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

entrepreneur and VC mentors. “It taught you fundraising, how deals were structured, how they came up with ideas and hired people. It was a crash-course business school for startups,” Systrom said. The program’s codirector, Tina Seelig, said Systrom stood out as an obvious entrepreneur: “He was always building things—always experimenting. It was in his nature to be looking at the world through the lens of ‘Where’s the opportunity here?’”
    Through the Mayfield program, Systrom snagged a summer internship at Odeo, a podcast company founded by Evan Williams that would later birth Twitter. Odeo gave Systrom his first taste of the adrenaline-filled startup environment and showed him how quick, flexible thinking was vital to a company’s survival. During his internship Systrom created apps with a young engineer named Jack Dorsey, who would soon start Twitter and the payment company Square. It was a key connection: The two nonvegans in the office quickly bonded on runs for deli sandwiches, and Dorsey would later help Instagram get off the ground, building demand for its filtered photos by posting images on his much-followed Twitter account.
    Senior year, with help from Stanford career services, Systrom passed on a six-figure project manager role at Microsoft to stay local with a Google marketing gig that paid about $60,000. Google was a recent graduate’s dream—oyster lunches, team-building retreats in Brazil—but Systrom grew bored writing marketing copy for Gmail and Google Calendar. Denied a role in product development (Google required a computer science degree) he switched to corporate development, where he modeled discounted cash flows for companies Google aimed to acquire and saw firsthand how big technology deals got done.
    Hungry for the startup environment he found while interning with Odeo, Systrom jumped to a social travel guide site called Nextstop, where he turned himself into a Valley-grade coder, designing e-mail programs that suggested users to follow and building Facebook photo games. “All of a sudden I had a new skill that I could actually put to use,” says Systrom. “When you had an idea you could actually create it.”
    Soon he found something he wanted to create: a site that would combine his passion for photos with location check-ins and social gaming, mimicking the then-surging Foursquare and Zynga, respectively. He chatted up his idea—then known as Burbn, after his favorite booze—at a VC meet-up at the Madrone Art Bar and caught the ear of Baseline Ventures’ Steve Anderson. Anderson says he liked Systrom’s humble confidence and that Systrom’s site would be written in the then “it” code of HTML5. In the winter of 2010, Anderson offered him $250,000 to launch the company (and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz matched that stake) on one condition—Systrom needed to bring in a cofounder.
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    SYSTROM’S STANFORD DIVIDENDS CONTINUED long after graduation. He launched Burbn in the living room of his one-bedroom San Francisco apartment and would often work on the prototype at Coffee Bar in the Mission so that he could see other humans. There he’d sometimes bump into Mike Krieger, a Brazilian native who had graduated from Stanford’s Mayfield program two years behind Systrom and was working on apps of his own. Krieger had majored in symbolic systems—a Stanford mash-up of technology and psychology that counts LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer as alumni—and was working at a chat site, Meebo. On one occasion, Systrom let Krieger download his new check-in app. “I wasn’t superenthusiastic about location-based things, but Burbn was the first one that I loved,” Krieger told me, noting it was the ability to view photos of his friends’ various adventures that had him hooked.
    A month later Systrom invited Krieger