Achieving overnight success: Kevin Systrom | Hacker News Reader

Achieving overnight success: Kevin Systrom

joel.is

95 pointsrythie34 comments

I loved this.To loosely quote PG: "You shouldn't be focusing on the end goal or final dream, but questioning what opportunities you have at hand and picking from those" or to put simply don't be so future oriented you never know what opportunities will be available then so you should focus on your opportunities now.

We all have dots (events in our lives) that when connected backward from a result lead us to believe that it was these experiences that lead to the result. The human mind is very good at making these connections.

How many other people have had similar experiences with the exception of the end result.

It makes for good story telling, but aside from that, it doesn't show us the way to creating the next big thing.

The blog doesn't give us a recipe to create the next big thing. It just explains the only way to make it.

I assume you meant 'one way to make it', not 'only way to make it'

This sounds like a classic con: Kevin met Steve Anderson from Baseline ventures, and during the meeting Kevin got texts notifying him that people were joining Burbn. Steve knew some of the people signing up, and was intrigued enough to decide there must be something here. In this meeting Kevin secured his first $50,000 of investment for Burbn.

I don't believe those texts were purely organic, but I'm impressed all the same.

Stuff like this happens all the time in a community at this scale.

I don't really know if there is much to analyze. The guy went to Stanford and had the priviledge to meet other great folks with the same passion. His connections and this environment is what made him successful.

That's a nice excuse, but I don't buy it.

First of all, most people who went to Stanford don't found an Instagram.

Secondly, anyone can now apply to YC and make connections with great people.

I'm not selling you an excuse. I'm just saying this certainly played a big part of why he became successful. Stanford has a solid track record for successful start-ups.

In my opinion, applying to YC and hoping to get in versus having staff members on university campus with connections to students who now operate prestigious tech companies and being able to walk the same path they have are 2 entirely different experiences.

Few people from Stanford succeed like him. He's an obvious outlier that's worth understanding.

Thousands of people attend Stanford, yet not all of those attendees are successful to this level. Also, not all really successful people attend to top universities (eg. this was measured for Nobel prizes). So you need to start looking at other factors too.

You're missing the whole point. Anyone has an entree into the startup scene if you work and follow up. It was a sequence of success and increasing access, not randomly granted, monolithic privilege.

The process begins with opening the level editor in Doom II.

Or in my case, Warcraft.

> have access to Adam D’Angelo (Facebook’s first CTO) when he had scaling problems with Instagram.

It was even more fantastic than that.

> “Who’s, like, the smartest person I know who I can call up?” Mr. Systrom remembered thinking. He scrolled through his phone and found his man: Adam D’Angelo, a former chief technology officer at Facebook. They had met at a party seven years earlier, over beers in red plastic cups, at the Sigma Nu fraternity at Stanford University. That night in October 2010, Mr. D’Angelo became Instagram’s lifeline.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/technology/instagram-found...

at the Sigma Nu fraternity

Crucial detail, that.

Never got to use burbn, but it's mentioned a couple of places that:

"Burbn was a mobile check-in app built purely in HTML5." then "When you checked in on Burbn, you could post a video or a picture."

how was this done? You can seemingly only do this with some versions of Android - certainly not iOS or Windows. Any more info on how they/he did this?

IIRC The HTML5 version of burbn was a mobile browser app, which was actually rewrote as a native iPhone app before Kevin and Mike realised that it was too cluttered and over-run with features. This then lead them to removing everything aside from photos, likes and comments and rebranding as Instagram

His github account is nothing really special though just saying

Many aspiring entrepreneurs seem to think there is such thing as a 'get rich quick' startup - when the reality is far from this (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3908088)

Additionally, films like the Social Network seem to propagate this myth/stereotype.

So great job Joel for hopefully helping to dispel some of these myths.

He had opportunities and he made most of every single opportunity. And thats the difference between successful people and wannabes. I remember one quote - "A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds". And it is totally applicable to Kevin.

Good analysis Joel. Good to see you blossom into a successful tech entrepreneur (and a famous one now - the north west love you!). www.edocr.com must be one of the few tech companies to had the privilege to work with both OnePage and Buffer, and hopefully whatever you do after Buffer!

I am glad you did not take my advice on Buffer! You saw an opportunity (I didn't see) and went after it.

We should review edocr/buffer integration after we launch Hootsuite app! Will let you know as soon as we go live!

Keep up the good work mate!

Thanks to this article I discovered Buffer.

Installed the Chrome extension and discovered HN snap-evolved an "add to buffer" organ that creeped me out a little bit. I think I like it.

Haha, glad you like it :-) Let me know if I can help with anything.

The article is basically notes taken from his Foundation interview with Kevin Rose they did a few months ago > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nld8B9l1aRE . Very cool guy. Other foundation episodes are also golden.

Ah, that's where I remember this stuff from. Yes, this is a great series, and it's amazing how similar everyone's early-age start in technology was. Doom and Basic are common themes.

It was not exactly overnight, but as a result of small steps in his life. A really great job, nevertheless.

It wasn't at all overnight, I do believe that's Joel's point with the title. It might be a point that's lost on cargo culters building the next dozen photo apps, but it's what happened with Instagram.

great article. i have more respect for the guy after seeing that progression. it is not a trivial thing to switch into google corp dev. he must have a presence that pushes him up.

This is a fantastic article - something wannabes definitely need to be seeing - Instagram started when he was TWELVE YEARS OLD. I hope this article goes into a series like uses.this.

I personally also got a kick out of this one because I had an extremely similar 'start' - Doom levels and script kiddie maliciousness - amazing. Unfortunately it starts to diverge when he got accepted into Stanford and started kickin' it with internet billionaires and instead I went to UCSD and spent most of my free time drinking microbrews by the beach LOL.

Guess that's why I'm not the guy who made Instagram! Now I know. :)

Yeah, I was blown away by the opportunities available at Stanford (that he made the most of) to work and hobnob with internet luminaries. It really seemed to add jet fuel to his trajectory.

I was surprised that he found the introductory computer science class at Stanford difficult. If this guy can succeed, how can somebody like me who worked through half of SICP independently at age 16 fail? I don't think I'm exceptionally smart for an HN user, but I was surprised how little intelligence is needed before it stops being the main bottleneck (apparently).

Intelligence has many aspects, of which the ability to understand complicated "analytic stuff" from books is only a part. There's also intelligence in getting things done and avoiding dumb mistakes in complicated and uncertain situations, which seem to play the greater role in startups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

Of course it's not the only cognitive attribute that's important (I don't know of any evidence that ability to get things done correlates with g).

BTW, realized that the article didn't explicitly state that the computer science class was introductory, which changes things somewhat.

> When he got AOL, Kevin made programs in Visual Basic to boot people offline

That's just great. The world's most successful entrepeneur used to be a AOL%#$r script kiddie.

Kidding aside, nice tl;dr; summary of his success. I still believe U$ 1 billion for a startup was a bit too much to pay, kind of hard to understand for mere mortals like myself who also tinkered with Gorillas.BAS in QBasic but actually never kicked anyone off AOL using Visual Basic!

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