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  • Kevin worked at Google for a couple of years and Mike went on to work

  • at Meebo before they decided to get together and start their company.

  • They do have wonderful things to tell us about their experience,

  • and I won't get in the way and let them start.

  • So welcome back to Stanford. Thank you so much. Thank you, Tina.

  • Thanks so much for having us, Tina, and Stanford.

  • It's great to be back here. I remember...

  • how many years ago now, four or five...

  • sitting in this exact room and watching people stand up and

  • give advice about entrepreneurship and their experience,

  • and it's a little surreal to be standing up and giving back.

  • But it's a really exciting opportunity because,

  • I think in the past year or so since

  • we started what would become Instagram, we've learned a lot.

  • And today what we want to do is go through a series

  • of myths that we think we had learned along the way,

  • or thought were true along the way.

  • And as we did Instagram and as we went through

  • the process of founding this company,

  • we learned that not all of them were necessarily true.

  • So the big caveat here today is,

  • although we're saying all this stuff, experience is what matters.

  • And going through your own experience in a startup is

  • really what helps you debunk these myths as well.

  • So this is our chance to share some learning with you guys.

  • My background, obviously, I went to Stanford. Mike went to Stanford.

  • I studied MS&E, Mike, you studied... SymSys. ... SymSys here.

  • And that was the beginning of our entrepreneurship

  • experience in the Mayfield Fellows program.

  • Like Tina said, we both had really amazing internships

  • then that got us to get interested in entrepreneurship

  • and get excited about doing it when we got out.

  • And both of us after a year or so of working in a

  • larger company decided we wanted to do something.

  • And hopefully today, through that experience,

  • we can shed a little light on what we learned.

  • What we're doing today, Instagram,

  • is kind of interesting because it came out of

  • something we were doing before that didn't quite work.

  • How many people here have actually heard of Instagram/use it? OK.

  • Awesome. Most of the room.

  • How many people have heard of Burbn/use it? Used it.

  • Yeah, like three people. That's awesome.

  • So that's why we started working on Instagram because

  • that's basically the number of hands that went up

  • in the room when we were working on it.

  • Burbn was this check-in app that lets

  • you check into different places,

  • and while you were doing that allowed you to share

  • pictures or videos of what you were doing.

  • Long story short, we worked on that for a little while

  • and then realized it wasn't really going anywhere.

  • But the thing people loved the most about it was

  • actually sharing images of what they were doing.

  • So today, Instagram has about a little less than four million

  • users all sharing images of what they're doing out in the

  • real world through their iPhones on a daily basis.

  • How many mobile photos do we upload per day about now? It's like...

  • Jesus, six a second, more or less. So whatever that times...

  • Yeah, it's a lot. And this is pretty awesome to be in this position

  • only six or seven months after having launched.

  • But the myths we're going to talk about today,

  • I think, really helped us get to the next level and start Instagram

  • by learning that those myths weren't necessarily true.

  • So to start, I think Mike's going to

  • bring you through the first myth.

  • So the first one, when you're just starting out and

  • you're dealing with the bucket of uncertainty that

  • is being an entrepreneur and getting started,

  • you want to latch on to things that you've seen before.

  • We really quickly learned that you just cannot

  • really learn to be an entrepreneur from a book,

  • a blog or a talk, and it turns out that a day on the job was worth a

  • year of experience and what happens is the collection of experiences

  • and knowledge you can get from those sources are super important.

  • And I'm not dismissing them entirely as

  • something that you should just ignore,

  • but that first day when you're starting to make those decisions

  • where the data isn't really there and there hasn't been

  • a blog post posted to Hacker News that was like,

  • 'Deciding what to do on the first day of startup'

  • or 'Making this really tough decision',

  • it turns out a lot of it is very specific to your

  • situation and all you can really learn to do beforehand

  • is try to deal with that uncertainty.

  • So making snap decisions or quick decisions

  • in the face of a lot of uncertainty.

  • We'll hit up on situations early on where we weren't sure

  • if we were going to take Instagram a follow model,

  • for example like Twitter, or more friendship like Facebook.

  • And there is just no blog,

  • book or talk that we could've ever really seen beforehand

  • that would have taught us to do either of those things,

  • since that was about sitting down and saying,

  • 'Well, what do we know beforehand? What does our gut tell us?'

  • And trusting your gut, I think, is a theme of this talk.

  • And so developing a better gut is the

  • work you can invest in beforehand,

  • and then saying, 'All right, let's invest in this.

  • Let's stay the course for a while and really see it through,'

  • rather than wavering for months at a time being,

  • 'Oh, why don't we build both?

  • Then we'll switch off,'

  • maybe make it a preference like 'worst mistake ever,'

  • give up on making that decision and instead make it a preference,

  • and so and so forth where you're having these micro decisions

  • that in the end sum up to what becomes your product basically.

  • And we really rapidly found that,

  • as tempting as it is to go search off for

  • prior accounts of something similar,

  • that's not decision is what makes a difference.

  • But what you can be doing is doing quick projects,

  • side projects during school,

  • even when you're outside when you're doing a job.

  • And most of what we learned and applied into our startup

  • were things that we were doing on the weekends which,

  • depending on the companies,

  • either something encouraged or discouraged.

  • But usually if you're excited enough about something

  • you will find the time to work in it.

  • The other thing is, once you do start a startup,

  • it's super tempting to get caught up

  • in the meta part of doing a startup,

  • so going to entrepreneurship events and being,

  • 'Yes, I want to talk about being an entrepreneur.'

  • We were incubated at Dogpatch Labs, which was a great experience.

  • We were surrounded by 30 startups, a rotating cast.

  • We were there for probably longer than anybody else. Too long.

  • Too long.

  • We saw three or four different classes of startups go through that.

  • And the successful ones were the ones that were in it 9 am

  • and left at 10 or 11 pm and were just putting in the work,

  • and not the ones that showed up at 10, hung around, left at 6,

  • who in my opinion were doing a startup as a lifestyle

  • choice because they didn't want a boss.

  • That's not really a good enough reason to do a startup.

  • It should be that you wake up and you're obsessed

  • with this idea and you want to make it happen,

  • and you're not there to hang around in this

  • club or have this fun chat with people.

  • And that distinction wasn't that apparent to

  • me Day 1 because everybody's doing a startup, this should be a thing.

  • And then one month in people were like, "You guys work really hard."

  • We kept hearing that comment at Dogpatch, and we were.

  • We were working the hours that we felt we wanted

  • to throw into the startup.

  • And I guess it's a gut check if you're finding yourself getting drawn

  • into the meta part of the startup of being an entrepreneur,

  • of being really excited about...

  • Somebody said to us earlier, the phrase was like,

  • "You can't call yourself an entrepreneur. Somebody

  • has to call you an entrepreneur in a way."

  • And it's true. It's very tempting to get caught up in that.

  • And I would encourage you to step back a little bit and find out

  • the only thing that ships products and the only thing ultimately

  • end users care about is the product you deliver to them,

  • not how will they talk about you in TechCrunch or exactly

  • who your investors were or which events you attended.

  • Another myth that we encountered as we started our company...

  • we talked to our friends who were holding

  • back from starting companies...

  • is that startups only come from Computer Science students.

  • Neither Kevin nor I studied Computer Science.

  • And that's something that we're actively proud of,

  • not because Computer Science is a bad degree by any means but

  • because it means you can get the technical chops you need to get

  • things off the ground to get things prototyped and shipped.

  • We built all of the initial version of Instagram ourselves

  • from things we mostly just were self-taught in.

  • The early Twitter employees, none of them even went to college,

  • and our first engineering hire didn't go to college, either.

  • I think with Twitter, maybe they didn't finish college.

  • Maybe they went to it. But it turns out there's things you can

  • do in school that I think are valuable,

  • and when you're trying to pick courses and

  • figure out where to focus your time,

  • the classes I look back to now and think,

  • 'Wow, these are the ones that helped me deal with that uncertainty

  • day to day' are the ones where Day 1 of the quarter they tell you,

  • 'We don't know what you're going to be

  • doing for the rest of the quarter. You'll get this at the d.school

  • a lot and all of the entrepreneurship classes.

  • It's your job to ask the question,

  • figure out the question that you're going to tackle,

  • and then answer it for the rest of the quarter.'

  • And that's just a very different experience from,

  • well, 'These are the 10 problems that you're going

  • to tackle and then we'll deliver them at the end.'

  • And, of course, going through those

  • motions is really important as well,

  • but having that ability to ask the question...

  • and Kevin will talk a little bit more about this in the next one...

  • but also just work through the rest of that quarter.

  • And the rest of it is, the engineering we end up doing we call

  • 'Sink or Swim School of Engineering'.

  • So we launched on this little machine server in Los Angeles.

  • We had no idea what we were doing.

  • We were like, 'Well, maybe some people would sign up.'

  • Within 24 hours, we had so much demand on that one machine that all of

  • a sudden we had to scale out to what we now have, millions of users.

  • None of us had touched Amazon's cloud

  • platform at all before launching;

  • we'd kind of heard of it but shied away from it.

  • And it turns out that there's no motivation stronger than

  • a bunch of people knocking at your door saying,

  • "I want to use your product. Fix your thing." We'd put in a lot of...

  • I don't really remember the first two months

  • of our startup because we didn't sleep,

  • and I think short-term memory goes out of the way.

  • I'm told we put in a lot of late nights that were all about saying,

  • 'What do we need to do to get our products

  • to a place where people can keep using it,

  • get excited about it, scale to the challenge?'

  • And you'll learn those things because you're bright and intelligent,

  • you started a company because you trust yourself.

  • So having that faith and not shying away

  • from a big challenge because you're,

  • 'Well, what if we're successful? We won't know how to scale...'

  • I barely really knew how to use a lot of the Linux

  • Sysadmin stuff and now we know it really well,

  • and if we did it again we'd have a totally different approach.

  • But it's a little bit of zen beginner's mind:

  • you focus on the simple, important stuff first if you're not

  • worried about scaling ahead of time.

  • It's really good to have friends that are Computer Science students.

  • Absolutely. It's all the building that network. Week 1...

  • I had worked at Meebo beforehand and

  • I was doing mostly frontend development,

  • so I wasn't doing a lot of hardcore scaling stuff...

  • and I remember 8 am in the morning I'd be waking up

  • my friends who led more normal jobs and be like,

  • 'I have no idea what this means.

  • How do I do this?' They'd come in, we'd buy them beer.

  • And you build that network and they'll help you out

  • because they're excited about what you're doing,

  • and it becomes less about feeling like you're

  • the entire source of knowledge for yourself. Right.

  • And I think what I'd add to the original point of going to events or

  • talks is that it turns out what you get from those things aren't necessarily

  • the takeaway is that we're going to put up here on the board,

  • but it's the people sitting next to you,

  • it's the people you meet before the event, after the event.

  • The people that you're sitting next to chatting

  • with them about the stuff that you're doing,

  • they'll end up being the most valuable part of your

  • entrepreneurship experience going down the line.

  • The fact that I remember being at a party...

  • I think it was maybe sophomore year in college

  • when Facebook had just moved out,

  • and I ran into Adam D'Angelo who was the

  • CTO at that time at this little party.

  • And we kind of kept in touch since.

  • And on the day we went down that first day we launched,

  • we had all these problems.

  • I was like, 'Who's the smartest person I know who I can call up?'

  • And Adam spent 30 minutes on the phone with us just walking

  • us through the basic things we needed to do to get back up.

  • Those little events are the things that matter.

  • So as much as you're paying attention to the stuff on the slides,

  • make sure you spend some time after the talk

  • getting to know the people around you. Absolutely.

  • I think Myth Number 3 that I'd like to talk about,

  • this is something I had no clue about.

  • It was that finding the solution to the problem is the hardest part.

  • I always thought like,

  • you're faced with these problems that people have,

  • you assume that you know exactly what you're going to tackle,

  • and the hard part is finding that algorithm.

  • The hard part is scaling that solution. It turns out...

  • thank you, Mike...

  • that the hard part is actually finding the problem to solve.

  • Solutions actually come pretty easily for the majority of problems.

  • Not for every problem, but for the majority of problems.

  • And in our case, what we did is when we sat down

  • and we were deciding to work on Instagram,

  • what we did was we wrote down the top five problems

  • people have with mobile photos because we wanted

  • to build a product that solved problems.

  • We didn't want to just build a cool app

  • to look for a problem that people had.

  • We wanted to do it the other way around.

  • So what we did was we listed out these five problems.

  • And I remember the top three that we circled.

  • Number 1 was that mobile photos don't look so great.

  • We've all had that experience...

  • you're seeing the sunset, you take a snapshot,

  • and it looks washed out, you can barely see the sun, etcetera.

  • And we were like, 'That's the major problem we want to solve.'

  • Number 2 was that uploads on mobile phones take a really long time.

  • So we were like, 'What could we do around that?'

  • Well, maybe if we started the upload way before

  • you're done even editing the photo's caption,

  • and what if we sized down the photo just to fit

  • perfectly on the screen but nothing else?

  • And that's the small little problem and solution that it turns out really

  • delights people because they press 'done' entering their caption,

  • it's already been uploaded.

  • The third problem was that we really wanted to allow

  • you to share out to multiple services at once.

  • We felt like, should you have to make the decision

  • of taking a photo with a Facebook app,

  • the Twitter app, so on and so on,

  • or should you just take it in one place and

  • distribute it to many places at once?

  • Those top three problems allowed us to really

  • hone in on what solution we wanted to build.

  • And that's really what Instagram became.

  • I also wanted to say that once you have those

  • top problems that you want to solve,

  • you need to verify that they're actually the ones that people have.

  • And really the way to do that is get your product in front

  • of people very quickly and test that hypothesis.

  • I think too many people wait a long time...

  • and I'm going to talk about this a little later.

  • Too many people wait a long time to see whether or not what they're

  • working on is actually the problem people are having.

  • And the last point is that, really, you should not be afraid to have

  • simple solutions to simple problems.

  • Like I said early on, I think too many people believe you have to

  • solve things in a really complicated way.

  • And at the end of the day,

  • if you delight people even a little bit with a simple solution,

  • it turns out it goes very far.

  • That first day when we had something like

  • 20,000 new users, I was like,

  • 'Clearly there was a need for this that hadn't been done before,'

  • and I'm so glad we tackled those simple problems.

  • There's something about...

  • in the tech community, you always want to feel like you're working

  • on the hardest problem in the world.

  • It turns out that simple problem becomes very hard at scale.

  • And that's what's really exciting. In a way, we often...

  • in our entrepreneurship classes we hear

  • about the Big Hairy Audacious Goal,

  • like, 'What's the huge chunk you're trying to bite off and tackle?'

  • And one thing that really struck me was that that

  • Big Hairy Audacious Goal could be bringing that simple

  • solution to something delightful to the masses.

  • Yeah. And that, in itself, is a huge challenge. Yeah.

  • And it's something we deal with on a daily basis.

  • Mike has to wake up at 4 am everyday to reset servers and stuff.

  • I wake up with him, but I don't actually do anything.

  • I just say, "OK, Mike, I'm here with you." Myth Number 4...

  • This is what I was talking about before...

  • working for months to build a robust product in secrecy,

  • and then launch to the world.

  • How many people have heard of stealth startup,

  • started a stealth startup,

  • feel like they would go into entrepreneurship

  • and keep their ideas to themselves?

  • I'm going to assume that everyone's going to raise their hand,

  • because we've all heard of the stealth startup, how cool it sounds.

  • The problem with stealth startups is that you don't

  • get the feedback you need quickly enough.

  • In order to test whether you're working on the right thing or not,

  • you need to put it in front of people.

  • And I think there are certain verticals...

  • I'm really talking about consumer internet here specifically...

  • I think there are certain verticals outside of

  • consumer internet where stealth might make sense

  • if you're doing pharmaceutical or something.

  • But for us, getting it in front of users

  • was the most eye-opening experience.

  • I remember putting Burbn in front of people

  • we didn't know and they were just,

  • 'What is this thing? What are you doing?'

  • We would be in a busy bar and trying to explain to them

  • on our mobile phones and they just wouldn't get it.

  • And that happened enough in front of people outside of our friend group

  • that it was really clear we had to work on something different.

  • Or at least refine the idea.

  • And I think that's something to keep in mind

  • as you're going about starting a startup.

  • Building the minimum viable product is super useful.

  • Don't build past what you need to build to answer the questions.

  • I think Eric Ries talks about this all the time.

  • He says he was at his job and he was building this 3D chat client...

  • the idea was you could basically link your Yahoo Messenger,

  • your MSN Messenger, all these different

  • messengers to this one 3D client...

  • and he spent eight weeks doing it. And then they launched it.

  • And no one used it.

  • And he said to himself, 'Couldn't I have just done one of those

  • platforms to prove that no one used it?'

  • So ask yourself, how much work do you need to do to actually

  • prove whether or not this thing's going to sink or swim?

  • The 'Sink or Swim School of Engineering'.

  • We should just write this book, right? It's really true, though.

  • Everything we do at Instagram,

  • we start by saying, what's the V1 of this feature?

  • What's the V1 of this thing that we're going to put out

  • in two days and test whether or not it's going to work?

  • I think that's super important to remember.

  • The last point here is failing early and failing often.

  • It's totally OK to fail in an organization.

  • You need to fail in order to find the right solution.

  • Often, the first thing you start off with

  • is not the thing you end up with.

  • And you should assume from the start,

  • your first idea is not going to be your last.

  • And your job is to fail your way to success.

  • And I think what's we did in Burbn pretty well.

  • We failed all the time.

  • And finally we woke up one morning and we were like,

  • 'We're failing too much. We need to move a little bit to the right.'

  • And even in Instagram,

  • we failed a bunch with different features and things.

  • But the idea is you're constantly refining this original idea.

  • It's not this 'wake up one morning and have

  • the brilliant idea and go implement it'.

  • You're constantly iterating on it.

  • This one's kind of interesting because I feel

  • like in all the books I read in college,

  • people are like, what you want to do is you want to build this

  • beautiful SlideDeck with graphs going up into the right,

  • and you want to go up and down Sand Hill Road and tell everyone that,

  • 'Yeah, Kleiner's in on the deal.

  • Are you in on the deal?' You play everyone off of each other.

  • When we were going to raise money, I said to Mike,

  • "I don't want to meet with all these people.

  • What I want to do is I want to seek out"...

  • and if we can actually show the reality...

  • "I want to seek out the people we really want to work with."

  • I think instead of optimizing for things like valuation,

  • you should consider optimizing for people.

  • There are a lot of venture capitalists

  • out there with a lot of knowledge, and I guarantee you,

  • your idea matches really well with a select group of those folks.

  • In a way, you have to think about bringing on venture

  • capital as you're hiring part of your team,

  • and who are the people you want to hire.

  • And I think far too many people you talk to, even at an angel stage,

  • are like, 'We need to optimize for getting some

  • ridiculous evaluation right out of the door.'

  • And then they end up with some VC firm they don't have

  • a lot in common with and they don't get along,

  • and bad things happen. It's all about the people.

  • And I think that's what you have to remember

  • when you're going out to raise money.

  • Find the people that believe in what you're doing,

  • that are going to give you the capital to achieve your goals.

  • The other point here is you can go off

  • and raise $40 million in a Series A,

  • but it turns out you don't need a lot of

  • money to get off the ground these days.

  • We spent like 60K to launch our first version of Instagram.

  • Sixty K. We had raised 500 and we were kicking

  • ourselves the second day after...

  • not after we raised, but after things started taking off.

  • We were like, 'We have all this money left over and we got this far.'

  • It turns out you can bootstrap yourself with Amazon Web services.

  • You need two engineers these days to do things well.

  • And it turns out that you can get a lot done on a shoestring budget,

  • especially with all these incubators and

  • things that are happening these days. It's something to remember.

  • So the main takeaway here is, optimize for people,

  • don't optimize for valuation.

  • Because if you have a great idea,

  • it's going to get a great valuation, you're going to do well.

  • But those people are what make the difference.

  • The second point on this slide I just want to make very

  • quickly is that bringing a prototype into a pitch meeting

  • is so much more powerful than a bunch of graphs that say

  • you're going to make lots of money in the future.

  • Prototypes are tangible.

  • Prototypes are things that people can sink their teeth

  • into and use and react to and ask questions about.

  • We have yet to create a pitch deck for Instagram.

  • We don't have a pitch deck anywhere.

  • It was always a prototype that we brought in and we showed.

  • I think that while you should probably create a pitch deck,

  • and that's probably not a lesson to learn from us,

  • what's more important is that I think people

  • really attach themselves to prototypes.

  • So that's how I think about the whole financing of startups.

  • And I think that while you go off to the world to start a startup,

  • just keep these lessons in mind.

  • Another myth is that starting a company is building a product.

  • I remember getting so excited when we were starting

  • Burbn that we had all these feature ideas,

  • we had all these product ideas to work on.

  • But it turns out that starting a company is 50% building

  • your product and 50% a lot of other stuff: bank accounts,

  • insurance, taxes that you didn't know existed,

  • filing for things in the City of San Francisco and

  • forms in the basement of City Hall to make sure that

  • your founder from Brazil can get a job with you.

  • There's all these other stuff that isn't about having

  • brilliant product ideas that takes a lot of work.

  • And I think when people decide on whether or not

  • they're going to go into entrepreneurship,

  • you need to remember that building a product is great,

  • but there is a lot of legwork involved

  • in getting a team off the ground,

  • I think specifically in recruiting a team.

  • Team-building is one of the most important

  • things when you get off the ground.

  • It's not just about having a great idea.

  • It's finding the people to bring in to make that idea happen

  • and supporting them by shielding them from the press and the

  • checking accounts that you have to set up, etcetera...

  • especially raising capital. That can be a huge time sink.

  • And you don't realize that until you get into the flow of

  • things that building a company is not building a product.

  • At the same time, it's supremely important to know that

  • you have to be good at building a product and that you're

  • going to be willing to do the legwork to do the rest.

  • As we wind down for the last two myths,

  • you might be sitting there going, 'OK, so what's next?

  • When will I know I'm ready?

  • How do I know that it's time to go and start a startup?

  • And what's it going to be like for the next few years?'

  • And it turns out, it's not the idea that's going to hit you

  • while you're walking down the street or in the shower.

  • Like Kev mentioned, I'm from Brazil originally,

  • and I'll do all these interviews back home where entrepreneurship

  • is still like a building process and it's not as much

  • in the culture as it is here in the Valley.

  • And they always ask me, "When did you have your idea?"

  • "What a great idea you guys have? What struck you guys?"

  • There was no one moment where we were like,

  • 'Oh, yeah, photos with filters!'

  • Ideas really are the result of a lot of these iteration

  • steps that we've talked about earlier,

  • and your job is just to explore the solution space until

  • you figure out where in that solution space you fit.

  • And it turns out people are always,

  • 'Well, does my idea need to be the most unique thing in the world?'

  • Nowadays, especially in the social space,

  • ideas are combinatorial. That childhood exercise where you take different

  • parts of the animals and you make a new animal out of it?

  • That's a lot of what startups are like.

  • You're saying like, well,

  • there's things about Twitter we really like,

  • but it frustrates us that we don't have an emotional connection

  • with the content that we're receiving because it's not visual.

  • And there's things we like about things like Hipstamatic

  • with these cool ways of making your photos look better,

  • but the photos get caught on the phone and you don't

  • really get to connect with your friends through them.

  • So these combinatorial ideas are really

  • where you end up having these 'Aha!' moments

  • later after you've explored the solution space

  • rather than the shower idea that ends up killing them.

  • And as we've mentioned before, in the sharing and discussing process

  • is where those ideas get refined.

  • So getting that consumer validation, going through those bar exams...

  • we call them 'bar exams'.

  • Like you're in the bar,

  • can you explain your idea and show it off to your friend

  • in a way that they're not going to be like...

  • Well, it's really loud and people are drinking and...

  • They have the other 50 things they want to do.

  • And one thing I really want to emphasize is that

  • careers are very much like a series of themes that

  • you go through and explore in your career.

  • If you look at Dennis Crowley at Foursquare,

  • he's been working on that drive,

  • on that idea around location and unlocking your city,

  • for almost 10 years or more. He's probably been thinking about it...

  • maybe sketching it as a kindergarten, I don't know.

  • And we've made photo... just like kindergarten, right?

  • We've been excited about photography and about

  • communicating the real world for years.

  • And probably whatever we do for the next 30 years,

  • we'll have some hint of that forever.

  • So very much so, your startup and your career is an expression

  • of you and your co-founders in a way that expresses what are

  • the themes that are going to recur throughout your careers.

  • And you'll know when you hit upon that for yourself because you'll

  • wake up every morning and you can't think of anything else.

  • You're in the shower and you're like,

  • 'Oh, we can do this different thing!'

  • And that's when you know you've hit the great idea.

  • It's not necessarily the idea. It's the theme. It's the drive.

  • It's the problem you want to solve out in the real world.

  • What question are you answering?

  • And the good/bad news is that even once you have that

  • drive is that it's not going to happen overnight.

  • And one of my favorite quotes is from Biz Stone.

  • He wrote, "Twitter was an overnight success

  • that took five or six or seven years." And it's just absolutely true.

  • Things seem very obvious in retrospect and you're like,

  • 'Well, of course, photos. Why not? That makes total sense.'

  • People are like, 'Oh, that idea was just waiting around forever.'

  • But it's the relationships you've built along the way.

  • It's the fact that Kevin and I knew each other through the

  • Mayfield Fellows program and so we had connected before,

  • and when he was starting to think about a co-founder,

  • it was someone we could connect to.

  • It's the fact that on the weekends back when I was working

  • at Meebo I really wanted to learn iPhone programming,

  • so I took the San Francisco crime database and I made this silly

  • augmented reality like 'crimes around your application'.

  • And then so I had a little bit of iPhone experience.

  • And the friends I could call at five in the morning when it's like,

  • 'I don't know what this message means. Please help.'

  • And again, it's the themes that you've built up throughout your

  • career and the line that you're weaving throughout your life

  • in a way that informs your startup and makes it happen.

  • And it never gets easier, is what we found. Definitely.

  • And that's OK. And you adjust to that reality after a

  • few months and you stop telling people, 'Oh, when I get less busy.'

  • You're not going to get less busy, and that's OK.

  • And once you accept that and love it,

  • then I think your life is a lot happier as a startup founder.

  • But it is a long slog, and I think that's what people don't realize,

  • and I certainly didn't before.

  • You think these startups happen in the course of a year,

  • but it's a lifetime commitment in some ways.

  • I'm prepared to do this for many,

  • many years going forward because I feel

  • like we're at the tip of the iceberg. And I can see it.

  • We have four people in our office and

  • we only have four-ish million users.

  • I can see this becoming much, much larger.

  • And what excites me is that challenge.

  • And I think part of entrepreneurship is realizing different things

  • along the way are going to excite you in different ways.

  • And the people that grow best in companies are the people that realize

  • that and get really amped about the different challenges,

  • the different stages of the company.

  • And this metaphor for us, I was talking to my friend who biked from

  • Seattle down here to San Francisco,

  • and he said the biggest difference on that ride versus all

  • his other rides was after the first day and your legs are

  • sore and you can't believe if you got up again the second

  • day is you stop thinking about the destination and you start

  • thinking about the next few hills in the end of the day.

  • And you're saying, "Wow, all of a sudden I don't think,

  • 'One more hill and my legs will give out. I can't go any further."

  • You're like, "Well, I know I've got to

  • go to San Francisco because if I stop,

  • I'm in the middle of Oregon and I have

  • a bike. What am I going to do?"

  • Day in and day out. And that mindset changed. Something clicked.

  • I think for me and for you as well.

  • All of a sudden you're like, 'All right, let's get to the next hill.

  • Let's keep fighting.

  • Let's find other people to bring on our crazy bike ride.

  • And who knows where San Francisco is.

  • It might be 10 years out, and that's fine because biking is awesome.'

  • Absolutely.

  • And I think, really, there's no better time to start than now.

  • Whether you want to join a startup or whether

  • you want to do something yourself,

  • I think the best thing you can do is to start. I remember...

  • and I'll tell this story just because

  • we're at Stanford and Tina's here.

  • I remember studying abroad and applying

  • for the Mayfield Fellows program.

  • And I was so amped about learning how to make websites

  • that I made this thing called the 'Tree List' which was

  • a terrible knockoff of Craig's List for Stanford.

  • And I was studying abroad in this little room and I was making

  • the website in that room with no internet connectivity.

  • But in order to push code out, I had to go in the snow...

  • it was snowing in Florence at the time...

  • across to the library that just eked out free

  • WiFi out of their window and push the code. And it went up.

  • And I still remember people started using it at Stanford,

  • and I was over there in Italy and there

  • was this awesome connection with people.

  • And what I realized then was just the hunger to build

  • stuff and put it in front of people is really valuable

  • as you get moving in entrepreneurship.

  • And there's no reason you can't start.

  • If you're studying abroad, there's no reason you can't start.

  • If you know nothing about HTML or CSS or Javascript,

  • there's no reason you can't pick up a book.

  • If you're doing something outside of consumer internet,

  • there's no reason you can't start thinking about the

  • idea and interviewing people and meeting the people

  • that are going to help that happen over time.

  • Because in the end, it is a long slog.

  • And what we've found is the thing that really has helped us along the

  • way are those little skills we picked up by hacking on the side.

  • So, if you're interested in working in Instagram,

  • please do email us: jobs@instagram.com.

  • We're looking for very talented people.

  • Thank you very much, everyone. That's amazing.

  • I'm so proud of you guys. This is so incredible to have you here.

  • We've got current Mayfield Fellows in the audience and I told them,

  • "Look ahead a few years, you guys are up next."

  • So I want to ask you: can you...

  • I'm going to open this up to the questions

  • from the audience in a second, but I want to start out with,

  • can you tell us a little bit about your working relationship?

  • Who does what? And has it always worked well?

  • Have there been tensions that have come up?

  • Tell us a little bit about how that works.

  • And then I'm going to let you moderate questions.

  • I think, of all the co-founders I know, we probably get along best.

  • I've definitely talked to co-founder

  • pairs that don't get along at all.

  • I think what you need to do in a co-founder relationship is

  • not necessarily decide who is good at what but realize that,

  • like any relationship, your goal is to figure out the other person

  • and figure out your relationship with them.

  • And through the last year or so,

  • we've really gotten into the groove of...

  • we own different parts of the day-to-day stuff,

  • but at the same time we use each other to bounce ideas off.

  • You do a lot of the iPhone clients stuff,

  • I do a lot of the CEO stuff of accounting,

  • etcetera, and do a lot of the backend coding as well.

  • But what happens is, because we both have our own specialties

  • but also overlap into each other's areas,

  • it really provides for this nice relationship where you can

  • bounce ideas off of other people or get that person to say,

  • "Are you sure you want to do it that way?"

  • And what has happened is it's that yin-yang relationship

  • that I really think has helped us succeed.

  • And it's hard to screen for ahead of time. We knew each other...

  • We barely knew each other. Yeah, barely knew each other.

  • We figured out that we can work together on a technical level

  • by just getting together over a bunch of weekends and saying,

  • 'Let's build a little simple Facebook game.

  • It's going to take a few hours.

  • Let's build it together,' whatever, and you can get going.

  • But a lot of it ends up being, what's your gut feel?

  • Do your reference checks. They said nice things about you. Thank you.

  • So let's get going and let's see how it goes. Yeah.

  • It's hard because I think no matter who you work with,

  • you have to figure out...

  • And this is actually more even for employees.

  • Your relationship is going to be a long one,

  • and if you're in the entrepreneurship world,

  • your best ally is sitting next to you,

  • and you need to make sure to cherish that relationship

  • because that's what gets you to the next level.

  • The biggest source of strife I found is when there's

  • a disconnect between expectations as to what you're building

  • and how long you want to be building it for.

  • And it's important to both of us that are like,

  • 'I can't imagine doing anything else in the world.

  • I love doing this and I want to be doing this for a really long time.

  • I love what I do. I love coming in.'

  • If people are, oh, six months to a year,

  • then cash out, that's going to be really difficult.

  • Unless you're both feeling that way,

  • then it's a different relationship.

  • But if you're in it for the long haul,

  • make sure that the people you know are in it as well.

  • It's a tough conversation and you might

  • lose a co-founder that way early on,

  • before you start, but it's much better,

  • I think, than going on and then six months later having that really,

  • really worned-down relationship.

  • I'm looking back... by the way, just to finish off the thought.

  • I can't imagine starting a company without a co-founder.

  • I said that to you today, Mike. Yeah.

  • It's such a hard job to get off the ground.

  • It's such a hard job to recruit people, to deal with...

  • whether it's investors or press.

  • Having someone across the way to be like,

  • "Man, this really bummed me out," or "How do you think about this?"

  • I actually think that's one of the things that has kept us going in

  • 4 am or 5 am when we're fixing the servers or dealing with some issue.

  • It's been fantastic. Absolutely. Any questions from the audience?

  • Yeah, so, how did you find your first engineer, how did you get him?

  • The question was, how did we find our first engineer?

  • Do you want to tell this one? We were really lucky.

  • We were at Dogpatch Labs which is this incubator run by

  • Polaris Ventures up in San Francisco and we happened to

  • be sitting at the same table pod as this guy Shane,

  • who's an engineer but at the time was working with

  • a different startup and doing some freelance stuff.

  • He taught Kevin the initial steps of iPhone coding,

  • so we knew not only that he knew his stuff but also

  • he was very good at communicating information,

  • which is really important.

  • Our bar for hiring is, can they teach us a bunch of stuff,

  • because we were not trained in Computer Science.

  • We were not by any means totally knowledgeable

  • about everything we were building,

  • so who can build that can teach us.

  • So the fact that he had both of those assets was really important.

  • And it took probably three months after launch and we were

  • eight months into the startup process at that point.

  • Well, we built all of V1 ourselves.

  • You said you had a lot of users 24 hours after launch.

  • How did it happen? Where did they come from?

  • So the question was, we said that 24 hours after we launched

  • we had a lot of users sign up.

  • Where did they come from? How did it happen?

  • We get asked this question a lot.

  • It is not clear that we have the exact answer,

  • but we have some hunches.

  • I think the biggest thing overall was that as we

  • were prototyping and testing the application,

  • we gave it to a few folks that we knew

  • had very large Twitter followings...

  • and not necessarily very large Twitter followings overall,

  • but very large followings in a certain community,

  • specifically the designer community like

  • the online Web designer community,

  • because we felt photography and the visual element of

  • what we were doing really resonated with those people.

  • And we gave it to those specific people that have lots of following.

  • I remember going down the list of the top

  • followed people and just emailing them,

  • and all of them were like, 'Yeah! We'll try it out!'

  • And because they shared to Twitter,

  • I think it created this tension of, 'When is this thing launching?

  • When do I get to play with it?'

  • And that's the day when we actually launched.

  • I think it had that springboard effect.

  • I don't think that works for every startup,

  • and I'm not sure that I would do it

  • that way if I did another startup.

  • But I think that certainly contributed to part of it.

  • The thing I think that above all else makes products

  • spread is when they're useful and they're usable.

  • It turns out when you make really nice stuff that people love,

  • they will spread it to their friends because they'll rave about it,

  • they'll tell people about it.

  • And that's what I think at the end of the day has allowed us to

  • grow very quickly is that people get really excited about sharing

  • photos and they really get excited about applying filters to them

  • and it's cool to show your friend that you do this thing.

  • That has caused, above all else, I think, us to spread very quickly.

  • And a big part, we had a lot of really great press on Day 1.

  • And a lot of that came from the fact that

  • we just took all the PR upon ourselves... Kev handled most of it...

  • which was not like going through a PR agency.

  • That becomes important as you scale out and

  • have more targeted things you need to do,

  • but two founders telling their story is

  • a really compelling pitch to a reporter.

  • They were so excited to actually talk

  • to a founder versus some agency.

  • They were like, "Really? You guys worked on this?"

  • And it was this freshness that I think allowed

  • them to get really excited about it. Totally. Yes.

  • In terms of staying lean and hiring and recruiting,

  • how do you balance... I'm sure you guys get a lot of people who

  • want to work with Instagram, right?

  • How do you balance basically really smart,

  • really talented people who fit in well with your team and hiring

  • and growing that team versus staying as small as possible?

  • What's the trade-offs there that you think about carefully? Right.

  • So the question is, what are the trade-offs between

  • growing the team and staying as small as possible?

  • I don't think we ever want to stay as small as possible.

  • I think there's a certain stage where...

  • or let me put it another way.

  • As you're growing your company,

  • there's this natural height for something that age.

  • It's just like humans.

  • There's a natural height for a three-year-old,

  • and you can be within a certain range.

  • I think the wrong thing to do is be six-feet-tall as a one-year-old.

  • Hire up 40 people and decide you're going to attack some

  • problem really quickly and you haven't even launched yet.

  • I think, at the same time,

  • when you are six months old and you have two people

  • and you're proving out an idea just to get traction,

  • that's great, because it turns out there's not a lot of disagreement.

  • We're sitting there, we can look across the table,

  • make split-second decisions, and move very, very quickly.

  • But at a certain point you have to start

  • refining your idea and scaling it out.

  • And at a certain point,

  • the fact that you only have four people becomes the bottleneck.

  • So I think what my answer would be is,

  • don't shoot for one or the other.

  • Shoot for the natural height of your company.

  • Shoot for where you are in the life cycle of your company.

  • Absolutely. Does that make sense? Yeah. I agree with that.

  • Anything else? In the back?

  • Question on how do you guys as entrepreneurs

  • think about work-life balance?

  • These are your best years and you're working all the time. Yeah.

  • That's a great question.

  • So the question was, how do we think about work-life balance?

  • I think we should have a two-part answer because I bet

  • we think about it similarly but also very differently.

  • We both have girlfriends,

  • which I think naturally means that we cannot work all the

  • time because they get very angry at us if we do that.

  • At the same time, it's great.

  • And I end up deciding that there is a way to work hard.

  • It doesn't mean you need to work long.

  • I think that you can burn yourself out really easily if every

  • single night you're up to 3 am and you sleep three hours.

  • I don't function if I don't sleep for eight hours,

  • which is terrible for an entrepreneur.

  • At the same time, when you do work,

  • not having TechCrunch open on the side,

  • not having IRC channels open on the side.

  • I make a really concerted effort for when I am working to

  • work on the most important things so that I can go home at

  • the end of the day and spend time with my girlfriend,

  • spend time with my friends on the weekend.

  • And I think that's helped us out,

  • which is that focus of working on the most important

  • stuff means that we create the work-life balance.

  • What happens is when you don't have that balance,

  • things start to go out of your life and I think that

  • that causes you to not work as well at work.

  • I think everyone has, again, their natural height,

  • they have their natural balance.

  • But it's never like a question of when

  • I'm working or when I'm playing.

  • Work is 24/7 for me,

  • but it might be in the form of going to an art gallery and

  • being inspired by seeing some filter on a photo there.

  • It might be having conversations with my friends at a bar

  • and watching them use Instagram in an interesting way.

  • I'd never consider there to be boundaries. It kind of mixes in.

  • But because I love what I'm doing, that's natural. Yeah.

  • A lot of it resonates with me as well.

  • The first couple of months are particularly difficult especially

  • as you're getting traction and things go a little bit crazy,

  • but as things have settled and you find ways of making your

  • day be something that you're excited about every morning...

  • I live about an 18-minute bike ride from the office,

  • and I make sure to bike to work and back everyday so at

  • least I'm getting some exercise in there and you feel a

  • little energized by the time you get into the office.

  • And it does mean that...

  • I used to read a lot of novels,

  • and I haven't really read a novel in a long time.

  • So there are things you obviously have to give up.

  • But I think there's still a way of doing it,

  • especially around being smart about how you use your weekends.

  • So if you're putting in hours in the weekend,

  • make sure you still have time to go

  • out and meet up with your friends. Or getting together.

  • There's a place called Coffee Bar in San Francisco,

  • which is this great coffee shop with a lot of open WiFi and seating.

  • And you can have a perfectly nice afternoon enjoying your coffee

  • working on stuff but being social with your friends who maybe are

  • also working on maybe their own side projects, for example.

  • And you find those slots in there.

  • I'd say there's things you need to give up and there's

  • distractions you need to absolutely give up,

  • and you need to make sure that your nine,

  • 10 hours in the office are just straight office.

  • One thing that I've given up in my life is long lunches.

  • I used to have lunch and then sit down and talk for an hour.

  • Now we get lunch and we eat and then we get working.

  • And that's fine, because I know that that means that

  • hour is an hour that's going to pay me back later

  • in that day when I can go home an hour earlier.

  • Right here in the middle?

  • Kevin, I'd like you to tell Mike that, forget what you signed,

  • that you now own 90% of the company and he gets 10.

  • I'd like Mike to respond.

  • I don't think it's about... It's interesting.

  • The whole equity split always is really

  • interesting to me with startups.

  • I think everyone has a different prescription

  • for how you should split up.

  • I think your friend... I can't remember his name...

  • is like, 'You should never have equal share. That's terrible.'

  • And then I hear, 'You should have equal share.'

  • I think the startup equity split is one of

  • these things that has always befuddled me.

  • I don't quite understand it.

  • I don't quite understand why people split it the way they do.

  • It turns out that if you work hard, good things happen.

  • And I think that that's really the basis of it.

  • You should just try to be as fair as possible for the stage of the

  • company you're at and the work people have put in before or after,

  • and make sure to treat your employees really well.

  • And when you bring on people and you have a large option pool,

  • make sure to be generous, because those are the people that are

  • going to stay with you until 4 am. Absolutely.

  • I didn't hear Mike respond. Oh. Please respond.

  • To me, it's all about managing.

  • How much uncertainty are you dealing with with every step?

  • Ninety-ten would be a stretch,

  • but for example, I was still working in a job,

  • Kevin was like, 'I am going to quit my job

  • and raise money and live maybe on savings,'

  • and was ready to get money from his folks

  • back East or something if it fell through.

  • And that's crazy uncertainty.

  • What I was doing was like, 'We have some money.

  • We have no idea what we're building.' That's crazy uncertainty.

  • After we launched, 'This thing has legs,

  • but we need to work on it for a really long time to make it successful

  • and it could still be hurt by all these different factors.'

  • That's still uncertainty. You're always dealing with that.

  • And I think equity splits should probably be a reflection

  • of those different factors and what kind of uncertainty and

  • what kind of questions you're answering at every level.

  • I do feel, just anecdotally,

  • like there's this weird dynamic where founders at a certain point

  • just get orders of magnitude than the first few employees.

  • And that's really a function of taking money from

  • venture and having an option pool and having to

  • budget for hiring your first, say, 20 people.

  • So the way these days to make lots of money in terms

  • of equity in a startup is to join very early on,

  • and it really is a 'risk or reward' ratio.

  • Or there's a relationship there.

  • And I'm not sure I'm excited about that relationship.

  • But I think that, as you'll see,

  • people have to raise less and less to get started,

  • and that means early employees are getting better and better deals.

  • I'll add Myth Number 9 based on that also,

  • which is that doing a startup is one

  • of the riskiest things you can do. It really is not.

  • If you're in the Valley, if you're connected to Stanford,

  • if you have good friends, the worst thing that could happen...

  • Sure, there's opportunity costs.

  • You'll be making less money than at a large company.

  • Those things are all true.

  • But Month 1 of experience for me was worth the

  • two years of work experience I'd had before.

  • And you will leave so much richer no matter how

  • badly your startup flops or how well it goes. I completely agree.

  • I still don't make as much money as I was offered out of school...

  • the job I didn't take... and I've made decisions along the way that

  • have taken less money along the way. Because I love what I'm doing.

  • And hopefully that pays back someday.

  • But I don't care because I do what I love

  • and it doesn't cost a lot to do that.

  • Yeah, green shirt.

  • First of all, you said something about 'themes, not ideas'.

  • With Instagram, there are a number of possible

  • themes and it could be the filters,

  • it could be the sharing, it could be the simplicity.

  • Just from your mouth,

  • I would be interested to hear what you guys think the themes are,

  • and do they all need to be there to have this successful product?

  • Or was it just an exploration?

  • To me, when I graduated from college,

  • I had two requirements for whatever job or startup,

  • whatever I was going to do.

  • One of them was be a company or a service or

  • something that helped people communicate,

  • because that just excites me.

  • I love seeing those connections. And I think that almost...

  • I would imagine everything I do for the rest of

  • my career has some element of that component.

  • And the other one, which is less relevant to Instagram,

  • which is it would help you teach or learn something.

  • So be educational in some way.

  • In some way, we actually find our power users will create

  • this little following communities where they're like,

  • 'I will show you how to take more interesting photos.'

  • So there is some of that happening on Instagram.

  • That was just a consequence of a larger site.

  • So to me that communication,

  • particularly between people who may not know each

  • other before they even signed up for your service,

  • is a huge part of what I'm interested in and something

  • that gets manifested in Instagram in a serious way.

  • Photography, it's interesting. I remember sitting down with...

  • and I won't name names...

  • a founder of a pretty successful startup in Palo Alto when

  • I was thinking of leaving my job at Google and saying,

  • "I think I want to start a photography startup."

  • This was way before Burbn.

  • And I still remember him being like, 'Photography?

  • Photos on the internet? Hasn't that been done a million times?

  • That's not interesting. Go do this other thing.'

  • And I remember walking away feeling kind of bummed out

  • that my passion for photos was somehow not going to get

  • married with something I did in the future online.

  • And I feel like, looking back in retrospect,

  • I'm so glad we're doing what we're

  • doing now because that's exactly...

  • If you asked my friends in high school what kind

  • of startup I'd be doing 15 years from then,

  • they would be, 'Oh yeah, he'll be working on a photo thing.

  • For sure.'

  • And I'm glad we came back to that,

  • but I didn't realize it at the time.

  • But now that we're doing it,

  • I'm like, 'Duh, of course we wanted to do something in photos.'

  • So having that passion and following that theme and realizing

  • what the things are that make you really excited,

  • just keeps you up a little later at night,

  • makes you drive through the hard times.

  • It's not necessary, but it sure does help.

  • How do both of you resolve disagreements?

  • Fist fights. Fist fights. No. So, how do we resolve disagreements?

  • It's interesting. We don't really disagree very much.

  • That's a good question. How do we?

  • Somebody asked me this question the other week and I was like,

  • sometimes we don't disagree.

  • It's not often that... I think we're both hyper-aware that neither...

  • For example, we were debating a user interface decision yesterday.

  • And we sat down, and I had an opinion and he had an opinion,

  • and we came up with something completely different.

  • I think we're both hyper-aware that whatever we

  • have in our heads is going to get improved the second

  • we start talking to somebody else about it,

  • particularly each other because we have a really good rapport,

  • and then at the end,

  • you say, 'Wow, we actually decided not to build this feature at all.

  • We're building something different and we can agree on that.'

  • In terms of stalemates, I don't know if we've really had...

  • Ask us in a year, I don't know. Ask us in a year. Yeah, exactly.

  • But in all honesty, I think disagreements are interesting

  • because I think often people put their personalities in

  • the way or they get really attached to an idea.

  • But every single thing we talk about is always a discussion.

  • Like someone asked before, do we get along?

  • It turns out you can get along really well with

  • someone if you just discuss lots of stuff.

  • Also, it's nice to find a co-founder who

  • shares a lot of the same values you have.

  • And I think we're very aligned on a lot

  • of how we want to build the company,

  • the type of people we want to bring in,

  • the type of work we want to do. It's just helped us a lot.

  • But that's not the case in every single co-founder relationship.

  • And some that I know disagree all the

  • time and get in screaming matches.

  • But they go home and they shake hands and they say,

  • 'Whatever, bygones be bygones,' and they still get along.

  • I think it's about finding your natural relationship with your team,

  • not just your co-founder. Yeah.

  • Yeah. Go for it.

  • So I'm a founder of a pre-funding startup,

  • and I wanted your perspective on this one. I'm confused.

  • I'm conflicted as to whether I should launch the product and then look

  • for the funding or whether I should try to get the funding first,

  • launch it, because chances are the whole thing might

  • just stay quietly and maybe I may not have the funds

  • to fund that particular growth that might be there.

  • I'm conflicted as to when is the time when I should go and fund a...

  • and get the funding.

  • The question was, when is the right time to go for

  • funding that there's this conflict between wanting

  • to go early so that when you start growing quickly,

  • you can manage that growth, and then on the opposite end,

  • do you wait until you start growing and then go raise money?

  • Honestly, if you're growing as quickly as you say,

  • there are startups that just open credit cards.

  • I'm trying to think of startups that do that.

  • They open credit cards to pay for the

  • week where they're growing quickly.

  • Money will come if you're growing that quickly. Yeah.

  • There is so much money out there chasing bad

  • ideas that a good idea will get funding.

  • And I think that I wouldn't worry about the best case scenario;

  • I would worry about the average case scenario.

  • I think what I learned was that it was really powerful

  • to get a prototype out there and prove that this

  • was something I wanted to work on more, or that users would use.

  • And that just resonated with a lot of

  • the angels and VCs that we talked to.

  • My advice, and not knowing what you're working on,

  • would be to at least get it in front of many users first.

  • Not necessarily a public,

  • but put it in front of real people and prove out the point.

  • And always be making the relationships that will help

  • you raise the capital to do what you need to do. Yeah.

  • If you have the connections and the introductions to say like,

  • 'I'm not pitching you right now,

  • but here's what I've been working on. I'd love your...'

  • People are busy, so it's not always possible,

  • but to the extent that you can build those relationships...

  • like that one cocktail party ended up being super

  • pivotal when it came time to actually raise.

  • Right. How many more questions can we take? Just one more.

  • Just one more. OK. The special one.

  • How about you right there in the middle?

  • How do you guys deal with competition part of it?

  • In terms of principle, will you go to sit down and schedule...

  • I don't know if you sit down and schedule your time at all.

  • How much time do you schedule to develop

  • features in anticipation of competition?

  • And how much time do you have more artistic

  • or focus on future development?

  • How do you make that kind of investment into...

  • I think that scenario we both matured in.

  • I think early on, as you built something,

  • you've put your baby out in the world,

  • and people are using it or criticizing it or loving it,

  • and then every week something pops up that

  • is at least nominally competitive with us.

  • And I think at first, personally, I would look at them and be like,

  • 'Oh, man, they have this one thing that's better than ours!

  • It's going to take off!'

  • You shouldn't be completely oblivious to it,

  • but there was a moment about three or four months in,

  • we looked at each other and we were like,

  • 'The only way we got to where we are today is being

  • ourselves and putting in the work that we want to do

  • and building the product that we want to build.'

  • And then when that clicked,

  • that changed the way we looked at competition.

  • You're not oblivious to it, and it's not good to be just like,

  • 'Oh, I'm in my own world and nothing else is happening out there.'

  • But build the product that you're in love

  • with and I think good things will follow,

  • and ultimately you'll see the extent of your

  • vision versus trying to cobble together.

  • Because what I've found in products that end up borrowing

  • from other things is that you end up with this 'Franken'

  • product where nothing feels sincere.

  • The biggest learning for me was...

  • we were looking at a sign-up form for

  • a particular startup and we were like,

  • 'Well, I wonder why they mail these decisions?'

  • And months later we met their founder and they were like,

  • 'Oh, we did that in an afternoon.

  • It's totally wrong. I can't believe we shipped that.'

  • And so the things that you think are really well-thought-out

  • in other startups might have been off-the-cuff,

  • last-minute thoughts. And same for us.

  • Some people copy things in our app that I'm like,

  • 'Oh, we're probably changing that next week.'

  • But at the same time,

  • I think it's really easy to get caught up in competition early on,

  • especially in the press.

  • I think I worried a lot about, 'Who's announcing funding and when?'

  • It just doesn't matter.

  • It spends a lot of your cycles worrying about this meta stuff.

  • What matters is building great products and delighting people.

  • And I would just encourage you to focus on building great products.

  • Thank you so much!

Kevin worked at Google for a couple of years and Mike went on to work

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