

Achieving overnight success: Kevin Systrom - rythie
http://joel.is/post/22436341176/achieving-overnight-success-kevin-systrom

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johnnyjustice
I loved this.To loosely quote PG: "You shouldn't be focusing on the end goal
or final dream, but questioning what opportunities you have at hand and
picking from those" or to put simply don't be so future oriented you never
know what opportunities will be available then so you should focus on your
opportunities now.

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pedalpete
We all have dots (events in our lives) that when connected backward from a
result lead us to believe that it was these experiences that lead to the
result. The human mind is very good at making these connections.

How many other people have had similar experiences with the exception of the
end result.

It makes for good story telling, but aside from that, it doesn't show us the
way to creating the next big thing.

~~~
Jayasimhan
The blog doesn't give us a recipe to create the next big thing. It just
explains the only way to make it.

~~~
pedalpete
I assume you meant 'one way to make it', not 'only way to make it'

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dpritchett
This sounds like a classic con: _Kevin met Steve Anderson from Baseline
ventures, and during the meeting Kevin got texts notifying him that people
were joining Burbn. Steve knew some of the people signing up, and was
intrigued enough to decide there must be something here. In this meeting Kevin
secured his first $50,000 of investment for Burbn._

I don't believe those texts were purely organic, but I'm impressed all the
same.

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DaniFong
Stuff like this happens all the time in a community at this scale.

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sakopov
I don't really know if there is much to analyze. The guy went to Stanford and
had the priviledge to meet other great folks with the same passion. His
connections and this environment is what made him successful.

~~~
mikek
That's a nice excuse, but I don't buy it.

First of all, most people who went to Stanford don't found an Instagram.

Secondly, anyone can now apply to YC and make connections with great people.

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sakopov
I'm not selling you an excuse. I'm just saying this certainly played a big
part of why he became successful. Stanford has a solid track record for
successful start-ups.

In my opinion, applying to YC and hoping to get in versus having staff members
on university campus with connections to students who now operate prestigious
tech companies and being able to walk the same path they have are 2 entirely
different experiences.

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wallflower
> have access to Adam D’Angelo (Facebook’s first CTO) when he had scaling
> problems with Instagram.

It was even more fantastic than that.

> “Who’s, like, the smartest person I know who I can call up?” Mr. Systrom
> remembered thinking. He scrolled through his phone and found his man: Adam
> D’Angelo, a former chief technology officer at Facebook. They had met at a
> party seven years earlier, over beers in red plastic cups, at the Sigma Nu
> fraternity at Stanford University. That night in October 2010, Mr. D’Angelo
> became Instagram’s lifeline.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/technology/instagram-
found...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/technology/instagram-founders-
were-helped-by-bay-area-connections.html?pagewanted=all)

~~~
rhizome
_at the Sigma Nu fraternity_

Crucial detail, that.

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mgkimsal
Never got to use burbn, but it's mentioned a couple of places that:

"Burbn was a mobile check-in app built purely in HTML5." then "When you
checked in on Burbn, you could post a video or a picture."

 _how_ was this done? You can seemingly only do this with some versions of
Android - certainly not iOS or Windows. Any more info on how they/he did this?

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itsprofitbaron
IIRC The HTML5 version of burbn was a mobile browser app, which was actually
rewrote as a native iPhone app before Kevin and Mike realised that it was too
cluttered and over-run with features. This then lead them to removing
everything aside from photos, likes and comments and rebranding as Instagram

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ojr
His github account is nothing really special though just saying

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bmj1
Many aspiring entrepreneurs seem to think there is such thing as a 'get rich
quick' startup - when the reality is far from this (see
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3908088>)

Additionally, films like the Social Network seem to propagate this
myth/stereotype.

So great job Joel for hopefully helping to dispel some of these myths.

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dm8
He had opportunities and he made most of every single opportunity. And thats
the difference between successful people and wannabes. I remember one quote -
"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds". And it is totally
applicable to Kevin.

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manojranaweera
Good analysis Joel. Good to see you blossom into a successful tech
entrepreneur (and a famous one now - the north west love you!). www.edocr.com
must be one of the few tech companies to had the privilege to work with both
OnePage and Buffer, and hopefully whatever you do after Buffer!

I am glad you did not take my advice on Buffer! You saw an opportunity (I
didn't see) and went after it.

We should review edocr/buffer integration after we launch Hootsuite app! Will
let you know as soon as we go live!

Keep up the good work mate!

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sj4nz
Thanks to this article I discovered Buffer.

Installed the Chrome extension and discovered HN snap-evolved an "add to
buffer" organ that creeped me out a little bit. I think I like it.

~~~
joelg87
Haha, glad you like it :-) Let me know if I can help with anything.

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ofca
The article is basically notes taken from his Foundation interview with Kevin
Rose they did a few months ago > <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nld8B9l1aRE>
. Very cool guy. Other foundation episodes are also golden.

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james4k
Ah, that's where I remember this stuff from. Yes, this is a great series, and
it's amazing how similar everyone's early-age start in technology was. Doom
and Basic are common themes.

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Heliosmaster
It was not exactly overnight, but as a result of small steps in his life. A
really great job, nevertheless.

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mmahemoff
It wasn't at all overnight, I do believe that's Joel's point with the title.
It might be a point that's lost on cargo culters building the next dozen photo
apps, but it's what happened with Instagram.

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drudru11
great article. i have more respect for the guy after seeing that progression.
it is not a trivial thing to switch into google corp dev. he must have a
presence that pushes him up.

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carguy1983
This is a fantastic article - something wannabes definitely need to be seeing
- Instagram started when he was TWELVE YEARS OLD. I hope this article goes
into a series like uses.this.

I personally also got a kick out of this one because I had an extremely
similar 'start' - Doom levels and script kiddie maliciousness - amazing.
Unfortunately it starts to diverge when he got accepted into Stanford and
started kickin' it with internet billionaires and instead I went to UCSD and
spent most of my free time drinking microbrews by the beach LOL.

Guess that's why I'm not the guy who made Instagram! Now I know. :)

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smalter
Yeah, I was blown away by the opportunities available at Stanford (that he
made the most of) to work and hobnob with internet luminaries. It really
seemed to add jet fuel to his trajectory.

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astrofinch
I was surprised that he found the introductory computer science class at
Stanford difficult. If this guy can succeed, how can somebody like me who
worked through half of SICP independently at age 16 fail? I don't think I'm
exceptionally smart for an HN user, but I was surprised how little
intelligence is needed before it stops being the main bottleneck (apparently).

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is74
Intelligence has many aspects, of which the ability to understand complicated
"analytic stuff" from books is only a part. There's also intelligence in
getting things done and avoiding dumb mistakes in complicated and uncertain
situations, which seem to play the greater role in startups.

~~~
astrofinch
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)>

Of course it's not the only cognitive attribute that's important (I don't know
of any evidence that ability to get things done correlates with _g_ ).

BTW, realized that the article didn't explicitly state that the computer
science class was introductory, which changes things somewhat.

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josefonseca
> When he got AOL, Kevin made programs in Visual Basic to boot people offline

That's just great. The world's most successful entrepeneur used to be a
AOL%#$r script kiddie.

Kidding aside, nice tl;dr; summary of his success. I still believe U$ 1
billion for a startup was a bit too much to pay, kind of hard to understand
for mere mortals like myself who also tinkered with Gorillas.BAS in QBasic but
actually never kicked anyone off AOL using Visual Basic!

