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

Our third live episode from the 2019 How I Built This Summit features Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, co-founders of Instagram. They talk to Guy about what they've been doing since they stepped down from the company, and whether they think social media can still help make a kinder world. In the new year, we'll release more episodes from the HIBT Summit, so keep checking your podcast feed! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Guy Raz?

  Hey. So for the past few weeks, I've been asking you to consider a donation to your public radio station. And the idea behind it isn't just to ask for money, but to ask for your support. Because public radio stations depend on your contributions. And it's how they can broadcast news programs and shows like this one on their airwaves. So if you can, please consider donating by going to donate.npr.org/built. And thanks.

• 0:33Guy Raz?

  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 Systrom 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 $8 billion. 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.

• 1:16Guy Raz?

  After 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, because 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.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the first readjustment is all of a sudden, like, you do have a weight off your shoulders because 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, whoa, OK, now we're in a different place now.

• 2:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  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 this 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.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  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 I decided I was going to learn to fly. That was going to 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. I did it, though. We can get into that. 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.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Like, I just sucked. It's like at work, I knew exactly what I needed to do. And 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 going to 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.

• 3:59Guy Raz?

  You know, I remember you telling the sort of the origin story of Instagram. I started this bourbon as a check-in app and then I think and and your girlfriend then now wife 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 sold their companies or David Neileman was pushed out of JetBlue. He was here earlier today.

• 4:36Guy Raz?

  It's hard. I mean, even if you're paid well and you get the payout, it's a thing that you made. It's yours. Is a part of it, a part of that hard?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  I 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? Or I still feel like I can have impact? 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, 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, uh, is awesome. And I realized, like, I'd gotten attached to being co-founder and CTO and I will always get to be co-founder and that feels really good and starting conversations and having people be excited about something that we built.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  So, um, I think that part of the identity feels solid. And 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. Um, so it kind of like-

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Half these people just got really disappointed.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  I know. 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 of, like, waking up and everybody's like, oh, yeah. You're like, you're not important anymore. You're not there.

• 6:08Guy Raz?

  Kevin, you were quoted 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?

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Cause, you know, you don't leave because everything's awesome.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Sorry, I'm just, I'm reflecting on that line. Okay, so a couple of things. One is, we sold the company in 2012. 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 it 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. Yeah.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  But I'm, I'm standing there on the side of the road. I was on the big island and I'm watching the Ironman happen. And these throngs of people are coming by on their bikes and their 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 a 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, the proverbial end, and you say to yourself, "Wow, we've been through a lot, but do I want to go more? No." Like, like, "I'm done. I just did a marathon and I just did a hundred whatever miles."

• 7:59Speaker 02

  That's why I think we ended up leaving because you want a little break and recovery time. And then my personality is 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. Not just because of the bad stuff, but because it's really hard and you need this regeneration time to do something new.

• 8:27Guy Raz?

  There was a really interesting quote in Wired about the two of you. 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 social media landscape and maybe you thought, you know, this isn't really what we signed up for. Is there any truth to that?

• 8:59Speaker 01

  That was not a big factor for me. I think, in fact, it was weighing on me in the opposite direction. I remember when, 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 building a positive network, and we really need that, so please stay." Which added this guilt factor for me for the next 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 maybe this is when we could be most needed." And that was definitely like a factor that I weighed when thinking about the departure.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  There is 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 we can scale these sites to over a billion people, like, when's the last time a company was able to touch over 2 billion people every month? Like, it's unprecedented. So, 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? 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?

• 10:27Speaker 02

  And I agree with Mike, it wasn't a factor 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?

• 10:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:23Guy Raz?

  Just out of curiosity, do you use Instagram?

• 11:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, every day.

• 11:26Guy Raz?

  Use it every day?

• 11:27Speaker 02

  I was in the green room and I was.

• 11:28Guy Raz?

  Instagram?

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:30Guy Raz?

  Do you, I mean, do you think in general, social media is right now a force for kindness?

• 11:39Speaker 02

  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 turned out to do very, very well.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  But like, think about all the projects you can do when you control a platform of that scale 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, it, at large, social media, I think it's very difficult to control how kind it can be because of how massive it is.

• 12:44Guy Raz?

  Sure. Was there any way to anticipate that when you guys were sitting in, you know, at Stanford? And when you met there?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  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, 100, 100 users. And but as we've regrew, you know, all of a sudden you go beyond friends and family to friends of friends of friends. And, you know, I remember actually 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 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.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  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, 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 at first wanted to put a roadblock for negative self-harm hashtags. So if you go to a hashtag that was 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

• 14:16Speaker 01

  with National Crisis Center. And what we found, you know, you did, you do the simple thing and you just implemented 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 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.

• 14:39Guy Raz?

  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 curious. I mean, both of you built this incredible-

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Do you want to take a selfie? Is that the question?

• 14:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Can we take a selfie? We should do that after. You know, you built this-

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Sorry, you were saying? The question we don't want to hear.

• 15:02Guy Raz?

  You built this incredible company and brand and have this amazing legacy connected to it. Both of you obviously are financially secure beyond your wildest dreams and beyond for possibly generations. There's a lot you can do. I know that probably both of you wanted to take some time to just reflect and just kind of get out of the day-to-day grind and you probably had assistants and people who always needed your time and there was team meetings and now all of a sudden you go from 100 miles an hour to like 5 miles an hour, right? Are you starting to think about the next chapter and what does that look like for you, Mike?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  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 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 2009. It was like all these things were much more like inner sources of joy and excitement and interest and learning. And I think it

• 16:22Speaker 01

  took probably six or seven months for me to let go of the idea that I had to be perfectly aimed in terms of the next direction to instead reconnect with what was true early on, which is like, I love learning. I love hard technical problems and I love working with people 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 you're like, oh, like, we don't have to figure this out tomorrow. And if we'd had that pressure for Instagram, we never would have done anything.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  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. Like, if you take those three and intersect them, hopefully at the intersection is what we'll 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. That unwiring takes a little bit. And for me, it 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

• 17:38Speaker 02

  up Mike, and Mike had to be my tech support over Zoom. And like, 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 gonna do? I'm not gonna sit on a beach, although, yes, I was in Hawaii, come on. But I'm not gonna 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...

• 18:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  The world's your oyster.

• 18:20Guy Raz?

  Before we go, you know, the theme of this conference is kindness and collaboration. This was a collaboration. The two of you got together. What's amazing is, we've done stories about businesses with co-founders and, you know, they fall apart or the relationship breaks down. You guys are closer than ever. I mean, what is about the other guy that works for you, Mike?

• 18:39Speaker 01

  I think every, almost every interaction I've had with Kev, I feel like makes me smarter and like pushes me in some interesting way. Like, 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 I fixed it. And I was like, oh, it's fixed. And Kevin's like, yeah, but what happened? And 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 a hard thing to quantify, but like there's

• 19:23Speaker 01

  very few people in the industry who I feel like have like the integrity and have been shown, you know, over now 10 years of working together. I'm like, yeah, like I trusted him to fly me in his plane, which I do not trust almost any other person.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  It's a very long, bumpy flight, but it worked.

• 19:40Guy Raz?

  Kevin, what about Mike?

• 19:41Speaker 02

  I like that he'll come on a flight with me. So trust, I think, is number one, which is in this world, especially the business world, you never know who you can trust. 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 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 final story I'll say here is towards the end of Instagram, we took some personality tests because we're getting to like that level of management where we all wanted to know what everyone's personalities were and how it could

• 20:24Speaker 02

  work together. 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 kind of interesting. And then Mike had a slightly different personality type that on paper interacted very well with mine. Like it was almost like a yin and a yang. And that's the only way I can explain like succinctly 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 keeled, like happy leader who just, we'll get through it, Kev. And that, that yin and yang, I think, keeps you, it keeps you

• 21:09Speaker 02

  grounded and it keeps you moving. And fun fact, it turns out my wife has the exact same personality type as Mike.

• 21:16Guy Raz?

  It's a marriage.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  It is.

• 21:18Guy Raz?

  It's a marriage. Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, co-founders of Instagram. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you.

• 21:27Guy Raz?

  That's Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the co-founders of Instagram. They join me live onstage at the 2019 How I Built This Summit, which happened in October at the Yerba Buena 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 Fareed of Edible Arrangements. Thanks to Candace Lim, who produced this episode, and Raptine Arab-Louis, who wrote the music. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.