THE STORY OF INSTAGRAM

'Instagram' was released on 6th October 2010, it was well-received by the audience and its remarkable features of sharing images and videos were adopted by more than a billion people. The idea behind Instagram is to make photographs fast, simple, and beautiful, and it was set to transform the nature of Photography. The founder of Instagram is Kevin Systrom and he was the former CEO. 

INTERESTS IN PROGRAMMING

Kevin was born on 30th December 1983 in Holliston, Massachusetts to Douglas and Diane Systrom. His father was a Vice President in TJX companies, and his mother was a marketing executive at Zipcar. While he was studying at school, he was introduced to Computer programming at a young. His interest in programming grew further while playing he was playing Doom 2, it is a first-person shooting game. After this, he began to create his own levels. As he grew, his interest in technology also increased. He used to prank his friends by creating programs that appear to hack their messenger accounts. 

EDUCATION

He later graduated from Stanford University in 2006 with a bachelor's degree in management science and engineering. He first registered in computer science engineering but moved because of its lack of applications compared to management science. He was one of the twelve students chosen from Stanford University to participate in the Mayfield Fellows Program, where he got the notion of a startup. He later did an internship at Odeo. 

WORK AT GOOGLE

Kevin later worked at Google as an associate product marketing manager for two years but left the job because of the disappointment of not being moved to the associate product manager program. He later moved on to the Corporate development team. He was always interested in social platforms and in January 2009 he joined his startup called nextstop.com and worked as a product manager. 

BURBN                                           

While he was working at nextsop.com he had an idea for an app which is a mix of Foursquare and Flickr. And it is the app Burbn, a location-based photo-sharing app, he presented the prototype to Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. He received seed funding of $500,000 from both of them just after two weeks of quitting his job. But because of its similarities with Foursquare, the app was going nowhere. It has many features but he understood that people need something simple. That is when He joined with his friend Mike Krieger and started working on a simple feature, photo sharing.

INSTAGRAM

 While he was on a vacation with his girlfriend, she said to him that she will not use his app simply because of photo-sharing and also told him that he should add filters which would make it look much better. With all these features they customized this app initially only for iPhone users because iPhone 4 was launched at that time which has a built-in high-resolution camera. But later they worked for eight straight weeks and On 6th October 2010, they officially launched Instagram. The name was derived from 'Instant' and 'Telegram'.  

Due to traffic, the servers came down just after two hours of the launch, they worked all day to bring the server's back up and then to keep everyone online and running. Within just after 24 hours more than 25,000 people were signed up on Instagram. People loved this idea of photo sharing without asking for personal information and it was just about following others and sharing pictures. Within just 9 months Instagram had a record-breaking of 9 million users. 

SOLD OUT

Rapid downloads of Instagram caught the eye of Mark Zuckerberg that, most of his users stopped uploading photos on Facebook and started sharing on Instagram. Since it was one of the core features of Facebook which brought the initial popularity. So, he proposed the same to Kevin that why don't they be the same company. At the same time Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter offered him that they would buy Instagram for $500 million in addition to this he was also offered funds from Sequoia Capital. At that time he wanted to be an independent company and went on with the investments from Sequoia Capital.

                                         

But later in 2012 Facebook bought Instagram for $1billion and even after this it exponentially grew to the top. In 2018 Kevin Systrom resigned as the CEO of Instagram. Now, Instagram became home for all the big celebrities like Cristiano Ronaldo, Kardashian's...

Image source-Google 

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