You Only Have to Be Right Once by Randall Lane Page A

it, is nothing short of extraordinary under any circumstance; to do it with such a small team is unique in the annals of technology.”
    While the Web-based biggies tried to jam their products into mobile apps like an overstuffed suitcase into an overhead bin, Instagram’s photo network was jet-set from the start: fast, stylish, and elegant. With a few simple thumb taps you could snap, edit (with awesome filters), and share an Instagram photo with the world. A few more taps let you do all the things that built Facebook, including comments and likes. “You can look at Facebook as this bundle of so many different things, but it turns out that people just like photos more than anything else,” said Adam D’Angelo, the former Facebook CTO who took over the question site Quora and invested early in Instagram. “So if you specialize in photos and do photos really well, that’s in some way more powerful than this bundle of everything else.”
    Systrom offered early proof that in the digital economy a great idea can grow into a billion-dollar company in a matter of months. But these windfalls, serendipitous as they seem from the outside, are almost never accidental. In Systrom’s case, his good fortune can be traced directly to Stanford.
    The Palo Alto campus provided Systrom his first look at the worlds of tech and venture capital, his first internship at a startup, and his first job at Google. He discovered his love for vintage photography through a Stanford study-abroad program and met Zuckerberg and his young Facebook crew at a Stanford fraternity party. When he was searching for a cofounder to launch the company that later morphed into Instagram, it was a Stanford connection that brought the pair together. “When people say that college isn’t worthwhile and paying all this money isn’t worthwhile, I really disagree,” said Systrom. “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.”
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    SYSTROM, A LANKY SIX foot five, loved technology well before his college years. At age twelve he was pranking his friends in Holliston, Massachusetts over AOL with programs that allowed him to control their cursors or knock them offline (his Bart Simpson antics got the family AOL account blocked). He applied early to Stanford, with the intent of studying computer science, but after enrolling in an advanced programming course in his freshman year, Systrom found himself over his head, spending forty hours a week on one class just to squeak out a B: “I loved it but started to think maybe I shouldn’t be a computer scientist.” Instead, he majored in management science and engineering. “It basically taught me how to be an investment banker.”
    Long interested in entrepreneurship and startups (his mom was an early employee of Monster.com and then worked at Zipcar), Systrom spent his free time building websites, such as a Stanford version of Craigslist. Another site, which he called Photobox, was a place for his fraternity, Sigma Nu, to post photos from the latest keg party.
    During junior year Systrom traveled abroad to study photography in Florence, Italy. He arrived in Italy with a high-powered SLR camera only to see his photo teacher swap it for a Holga camera. The cheap plastic device produced quirky square images with soft focus and light distortions that yielded a retro look. Systrom loved the aesthetic. “It taught me the beauty of vintage photography and also the beauty of imperfection.” It was Systrom’s Steve Jobs moment—a flash of artistic inspiration that he would later combine with technology to rocket Instagram ahead of its competitors.
    While in Florence, Systrom applied to Stanford’s elite Mayfield Fellows Program: a work-study seminar that threw twelve students into the world of startups and paired them with