Working at a startup to make a lot of money was never a thing, and that’s why I decided to just finish up school. That was way more important for me.
I have a pretty random life. I run a business and go all over the world doing things for that business, things that are fairly orthogonal. But my job is to run my company, not to be the best Instagrammer. I’ll let other people be awesome at it.
If you’ve got an idea, start today. There’s no better time than now to get going. That doesn’t mean quit your job and jump into your idea 100 percent from day one, but there’s always small progress that can be made to start the movement.
I don’t think you should ever start a business and move in a direction where you can’t see it becoming a business.
People interact with their phones very differently than they do with their PCs, and I think that when you design from the ground up with mobile in mind, you create a very different product than going the other way.
I always look toward teens on Instagram to really understand what’s going on. For some reason, when you’re a teen, you just understand the world better than anyone else.
What people tell you and how they act is very, very different sometimes.
I’m always in awe of people who are artists in their fields – people who understand that simply by taking ideas and translating them into reality, they’ve created value in the world.
Every startup should address a real and demonstrated need in the world. If you build a solution to a problem lots of people have, it’s so easy to sell your product to the world.
A lot of the earliest Instagram celebrities took really beautiful photos. But you’re starting to see a change where it’s not about beauty; it’s about the story that you tell.
People always told me photos have been done. My feeling was, these people are wrong.
The number of people who have either gotten married or had kids or started dating or just made great friends over Instagram is countless. I think we’re the only platform that continues to be successful in bringing people together in real life for these real relationships.
On the intimate relationships, I’d say you can be someone who wouldn’t normally get attention in traditional media and come onto Instagram and build this massive following.
I really love connecting people, creating communities. As a kid, creation was something that I always loved.
In my fourth grade classroom, I even instituted a government structure, because I was really interested in people having positions and there being law.
I love challenging the notion that, in order to be a tech founder, you have to be holed up in a dark room wearing a T-shirt and baggy jeans.
There’s real beauty in pushing yourself to expose the real you in more ways.
Obviously, being the CEO, there are a lot of eyes on what you do and what you post and how you post, and I think one of the challenges of Instagram in general is that, as we get bigger, there are just more voices in the room, more eyes on everyone’s accounts.
Having a company that’s successful is a wonderful platform to do new things. You don’t have to raise money for it; you can take profits from the company and pump them into new business.
I really value passion for the product above experience.
We’re just taking people and shifting them from taking photos anyway to taking them on Instagram.