Quotes from Kevin Systrom

I believe photos is one of the underlying things in every social network that becomes successful.

One of the earliest requested features was to do premium filters where a brand could sponsor a filter. It's just not in our wheelhouse. It doesn't feel 'Instagram'-my in the way that the high-quality brand ads do.

I do believe that Instagram has put a stake in the ground and we're growing more quickly than anyone. Is there something in there we could do to make it a multi-billion dollar business? I think we can figure out something along the way.

You can build a filter app get people really excited, but the way to keep them is to provide long-term value. Long-term value is, in fact, being its own network.

Every startup should address a real and demonstrated need in the world - if you build a solution to a problem lots of people have, it's so easy to sell your product to the world.

Working at a startup to make a lot of money was never a thing, and that's why I decided to just finish up school. That was way more important for me.

I've always had a passion for technology, photography, startups, and connecting people. Bringing those aspects together made me successful.

I don't foresee a future where people don't have some sort of phone that's like a computer. I don't foresee a future where those phones don't have cameras in them. That spells a future where smartphones are the status quo. You have to ask yourself how you allow people to communicate what's in their lives.

Mike Krieger and I started talking, and he decided he liked the idea of helping start the company. Once he joined, we took a step back and looked at the product as it stood.

Facebook's campus has a lot of creative spaces: an analogue print shop, a candy store. It's a dynamic place and one of the best environments I've been in, period.

Whether it's an ad or organic content, video provides a new creative dimension for storytelling on 'Instagram'. Video lets people convey the power and beauty in a moment through sight, sound, and motion.

I can't imagine that companies are uninteresting if they don't have a billion users. But I do believe, to have mass scale, you have to be in the many-hundreds-of-millions-of-users range, and there are not that many companies that get there.

Most photo apps before asked something of the users. They said, 'You produce, act, and perform.' 'Instagram' said, 'Let us take care of the secret sauce.'

'Instagram' reached 13 million users in just 13 months.

There are a lot of apps that are fun to use - they're utility apps; they're fine. But there are a fraction of apps that are in the cream of the crop. You just need to be in the cream of the crop to get noticed.

A photo app is a utility. It's like comparing 'Twitter' to Microsoft Word. If you want to be an author, you're not always going to constrain yourself to 140 characters.

Just so everyone knows, we're not a photo-sharing company. I don't see photos on 'Instagram' as art. They're much more about communication.

Back in the day, I actually studied photography in Florence for a few months, and my photography teacher took away my digital camera and said, 'No, use this - it's analog and it's square.' It was a Holga camera, a very cheap $3 or $4 plastic camera. And that's what inspired 'Instagram'.

The best companies in the world have all had predecessors. 'YouTube' was a dating site. You always have to evolve into something else.

Having a company that's successful is a wonderful platform to do new things. You don't have to raise money for it; you can take profits from the company and pump them into new business.

I don't think you should ever start a business and move in a direction where you can't see it becoming a business.

There are fun parts of running a startup and not so fun parts, and Facebook handles the not so fun parts, like infrastructure, spam, sales. The real questions are, how big can 'Instagram' get? Is it 400 million, or bigger? Can it be a viable business if it is that big? These are at the top of the list for everyone in Silicon Valley.

Videos are a very difficult medium to be good at and also a difficult medium to consume quickly.

Someone once described entrepreneurship to me as a series of happy accidents.