The sale of Instagram to Facebook for a cool billion in the spring of 2012 was the ultimate Silicon Valley fairy tale: 18 months from launch to offer. But, for co-founder and C.E.O. Kevin Systrom, it was more of a roller-coaster ride, with several missed opportunities, at least two “aha” moments, and one major reboot.
The offer was even more impressive given Instagram’s size and age. At the time, it had just 13 employees, operating out of a cramped space in the South Park section of San Francisco. Still, the small crew had managed to attract 30 million iPhone users in just a year and a half by offering a service that allowed a person to quickly upload, prettify through the use of filters, and publish images to the Web for friends to see. A version for Google’s Android mobile operating system had launched the week before, gaining another million users in a single day. What’s more, although the app generated no revenue, it had attracted so much attention from venture capitalists that the start-up had nearly closed an impressive new round of funding at a wildly high valuation of $500 million. Zuckerberg had just doubled that, leaving Systrom with a lot to think about on that train-station bench.
