Quotes from Mike Krieger

Who I love reading is Jordan Mechner, who wrote 'Prince of Persia.' He put all his journals while he was writing 'Prince of Persia' online.

I was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and from an early age was interested in technology and engineering.

By 2013, we had 200 million people using 'Instagram' every month and over 20 billion photos stored.

People want to share photos with only their friends and loved ones.

You can't start a product simply by building it. You have to know why you're building it, and you might go down the wrong rabbit hole, waste time, and confuse things. Spending long afternoons with a sketchbook or talking through your ideas with other people can save a year in software development later on.

You have to tailor yourself to everybody. Sometimes people need a firmer hand; some people you can have a laugh with, and they concentrate more. What they needed was more certainty about the future of the company.

In 2010, the night before we launched 'Instagram v1', my co-founder Kevin and I bet on how many people would download the app its first day in the wild.

People want to share their photos publicly with lots of people.

I grew up not liking coffee, even though I'm from Brazil. Then I realized when I moved to San Francisco that it's not that I don't like coffee, I just didn't like the coffee I'd had before. I fell in love with my morning cup of coffee, and my second one at 11 A.M., and so on and so forth.

Every year, thousands of startups are founded - not only in technology, but increasingly also in health care, education, and energy.

Computer vision and machine learning have really started to take off, but for most people, the whole idea of what is a computer seeing when it's looking at an image is relatively obscure.

My dad worked for different companies that made whiskey for a long time, so we were definitely whiskey drinkers. Growing up, my friends would get toy cars, and I would get swag from whisky companies.

Hearing 'no' a lot of times usually tells you either you're crazy or you're on the right track, and you don't know which one it is until you finally launch.

Focus on doing the right things instead of a bunch of things.

I remember, when I was in college, an anonymous donor gave Stanford students a year of 'Yahoo Music Engine'.

Just because you've Googled something doesn't mean you've learned.

Software is like gardening - one day I'll go behind the shed and clean up. But if nobody ever goes there, does it matter a lot?

Doing the simple thing first doesn't mean your solution will work forever.

With 100 million people, somebody is using your product in some interesting way. If you change it... you're going to break some use cases.

Empathy is key in the design process, especially when you start expanding outside of your comfort zone to new languages, cultures, and age groups. If you try to assume what those people want, you're likely to get it wrong.

Don't spend months building something without any idea if someone actually wants it.

Working on a startup is a balancing act: being crazy enough to believe your idea can take off but not crazy enough to miss the signs when it's clearly not going to.

The biggest problem is startups in search of a problem. Chase what you're passionate about; you'll probably already have knowledge in the space.

Since I was born and raised in Brazil, the steps to becoming an entrepreneur in the United States have not always been easy.