Showing posts with label Kevin Systrom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kevin Systrom. Show all posts

Monday, July 23, 2012

Mayer's Products

It is interesting that people are making it sound like Steve Jobs just came back to Apple, a dying company!

Marissa Mayer Has a Secret Weapon
For the past decade, she has been the doyen of a collection of some of the most talented young engineers and product managers in all of technology. These are the hand-selected prime talents of an accelerated leadership program at Google called Associate Product Manager (APM)...... Consider the first APM, a fresh Stanford grad named Brian Rakowski. He became a key leader of the team that built the Chrome browser and now is the VP of the Chrome operation. The second was Wesley Chan, who made Google Toolbar a success, then launched Google Analytics and Google Voice. He’s now picking winners for Google Ventures. Another early APM was Bret Taylor, who earned his bones by launching Google Maps. He left Google and co-founded Friendfeed, then become the Chief Technical Officer of Facebook..... there are over 300 who have been through the program. .... And the glue to the whole shebang was Marissa Mayer, who was the APM boss, mentor, den mother and role model. ..... Mayer thought up the program in early 2002. Google had been struggling to find PMs who could work within the peculiar company culture — team leaders who would not be bosses but work consensually with the wizards who produce code. Ideally, a Google product manger would understand the technical issues and sway the team to his or her viewpoint by strong data-backed arguments, and more than a bit of canny psychology. But experienced PMs from places like Microsoft, or those with MBAs, didn’t understand the Google way, and tried to force their views on teams..... The ideal applicants must have technical talent, but not be total programming geeks — APMs had to have social finesse and business sense. ..... They would undergo a multi-interview hiring process that made the Harvard admissions regimen look like community college. The chosen ones were thrown into deep water, heading real, important product teams. (As the first APM, Rakowski was asked to launch a nascent project called Gmail. By the way, I hear Rakowski is taking over the program now that Mayer is gone.) “We give them way too much responsibility,” Mayer once told me, “to see if they can handle it.” Also, Google had APMs perform tasks for top management, like note-taking at high-level executive meetings or drawing up white papers on ambitious potential products. ..... The program has been so successful that Google has created a variation for leaders of non-product teams. These are called Marketing APMs. ..... Kevin Systrom was an MAPM — before he left Google and founded Instagram. ..... You didn’t get to be an APM unless you connected with her; she was the last interview in a long series, and she’d typically make ultimate decision. (“Tell me about a product you love,” she’d ask candidates. There was no right answer. But not describing the choice with passion was the wrong answer.).... a high percentage of APMs go elsewhere. APMs are chosen for their ambition and independence. Those traits are often at odds with working at a big company...... Naturally, one of the first e-mails that Mayer sent after accepting her new job was a blast to the entire APM network, informing them of her move and assuring them that she will still be in touch.
One Week of Mayer at Yahoo: Whither Ross? New Old Yahoos? More Search? Product Side “Elated!”
“Let’s be clear, she is our last hope,” said one board member to me, a sentiment that I also heard from another; and so, too, from a lot of execs and rank-and-file around the company. ...... former Googler Shashi Seth, who has been in charge of a number of product areas at Yahoo for a while now ... “Shashi has been smiling from ear to ear since Marissa arrived — he can’t contain his glee,” said one person. ...... “I think we have a ballgame now! It’s amazing how fast the sentiment changed internally,” said one person in the product org, in what has been a common refrain. “Everyone [is] ELATED. People I know that were close to leaving (including myself) are now giving it another shot.” ..... She has appeared getting her own lunch in the cafeteria, which has delighted more employees than you might imagine at Yahoo. ..... In what appears to be a whirlwind of fact-finding meetings with Yahoo employees since right after she started last Monday — no all-hands for her off the bat — Mayer has been asking questions and taking in information. ..... “curt,” “whip smart,” “suffers no fools,” and “a sponge.” ..... Mayer’s most critical ally in her early stages appears to be the quiet and retiring Yahoo co-founder David Filo, who emerged to be a vocal supporter of her from the start. That he gave a quote in a press release and did interviews — my nickname for him has long been “Silent Bob” — should say a lot to anyone paying mind..... the heart of the company is still with both Filo and also Jerry Yang. ..... all about building up tech again at Yahoo. ..... Some big initiatives on the burner at Yahoo that she must mull: A wide-ranging integration with Twitter, which would be similar to Yahoo’s efforts with Facebook ..... many think a halving of the company’s workforce is in order ..... What about a new kind of commerce hookup with retail giant Walmart, for example, where Mayer serves on the board? Why not become a video Switzerland for all the competing content makers out there? What about really committing to content all-in, a la AOL and its Huffington Post Hail Mary? Could she make a startling purchase of something big, such as Hulu or Zynga?
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Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Instagram Does Not Know What It Has On Its Hands

Image representing Kevin Systrom as depicted i...Image via CrunchBase
"The only thing that will make other platforms happen is natural growth of the team. I think we didn't expect how quickly we'd grow a year ago when we were like ‘oh let's work on Android next.' Everything became a priority, and because everything became a priority we had to focus on what was most important which was to keep the site going and make users really happy. A person is a person is a person no matter what phone you own. I'm excited to be on Android someday. Are you kidding me? Our growth is going to double." - Kevin Systrom
This is an insane thing to be saying.

Instagram is one of those lucky companies that does not have to worry about money. It can raise money. And it is not true there are only 10 good engineers on the planet. So if it not lack of resources or talent, what holds them back?

I think the Instagram guys might have hit the jackpot but they don't really fathom the full implications of what they have in their hands.

They should raise 50 million and grow to 50 engineers. Right away.

Mark Suster's Web Second Applies To Istagram
Kevin Shitstorm Of Instagram

Monday, October 03, 2011

Instagram Now Bigger Than FourSquare

Instagram DuckImage by ThePitcher via FlickrI think I made the prediction at this blog late last year, that Instagram is going to get bigger than FourSquare, and now it has.
The Next Web: Instagram: Now adding 25 photos and capturing 90 likes every second: Instagram is growing like a weed; the app has already blown past 10 million users ...... 25 photo uploads and 90 likes every second ...... while making sure to introduce “as few moving parts as possible” to ensure the team can continue to grow with the small number of engineers the company currently has ...... At the end of the September, the service was seeing a signup rate of over one new user a second — roughly 75 per minute, pushing the service past the 10 million user milestone.
Kevin Shitstorm Of Instagram
Path + Instagram + Color
Twitter ---> Instagram ---> FoodSpotting
Instagram Wave
Google Images, Facebook Photos, Twitpic, Instagram, FoodSpotting
Scaling Instagram Out Of A Coworking Space
Instagram Magic
Does Google Have An Innovation Problem?
What's Up With Pictures?

It should not take Instagram more than two years from now to hit a hundred million users. Give me an Android version, will you? And a web version.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Path + Instagram + Color

Mark ZuckerbergImage by jdlasica via FlickrMark Zuckerberg is obviously the man to watch. The guy wants nothing less than to own the decade. I am not sure the decade can be owned by any one person, but I have no doubts he will be one of the people who will.
TechCrunch: Exposed: Facebook’s Secret iPhone Photo Sharing App (Which Looks Amazing): Path meets Instagram meets Color meets (Path’s new side project) With — with a few cool twists. And obviously, it’s built entirely on top of Facebook’s massive social graph.
Behold: Facebook’s Secret Photo Sharing App Facebook, which is by far the largest photo service on the Internet with close to 100 billion photos, to make their own dedicated photo app. ..... Facebook’s focus on mobile photos going forward is very clear. ..... Given their talk of commitment to HTML5, Facebook likely wants to make an app that is as portable as possible. That is, while it may be built first for iOS, it can easily be ported to Android and other platforms with the HTML5 elements in place. ........ Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom was once approached by Mark Zuckerberg about working at Facebook way back in 2004 ...... Systrom declined the invitation, and now Zuckerberg is a Instagram user ....... the location elements, likes and comments, multi-picture mode, filters, multi-user albums, face-tagging, and more

What's Up With Pictures?

This is Mark Zuckerberg showing Bill Gates tendencies.

Friday, April 01, 2011

Scaling Instagram Out Of A Coworking Space

Instagram Magic
Instagram Wave
Twitter ---> Instagram ---> FoodSpotting

Instagram 365: #32Image by exoskeletoncabaret via FlickrI was reading this story on Mashable, and the paragraph that most got my attention was this one:
So, Krieger, a former UX designer at Meebo with admittedly no experience scaling a startup, walked around the Dogpatch Labs coworking space in San Francisco — the locale of Instagram’s first office — and queried other startup founders about what to do. Officemates suggested that Instagram move its service to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Instagram was in a General Assembly like place. Wow. That should not surprise me. But that part of the story is really inspiring. All those startup folks laboring in all those many coworking spaces should take heart. Big things are possible out of crowded coworking spaces.