Instagram’s founder, a marketer who learned to code at night
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
"Depends what you mean by coding. I've been programming here and there since I was in middle school. In high school I was excused from my foreign language requirement so I could take more computer science classes. The first real class I took was in Pascal, and then later in c++. Independently I started playing with MySQL and PHP, but never did anything significant.
My freshman year at Stanford I took CS106X which was the first year's worth of CS in 1 quarter (it's usually two). I wouldn't say I did so well... I looked around and saw so many fantastically smart folks in that class and decided I was better off majoring in something like business. Looking back I wish I had stuck with it. It turns out that no undergrad class prepares you to start a startup -- you learn most of it as you do it."
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-kevin-systrom-a-qa-the-2...
If you are committed to a goal, picking up any specific hands-on skills (coding included) is just the matter of sticking to it.
Something to keep in mind when hiring.
Calvin Coolidge
"If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on and the dedication to go through with it."
John Carmack
Some types of free services that go out of their way to build traffic at the expense of revenue, or computation intensive services like real time audio/video may be exceptions to that rule.
Some anecdotal evidence - I ran a cacheless Django site that more than made the server costs back monthly via a single Adsense unit, in the gaming sector where eCPMs are rubbish, and the files you serve are huge, and the server was never at any point at more than 20% utilisation.
By and large, the cloud has lowered the barriers to entry. Unless you're running Justin.tv, server costs are down in the noise. Getting users is the hard part; serving them pages is not.
John Carmacks quote becomes more pertinent as time goes on because computing power is only becoming cheaper. And to directly address your point, the common person now has access to more computing power than ever before at a cost lower than ever in history because of the cloud.
If anything the barriers to entry continue to drop leaving only our lack of persistence as what stands between us and success.
The demand for servers and compute power has increased because of the cloud. Just because server rooms have turned into datacenters does not mean they "shrunk", quite the opposite.
Cheap PCs in your basement, or cheap VPS machines are perfectly acceptable for starting out. Also, if you're conscious about performance and have good bandwidth, you can serve insane amounts of traffic from a single server.
Cloudwise EC2 is trending down, Heroku starts free with reasonable limits, and VPS with 500M memory at Linode is $20/mon.
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2012/03/05/new-low...
I could interpret the article to say that being determined and focused, while being ready for opportunities, are the critical ingredients to success.
Saying that determination and focus are key ingredients - is just taking an event and looking at it through your own personal lens.
Heck, you could have been the hardest worker, and a genius, but if your name was Nikola Tesla your end result would still be penury.
If you had been Tesla, your "end result" would be that you were Tesla.
Luck, or what appears to be luck, generally happens to people who are constantly prepared to accept an opportunity when it presents itself. In fact this leads to another popular saying that opportunity is everywhere. The problem is that it is often dressed in overalls and looks like work[1].
[1] Very liberal paraphrase of Edisons quote.
Yes, but creating a business isn't as easy as buying a ticket. That's my point. There is more skill than luck involved in any business success.
I am in no way agreeing or disagreeing with this notion of "success", just stating how I think society in general broadly feels.
Line 1 basically refers to stuff like learning code, while line 2 seems to allude to success in terms of making bank.
However, the flip side of the coin is that it's a great weakness if you don't know what you don't know. It's only when you know you don't know that you can find someone to fill in for that or expand your skills. Because in the end it's what you do that counts.
the sad truth is, that there are no set in stone rules how to become successful. perhaps its good, because otherwise if everyone would get successful, nobody would be successful.
think it this way: imagine solid set of rules how to hit jackpot in lotto. if everyone would read those rules and applied, then everyone would win... a dollar.
yes, hard work is important. yes, who you know is important. yes, idea and execution is important. yes, luck and timing is important too. but deliberating that you cant success without this or that is a pure waste of time.
That's nice to think. Hell, I wish I had your tenacious optimisim, but you'd have to be willfully avoiding reality to truly believe this is always the case. Sadly, it just is not.
I should read more about Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.
I'm confused now. The article says he began in 2010, just two years ago. Absolutely not true at all?
(My dad, a construction engineer, learnt programming at college in the freaking late 70s. He never needed it during his long and successful career as a construction engineer, though, and has forgotten all about it. Today, anyone who studies anything to do with social sciences – for example – needs to have some coding skills if they want to do effective statistical analysis.)
There is a difference between that and building your own app.
I do know how to program (R mostly, some python and java) but I am an extreme outlier with my field. In fact, people are ridiculously impressed at my use of awk and regex to extract relevant articles from a CSV file.
I would agree that everyone who studies the social sciences should have some familiarity with coding, but SPSS refutes your claim that it is a necessity. In addition, I had never coded a line before the age of 28 (I'm almost 31 now).
Given that, I'm with the parent. It does seem kind of amazing that virtually anyone in the workforce today in North America didn't have at least some programming training. Whether they still remember is another matter, but I guess everyone comes from a different background.
> Today, anyone who studies anything to do with social
> sciences – for example – needs to have some coding skills
> if they want to do effective statistical analysis.
i don't know about this...i'd say that the majority of college graduates have had no programming experience, not even the basics. programming wasn't taught in any of my schools growing up
I wonder what impact being around world-class engineers are Google had on Systrom's path.
Behind every internet hit was a lot of clever marketing and positioning that really made it (facebook, zynga, groupon, mint, plentyoffish, hotornot, the list goes on).
If he was a developer and not a marketer, would the community be judging or discussing him in the same way?
As quite a few people have pointed out here going to Stanford in any capacity and graduating gives you a huge leg up in terms of the potential Alumni you can now reach out to.
Right place/Right Time/Right Product is what this boils down to. I am also assuming that he did not write most of what is the current Instagram code. Funny that no one mentions that Mike Krieger as his Cofounder in addition to the other engineers on the team.
Unlike Mark Zuckerberg, the man responsible for acquiring the popular photo sharing app for $1 billion, Systrom received no formal engineering training.
From Systrom's bio on Instagram:
Kevin graduated from Stanford University in 2006 with a BS in Management Science & Engineering—he got his first taste of the startup world when he was an intern at Odeo that later became Twitter. He spent two years at Google—the first of which was working on Gmail, Google Reader, and other products...
Gotta love the spin.
This is one of the reasons I have a lot of hope in online education. When it becomes mainstream, HR departments won't be able to ignore it.
Aren't people who are motivated to teach themselves coding the very kind of people who would want to avoid dealing with Suit HR departments? Wouldn't they be more interested in working at a smaller firm, especially a startup, if they had to work for someone else at all?
What bugged me about the spin was the comment about Systrom receiving no formal training, unlike Zuck. Zuck built Facebook with next none of the "formal training" he was supposedly getting during his short stint at Harvard. Systrom actually graduated and then went on to be exposed to some pretty big name companies in the tech world.
Good on him though, and yes, inspiring stuff.