Top 129 Quotes & Sayings by Kevin Systrom

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.

People interact with their phones very differently than they do with their PCs, and I think that when you design from the ground up with mobile in mind, you create a very different product than going the other way.

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.

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 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.

Calling 'Instagram' a photo-sharing app is like calling a newspaper a letter-sharing book, or a Mozart grand era symphony a series of notes. 'Instagram' is less about the medium and more about the network.

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.

People don't work in a dotcom because they have to. There are many professions that don't require that sort of time. But people sign up because they want to make world-changing differences, to build something that affects millions of people.

There are billions of dollars spent every year on traditional media. The majority of people are spending more time every day on the Internet, especially on mobile. You're starting to see a shift of that spend go to mobile, especially to things like 'Instagram'.

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.

It is cool to see that the fashion world has really taken to 'Instagram,' but, again, it is one of the many examples of many communities, whether you are a chef, a skateboarder, a surfer, a skier.

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'.

If it's one thing we do really well as a company, it's that we take big change slowly and deliberately and bring the community along with us.

I own a Canon 20D, though I don't remember the last time I used it. Ever since the iPhone 4, I've been completely absorbed in taking photos from my mobile phone.

A lot of the earliest 'Instagram' celebrities took really beautiful photos. But you're starting to see a change where it's not about beauty; it's about the story that you tell.

I like to compare 'Instagram' to the Library of Congress.

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

'Instagram' can engage generations of people that may not be on Facebook yet. I think that's true with 'WhatsApp,' and I think that will be true with things like Oculus.

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

It helps to see the world through a different lens, and that's what we wanted to do with Instagram. We wanted to give everyone the same feeling of discovering the world around you through a different lens.

I care deeply about craft: the quality of how something is made and the experience it enables.

'Instagram' is definitely becoming a new entertainment source for people day after day.

'Instagram' is a media company. I think we're about visual media. I explain ourselves as a disruptive entertainment platform that enables communication through visual media. I don't think it's just photos.

Every photo you take communicates something about a moment in time - a brief slice of time of where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing.

'Instagram' is an app that only took 8 weeks to build and ship but was a product of over a year of work.

If you've got an idea, start today. There's no better time than now to get going. That doesn't mean quit your job and jump into your idea 100% from day one, but there's always small progress that can be made to start the movement.

Brands, musicians, and public figures were among the first to embrace video on 'Instagram', and we've been impressed with how brands have extended their reach with video ads.

I grew up as a photo nut. Every Christmas I would get a new camera. It's a huge part of my life.

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.

Really, we're just taking people and shifting them from taking photos anyway to taking them on 'Instagram'.

In the past, people have looked at photos as a record of memory. The focus has been on the past tense. With Instagram, the focus is on the present tense.

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.

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.

The major reason why Instagram works is that you can follow anyone out there and start following their photos immediately.

When people say that college isn't worthwhile and paying all this money isn't worthwhile, I really disagree. I think those experiences and those classes that may not necessarily seem applicable in the moment end up coming back to you time and time again.

I try to list the top three things to get done every day, and I'll be lucky if I hit all three, but it's amazing what that does to keep you on track.

The way people communicate is changing, and no one knows this better than teens. We are using images to talk to each other, to communicate what we're doing, what we're thinking, and to tell stories.

There are a lot more companies with a lot younger people. It is just like 23-year-olds are starting companies, and they are scaling really quickly.

As a kid, creation was something that I always loved. Creating worlds for video games, creating businesses that didn't make any money, selling lemonade, etcetera. In my fourth grade classroom, I even instituted a government structure because I was really interested in people having positions and there being law.

Photos were seen as the most private type of content, and 'Instagram' really flipped that on its head and said photos can be really public.

There's a natural set of constraints with mobile phones that force you to be a better photographer by acknowledging and observing the world around you.

A platform is the base from which something big happens. In our case, we're an entertainment platform in the sense that there are people signing up like MTV, Burberry, folks like Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. And why? Because it's their channel to control their entertainment to their fans.

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

The printing press did something really big for the world when everyone could get books in their hands and read.

Instagram was created because there was no single place dedicated to giving your mobile photos a place to live and to be seen.

I've always been into taking my photos, cropping them square, putting them through a filter in Photoshop.

Great products sell themselves.

'Instagram' is great if you want to share photos, but you're not that technical. Or, if you're not interested in sharing publicly, 'Instagram' becomes a place where you can not only consume photos and videos from musicians, or whoever, but send them directly to your friends.

'Instagram' doesn't exist in a vacuum. We're not a bunch of siloed individuals. It's a bunch of people coming together on topics, fashion, you know, youthful teens, creatives, photographers, foodies, everyone coming together and building a community around the things they love, communicating visually.

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.

On average, people miss about 70 percent of the posts in their 'Instagram' feed. What this is about is making sure that the 30 percent you see is the best 30 percent possible.

Instagram is a media company. I think we're about visual media.

I'm always in awe of people who are artists in their fields - people who understand that simply by taking ideas and translating them into reality, they've created value in the world.

When you open up 'Instagram,' you need to know that you're seeing the real Tony Hawk, the real Taylor Swift, the real Burberry.

Do what you love, and do it well - that's much more meaningful than any metric.

I actually think some of my best moments in life have been while I was with people from Instagram - whether it's super late nights getting a release out or being able to travel to places I'd never visited and meeting some of the most interesting people I've ever met.

'Instagram' Direct is a really interesting feature because it's grown significantly since we launched it. People continue to use it to communicate more privately.

I think not focusing on money makes you sane because in the long run it can probably drive you crazy.

I run a business and go all over the world doing things for that business, things that are fairly orthogonal. But my job is to run my company, not to be the best Instagrammer. I'll let other people be awesome at it.