Words of Wisdom from Kevin Systrom

by Scott Edward Walker on October 11th, 2013

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series entitled “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we share a favorite video of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics.  This week, we present Kevin Systrom, the co-founder and CEO of Instagram.

In this solid interview by Kevin Rose (episode 16 of his Foundation series), Kevin Systrom shares some extraordinary advice and nuggets for entrepreneurs, including the following:

• “I basically pitched myself [to Ev Williams] as ‘listen, how can I help?’  I think that’s the best way to do it as an entrepreneur, and as an intern especially.” (at 11:07)
• “Building a startup is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do… It’s not all glory, and you’re not doing great stuff all day; and it takes a lot of hard work…”   (at 11:36)
• “We were like ‘let’s focus on one thing’ – and that ended-up being photos.” (at 19:28)
• “We set out to solve three problems with Instagram.  The first was we hated all the photos we were taking with a normal camera… The second problem was we wanted to allow you to share across multiple networks … And the third one… it was an eternity to take a photo and upload it, an eternity…” (at 23:00)
• “Find a crew that loves what you’re doing.” (at 29:33)
• “I promise you, a lot of it is luck. But you make your own luck by working really hard and trying lots and lots of things.” (at 30:29)
• “I think what we’ve realized is that you find really smart people with a lot of potential and you put a lot of trust in them.” (at 32:07)
• “A lot of people when starting a company think they’re starting a product… But really, in the long run, you have to build a company – and that’s way harder than coding a few lines and building the design out.” (at 41:03)
• “Stay away from this private beta stuff.  Put it out there.  Find the people that are vocal about what you’re doing, and put in their hands and listen to them – listen to what they’re excited about.” (at 43:21)
• “[Focus] on solving problems… Far too many startups are technologies in search of a problem… Too many people don’t focus on problems that people have… Solve problems that people have!” (at 43:33)
• “The things you launch that end-up making the difference are not yet another feature that no one’s going to use; it’s like, ‘what can you go really deep on?’.  (at 45:15)

I hope you enjoy it.  Cheers, Scott