Kevin Systrom (Instagram) - How Instagram Scaled

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Journey, Startups, Education, Stanford, Culture, Strategy, Stanford University, Entrepreneurship, Business, Life Lessons, Thought Leadership, Creativity, Etl, Challenges, Leadership, Innovation, Founders

4.4 • 739 Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2020

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, first spoke at ETL in 2011, just seven months after Instagram launched. Here, he returns to ETL nine years later to draw some new insights about the startup's rocket-like growth. In an interview with Stanford professor of the practice and STVP faculty director Tina Seelig, Systrom reflects on the lessons he’s learned during the course of that journey, and also talks about his work on Rt.live, a new platform that aims to model the COVID-19 pandemic.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Who you are defines how you build.
0:06.0	This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series.
0:09.0	Brought to you by Stanford E-Corner.
0:13.0	Hi, I'm Tina Seleig, and I'd like to welcome you to the Entrepreneurals Thought Leaders series,
0:19.0	which is presented by STVP, the Entrepreneurship Center at Stanford School of Engineering, and also by basis, the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurals students.
0:29.6	Today we are super excited to welcome Kevin Sistram back to our ETL stage. When Kevin was here first in May of 2011, Instagram had just launched
0:41.0	the previous October, and he and his co-founder Mike Krieger spoke about how as two young
0:46.6	Stanford alums, they leveraged their education in engineering and entrepreneurship to create
0:51.7	Instagram and how they navigated the first eight months of a rocket
0:56.1	like growth. It's almost a decade later and Kevin is here to discuss what he's learned
1:01.0	over the past 10 years. Welcome, Kevin. Thank you. I'm so excited to be back. And I can't
1:06.3	believe it's been nine years. It feels like it was yesterday. Isn't it amazing? Time really does fly.
1:11.6	In fact, it was 15 years ago that I first met you and it was remote. You were living in
1:16.5	Florence. I was. And you were interviewing for a spot in the Mayfield Fellows program. And because
1:21.9	you were remote, we ended up talking to you by phone. And here we are. 15 years later, meeting remotely again.
1:29.7	I actually remember that because I had to go to just the right location in my host family's
1:36.0	house. I was studying abroad in Italy and I had to crotch down just right with the antenna out
1:41.3	the window to make sure that I had signal and I was super nervous.
1:44.6	So I don't know what I did that day, but thank you for letting me do the program.
1:49.2	I'm not sure this all would have happened without it.
1:51.0	But here we are, 15 years later.
1:53.9	It's awesome.
	...

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