As a kid, creation was something that I always loved. Creating worlds for video games, creating businesses that didn't make any money, selling lemonade, etcetera. In my fourth grade classroom, I even instituted a government structure because I was really interested in people having positions and there being law.
Products can introduce more complexity over time, but as far as launching and introducing a new product into the market, it's a marketing problem. You have to explain everything you do, and people have to understand it, within seconds.
When you're introducing a mobile app, you look around and say, 'We could be doing 15 different things, but how do we communicate to someone why they would want to download and even sign up for this thing?'
I think Instagram at its best is where you feel like you're getting the most authentic version of the person on the other side of the camera. Someone who does this wonderfully well is Lena Dunham.
There's a natural set of constraints with mobile phones that force you to be a better photographer by acknowledging and observing the world around you.
Traditional businesses can say, 'We're going to sell widgets to people, and it will make X amount of profit.' But new business models are hard.
I've always been into taking my photos, cropping them square, putting them through a filter in Photoshop.
Our goal is really to make sure that 'Instagram', whether you're a celebrity or not, is a safe place and that the content that gets posted is something that's appropriate for teens and also for adults.
The best companies in the world have all had predecessors. 'YouTube' was a dating site. You always have to evolve into something else.
It turns out that no undergrad class prepares you to start a startup - you learn most of it as you do it.
In the past, people have looked at photos as a record of memory. The focus has been on the past tense. With Instagram, the focus is on the present tense.
The printing press did something really big for the world when everyone could get books in their hands and read.
It's funny: I was a photographer before I was a programmer.
Brands, musicians, and public figures were among the first to embrace video on 'Instagram', and we've been impressed with how brands have extended their reach with video ads.
There are a lot more companies with a lot younger people. It is just like 23-year-olds are starting companies, and they are scaling really quickly.
There are fun parts of running a startup and not so fun parts, and Facebook handles the not so fun parts, like infrastructure, spam, sales. The real questions are, how big can 'Instagram' get? Is it 400 million, or bigger? Can it be a viable business if it is that big? These are at the top of the list for everyone in Silicon Valley.
I don't foresee a future where people don't have some sort of phone that's like a computer. I don't foresee a future where those phones don't have cameras in them. That spells a future where smartphones are the status quo. You have to ask yourself how you allow people to communicate what's in their lives.
A platform is the base from which something big happens. In our case, we're an entertainment platform in the sense that there are people signing up like MTV, Burberry, folks like Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. And why? Because it's their channel to control their entertainment to their fans.
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.
I can't imagine that companies are uninteresting if they don't have a billion users. But I do believe, to have mass scale, you have to be in the many-hundreds-of-millions-of-users range, and there are not that many companies that get there.