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The story of Instagram’s explosive rise reads like a Silicon Valley fairy tale, with the company gaining staggering momentum within just a few short months. The photo and video-sharing social media application took only eight weeks for software engineers to develop before it was launched on Apple’s mobile operating system in . In less than two years, Facebook (META) had acquired the company for $1 billion in cash and stock.
But, like all good tales, the process involved many twists and turns, failures and successes, conflicts and synergies, and a dose of fortuitous happenstance.
Key Takeaways
- Instagram is a photo and video-sharing social media application that was launched in 2010 by Kevin Systrom.
- The first prototype of Instagram was a web app called Burbn, which was inspired by Systrom’s love of fine whiskeys and bourbons.
- The Instagram app was launched on , and racked up 25,000 users in one day.
- From the beginning, the primary focus of the app was to feature photographs, specifically those taken on mobile devices.
- Just prior to Instagram’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2012, Facebook acquired the company for $1 billion in cash and stock.
History of Instagram
In 2009, Kevin Systrom, a 27-year-old Stanford University graduate, was working at Nextstop, a travel recommendations startup. Systrom had previously worked at Google (GOOG) as a corporate development associate and interned at Odeo, a company that would later evolve into Twitter (TWTR).
While Systrom had no formal training in computer science, he learned to code on nights and weekends while working at Nextstop.