Kevin Systrom

After graduating Stanford, he joined Google working on Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs, Spreadsheets and other products.[10] He spent two years at Google as a product marketer; Systrom left Google out of frustration of not being moved into the Associate Product Manager program.[15]

He made the prototype of what later became Burbn and pitched it to Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz at a party. He came up with the idea while on a vacation in Mexico when his girlfriend was unwilling to post her photos because they did not look good enough when taken by the iPhone 4 camera.[6][13] The solution to the problem was to use filters, effectively hiding the qualitative inferiority of the photographs.[13] Subsequently, Systrom developed the X-Pro II filter that is still in use on Instagram today.[13]

After the first meeting, he decided to quit his job in order to explore whether or not Burbn could become a company. Within 2 weeks of quitting his job, he received US$500,000 seed funding round from both Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. While in San Francisco, Systrom and Mike Krieger built Burbn, an HTML 5 check-in service, into a product that allowed users to do many things: check into locations, make plans (future check-ins), earn points for hanging out with friends, post pictures, and much more. However, recalling their studies in Mayfield Fellows Program, Krieger and Systrom identified that Burbn contained too many features and the users did not want a complicated product. They decided to focus on one specific feature, photo-sharing. The development of Burbn led to creation of Instagram. A month after launching, Instagram had grown to 1 million users. A year later, Instagram hit more than 10 million users.[16]

In 2010, Systrom co‑founded the photo-sharing and, later, video-sharing social networking service Instagram with Mike Krieger[17] in San Francisco, California.

In April 2012, Instagram, along with 13 employees, was sold to Facebook for US$1 billion in cash and stock.[18] According to multiple reports, the deal netted Systrom US$400 million based on his ownership stake in the business.[19] One of the key contributions to the acquisition was that Mark Zuckerberg stated Facebook was "committed to building and growing Instagram independently", allowing Systrom to continue to lead Instagram.[20] Systrom stated in an interview with Bloomberg that the pros of becoming a part of Facebook were that "we got to pair up with a juggernaut of a company that understands how to grow, understands how to build a business, has one of the best, if not the best, management team in tech and we got to use them as our resource".[21]

In an interview with Forbes, he stated that "Instagram is a new form of communication that's an ideal fit with the always-with-you iPhone in today's social media world. Instagram's a social network built around photos, where people can quickly comment on or 'like' photos and share them on Twitter or Facebook."[22] Systrom identified Instagram as a media company, which explains the roll-out of video advertisement by big companies such as The Walt Disney Company, Activision, Lancôme, Banana Republic and CW in late 2014.[23]

On September 24, 2018, it was announced that Systrom resigned from Instagram and would be leaving in few weeks.[24][25]

On January 31, 2023, Krieger and Systrom launched Artifact, an AI-powered news app, on the App Store and Google Play.[26][27]