Transcript

Instagram's Kevin Systrom: Keep it simple while scaling big

The very best founders I know are brilliant at building systems. They connect teams, they remove bottlenecks, and they eliminate single points of failure. And yet When it comes to their own wealth. Most are running a disconnected stack. A tax accountant here and a state attorney there, a wealth manager who doesn't talk to either one of them.

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Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Florence. Italy.

Set amongst the cypress trees and the olive groves. Art. Science and culture. Flourished here between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, setting the stage for the modern world. Today.

Art lovers flock to the siti to see Michelangelo's David. Brunelleschi's Duomo and models of Da Vinci's flying machine. Алам від Хадрид. Of Renaissance sculptures. And frescoes.

It was this artistic pedigree, along with a fantastic Italian espresso, that drew a young Kevin Sistram. To Florence. I decided my junior year I wanted to study abroad and Honestly, I didn't like languages, but I picked Italian because I was told it was the easiest to pick up. But I fell in love with it.

And I wasn't terrible at it. I got pretty good. And I was like, Yeah, I wanna go to Italy and I I love coffee and and art. Kevin was an avid photographer. He went to Florence with lofty intentions of creating his own art.

He came equipped. With a very expensive camera. It was like the exact lens you want to use with the sharpest glass that you could get. Kevin was about to get a lesson that would stay with him forever. My professor Charlie looks at me with my camera, which is I think a embodiment of my personality of perfection, and he looked at me and he was like, No, no, no. Like you're not here to do perfection.

Give me that. So I did, and I thought he was gonna tweak with the settings, and then he went into the other room, came back with a plastic camera. He's like, You're not allowed to use your camera for the next three months. And I had like save for this thing. So he gives me this camera and I'm like looking at it, it's like a toy camera. Charlie had replaced Kevin's prize professional rig. With a simple

Cheap Chinese camera. Known as a Holger. If you haven't seen a Hulga, it l it's like a toy camera. It's got a plastic lens and like light leaks into the side of it if you're not careful. He's like, you have to learn to love in perfection. With his new toy in hand.

Kevin immersed himself in the art and cafe culture of Florence. Assume. Embrace the simplicity. of the Hulga. I started taking pictures on the go when I was around Florence and I would bring it back and he would show me how to develop these photos.

And they were square, first of all, but they were like slightly blurry and slightly artistic. Then he showed me how to add chemicals to the development bath so that it could actually tone the black and white photo with different colors. So if you're listening to this and you know Instagram, You see a connection, right? Like square photos and and filtering photos. That's right.

Kevin Sistram would go on to co found Instagram. The photo sharing app. The app that gave everyone Аксес тоді естетикс. And the appealing simplicity.

of the Hoga. If you go back to my profile and scroll all the way back, I mean It's blurry, it looks like there are light leaks, et cetera, and Two and two dish came together. I think the best Products are usually built.

Based on personal experience from your past. And you never know exactly what parts of your past will come together. to like form that puzzle and be a product that you want to build for the world, but inevitably. something from your past triggers a memory and and you say, you know what, people might just like that. People certainly did.

Over one billion of them. And each day. More people. fall under the fantastic plastic spell. conjured by Kevin's first encounter.

Without Hulger. His early lesson in the power of simplicity. hit the app store and social media networks at exactly the right time. I believe simple ideas can soar to massive scale. But only if you steer them.

To catch the prevailing winds. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? And then you go back to this is truly gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Just how you do it. This

is masters of scale. I'm Reed Hoffman. Founder of LinkedIn. Investor at Greylock. And your host.

And I believe simple ideas can soar to massive scale. But only if you steer them to catch the prevailing winds. Regular listeners of the show know that I often compare the entrepreneur's journey to jumping off a cliff. and building a plane on the way down. But some founders

Do something even more daring. Instead of scrambling to build a jet. They craft the simplest possible glider. They strip out every part of the plane. You'd think they'd need to stay airborne. The engine, the propellers, the wheels.

And they coast. On the prevailing winds. A glider. І the model of simplicity.

And with the right pilot. Simplicity. means agility. The ability to swoop enormous distances and soar to great heights. So long as you know.

Precisely. When and where to catch the right updraft. It's the same with companies. A simple business idea can soar to scale if the founder knows how to read and ride. The prevailing winds.

I wanted to talk to Kevin Sistram about this. because he and his co-founder, Mike Krieger. Achieve the impossible. With Instagram. Not only did they launch a dead simple app

That blew up the internet. But they did it with a smallest. Simplest staff imaginable. Only thirteen people. Ворти інстаграм дерні і цферст і тінь мантс.

when it reached 30 million users. That's Wellmore. than two milli customers. for each team member. Let's face it.

This ratio is nearly impossible. And frankly, I don't recommend it. Па інстаграм стал симпліситі. І з вorth прсую.

Kevin and Mike were able to massively scale a simple product. With a teen team because they were masters at drafting off the prevailing winds and technology. They also knew exactly where to invest their own resources. In order to create something people loved And wanted to share.

And Kevin has been sharing things he loves for a long time. Before photos, he shared music. His method was low tech. And Perhaps a little on the shady side.

Apparently. You were the kid who hung an antenna out of the window of your dorm room to broadcast a Pirate radio station. What's the story with that? I can neither confirm nor deny the allegations. But let's say it was true. Yes. Uh hypothetically speaking, um at my boarding school, I I was really into music and radio and DJing. I I had two turntables. And the microphone I loved electronic music. Back when electronic music was really uncool and I still remember all the kids looking at me like what are you listening to?

I was really into the idea of broadcasting music and having a relationship with a community of listeners. And this was before internet radio was like really a thing, although honestly that probably would have been a better idea. Kevin's musical taste wasn't exactly a crowd pleaser. but he felt a need to share his passion for it. So literally out of my dorm room. I hung this like big steel antenna on the roof whenever I went live. and hooked it up to my turntables and started playing music that no one liked.

It was so fun because I I remember like the next day talking to someone. They're like, Oh yeah, eighty-nine point three. Like that was great for the one hour you went on. His parents told him he needed to get a job. And in their eyes. Біг а Джай Didn't count.

So Kevin did the next best thing. He got a job at a record store in Boston called Boston Beat And open'em up. to a whole community of people like him.

Who enjoyed the simple pleasures of digging through crates to find obscure records, and it brought him a whole new audience. For his DJ. I also got to go to these clubs and and actually sit in the DJ booth watching people do the thing, but I was like sixteen in a twenty one plus place and I behaved myself, I promise, mom and dad. Um and I did. I I was a goodie two shoes.

And was that DJ experience Any of the kind of early glimmers of now thinking about social networks later. Was there any of that kind of social pattern in that from the DJ booth? I You know, it it's all connected, which is

You know, when I did sports as a kid I was the goalie. When I played baseball, I was the pitcher. Like I always wanted to be in the center of it. Uh and

Not controlling it, but I wanted to be in the center of it. And the DJ is kind of the same thing, right? So the early glimmers of I think wanting to start a company and lead people In a specific direction, sure, like that relates a lot to whether you're the goalie, the pitcher, or the DJ You're in these types of positions.

Those glimmers. Came into focus at Stanford. Kevin studied management science and engineering. He took that fateful trip to Florence. He also built web apps in his spare time.

Including a photo sharing app for his friends. when graduation came around in two thousand six He took a job. At Google. The next two years

at Google were so influential for the rest of my life because I saw People working hard building products that sometimes worked, sometimes didn't. But I saw the process of building. Kevin soon moved from a team that was building new products to to one that was charged with acquiring them.

He loved it. But there was one problem. It was two thousand eight. And the market tanked after the financial crisis. And Kevin?

He got bored. I was complaining, hey, like The market crashed, we're not buying any companies, what should I do? And one of my coworkers was like, you should pick up golf. And like unironically, just like looked at me and was like, learn to love golf. At that very moment in my head it was like ding you're leaving. Like I just like I'm twenty five or six or whatever. Like I'm too young to go pick up golf. Kevin fled the fairway for a travel startup called

Next stop. Founded by some former Google colleagues. For Kevin, it was a start up life. He had yearned for. Next stop was so influential because number one, I was a marketing

Guy there. Like they asked me to join as basically marketing and growth. Like how could we grow the service? And I was pretty bad at that, actually. Like I'm not sure I ever Helped grow it. Um I tried. I really did. That's right. Kevin Sistram.

The man who would co found one of the fastest growing tech companies in history. was bad at growth. But next stop ignited Kevin's desire to build something himself. He studied the code that Next Op was based on and learned the basics of building a scalable web app. Soon he was building his own projects outside of work.

He tinkered at night and over the weekends. And one of these side projects was a check in app he called Bourbon. Though he spelled it. B U R The end.

You know Mafia Wars, remember Mafia Wars? Mafia Wars is a hugely popular online game created by Zinga. For more information, listen to the Masters of Scale episode with Zinga's founder. Mark Pincus I had this idea that Mafia Wars

would be great in the real world. Like instead of fighting for territory in the digital domain, like imagine like taking over a pizza parlor digitally, or taking over, you know, your favorite bar because you checked in a few times. You could join families and war against each other, and that's why it was called Bourbon,'cause it was supposed to be like speakeasies nineteen twenties, whatever. Bourbon was a simple app. Sometimes simplicity is intentional, but Other times.

It's voiced upon us. In time. In resources, or in Kevin's case, his own abilities. It turns out like I I wasn't good enough to build all of the gaming features, so it was just a check-in service.

And I gave it to my friends and they started using it. This was a time when check-in apps were big. VCs were pouring money into things like Foursquare and Goala. If Kevin had persisted in trying to build gaming features for Bourbon, he probably wouldn't have found a backer.

But he had kept it simple. And he got some attention. One V C made him an offer. But It came with a condition.

One of the VCs was like, Hey, like I'll give you money to do this, but you have to find a co-founder. I was like, What? Like I can do this? Like I'm No no no. Like all companies I fund You have to have a co founder. I agree with his unnamed VC.

In my experience. Two co founders are almost always better than one. And three co founders are frequently better than two. We have another episode planned on this entire topic. And his search for a co founder.

Kevin Cross Paths with Mike Krieger. An old college friend who brought the engineering heft. To balance. Kevin's product development credentials.

We just hit it off. He's one of the nicest guys I know, super humble, but so sharp. I think we've just had a compatible work relationship for the last eight years, but it all started then and we took a bet on each other. Kevin and Mike clicked instantly. They struggled to push Bourbon beyond 80 users, and most of those eighty users were their friends. We worked on Bourbon. Our friends liked it, but no one else liked it.

Uh And I'm like looking back, I'm actually surprised anyone gave us money to work on this idea. Growth was stagnant. Kevin and Mike examine their options. They identified the three most popular features on Bourbon.

And decided to focus on just one. The features were Checking in at locations. Coordinating visits with other users. and uploading photos when you checked in somewhere.

As you probably already guessed. They chose photos. What was the insight to We have to prune everything else away. Right. Like we just have to say, okay

This is the thing. everything else goes'cause there's a natural tendency to say, well, but people like this and we're getting some positive user feedback and you know, we put some energy into it. So we won't develop it, but we'll leave it. What was the it must all go This is the thing. I think it was about trying to have a clear story to tell people. when we were introducing it to them. I I like to say like

Products that do too many things. That aren't adjacent. Like, how do you explain like if you're gonna tell a friend about a cool new service that does all these things, like how do you explain it to them? This is one of the things I love about Kev's approach to product. He understands that he needs to excite users.

But he also needs them. To tell their friends. And if they can't do that in a single sentence, they're less likely to do it at all. So Bourbon

A check in app. became Instagram The photo app When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious.

Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years. Building. Creative planning where wealth works together. Lear more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale.

Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.

There's gonna be two types of companies. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Chayubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone.

Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Kevin and his co pilot Mike. Jettison the dead weight. They had decided on the basic structure of their glider.

and they had identified the first gust. that would repel them on their journey. Now is time. to bank hard to capture that breeze. They did this.

By creating Instagram's killer app. It's filters. Kevin wished he could take credit for it. but he says it was actually his wife's idea. It came to them.

During a trip to Mexico. We rented a little room and a bed and breakfast and I was working on bourbon at the time. And we were pivoting to photos, but she was like I don't think I'm gonna ever use this app. Like, why not? She's like, Well, my photos aren't good, and I was like, Well, that's fine, like you can post photos, it'll be good, and she goes, Well,

They're not as good as your friend Greg's. And I was like, Well, Greg filters all his photos. And she looks at me and she's like, Well, you should add filters then. I was like, ah, you're right. I shouldn't have filters. I hear stories like Kevin and Nicole's all the time. Entrepreneurs take note. An honest partner.

Is always your best source of ideas. Kevin was smart enough to listen. I went back to the bed and breakfast room and with a dial-up connection in Mexico of all places. I was looking up

code on how to change colors in photos. And I made the first filter there on the spot and it's still in the app called X Pro Two. X Pro two was one of the eleven original filters that Instagram launched with. Each of the distinctive filters added the kind of blurred edges, color wash, and light leaks

They gave even mediocre photos. A sense of nostalgic meaning. And when Instagram launched There were a lot of mediocre photos. Phone cameras were still primitive.

Many years later when I looked at The idea of having this kind of like not so great iPhone 3G camera. I mean, back in the day it was kind of blurry, effectively like a toy digital camera. And I was like, you know what, the goal here isn't to make this beautiful. The goal is to like deal with the imperfection. So that's that's like honestly where the inspiration came from. So like the iPhone uh

Three cameras are like little mini digital Hulgas. Totally. It was as if Kevin and Mike had handed each of their friends a hoga and told them not to sweat the details. Instagram will give your snaps the wow factor. All you need to worry about.

is pointing and shooting. Uh Yeah. Any person we gave it to, their eyes lit up because they were like, Oh, like my photo seem so much better now. And that was the moment when we realize we think we have something.

Filters were the simple feature that set Instagram apart. But Instagram also made it simple. To share those beautiful fotos. And this Was its true secret to scale. And I remember hearing from people they were like Whoa I just got a like.

And I was like, Yeah,'cause it's network and they're like, Oh, I didn't realise it. I thought it was just A camera app. Before Instagram Other photo apps. kept people inside them.

They didn't create a network in the app. And they didn't leverage. Social networks. But here With Instagram.

The loop was piggybacking on all these existing networks. We had Tumblr, Postterus, Twitter Facebook. I'm trying to remember the other ones. Four Square, I think. Instagram wasn't the first mobile app to offer photo filters. But it was the first to tap seamlessly into the social network ecosystem.

would have did better than any other app to date. was leverage these new networks to enable massive scale These networks Or like the trade winds that let Instagram soar. Almost effortlessly.

The problem is that you have this app That's a network. But no one's on the network and it only becomes useful once people are on the network. So you have to have what we called single player mode feel awesome. And it turns out single player mode as a app where you could take a photo, filter it.

And share it to many networks at once. That was utility in single player mode. Like no one else needed to use Instagram at the time to make that useful. It was a tool for you. But if we wanted to get lots of people downloading it, they'd have to see the photos, the output. And it just turns out the square photo and the borders and the links to Instagram were calling cards.

If you like what you see. You too can go do this exact thing, download this app. Instagram was an insta hit. On its first day in the app store. Twenty five thousand downloads.

Within a week. A hundred thousand. Within ten weeks One million users. Instagram.

Multiplayer mode. The viral loops were kicking in. With some strategically placed help. Kevin and Mike.

in the hands of a hundred artist influencers. And it paid off. So we went out and we got all these influencers who were photographers and designers to sign up, and I think we had a hundred people sign up. And the day we launched, they started posting all their photos to Twitter and to Facebook.

And we figured out the viral loop. To help it grow. And it just exploded. Simplicity. Combined with leverage all of these outside forces.

is what allowed Instagram to scale. However. To maintain that scale. Simplicity is not enough. You may remember a slew of simple Facebook games.

Zombie versus werewolf. You'd get bit by a zombie or a werewolf. Then you turn into one. Then you would bite your friends and try to recruit them to your team.

It was simple. And fun. And reached massive scale. And then User numbers tanked.

It was entertaining for a bit. But it didn't tap into an ongoing need or desire. In order to scale. You have to tap into a fundamental human need. That feeling

Of being connected. Of being a part of the tribe. Is the fundamental need that let Instagram scale into a huge number of users. And Persist.

Mm. Instagram scaled fast from day one. It was as if they steered their glider straight into gale force winds. The night of the launch. There's servers.

Crashed. Mm. Kevin put out an SOS. I called up a friend Adam D'Angelo, who I had met, who was CTO at Facebook. I think he had left at that point. But he knew how to scale a very large service, or at least a service of our scale. Just as Instagram, the app

Sword by drafting off much larger social networks. Instagram. The company. Draft off the founders. Social networks.

That night of the launch. Adam talk Kevin and Mike. Through how to stabilize their servers. They set up a text alert. For when their servers went down.

That ringtone. Haunts. Kevin to this day. Every time I hear that ringtone today, it literally makes my insides turn. Because like the number of times our servers would go down at two A. M. or I'd have to step out of a birthday party or miss a concert, whatever, like

Yeah too many to count. So I now have a mild form of PTSD with That specific sound. It's the only True I think fight.

Mike and I have ever had Which was we were scaling and He was like, We're gonna need another server. Mm. And

I was like, No, we don't. And it was'cause I don't know, I was really cost conscious and like It was gonna be expensive to start up a new one. I mean not expensive in today's terms, but I remember that was the one really big disagreement we had and it lasted about a minute. And then we calmed down and I was like, You're right.

I think there may have been more to Kevin's reluctance than cost consciousness. Kevin was still in early day founder mode. He was hungry for the thrill of the fight. And this perhaps led him to quite simplicity. with doing everything on a shoestring.

In this case. Keeping their server count down. Was not The simple solution. In fact, it added complexity.

It's an easy and ironic trap to fall into. By trying to stay true to simplicity. You overthink things. And before you know it. You're in a tang of complexity.

It's a pitfall. That comes in many guises. And one that we may not even realize we have stumbled into. Someone who spent a lot of time thinking about this issue is Rohan Ganata Lake. He's the creator of Budafy.

The app that helps people make meditation a part of everyday life. Mm. One of my favorite definitions of meditation is that meditation is a training In simplicity. And

From a mindfulness perspective, I would say that simplicity and complexity are actually not the opposites of each other. If you look at it in a different way. Simplicity is what's here, and complexity is where we lay on top of it. Note that Rohan isn't saying complexity is necessarily bad.

But it is something. Humans have a tendency towards. But even when we're trying our best. To glide towards simplicity. These efforts themselves.

Can bring us into complexity. Along the way, sometimes Some of us Can get fixated on The process as opposed to the outcome. And suddenly

The start ups more important than solving the problem. Suddenly my status as a meditator is more important whether I can actually Be present with my two year old when I'm playing with him. And I see it all the time in b in both of those worlds.

And I think a really powerful thing to do, whether you are thinking in the context of business or in the context of mindfulness practices to Every time you're practicing Remind yourself why you're doing it.

And then that'll give you the orientation. the energy and the inspiration to avoid falling into that. pitfall or that trap.'Cause it's something I've done uh several times in the past, both on the business side and on the meditation side. Kevin and Mike.

Made brilliant choices. To keep their product and staff simple. Remember those numbers? They ran a massive service. with a leverage of just thirteen employees.

They were able to keep their staff small. Because of the specific decisions they had made to keep their product simple. They simply didn't do things that other companies would have considered vital. Instagram was an iPhone app. It wasn't on the web. It wasn't even on Android.

They didn't make any revenue, so they didn't need sales. They didn't need payments. These choices allowed them to stay small. And there are huge benefits to having a small, massively leveraged team. It's easy for everyone to cohere. Communication is simple.

Costs are seriously low. And it's maximum productivity per individual. Everyone feels the importance of the mission and understands their place in it. But with only thirteen employees. Kevin took this to the extreme.

Even he Doesn't recommend it. Oh man, this is painful to relive. Um, mostly because I look back and Our lives for those first two years would have been so much better had we just hired

I love leverage and I love, you know the fact that we were able to scale a service with thirteen people. I mean we were like on average like six people for that first year. We only hired up to thirteen right before we got acquired. So whenever people are like oh thirteen, I'm like actually there's more like five or six Our lives would have been a lot easier. So lesson number one is like find great people that know their stuff because there are a lot of them in the world. And they would be happy to deal with the problems that you are currently facing. That is the lesson number one of of growing a company.

By early 2012, the viral loop was an overdrive. Users. Flocked to Instagram. And the more they came, the The more unstable.

The service God. Kevin and Mike knew it was time to invest big in infrastructure. They needed servers, they needed data analysis. And they needed people. But they were yet to see a dollar from Instagram itself.

They did a deal with a group of investors, including Greylock. But just days after Kevin announced that he'd done a deal with Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook. Would pay one billion dollars.

to acquire Instagram. The decision to sell was mostly about whether or not we were aligned in our vision of Instagram and I think Mark and I both saw at the time that Instagram was a special thing. It wasn't gonna be like Oh, we'll buy this thing and it'll just be Facebook photos. Like we'll rebrand it and it's just Facebook photos.

It's a unique community. It had a unique angle. And he wanted to invest in it. And that's the way I look at it. It's kinda like We switched investors and we had a new board and that board became Some of the smartest technologists that Silicon Valley had, which was the Facebook management team.

When Facebook acquired Instagram. Some people snickered at the billion dollar price tag. but investors didn't. It was seen as the total bargain of the century. For Facebook.

The deal was a leg up in a mobile. As for Instagram, it now had access To resources that would propel growth even further. This meant no more late night text messages about crashing servers. The ghost of that ringtone.

Yeah. Was banished. We had a a pretty broken infrastructure'cause it was duct taped along the way and I I don't regret that at all. Like we had to duct tape it along the way. But we spent the first month or so stabilizing. It turns out stabilizing helps growth.

Because it's more stable, people enjoy it more, people can sign up more reliably. Now Instagram. might have gotten to even greater scale without being acquired. But there was a bunch of stuff. That Instagram got from Facebook.

It got scale infrastructure. In terms of how to handle all the data loads and build scaling servers. It got detailed ad targeting and systems. А на селс форс. For doing it.

Instagram could have built these things itself, but it would have taken time and it might not have worked. Meanwhile. Facebook and others could build their own Instagram competitors. And Facebook. Kevin and Mike saw a powerful wind that could take them to an entirely new level of scale.

Facebook gave them this new updraft of scale. Facebook also had something else. A sophisticated means of measuring and capitalizing. on user growth. And I believe they had pioneered this was the growth accounting formula, which is okay, like your net growth on any given day, you can break it up into separable parts. It's how many new people came in the door,

How many people decided to stop using you, and then how many people who used to use you decided to use you again? Plain and simple. Those three terms equal net growth. This analysis. meant Kevin and Mike could hone the firo loop. There were a bunch of those critical numbers early on that then we kind of started to instrument and realize, you know what, like what percentage of users get this number of followers in the first week?

And we could track that and then ask ourselves, hey, how do we drive? More followers to people and how do we make sure that new users get enough engagement on their first few posts? Without measurement you're kinda wandering it around in the dark and you're not able to produce something That has product market fit. But even with this influx of resources.

There was one thing Kevin and Mike were determined not to change. Their commitment. To keeping Instagram. Simple. Our first value, meaning when we wrote out our values, the first one on the list is keep it simple.

When we started Instagram we went from Solvier things to solving one really well. And we saw that pay off in spades. And I think the hard part is when you grow a service and let's say you have hundreds of millions of people using it.

you have varying use cases. You have varying Stakeholders. Some are businesses, some are celebrities, some are video stars, and some are Creatives. You have pets on Instagram, right? Like How do you keep it simple when you have so many people use it?

To this day. They have regular meetings. So that the whole team can re examine the app. Kevin. Think long and hard.

About adding new features. And he will only do so if there's a clear case for them. Often That means spotting any interesting or unexpected ways. People are using his product.

So when we added video to Instagram, that was a big move. That's an evolution of how people were already using it. Stories, same thing. Messaging, people do it all the time in comments. So Adding complexity is okay as long as you don't add

orthogonal use cases that feel totally unrelated. When we do that, we typically launch separate apps. Or we consider doing that. But I think it's important not to just like not build features. I think it's important just to think about the number of use cases. That you have and ask yourself, are you keeping those in a limited set?

It's something worth asking yourself on a daily basis. But don't let it turn into an exercise on self doubt. Many ideas require careful thought. But they also need swift and decisive action. Far too many times entrepreneurs assume that things aren't reversible. Jeff Bezos talks about one way doors.

He likes Employees to make decisions quickly when there are I don't know, two way doors or revolving doors. But when there are one way doors, think long and hard. Yeah.

And I think often people confuse one way doors and two way doors. There's a danger if you rush through a one-way door that you won't be able to find your way back inside. But the greater danger is not taking any doors. If you don't change the service, I think the world changes underneath you and you become less relevant. So the lesson is to not not change the service. But rather, what do you change it to and when you change it, how do you keep it feeling

Simple. This philosophy of Kevin's, like Instagram itself, is a study and simplicity. Kevin knows that the winds around him are changing constantly. And in order to stay aloft. You have to stir.

Toward the most powerful prevailing winds. You might even need to redesign your glider. But it has to remain simple. I'm Reed Hoffman. Thank you for listening.

Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. The show is recorded on site in California and produced at the studio. Inside SY Partners in New York. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our producers

Are Chris McCloud, Adam Skuse, Jenny Cotaldo, Dan Kedmi, and Ben Manilla? Our supervising producer is Jay Punjabi. Original music and sound design is by the Holiday Brothers. Mixing and Mastering by Brian Pew. Special thanks to Krisje, Bob Safian, Elisa Schreiber.

David Sanford, Saida Sepieva, Christina Gonzalez, and Sarah Sandman. Visit masters of scale dot com to find the transcript for this episode. And be sure to subscribe to our email newsletter.