Kevin Systrom: Instagram | Lex Fridman Podcast #243
Lex Fridman2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2021–2022
podcast · general · evergreen · 2021–2022 on HN
Lex Fridman interviews Instagram co-founder and former CEO Kevin Systrom about building the product, its early days and its pivot story.
Pointed to for the founder's own account of Instagram's pivot, early scaling on Django with a small team, and avoiding overengineering.
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4 comments from Hacker News
Thank you for sharing this -- I didn't realize this existed. Instagram is covered in your link, and you can hear about it from the founder in this really good Lex Fridman podcast: ▶ this video These lists always kind of remind me of popular bands that changed music over time. The most drastic "pivot" I've ever come across in a known band is Ministry, who went from a benign new-wave Depeche Mode clone in 1983 [1] to a pseudo-Cabaret Voltaire in 1986 [2], then to full-on metal by 1991 [3]. [1] link [2] link [3] link
Interesting interview of Lex Friedman to Kevin Systrom co-founder of instagram where he talks about the beginning of the platform and overengineering. ▶ this video
In the early days, Instagram silently uploaded your photo before you actually officially posted as a way to improve the "speed" of the user experience. So go ahead and add your filters, the text for the post, etc. because then the moment you clicked Post the app presented like it happened immediately. All for the UX. Source: Kevin Systrom on Lex Fridman Podcast ▶ this video
I watch the other day, the Lex Fridman podcast with Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram. He talks about the scaling issue; they were using Django at that time and scale up to 50 millions users with a small team of developers. I do not think a majority of companies have more than 50 millions users and absolutely need to go full microservices. ▶ this video