Instagram sold, but it hasn’t won yet, Systrom says
By Erin Griffith
On October 18, 2012
Making a ton of money by selling for a billion dollars to Facebook is nice, but Instagram’s staff isn’t retiring just yet.
CEO Kevin Systrom wants Instagram to be around in 50 years, and the haters that emerged after the same have made him work harder, he said at PandoMonthly in San Francisco tonight.
“That’s one of the things that I think companies that succeed face. The second anyone starts thinking ‘Oh we won,’ people just start acting differently,” he said. “If I don’t act any differently, I obviously don’t think that we’ve won.”
“I’m not going to be coy and say that selling for a certain amount of money is not awesome. It’s great. But at the same time, it’s not what gets you up in the morning,” he said.
He’s driven by making Instagram into a big place where people network with their photos. “I think, if anything, the experience from selling this company is to focus on the things that get you up in the morning.” The Facebook deal is one part of making sure Instagram is going to be around in 50 years, because it allows him to continue building a good product without worrying about how to make it into a profitable business.
He doesn’t want the legacy of Instagram to be that it sold for a billion dollars, he said. He wants it to be the app that captures daily life.
Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in VCJ, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.
