Kevin Systrom: The Man Who Created Instagram

Kevin Systrom (born December 30, 1983) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He co-founded Instagram, the world's largest photo sharing website, along with Mike Krieger. Systrom was included on the list of America's Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40 2016. Under his leadership as CEO, Instagram became a fast-growing app, with 800 million monthly users as of September 2017. He resigned as the CEO of Instagram on September 24, 2018.

Early Life and Education

Systrom was born in Holliston, Massachusetts. He is the son of Diane (Pels), a marketing executive at Zipcar, who also worked at Monster and Swapit during the first dot-com bubble, and Douglas Systrom, the Vice President in Human Resources at TJX Companies. Systrom attended Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, where he was introduced to computer programming. His interest grew from playing Doom 2 and creating his own levels as a child.

He attended Stanford University and graduated in 2006 with a bachelor's degree in management science and engineering. At Stanford, he was a member of the Sigma Nu fraternity. He spent the winter term of his third year in Florence, Italy, studying photography.

Career Before Instagram

Google

After graduating from Stanford, he joined Google working on Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs, Spreadsheets and other products. He spent two years at Google as a product marketer; Systrom left Google out of frustration of not being moved into the Associate Product Manager program.

Nextstop

After leaving Google, Systrom joined Nextstop, a location recommendation startup founded by ex-Googlers that was acquired by Facebook in 2010. Systrom thought of combining location check-ins and popular social games like Mafia Wars. He made the prototype of what later became Burbn and pitched it to Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz at a party. He came up with the idea while on a vacation in Mexico when his girlfriend was unwilling to post her photos because they did not look good enough when taken by the iPhone 4 camera of that time. The solution to the problem was to use filters, effectively hiding the qualitative inferiority of the photographs.

The Birth of Instagram

In 2010, Systrom co-founded the photo-sharing and, later, video-sharing social networking service Instagram with Mike Krieger in San Francisco, California. The name "Instagram" comes from the words "instant camera" and "telegram".

In April 2012, Instagram was sold to Facebook for US$1 billion in cash and stock with 13 employees. According to multiple reports, the deal netted Systrom US$400 million based on his ownership stake in the business. Systrom described the acquisition as "a dream come true".

Later Career

On September 24, 2018, it was announced that Systrom resigned from Instagram and would be leaving in a few weeks. He and Krieger left Instagram due to tensions with Mark Zuckerberg regarding the direction of the app and its integration with Facebook.

Since leaving Instagram, Systrom has been involved in other ventures. In 2023, he and Krieger launched Artifact, a personalized news reader app using machine learning.