While attending college in California, Kevin Systrom fell in love taking pictures (gotta capture the moment)—in fact, Kevin became fell so hard that he built a photo sharing website for all his fraternity bros so they could share their snaps with one another... During his junior year, he said sayonara and went to Italy to study abroad. While Kevin was scarfing down pasta in Florence, he started taking photography classes. It was in Italy where his love for the art of picture-taking was taken to a whole new level. He couldn’t get enough of the different angles, lenses, exposures, and resolutions. When he came back to the US, our boy Kevin’s skills were in high demand. During his senior year, Zuckerburg tried to recruit him to work for Facebook. Kevin turned him down—he gave Zuck the cold shoulder because he wanted to graduate first. When he did graduate, Google scooped him up. After the photography-aficionado’s short 3-year stint at Google, he began working on his own app as a side hustle. At the time, its name was “Burbn” because his drink of choice was some good ol’ bourbon. His app got funding, but it needed something to set itself apart from all the other social media platforms. And that’s when Kevin’s now-wife came to the rescue and gave him some billion-dollar advice. She said, “You should add filters to the pictures”. That advice was an absolute game changer—the golden ticket. And in 2010, Kevin took his revolutionary app live. But right before he did, the name was changed from “Burbn” to “Instagram”. Can you imagine? “This picture is dope, I’m going to post this on Burbn!” - You Kevin and Instagram have had plenty of successes over the past decade: the billion dollar sale to Facebook, the nearly one billion users, and even flying back overseas to visit the Vatican and help the Pope set up an account (yes, his holiness has an Instagram). **Read more with these resources: this Time article, and this Business Insider article **Read more FS Stories here. If you liked reading this article, you might also like The Wedge: a quick-to-read weekly e-mail newsletter with awesome business stories that'll increase your creativity and resourcefulness just by reading them. Learn more and sign up here. Comments are closed.
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