Why silicon valley funds instagram
Zuckerberg started his social network in the days when PCs and browsers ruled the internet. Even somethings can look a bit dated in these fast moving days.
Systrom, a Stanford University graduate like so many Silicon Valley multimillionaires, grew up in Boston but was an early witness to the dotcom boom. His mother, Diane Systrom, worked at Monster. The history of the billion-dollar deal goes back to his university days where he was studying for an engineering degree.
Systrom, a big photography fan, started looking at ways to share photos online. His interest subsided as he looked for a job, ending up at Google, where he spent two years in product development and corporate development. Systrom then started Burbn, named after his favourite liquor, a company that focused on the super-hot area of mobile but whose basket of services seemed to lack any clear identity.
It had photos but also check-in capabilities, like FourSquare, and other apps. Now it is. So, they have the money. Now what are they doing to do with it? I can already see the comments: why does a photo-sharing app for the iPhone need a world-class engineering team? Because they have much grander goals. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Margaux MacColl. After their first meeting, Systrom decided to quit his job and focus on Burbn. This seed funding allowed Systrom to start building a team of people to support his venture; the first to join him was year-old Mike Krieger. Also a Stanford graduate, Krieger had previously worked as an engineer and user-experience designer at the social media platform Meebo.
The two knew each other from their time as students at Stanford. After Krieger joined, the two reassessed Burbn and decided to focus primarily on one thing: photographs specifically taken on mobile devices. They carefully studied leading apps in the photography category at that time. For Krieger and Systrom, the Hipstamatic app stood out to them because it was popular and had interesting features that you could apply to photographs, such as filters.
However, it lacked social media-sharing capabilities; Systrom and Krieger saw potential in building an app that bridged Hipstamatic and a social media platform like Facebook. They took a step backward and stripped Burbn down to its photo, commenting, and "liking" functions. It was at that time that they renamed their app Instagram, combining the words instant and telegram.
They also began focusing on improving the photo-sharing experience. Their intention for the app was that it would be minimalist and require as few actions as possible from the user. After eight weeks of fine-tuning the app, they gave it to friends to beta test and evaluate its performance. After resolving some errors in the software, they brought it to launch. The Instagram app was launched on Oct. At the end of the first week, Instagram had been downloaded , times, and by mid-December, the number of users had reached one million.
After the rapid rise in Instagram's user base, more investors became interested in the company. In addition to institutional investors, the company attracted the attention of other leading companies in the social media technology industry, including Twitter and Facebook.
Although this new round of financing gave Systrom and Krieger the opportunity to hire more people, the founders decided to keep the company really small, with barely a dozen employees. Systrom knew Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, from his time as an intern at Odeo. Dorsey expressed a strong interest in the company and pursued the idea of acquiring Instagram. In April , Instagram was released for Android phones and was downloaded more than one million times in less than one day.
Systrom and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had become acquainted through events held at Stanford, and the two had been in communication in the beginning of Instagram's rapid rise in popularity.
Instagram made a limited-feature website interface available in November In June , the company introduced an app for the Amazon Fire device, and finally, in , it created an app that made it compatible with Microsoft Windows tablets and computers. Instagram hit a bump in the road in December after updating its terms of service. This update effectively granting Instagram the right to sell users' photos to third parties without notification or compensation. The move drew immediate criticism from privacy advocates and many of the app's users; some users responded by deleting their accounts.
Instagram eventually retracted the controversial terms. Although Instagram has a variety of features, in general, the app's interface allows individuals who have created a free account to upload media—both photos and videos.