Transcript

Live From The HIBT Summit: Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger Of Instagram

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Hey, it's Guy here, so today we're releasing another live interview from this year's How I Built This Summit, which happened this past October in San Francisco. And this one's my conversation with Kevin Sistrom and Mike Krieger, the co-founders of Instagram. And if you haven't heard their original podcast episode, you should definitely go back and give it a listen. In that episode, they talk about how they kind of stumbled on the idea of using filters for photo sharing. and how in just two years, they got nearly 30 million followers and then sold to Facebook for a billion dollars. They spent six more years there, and then both of them stepped down in 2018. And so when we sat down together at the summit, here's the question I was thinking of. Have to you launch one of the most successful apps in the world?

What do you do next? Let's talk about the last year. It's been about a year since you left. Has it been a little bit weird. I mean'cause you had a staff and this team and this company and you were coming into work every day and Then there's a day where you

Don't do that. all of a sudden like you do have a weight off your shoulders because like the site isn't down, there isn't a decision to be made every single second. And you're able to sort of step back and reflect. But what you touched on is really true as well, which is one, you miss the people you work with, right? Like that's a thing that is really notable as well. But also your leverage is totally gone. So if we have an idea now or we want to get something done, like we go and do it by ourselves, which is also an exciting, like, you know, hands on kind of moment as well. But that's I think the most notable sort of Oh, okay, now we're now in a different place now. Yeah. I think if you look at companies that have been around now for a while in Silicon Valley You run it and and and there are people running it and you look around and like there's the system that supports everything. It just goes every day. You've got your

your monthly check-ins, you've got your weekly staff meetings and you just know what your schedule is going to be. And everything has this enormous Momentum or inertia. I don't know which one is which, but you know what I mean. It's got a lot. And

And then you get out of it, um And you realize that life no longer has that inertia or that momentum. We'll look this up later. And But what you but what you realize is like, oh my god, I have to be a beginner again. And that's thrilling. It's it's both it can be scary, depending on like your personality type, it can be either terrifying

Or it can be thrilling. And um I decided I was going to learn to fly. That was gonna be my thing when I left work. I just I wanted to take like a few months, which it turns out is not enough time to learn to fly. Um I did it though. We can get into that. Um Uh so I took a few months and I said I wanted to learn to fly, and I was so frustrated by the fact that I like sucked. Like I just sucked. It's like at work I knew exactly what I needed to do and I I I mean it's not that I was great at it all the time, but like

I knew what to do, but like when you do something new for the first time, you're like Wait I have to like read a book again, I have to like go through all this. And it's it's it was thrilling to know that life is going to be full of a lot of these chapters if we do it right. That you're gonna be a beginner over and over and over again. And what's great is if you're a beginner and you have a partner

while you're a beginner, because then when you make a mistake You know, someone can pick you up from it and be like, Yeah, that was a mistake, but let's keep going. You know I remember you telling the the sort of the origin story of Instagram. I started as Bourbon as a check in app and then Um I I think and in and your girlfriend then that wife, um

was you know, you were on vacation and you took the photo and then this sort of light bulb moment where you guys thought well maybe This is the thing it should be, and you built it into this huge platform and and and your identities were so wrapped into it, right? And we've we've had stories of the show where founders Have solar companies or David Neileman was pushed out of Jet Blue. He was here earlier today.

Um It's hard. I mean even if you're paid well and you get the payout It's It's a thing that you made. It's yours.

A part of that heart? I had thought about this a ton in like say like the year before our departure. You start thinking about I used to tell the team very openly like every year, you know, I would sit down and like sort of recommit to Instagram and say like am I still learning? Is this still exciting? I still feel like I can have impact. Um or is it time for the next chapter? And the question that I would often get from friends would be like Aren't you worried like you're not Like gonna be important after Instagram? Like in s not so many words, but basically asking that question. And you realize a couple of things. One is

The legacy lives on and like the fact that I get to use the product and people still come up to me and are like, oh, you built this is awesome. And I realized like I had gotten attached to being co-founder and CTO, and I will always get to be co-founder, and that feels really good in starting conversations and having people be excited about something that we built. So um I think that part of the identity feels solid. The other part is you kind of realize like who's excited to spend time with you for you know what you've built and what you're interested in and the people who just wanted to get verified or whatever they are like whatever requests that they had. These people just got really disappointed. Judging from my Instagram direct inbox, people have not gotten the message that we've left, but you know, it's a it's that that transition moment was actually like a you're jumping off the cliff's edge and you're trusting that like There's something on the other side that will feel really good, but I was also kind of scared that like waking up and everybody's like, Oh yeah, you're like you're not important anymore, you're not there. Kevin, you were code at the time.

Last year you said. You don't leave a job because everything is awesome, right? And I'm I'm curious. Why? Why'd you leave?

Mm. 'Cause you know, I you don't leave'cause everything's awesome. Sorry, I'm just I'm reflecting on that line. Uh Okay, so a couple of things. One is um we sold the company in twenty twelve. Yeah. And everyone thought that we were done. Like I remember seeing people on the street and they were like

What are you up to now? I was like, running Instagram? And they're like, Why? You sold the company and I was like, Yeah, but like we really love it. Here's what most people don't realize. Once you sell a company, like If you still love it, you still want to run it. So і was six years.

of grinding to get this thing off the ground. You know, we sold it and it was how many million users? Maybe thirty or forty million users. And we got it to over a billion. It took lots of time. And that is like so I was just in Hawaii the other day. I guess this is what you do when you don't have a job.

But I'm s I'm standing there on the side of the road, I was on the big island and I'm watching uh the Iron Man happen. Uh and these throngs of people are coming by on their bikes and they're wetsuits and everything and their speedy bikes and And they have to bike I don't even know how many miles. I think it's like over a hundred miles, and then they have to do a marathon, and then they have to do uh swim, or I guess it's swim, bike, run, so I got the order wrong. But

That's what Instagram's like, but in business. And you get to the end, you the proverbial end. And you say to yourself, Wow, we've been through a lot, but do I want to go more? No. Like I like I'm done. I just did a marathon and I just did a hundred whatever miles.

That's why I think we ended up leaving because you want a little break in recovery time and then my personality as such that I'm excited about doing something new. Like I I'm just like I'm always on to some new idea. And I don't know, it probably won't be as big as Instagram, but it'll be just as exciting to me. And that's why you end up leaving, um not just because of the bad stuff, but because it's really hard and you need this regeneration time to do something new. There was a really interesting um quote and wired about the two of you. It it basically said social media properties can be like nightclubs.

They're cool while the cool people are there and they disappear. Without leaving a trace. Kevin and Mike are smart enough and cool enough to know You should never be the last person to leave the party. Now essentially

What this article was saying is that You sort of saw the the social media landscape and maybe you thought, you know, this isn't really what we signed up for. Is there is there any truth to that? Mm.

I don't that was not a big factor for me. Like I think act In fact, like it was weighing on me in the opposite direction. Like I remember when um like early last year, so before we were really thinking seriously about leaving, I sat down with some folks and they're like I hope you stay for a long time, because I can tell you really care about kindness, you really care about uh building a positive network, like and we really need that. Um so please stay, which added this like a whole guilt factor for me for the next like you know a few months as we started thinking about leaving. So I saw it less like you know the tide is changing, therefore it's time for us to leave. And in fact it was like the other side, like oh like maybe not to sound conceited, but like maybe this is when we could be most needed. Um and that was definitely like a factor that I weighed uh when thinking about the departure. There's absolutely a moment in time right now.

Of reckoning for social media, a reckoning for tech, right? And because we've discovered all these amazing tools like machine learning and And we can scale these sites to over a billion people. Like when's the last time a company was able to touch over two billion people every month? Like it's it's unprecedented. Now that we're really good at learning because of data, we're really good at learning because of machine learning, and we can touch so many people, you start to ask yourself like what is the responsibility of this company, any company with that power. Um it doesn't matter which company, and there are many of them, how do they act going forward? What things are allowed, what things aren't allowed.

And um I I agree with Mike. That it wasn't a factor in in leaving, but it was certainly the most interesting thing that I think we were facing towards the end, which was like, what is our responsibility as co-founders of this thing in the world? You know, I have I have a young daughter. And one of the reasons why we decided to focus on kindness

as a big theme at Instagram and our community. was because we realized like what legacy did we want to leave in the world. So if anything it had the opposite effect. This this reckoning of tech was like something that made us want to stay even longer to participate and make it great. Because I think these things can go one of two ways. They either they either implode under their own weight Or you have great leaders who care deeply about their mission and think that the thing that they created in the world can be This amazing force for good.

And you can make that happen. Just out of curiosity, do you use Instagram? Yeah, every day. I was in the green room then I was Do you

M, do you think in general social media Is right now a force. For kindness. Is social media in general a force for kindness? No. Uh are there

leaders and teams within social media who are doing their best to make it a force for kindness? Absolutely. I mean One of the most interesting technical projects Mike and I ever worked on. Was this machine learned filter for bullying.

Basically like, okay, you all have spam filters in your inboxes and everything, and that keeps spam generally from reaching you. But like what if you could train that on bullying? And what if you could actually keep young children online from having that experience? Right, with someone else. That's like one little project that we were working on that uh turned out to do very, very well. But like think about all the projects you can do. Веню контрол платформ о скал. To keep people safe and to encourage kindness. Um

I absolutely think that there are people working very, very hard on that. Uh I just you know I a at large social media I think it's very difficult to control how kind it can be because of how massive it is. Was there any way to anticipate that when you guys were sitting in you know at Stanford and when you met there and you're lucky early on because the community self-selects for people that are excited about something new. It's rare to get like a troll as one of your first hundred. You're very unlucky if like some jerk joins in your first, you know, hundred hundred users.

Uh but as we we grew, uh You know, all of a sudden you go beyond friends and family to friends of friends of friends, and you know, I remember actually I distinctly remember the first person that we ever had a problem with on Instagram. I think we were like a month in or even less than that. And it was somebody who had been stalked by a another person and they're like Hey, can you please build a block feature? Like we didn't launch with a block feature because we didn't need it at the beginning or didn't think we needed it. And they're like, I don't want this guy on my Instagram. And we're like, oh yeah, that makes sense. And I think we had that out in like two or three days. It was amazing. Like back in the early days, like building something is like pretty easy to do. And we launched it and Over time you start adding these safeguards in, um whether that's like being able to mute comments and In some ways that means you're on you know more of a reactive side, but I think it's also just the reality that as like every order of magnitude you scale to, I think it introduces a new set of problems. Like all these different sort of things happen. I think what's important is like when you do react, like you don't build things you don't try to solve it for the exact problem you have. So for example, we um

at first wanted to uh put a roadblock for negative self harm hashtag. So if you go to a hashtag that was um either disgusting or promoting or you know sort of touching upon self-harm, we would talk about like this is how you can get in touch with uh National Crisis Center. And what we found, you know, we you did you do the simple thing and you just implement it based on words, but you realize they start like slightly altering it. So over time we actually had to use machine learning to say, oh no, it's this whole cluster of tags that we should put this protection around. So not uh sitting on your laurels or saying, I fixed the problem like this will never be a problem again, but having the humility to realize that the community evolves every single day.

I'm curious, I mean I sort of hesitate to ask this question because it's sort of an irritating question. I'm sure you get a version of this question a lot, but I'm I'm curious. Both of you Build this in charge of the take a selfie? Yeah. Can we take a selfie? Um

You know, you build a second we don't want to hear. You built this incredible. company and brand. and and have this amazing legacy connected to it. Both of you obviously are, you know

financially secure beyond your wildest dreams and beyond for j possibly generations. There's a lot you can do. I know that probably both of you want it to take some time to just reflect and just kinda get out of the day to the day grind and you probably had assistance and people who always you know needed your time and it was a r you know team meetings and now you know all of a sudden you go from a hundred miles an hour to like five miles an hour, right?

Are you starting to think about the next chapter and what does that look like for you, Mike? I think the first chapter of the next chapter, if you will, was me trying to be way too strategic. You're like, I did this thing, it had an impact, like I had this whole company around it. I need to go through and like do a chart and like maybe like a matrix around like areas of impact and ideas. And uh somebody actually said to Kevin recently something that really resonated with me as well, which is Did you put that much work into starting Instagram? Like were you super strategic and thoughtful and like, no, we were interested in helping people tell their stories. We loved photography. I was excited about iPhone development. It was like two thousand and nine. It was like all these things were much more like inner sources of joy and excitement and interest and learning and

I think it took probably six or seven months for me to let go of the idea that it had to be, you know, perfectly aimed in terms of the next direction, to instead g reconnect with what was true early on, which is like I love learning, I love hard technical problems, and I love working with people uh who really push me and vice versa. And Once I let go of those things, I think the last two months when we've actually been spending a ton of time together again have been the most fun because all of a sudden are like, Oh, like we don't have to figure this out tomorrow and if we had had that pressure for Instagram, we never would have done anything. Yeah. Yeah.

The next chapter, whatever it is, will be based on what we're most passionate about and the skills we have and what the world needs. become. When you're inside of a large company that has grown from, you know, thirteen people at the acquisition to You know, we were probably over a thousand towards the end. You get wired in a certain way to think a certain way and talk a certain way and Um that unwiring.

Takes a little bit. Um And for me, it w probably took a good six months to really unwire to realize that I had to again be a beginner again. I had to suck at stuff. When I

had to install a piece of software and I couldn't figure it out. I had to call up Mike, and Mike had to be my tech support over Zoom. Like that that was thrilling because I was like man I forgot how great it felt. To be bad again. And

Moving through that. you start to realize that you're gonna make mistakes and there are gonna be false starts. But Listen, you have no choice but to have a journey. Like what am I going to do? I'm not going to sit on a beach, although yes, I was in Hawaii, come on. But I'm not going to sit on a beach. Like I'm too energetic, the world's too interesting. There are so many unsolved problems out in the world.

That is the most motivating force in the entire world. And if you can do that with a partner that you trust, yeah. The world's your oyster. Before we go, um, you know the theme of this conference is kindness and collaboration. This is this this was a collaboration. The two of you got together. What's amazing is we've done stories about businesses with co-founders and and you know they fall apart or the the relationship breaks down. You guys are closer than ever. I mean what what is about the other guy that works for you, Mike?

I think Every almost every interaction I have with Kev, I feel like makes me smarter and like pushes me in some interesting way. Like uh either something that, you know, I built that he looks at and is like, Oh, could this be different? Or why did it work this way? I remember like early on at Instagram we had like some outage and uh I fixed it and I was like oh it's fixed and Kevin's like Yeah but what happened? I was like I don't know, does it matter? Like it's fixed and he's like No no no we need to understand and it sounds simple, but actually that approach to like actually understanding the problem you're facing and really like understanding that the solution makes sense and not just taking things for granted is I think a pretty core part of your personality that I deeply appreciated because I think it ended up pushing me to become a better engineer and a better leader. So I don't know, it's exciting to work with somebody that you just trust implicitly, which is uh a hard thing to quantify, but like there's very few people in the industry who I feel like have like the integrity and have been shown, you know, over now ten years of working together. I'm like, yeah, like I trusted him to fly me uh in his plane, which I will not trust almost any other person. It's a very long bumpy flight. But it works.

Kevin, what about Mike? I like that he'll come on a flight with me. So trust I think is number one, which is uh in this world, especially the business world. you never know who you can trust. Um But when someone's there with you in the trenches from day one And you go through everything together, and I literally mean everything. When you go through really hard stuff.

You grow super close together. And I I don't connect with many people at that level, and Mike is on a very, very short list of people I connect with on that level. But maybe the the final story I'll say here is uh towards the end of Instagram. We took some personality tests because we were getting to like that level of management where we all wanted to know what everyone's personalities were and how we could work together. Um But listen, you guys are laughing, but it was really important, and here's here's why.

It turned out that actually like all of our product managers that worked with me, because I was on the product side. all roughly had the same personality type, which I thought was kinda interesting. And then Mike had a slightly different personality type that w on paper interacted very well with mine. Like w it was almost like a yin and a yang. Um and that's the only way I can explain.

Like succinctly in my relationship with Mike is that like if I'm a sprinter and I get really frustrated really quickly with a problem, Mike is the even killed, like happy leader who just we'll get through it, Kev. And that that yin and yang I think keeps you Uh it keeps you grounded and it keeps you moving. And fun fact, it turns out my wife has the exact same personality type as Mike. It's a marriage. It is. It's a marriage. Kevin's sister, Mike Krieger, co-founders of Instagram. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. That's Kevin Sistram and Mike Krieger.

co-founders of Instagram. They join me live on stage at the twenty nineteen How I Built This Summit. which happened in October at the Girba Buenas Center for the Arts in San Francisco. We're going to be running more conversations from the summit on Thursdays through the new year. Next week we've got Tarek Farid of Edible Arrangements.

Thanks to Candace Lim, who produced this episode, and Rumpin Erabloui who wrote the music. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.