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Instagram’s founder, a marketer who learned to code at night
- dmk23 14y agoThis just goes to show that the most critical ingredient to success is determination and focus, not any specific training. 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.
- melling 14y ago"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On, has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race." 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
- villagefool 14y agoIs it still true? can you actually do much nowdays (in that scale) on a cheap PC? it seems like heavy machines/cloud access is crucial
- reitzensteinm 14y agoYou can serve insane amounts of users on a single $200 a month server from Softlayer (or EC2). It's not uncommon for many types of businesses (that charge real money) to do $250k-$1m in revenue a year per server as powerful as that. 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.
- matwood 14y agoA cheap PC today is way more powerful than PCs of just a couple years ago. Server rooms have shrunk not just because of the cloud, but because the same amount of work can get done with less machine. 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.
- ceph_ 14y ago>Server rooms have shrunk not just because of the cloud, but because the same amount of work can get done with less machine. 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.
- matwood 14y agoWhen I started at my previous company we had a server room that was full of computers. When I left we had consolidated to a single rack, and nothing had been moved to the cloud. While the companies demand for compute power went up during the time I worked there, the compute power available in a single machine went up faster than the demand.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- gtani 14y agoIn US Costco's, where i mostly buy non-apple they mostly stock HP, Toshiba and Dell laptops. 6G RAM, duo core I5 is typically $600-700. 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-lower-pricing-for-amazon-ec2-rds-and-elasticache/ http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2012/03/05/new-low...
- bad_user 14y agoYou've been spoiled. 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.
- ojbyrne 14y agoI'm finding it challenging to find indications of "persistence." He did some coding at night for what sounds like a few months (this is the baseline effort for 99% of the people who live in Silicon Valley). Then he went to a party, where he was handed $500k.
- Maro 14y agoOn the other hand, there are plenty of people with determination and focus who aren't successful in the Instagram sense of walking away with $100M+ after 2 years of work.
- brunohq 14y agostill, you can be successful without making millions.
- ed209 14y agodepends on your definition of success
- skinnymuch 14y agoLooking at how society as a whole generally/broadly defines "success", yes, there are a few cases were not making millions or more is still considered [extremely] successful, but more often than not, "success" at the level of people like the founders of Instagram usually means making bank. I am in no way agreeing or disagreeing with this notion of "success", just stating how I think society in general broadly feels.
- intended 14y agoHeck the OP has such a vague definition of success (it changes from lines 1 to lines 3) that its basically discussion bait/fluff. Line 1 basically refers to stuff like learning code, while line 2 seems to allude to success in terms of making bank.
- melling 14y agoTrue, like the guys at Rovio. It took years before they had success. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rovio_Entertainment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rovio_Entertainment
- brunohq 14y agoI truly believe that talent helps but it doesn't take you as far as determination, focus, passion and ambition. If you want it badly enough you will make it.
- skinnymuch 14y ago> If you want it badly enough you will make it. 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.
- brunohq 14y agoI'll bet that optimism is another trait shared by those who actually make it. ;)
- skinnymuch 14y agoWell people like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates either directly or indirectly disagree with your assessment. At first I thought you were simply being wide-eyed optimistic. However, now it actually seems insulting that you just seem to hand wave around and assume the traits people have who "make it".
- brunohq 14y agodon't take me wrong here. sometimes I tend to hyperbolize my own statements to cross sell what I believe in. you're right. My point is, I try to avoid negativity all around (thoughts, people, environments, etc...) in order to achieve my own goals. That as been working for me so far. I haven't "make it" yet, but I'll do someday. What do you think about that? I should read more about Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.
- intended 14y agoSuccess is not reducible to some key rules. His first prototype idea got $500k seed from Baseline and AH. Thats after putting together a basic HTML5 Game mashup of foursquare and mafia wars. 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.
- gruseom 14y agoif 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.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoMy take away was that he had connections that let him pursue his ideas more than just as a weekend project.
- pclark 14y agoHe just went to a party. He didn't have rolodex of investors or anything.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoHe went to a party where Andreessen Horowitz happened to also be attending. I'm assuming he didn't crash this party. I didn't say he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, just that he was in a position where his hard work was likely to be recognized.
- mikecane 14y agoBeing at that party is precisely what luck is all about.
- joering2 14y ago?? what does him going to the party knowing that Horowitz will be there has to do with luck??
- matwood 14y agoLuck is commonly referred to as being ready when an opportunity presents itself.
- paulhauggis 14y agoMany people here on HN mistake it for winning the lottery. Almost as if that is the only reason you can and did succeed.
- viking 14y agoYes, the founders benefit a lot from keeping their identity small. Their identity should not be as a CEO, CTO, programmer, marketer, non-technical, etc. A founder need to have a flexible identity and learn as needed. 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.
- teja1990 14y agoAbsolutely.Determination , hard work and commitment.This is what college taught, it doesn't matter how smart you are , if you don't work hard . It will all go waste.
- joering2 14y agounfortunately its only half true. i know bunch of people that were lazy like a beach bum and got rich whether because of work of other people or because of luck. 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.
- lusr 14y agoYup. Since you cannot (as far as I know) influence luck or good fortune, your only option if you want to succeed is to hedge your bets and make as great an intelligent effort as possible. I'm still struggling with the 'intelligent' part...
- mikecane 14y agoRead the history of Hollywood. Not a single person who formed the major studios -- Cohn, Mayer, Goldwyn, etc -- ever created a movie themselves.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dshaw002 14y agoIntelligence and an understanding of the market helps out a lot, too. You can be determined and focused and making something, and it could not be that successful (assuming success in making a lot of money is your goal)
- simondlr 14y agoNot entirely true though. He's been coding for a long time. He studied management science and engineering. It's not as if he wasn't technical before he started with instagram.
- femto 14y agoDoes the degree title refer to the "science and engineering of management" or "management, science and engineering" or "engineering and the science of management"? My limited reading indicates the first, but can anyone confirm?
- coryl 14y agohttp://www.stanford.edu/dept/MSandE/cgi-bin/academics/bs.php http://www.stanford.edu/dept/MSandE/cgi-bin/academics/bs.php
- ojbyrne 14y agoManagement Science is a subdiscipline of management. Also known as Operations Research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research
- hej 14y agoToday, nearly everyone has been coding for a long time. Everyone learns the basics in school. At college or university many will have a lot of further contact with many computer science concepts. It’s a lot like math, really: everyone knows the basics (or has at least heard them once and promptly forgotten them), but that doesn’t make everyone a mathatician. (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.
- apl 14y ago
- StCroix 14y agoFrom the article: 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.
- shalmanese 14y agoI believe he was working as a Product Marketing Manager on Gmail and Google Reader, not an engineer.
- robk 14y agoHe was definitely a PMM. Started as an Associate PMM.
- capdiz 14y agoSpin aside. His story would be really inspiring for folks i have met who think that for one to learn how to program, they need to go to Uni and apply for a cs degree which is bullshit.
- pagekalisedown 14y agoThe problem is that a lot of HR departments won't consider people without degrees. A Stanford degree opens a lot of doors. 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.
- mikecane 14y ago>>>The problem is that a lot of HR departments won't consider people without degrees. 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?
- EXPERT_Coder 14y agoWhat's so hard to believe about that? Are there any programmers who aren't self taught these days . . .
- rhizome 14y agoTons. Most.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- denysonique 14y agoI thought that most tech entrepreneurs have learned to code by themselves.
- griperson 14y agoIt is good to know that there are GOOD marketers-turned-programmers in the world. I work with someone who bills himself as a programmer, in fact was hired to be "senior developer." This "senior developer" isn't. Instead, he's a marketer and bullshitter who lied his way into his position. He's not coded a single thing in the 8 months of his employ. Instead he has had his position changed to "marketing director" because "that's his niche." I wonder what impact being around world-class engineers are Google had on Systrom's path.
- plant42 14y agoFair play to him. He's achieved to what many here aspire. I cannot begrudge him the success because he's NOT a developer. If he was a developer and not a marketer, would the community be judging or discussing him in the same way?
- zerostar07 14y agoIs that true about Codeacademy?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- whatmypassword 14y agoSo I'm curious...what programming language did he learn and use for instagram?
- ojbyrne 14y agoThe way I parse it is he built something in html5, and showed it at a party.
- dpritchett 14y agoOwen, this is clearly a situation in which your insight is more valuable than most other people's. Care to elaborate on the Digg parallels?
- ojbyrne 14y agoI don't really want to draw parallels, because I don't know anyone at Instagram, but this really feels like a standard Silicon Valley puff piece to make the newly wealthy insiderish person look like a renaissance man. I'm going to guess that along with the $500k came the admonition to hire real engineers stat.
- whatmypassword 14y agoOh yes...got that. I was just curious what that led to using at instagram. Anyone know what they use?
- blackysky 14y agoI find the story misleading .... it is one thing to build a prototype and another thing to create an app to support millions of people and their pictures.. on top of that he has great connection and a great environment .... you must check the big picture and not just take one element to create that cinderella story.... by the way his co founder is a real CS genius .... let's face it ...it is easy to raise money right now in this crazy environment...I don't take away his hard work and talent but just check the picture too....
- tila 14y agoanother big dollar sign, another over'night' myth.
- louhong 14y agoThis is very misleading - his Quora answer (below) means that been involved (if at a limited capacity) with coding since he was very young. "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-28-year-old-who-just-sold-his-startup-to-facebook-for-1-billion-2012-4#ixzz1rekicv2z http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-kevin-systrom-a-qa-the-2...
- sayemm 14y agoRegardless of how experienced he was technically, think this is another case, among many, that demonstrate just how important it is to have sharp marketing instincts. 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).
- zdgman 14y agoI would like to believe that his skill at coding had less to do with it versus the connections he had and the people he surrounded himself with. 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.
- zdgman 14y agoI am going to reply to my own comment and also note that their first engineering hire, Shayne Sweeney also didn't go to college for programming.