Who is Kevin Systrom, the inventor of the world's most popular social media platform Instagram; How did he set up Instagram?

Kevin Systrom is the co-founder of Instagram, which was launched on October 6, 2010, and is one of the most used social media tools today. Kevin Systrom, an American entrepreneur and computer programmer, was born on December 30, 1983, in Massachusetts, USA. His father was a human resources manager and his mother worked in the technology industry. Like many children born at the time, Kevin Systrom was very keen on video games. He even managed to improve different levels of the game while playing Doom 2. Thanks to his interest in games, which developed in his childhood, he became interested in programming in his youth and progressed in this direction in his education life. Being a brilliant student, he won a scholarship that helped his advance in the field of technology.

I wonder why Kevin Systrom created Instagram. So why did he create social media about images, not social media about posting or sharing anything else? The reason is Systrom's love of photography. He created a site where he could share the photos taken by his friends for his photography hobby, which he was interested in during his university years. He even went to Florence for a semester when he was in the third grade to study photography. During his time in Florence, Kevin Systrom began to gain the aesthetic sense that defined Instagram. Thanks to one of his professors at the university, he was introduced to the cheap camera called Holga. Thus, he began to take photographs in a vintage mood.

Having completed his undergraduate education in management science and engineering and his interest in photography deepened at that time, Kevin Systrom did an internship at a podcast company called Odeo before graduating from university. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter at the time, was also working at Odeo. The two became close friends here. In 2004, while Kevin Systrom was still in college, Mark Zuckerberg came and offered him a job at Facebook. However, Systrom turned down the offer. In an interview in 2011, Kevin Systrom said, "Looking back now, I regret turning down Facebook. "I would like to be a part of Facebook's development over the years," he said.

After receiving a job offer from Google after graduation, Kevin Systrom spent his first two years at the company marketing Gmail and Google Calendar. He then moved on to Google's mergers and acquisitions division. After working at Google for three years, Kevin Systrom left Google to join a travel advice startup called Nextstop.

While working at Nextstop, the foundations of a new social media idea that would take the internet by the storm were beginning to take shape in his mind. Initially, they launched an app called 'Burbn' with one of their co-workers, Mike Krieger. Burbn was location-based social networking and photo-sharing app. Although the implementation is in its early stages, venture capitalist Steve Anderson has decided to invest $250,000 in Burbn. At the same time, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz also invested $250,000 in the venture.

After a while, Kevin Systrom included Mike Krieger, who was also a Stanford graduate, in the Burbn project. Mike Krieger was working on his own app called Meebo at the time.

By eliminating most of the features in Burbn and focusing only on the photo-sharing part, the duo embarked on the path of establishing Instagram as we know it today. The “hah that's it” point came when Kevin Systrom was at the seaside with his then-girlfriend, now-wife Nicole. Systrom describes that moment in an interview he gave in recent years:

“We were walking on the beach. When I told Nicole, “We need something that will make our app different,” Nicole said, “I personally don't want to take pictures because I can't take them well. It's not as beautiful as the photos your friend Greg took," she said. Greg was also called Burbn's at the time. I told Nicole that the reason Greg's photos look good is because of the filters he uses. “Then I think the filters are what will make you stand out,” Nicole said.

So Systrom started working on filters. The first filter that emerged was the X-Pro II filter, which is still used on Instagram. Systrom and Krieger officially renamed the app "Instagram" in October 2010. Instagram is a name created by combining the words “instant” and “telegram”. When Instagram was first published, more than 25,000 people tried to download it within 24 hours, and Instagram's servers crashed. After a month, the number of Instagram users increased to 1 million. Seven months later, it had reached 7 million. As you know, today Instagram belongs to Facebook. This happened in April 2012, when Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for $1 billion.

These days, Systrom's money is worth about $1.8 billion. Predictably, he spends his time biking, playing golf, and traveling. It's also about fashion. He has worked with well-known designers. He even attended the Met Gala, the annual charity gala for the benefit of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, a few times. One of the interesting tasks Kevin Systrom takes on is helping his friends set up Instagram accounts. For example, he traveled to the Vatican in 2016 and provided one-on-one assistance to Pope Francis' Instagram account. In 2018, Systrom and Krieger announced their retirement from the CEO and CTO of Instagram. The duo, who remained generally silent after that, came together with a new project called rt.live after the COVID-19 outbreak. Rt.live is a tracking app that instantly predicts the spread of the virus in each US state.

In September 2020, while the TikTok craze continued, The New York Times claimed that it was in talks with Systrom to take over the management. It is unknown for now whether Kevin Systrom will get his hands on TikTok, but if such a thing happens, Systrom will once again enter a direct race with Zuckerberg.

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