No Filter | Sarah Frier

Instagram is one of the two social media apps that I use regularly and when I see a book about it, I couldn't think so much about if it should be in my reading list or not, I definitely should read and learn more about it, so I just started.

It wasn't a book of "wow"s for me, it didn't enlighten me but anyway it was still a good book to learn more about Facebook and Zuckerberg. 

So let me share my highlights from Sarah Frier's "No Filter":

With the rise of Instagram, Beco do Batman has become one of São Paulo’s top tourist destinations. Via the vacation rental site Airbnb, various vendors charge about $40 per person to provide two hours of “personal paparazzi” in the alley, taking high-quality pictures of people to post on Instagram; the service is a type that’s become one of Airbnb’s most popular for its travelers in cities around the world.

For amateur photographers, the only cost is the stress of perfection.

Each month, more than 1 billion of us use Instagram. We take photos and videos of our food, our faces, our favorite scenery, our families, and our interests and share them, hoping that they reflect something about who we are or who we aspire to be.

The story of Instagram is an overwhelming lesson in how the decisions inside a social media company—about what users listen to, which products to build, and how to measure success—can dramatically impact the way we live, and who is rewarded in our economy.

I aim to take you behind the scenes with cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger as they navigated what to do with their product’s power over our attention. Every decision they made had a dramatic ripple effect. By selling their company to Facebook, for example, they ensured Instagram’s longevity while helping the social media giant become even more powerful and formidable versus its competitors. After the sale, the Instagram founders became disillusioned with Facebook’s utilitarian grow-at-all-costs culture and resisted it, focusing instead on building a thoughtfully crafted product, where what’s popular is shaped by Instagram’s own storytelling about its biggest users. The plan worked so well that Instagram’s success ended up threatening Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

A burger chain founded in Manhattan called Black Tap created indulgent milkshakes with entire slices of cake on top, and for months people lined up around the block to purchase them. Even though diners rarely finished their mega-desserts, they felt compelled to photograph them. In Japan, there is a word for this Instagrammable design movement: Insta-bae (インスタ映え), pronounced “Insta-bye-eh.” The more Insta-bae something is, whether it’s an outfit or a sandwich, the more socially and commercially successful it has the potential to be.

In the app, Instagram gave its users three simple measures for how they were performing: a “follower” count, a “following” count, and “likes” on their photographs. These feedback scores were enough to make the experience thrilling, even addicting. With every like and follow, an Instagram user would get a little rush of satisfaction, sending dopamine to the brain’s reward centers. Over time, people figured out how to be good at Instagram, unlocking status in society and even commercial potential.

“I like to say I’m dangerous enough to know how to code and sociable enough to sell our company. And I think that’s a deadly combination in entrepreneurship.”

By age 25 Systrom had received an introduction to how growth-driven Facebook was, how scrappy Twitter was, and how procedural and academic Google was. He was able to know their leaders and understand what drove them, which stripped them of their mystery.

From the outside, Silicon Valley looked like it was run by geniuses. From the inside, it was clear that everyone was vulnerable, like he was, just figuring it out as they went along. Systrom wasn’t a nerd, or a hacker, or a quant. But he was perhaps no less qualified to be an entrepreneur.

Still too risk-averse to start something without a salary, he took a job as a product manager at a tiny startup called Nextstop that made a website for people to share their travel tips. Meanwhile, on nights and weekends in cafes, he tried to build a new skill: making mobile apps.

In the tech industry, leaders rarely had any experience in the industry they were disrupting. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had never been in books and Tesla’s Elon Musk had never been in car manufacturing, but Instagram’s filters had clearly been made by a photographer. Earlybird was the best Rise had ever seen, he explained—far higher quality than anything on Hipstamatic.

After a few drinks, the founders asked Rise if he would like to create some filters of his own, as a contract job. Rise agreed, thinking it would save time to have an app that would automatically edit his pictures exactly how he wanted them to be edited. He’d built up a complicated system after spending years collecting textures from things he saw around him. He would overlay those textures on files in Adobe Photoshop, then add layers of color change and curves.

Systrom and Krieger wanted to come up with a name that was easy to pronounce—and spell, after Burbn. They also wanted it to portray a sense of speed in communication. They’d borrowed Gmail’s trick, and would start uploading photos while users were still deciding which filter to apply. A lot of the good photo-related startup names were taken, so they came up with “Instagram,” a combo of “instant” and “telegram.”

Articles would later reflect on Instagram’s origin, crediting the app with perfect timing. It was born in Silicon Valley, in the midst of a mobile revolution, in which millions of new smartphone consumers didn’t understand what to do with a camera in their pockets.

“Instagram was so simple to use that it never felt like work. I kept telling myself that once Instagram stops being fun to use, once it feels like work, I’ll stop using it. But it stayed simple.”

“Other people won’t always be in this for us,” Systrom realized. They could trust each other, and that was basically it. Nobody else was going to have Instagram’s best interests in mind.

Investor Steve Anderson reminded Systrom and Krieger of their strongest asset. “Anybody can build Instagram the app,” he said, “but not everybody can build Instagram the community.” Those artists, designers, and photographers were turning into evangelists for the product, and Instagram needed to keep them as excited as possible for as long as possible.

As Siegler wrote for TechCrunch at the time: “Step one: obtain a ton of users. Step two: get brands to leverage your service. Step three: get celebrities to use your service and promote it. Step four: mainstream.”

They would not pay celebrities or brands, they would not overcomplicate their product, they would not be pulled into investor drama. They would play nice with the tech giants, they would foster community through InstaMeets, and they would try to make Instagram live up to Zollman’s ideals of a friendly place on the internet.

Krieger did build a re-share button but never released it to the public. The founders thought it would violate the expectations you had when you followed someone. You followed them because you wanted to see what they saw and experienced and created. Not someone else.

A filter on Instagram was like if Twitter had a button to make you more clever. “If I can help people make those photos beautiful, it makes them more shareable, and by making them more shareable, this thing wins,” he said.

 “Then you need a re-gram feature,” Kutcher said. Systrom tried to explain. “It has to be a simple, clean stream. You’ll still be able to find content, but it has to always be directly attributable to its creator,” he said, using an argument he thought would appeal to a person paid for his talents.

Kutcher was put off by Systrom’s lack of flexibility in the face of a good idea. But he was still intrigued enough to invite him, with their mutual friend Joshua Kushner, on a ski trip in Utah with other technology founders. A half dozen men stayed there overnight in a large cabin in the snow.

“He chose us, not the other way around.”

Zuckerberg wasn’t sure how things would play out. But his motivation is outlined in a little red-orange book, handed down to new Facebook employees at every Monday morning orientation. On one of the last pages, against a navy backdrop, there are a few sentences in light blue writing that explain Zuckerberg’s paranoid leadership: “If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will. The internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.”

“I write to urge the Commission to open an immediate investigation into whether Facebook has violated the antitrust laws.… In hindsight, it is clear that by approving this purchase, the Commission enabled Facebook to swallow up its most significant rival in the social network market.”

The stronger Instagram’s network got, the more it would become an alternative to Facebook for those moments of blank space in a day—in a cab, in line for coffee, bored at work.

Phrases like “outfit of the day” and “food porn” and “Instagrammable” entered the vernacular as the company grew. Nobody said “Facebookable.” Instagram had a higher bar.

“I hate when people discount us. I hate when people tell us we’re not going to be something, that because we’ve sold, it’s all over. Looking from the outside, I get their perspective. I just wanted to prove them wrong.”

Krieger and Systrom started to understand the strengths of their position: they could learn all of Facebook’s tricks, and then they could understand the pros and cons of those moves by looking at how Facebook’s own product had succeeded or failed.