
How To Scale A $1 Billion Startup (Instagram Co-Founder Mike Krieger) - frankdenbow
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/12/how-to-scale-a-1-billion-startup-a-guide-from-instagram-co-founder-mike-krieger/
======
freshfey
I think the biggest takeaway here is "don't reinvent the wheel", which I think
is also a big problem for every engineer/hacker. Because we tend to build our
own solutions as soon as we don't like an element or how something is handled
etc. But this also causes that you lose focus and forget the bigger picture
("our users don't care whether we wrote the db ourselves").

~~~
hessenwolf
If my software engineering course left me with one thing, it was to remember
the three rules of software, "reuse, reuse, reuse". I think it might have been
quoted from Deitel & Deitel C++.

------
treelovinhippie
So I guess TechCrunch will be milking this "$1 billion startup" title for a
while...

~~~
Aqua_Geek
Seriously. The 30+ million users is the more relevant number here.

~~~
Julianhearn
Even the 30+ million is not relevant, Facebook with already have all of those
users. So they didn't buy any users, no revenue, no profit, just some
technology which they much have been able to build themselves for a fraction
of the price.

~~~
Aqua_Geek
30+ million users relevant to Facebook? Of course not.

30+ million users relevant to a talk about scaling? Absolutely. The title of
the article is "How To Scale A $1 Billion Startup" - but it's a tech talk
about how to scale to support their userbase, not a business talk about how to
increase quarterly profits. Hence, the number of users is far more relevant to
the discussion than how much they were bought out for.

------
simondlr
Fantastic to think 2 engineers can scale it so far. It is exciting to think
that a small team from anywhere in the world can think up the next big thing
and scale it easily from wherever.

------
mailarchis
Fav Quote

“surely we’ll have hired someone experienced before we actually need to shard”

------
devinfoley
He said that they had 2 engineers in 2010, 3 engineers in 2011, and 5
engineers 2012, but only 2.5 backend engineers.

I'm surprised that the number of engineers is so low, considering that they
had 15 employees.

Maybe the figures above don't include mobile engineers? But then what would
the other 2.5 be doing?

Thanks to Instagram and AirBnb for putting this on. It was an amazing event.

~~~
gsmaverick
I think he's only counting engineers working on the back-end and not those who
are working on the iPhone and Android apps.

~~~
shaynesweeney
No he was counting all of us :)

~~~
devinfoley
You guys are nuts!

------
xianshou
I was at this talk, and I think that by far the most important point was that
you should get great advisers and mentors. Instagram started with an okay
stack and terrible configuration. They ended up doing great on both counts;
now they have almost no downtime, they deploy several times an hour, and their
comprehensive tests take only 5 minutes to run. Some of that came from skill
and prior knowledge, but the majority from adaptability and the willingness to
switch quickly when advisers (e.g. Adam d'Angelo) suggested better
alternatives.

------
jreposa
I love that favicon is the first tip. It's got me more than once, which is a
sad testament to my ability as an engineer.

------
msie
The backend sounds really complicated now. Anyone draw a diagram of it?

~~~
Aloisius
Really complicated? While I'm sure some of the deep details are messy, the
overall architecture is textbook standard.

A search engine (SOLR), a load balancer (HAProxy), an app server (django), a
replicated/sharded database (postgres) and a replicated k/v store (redis).

------
beambot
Does anyone know if there is a video of the talk?

------
davidw
Someone want to get lots of karma points by summing up the text of this so
that we don't have to read through it

one

screen

at

a

time?

~~~
ShaunCodeweaver
Despite usually hating viewing slides without the presentation, I actually
find this style very good for getting the point across.

Hammer down and there are some good quotes/ideas in there.

~~~
davidw
They basically wrote most of it down, which could be easily excerpted into,
say, some normal text that one could quickly read.

