More interesting background on Instagram. Includes pivots, university ecosystems, and the idea of focus in the early days of a startup. Wow does location matter! From Eric Markowitz at Inc.:
Systrom’s first hire and eventual co-founder was Mike Krieger, a Brazilian-born 25-year-old engineer who worked at Meebo at the time. The pair had met at Stanford’s Mayfield Fellows program, a nine-month work-study program at Stanford designed to educate eager young students in running technology companies. Kim-Mai Cutler, writing for TechCrunch, describes Krieger as one of the “sweetest, most self-effacing engineers and user-experience designers.”
“Once he joined, we took a step back and looked at the product as it stood,” Systrom reflected on Quora. “We decided that if we were going to build a company, we wanted to focus on being really good at one thing.”
But Systrom and Krieger were unhappy with Burbn.
It was “cluttered” and “overrun with features,” Systrom noted on Quora, adding that the photo feature was by far the most popular. So in August, the founders made an incredibly risky, but perhaps prophetic, decision: They’d scrap Burbn almost entirely in order to build an entirely new app from the ground up.
“It was really difficult to decide to start from scratch, but we went out on a limb, and basically cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities,” Systrom continued.
Read the entire article, its interesting and highlights many interesting concepts about new ventures, apps, silicon valley, etc.. (BTW, the photo below, apparently was from when the instagram founders were renting a desk at a coworking space for $500 a month)
via How Instagram Grew From Foursquare Knock-Off to $1 Billion Empire | Inc.com.
Campus Entrepreneurship 