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It’s the summer of 2010. Many people in the SF Bay Area (+ elsewhere) are reaching the conclusion that photo-based apps would be a very big deal in this decade, and they were right.

However, why did Instagram win, over much better funded rivals Color and PicPlz ? A $100B story..
Lets back up to March 2010 first. Kevin Systrom had raised $500k seed for an app called Burbn, from a16z and Baseline Ventures. It was supposed to be a location-based startup but wasn't quite adding up for Kevin.

He started developing Instagram instead..
instagram.com/p/G/
PicPlz was the earliest to launch, driven by founders with prior successful exits. In Aug 2010, TechCrunch covered their launch.

If you are Kevin Systrom, what do you do ? Ignore, and keep building, of course. Two months later, Instagram launches.
techcrunch.com/2010/08/23/pic…
Color, another startup in this space meanwhile is readying a war chest. It goes on to buy the color.com domain for $350k. And colour.com for another $75k.

That's $425k for domain names only, compared to all of $500k raised by Instagram by that point.
In Nov 2010, a16z doubles down on PicPlz instead, investing $5 million in it

Kevin had pivoted to what PicPlz was doing - a nuance which NY Times handled a little differently

"we couldn’t morally go with Instagram"

Ethics > $

bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/how…

techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/and…
Color, meanwhile, with its top tier pedigreed team and massive ambition, went on to raise $41 million ($25 million from Sequoia), before their app launched, and hired 38 people in its Palo Alto office, with room for more

blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital…
The key difference here turned out to be usability.

Instagram was driven by "elegant minimalism", focusing on speed, self-expression (via filters) and instant gratification while PicPlz had an awkward UX, which this user pointed out

quora.com/What-is-the-di…
Color, which had a great concept, ran into a "chicken or the egg" marketplace problem as it wasn't offering tools to enhance pictures, only to group them based on location

If enough people used it at a location, it would be valuable - but what's the incentive for the first few ?
PicPlz offered photo-enhancing filters, but its problem was of usability.

By Jan 2011, they had acknowledged user experience problems and had re-worked the app. One Quora user wrote - it was then as good as Instagram.

techcrunch.com/2011/01/13/pic…
Instagram despite not having an Android app, and being up against startups (Color, PicPlz) backed by top-tier investors in its space, still came out ahead, as it focused on a simple + delightful product user experience.

It had the Hello Kitty effect.

web.archive.org/web/2012062221…
Trying to understand how are breakthrough consumer products built: Stars vs Black holes.

Stars shine early + in all directions, but there are a billion trillion of them.

Black hole-like products are focused, grow quickly and put a real dent in the universe. Then, they shine.
"Our mantra, 'Do the simple thing first' took shape during these first weeks and months. ..If we had tried to future-proof everything we did, we might have been paralyzed by inaction."

Screenshot from my own notes +
wired.com/2014/10/why-in…
Pre-Instagram Burbn had plateaued to about 1000 users. Founders chose a smaller, focused feature as a new product in itself: social photo sharing, for iOS users only initially.

They re-used Burbn code; 8 weeks dev time from start to finish => Instagram

techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/ins…
Instagram Growth
- Sept 2010: Private beta of 100 users
- October 6, 2010: 25,000 users
- November 2010: 1 million users
- 2012: 30 million users
- 2013: 200 million users

wired.com/2015/10/five-y…
Summary:

Founders developed a very sharp + narrow focus, built a useful and beautiful product + leveraged Silicon Valley appropriately for news coverage.

Magic happened, they then focused on being able to scale and were able to take off exponentially

techcrunch.com/2010/09/20/ins…
"The photography category seemed saturated, but Systrom saw an opening that many others didn’t"

Reading these essays inspired this thread:
paulgraham.com/fp.html
paulgraham.com/sun.html

Instagram was "not much new"

techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/ins…

cc @paulg you might like this thread
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Varun
@varun_mathur
6 months before UberCab launched, 2009 saw the launch of Cabulous. It had icons of moving cabs on a map and also the ability to e-hail a cab.

It didn’t close the loop on the UX though (no payments), raised too little (<$1MM), had a wide city-wide focus and declined Bill Gurley!
Here is Gurley suggesting a rebrand as “Limo Magic” to go into black cars + his $8 million investment offer, one year before UberCab launched with limos/black cars.

Amazing to see multiple people converging on a similar solution to a problem.

Source: “Upstarts”

cc @IlyaAbyzov
Also adding relevant pages from this book regarding the Cabulous reference in the original tweet above.

“Upstarts” - by @BradStone
Chapter 3 - The Non-starters

Highly recommend

Impact of early deltas in decision-making are not apparent initially but compound massively later
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Varun
@varun_mathur
/make hay

Early adopter markets are now so big and fluid that products can grow very fast in them, ventures get massive valuations and successful financial exits happen, all without actually having to cross the chasm, which was the failure point of startups in earlier years
The number of monthly paying subscribers to either Spotify or Netflix (~100MM) is higher than the total number of Internet users since the dot com boom 20 yrs ago!

3MM-5MM are hosts on Airbnb, or driver-partners for Uber, Lyft or DoorDash. Slack has 10MM DAUs

World of 4B+ users
I am guess-estimating that a startup can rise to $25 billion in valuation or market cap based on the early adopter markets alone

Even if it cracks the mainstream market, well, the market already assumed earlier it *will* based on growth with early adopter & is already priced in
Read 15 tweets
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Varun
@varun_mathur
Upcoming tech IPOs have one thing in common: none of these originated from “lean startup”.

They were deliberate efforts, toiling away in obscurity for several years and then launching with well-formed products focused on design and user experience.

LYFT, PINT, UBER, SLAK, ABNB
Summarized my key thoughts from this thread in this link along with the book recommendations and other references: medium.com/@startuphacker…

Thanks all for the feedback.
Lyft

Logan Green got inspired after a trip in 2006 from observing people in Zimbabwe giving rides to others and started Zimride. The team decided to create a peer to peer mobile app called Lyft in 2012/2013 and sold Zimride to Enterprise.

6 yrs journey to founding of Lyft!
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Seanan McGuire
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People might have missed this among the excitement about Saudi Aramco's bond prospectus, but it's potentially a big deal:

Saudi Arabia has only about a third of the natural gas we thought it did. #oott

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Important preamble: Aramco's accounts are the biggest secret in the world energy industry, hence the excitement about this prospectus. Most figures out there were previously just very good guesswork.
The figure I knew of before this was the one in BP's Statistical Review, a sort of handbook/bible for the energy industry: 283 trillion cubic feet.

For comparison, Exxon Mobil has iirc the biggest gas reserves among independent oil companies, at about 51 trillion cu ft.
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Thread: [In which a programmer opines about how to interview other programmers]. I interviewed well over 400 people in the SF Bay Area over the last 8 years, and along the way got to see a lot of other interviewers work.
The most common mistake I saw interviewers make was treating the interview as a search for everything the candidate *didn't* know, instead of everything they *did* know. It's an unfortunate mistake, often leading to false negatives, a poor candidate experience, and a monoculture.
These were interviewers working with the best intentions. They tried to be rigorous, fair, precise, accurate, exhaustive etc. They wanted to make sure they fulfilled their mission of selecting the best people for the team.
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A big theme in my speeches across Western US is the formative impact that Irish people & those of Irish descent have had in shaping modern day Western US. This is very true in #SanFrancisco where there is huge Irish heritage & where we have a vibrant @GlobalIrish community today!
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@SantaClaraCity & @LimerickCouncil are sister cities, as are @CityofMenloPark & @GalwayCityCo! Quick shout out to Kathy Watanabe @Carunningmom, the Vice Mayor of Santa Clara with proud #Roscommon heritage. Here’s me meeting with Mayor @LisaGillmor & Kathy earlier this year.
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