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WIRED25: Kevin Systrom on Life After Instagram

Instagram Cofounder Kevin Systrom spoke with WIRED's Lauren Goode as part of WIRED25, WIRED’s 25th anniversary celebration in San Francisco.

Released on 10/15/2018

Credits

Starring: Kevin Systrom

Transcript

00:00
(jazzy percussion)
00:03
Kevin, thank you so much for being here.
00:05
Yeah. Really appreciate it.
00:06
Yeah, of course.
00:07
Especially given how busy you are,
00:09
answering calls from VC's every day,
00:11
who now just want to fund whatever you're doing next.
00:15
First of all, I never thought we'd be going on stage
00:17
after Jony Ive.
00:19
That's a pretty awesome.
00:20
(audience laughs)
00:22
That's pretty awesome.
00:22
But I have. And Anna.
00:23
Yeah, and Anna, of course.
00:25
Did you think about what to wear?
00:27
No, no.
00:28
I'm regretting this decision.
00:31
Stop taking photos.
00:32
(laughing)
00:34
But yeah, I have a little more free time in my schedule
00:37
now, and I figured we could chat.
00:39
Yeah, I was gonna say, I think you might be
00:41
the only speaker here who's technically unemployed.
00:43
So we should...
00:44
(audience laughs)
00:46
I'm doing okay.
00:48
(audience laughs and applauds)
00:51
Thank you.
00:53
So I want to talk to you about building things,
00:57
but before we get to that I want to talk to you
01:00
about leaving things.
01:02
What was the moment for you within Facebook
01:05
where you started to think to yourself,
01:07
I should probably leave?
01:10
Well first, let's talk about leaving things in general.
01:14
Each person in this room, watching online,
01:16
has left something in their life.
01:18
And I'm not just talking about work.
01:20
I'm talking about relationships,
01:21
I'm talking about school,
01:22
I'm talking about the different chapters we all have
01:25
in our lives.
01:26
And sometimes those chapters are forced on us.
01:31
The number of people who have reached out after this,
01:33
and I've met them, and they're like the one difference
01:35
between you and I is I was fired.
01:37
And they're like you have it easy.
01:40
Sometimes they're forced on us,
01:41
sometimes we decide, and sometimes they're natural.
01:44
Something like a school transition.
01:45
You get to the end and you have to graduate and you go on.
01:49
But life is full of chapters,
01:51
and the question is how to make the decision
01:54
to end a chapter, if you're in control.
01:57
And I always knew that Instagram would be an
02:02
important thing in my life, and I never thought
02:05
that I would be doing it for eight years,
02:08
or at least inside of another company.
02:10
When we sold the company it was pretty clear to me,
02:13
based on the pattern of other companies in the past
02:15
that entrepreneurs don't stay forever.
02:18
And I was actually amazed that we were on the far side
02:22
of the average.
02:24
The PayPal guys, it was like two days.
02:28
There's 18 months (mumbles).
02:29
Maybe it might have been one day.
02:30
Maybe I'm giving them 100% markup on that.
02:34
But we were there for six years, and accomplished a ton
02:38
but at the end of the day a company,
02:41
especially when you're the CEO and co-founder,
02:44
it's kinda like a rocket.
02:45
You have to aim it in the right direction,
02:48
put the boosters on it, hope that it gets
02:51
into the right orbit, but then take your hands off
02:53
and let it go.
02:54
And we got to a billion users, we were making a bunch
02:58
of money, and I was proud of the business we built.
03:02
I was proud of the team we built.
03:03
We had three offices in New York, San Francisco we opened,
03:07
and then also Menlo Park.
03:09
And it didn't feel done by any stretch of the imagination,
03:13
but if felt like it was in orbit, and that if we let go
03:17
and let others take it, it would continue to do really well.
03:20
And I think if you look at places like YouTube,
03:22
and other like PayPal, you look at all these other
03:25
acquisitions and typically they do very, very well
03:28
post founder, and that's because if you get it into
03:31
the right orbit, it goes.
03:32
I think the decision for me was like,
03:35
are we in the right orbit?
03:36
And it felt like we were, and that's that.
03:40
So PayPal, rockets, you're doing a new space company,
03:45
like Elon Musk.
03:46
That's what I'm getting from all this.
03:47
But no, I mean really--
03:49
As much space as there is, it's a little bit
03:50
of a crowded space now.
03:53
I mean, what was it like for you the moment
03:55
when you had to tell Mark that you were leaving,
03:59
that you'd made that decision?
04:00
What were you feeling?
04:02
I mean, I think anytime you leave anything it's sad,
04:06
even if it's your decision.
04:10
But at the same time, you can't evolve as an individual,
04:14
or as a person, unless you make big changes in your life.
04:18
And it's like no decision is either all good or all bad
04:22
feeling, it's always a mix of the two.
04:25
But that's not a reason not to do it.
04:27
Usually the reason to do it is because you have
04:30
your sights set on a future that involves
04:33
something new and something different,
04:35
and for me and Mike it was all about the opportunity
04:39
to do something brand new.
04:41
I don't have any plans yet, except for hanging out
04:44
for a little while doing some of these on-stage things,
04:48
and figuring out what's next.
04:50
But you know we stumbled into Instagram.
04:52
Instagram wasn't like, we didn't have a business plan
04:55
written out on the side, and we're like eight years from now
04:57
we're gonna have this much revenue and this many employees.
05:00
We figured out what we loved, we built it for ourselves
05:04
because we desperately wanted something like this,
05:06
and then we poured our heart and souls into it
05:09
for eight years.
05:10
So I can imagine that happening, I mean, I'm 34.
05:13
So I think I have a few more Instagrams, timewise, in me.
05:17
I'm not sure if we'll ever do anything nearly as impactful.
05:20
It's an awesome thing, and like I said, it's in orbit now.
05:23
Were there tensions when you left?
05:27
Think about, like, when you leave anything.
05:28
There are obviously reasons for leaving, right?
05:31
No one ever, like, leaves a job
05:33
because everything's awesome, right?
05:36
(audience laughs)
05:38
Work's hard.
05:39
So things were not awesome, would you say?
05:42
Those are your words, not mine,
05:43
for all the reporters in the room.
05:46
But to be clear, like, when you leave something
05:48
it's sometimes it's because it's incompatible
05:51
with what you want to do, or things have changed,
05:52
or whatever, and in this case,
05:55
there are no hard feelings at all.
05:56
I mean, I'm excited to do something new,
05:59
and I think Instagram's in a really, really good place.
06:03
I love walking around, by the way,
06:05
so now that I'm not running it I have more time
06:07
to walk around and see people using it.
06:09
And it brings me such an amazing feeling inside
06:13
to be at like a bar or a restaurant
06:14
and see people loving it.
06:16
And there's zero, like, regret or anger that people
06:21
still love Instagram.
06:22
No, it's like I want this thing to succeed.
06:24
If this thing triples in size and becomes like
06:27
the most important company in the world,
06:28
that's like, that will be an awesome outcome for me
06:31
even if I'm not running it.
06:33
What did you learn about humanity through your experience
06:37
at Instagram, and the way people are using Instagram?
06:40
I tend to think of it as primarily a happy place,
06:44
still, that people go to, and in some ways
06:46
still feels siloed from Facebook and everything
06:49
that Facebook is dealing with right now.
06:51
But it's also a really interesting window
06:54
into how people present themselves in social media.
06:57
What did you learn about people through working
07:00
in Instagram, and how they use it?
07:03
I think people try to say that, like,
07:06
social networks are independent from the world
07:09
as if there's this happy world over here on Instagram
07:12
and over on this other social network
07:13
there's this unhappy world.
07:14
They're the same people, generally, who use these things.
07:18
The world is in a really tough place right now.
07:20
Internationally, we have all sorts of things going on.
07:23
Domestically we have all sorts of things going on
07:24
that make a lot of people in this room, and watching,
07:28
very afraid.
07:30
And that is not independent from Instagram.
07:33
All of those people use Instagram,
07:35
and all those people experience the world through Instagram
07:38
and see that there are some scary things going on,
07:41
and Instagram is not free from bullying,
07:43
it's not free from all the issues that plague
07:47
other social networks.
07:48
But I do think that what I learned was that if you
07:51
take a proactive stance against it and work on it,
07:53
you can make a dent.
07:55
We developed early on some machine learning filters
07:58
for bullying, and I didn't really think it was
08:01
going to be possible to even make a dent,
08:03
and the team came back with a bunch of data
08:04
that showed we actually started blocking a bunch
08:07
of these instances of bullying and harassment
08:09
on the platform.
08:10
We made a bunch of decisions to allow people
08:12
to turn off comments, even though that was like
08:15
anti-engagement because people wouldn't use the product
08:17
as much, just so that they could be in control.
08:20
What I learned about humanity was like
08:21
if you give people the tools to do things,
08:24
generally they make the right decisions
08:26
and you have to trust that you're doing
08:29
the right thing for them.
08:30
And I think we learned that over and over again.
08:32
But I'm still in awe about how big,
08:35
the strangest thing about running Instagram,
08:37
and you didn't ask this question, now I'm pivoting,
08:40
is you know on paper, we have a billion people
08:44
using this thing.
08:45
That's crazy, but unlike, if you like, say,
08:48
play a stadium and you're a musician,
08:50
like, you see everyone.
08:53
Running the company you don't see all these people.
08:55
Like sure, you see people from time to time
08:57
using it on the street, but there's this giant group
09:00
of people out in the world that love this thing
09:03
that you don't get to see,
09:04
and that's one of the crazier things about running a company
09:07
like Instagram, is that separation of your day-to-day
09:11
and then the reality.
09:13
But it's also the exciting part.
09:15
Now the tools that you mentioned to combat bullying,
09:17
that's something that your successor, Mosseri,
09:20
has now rolled out.
09:22
Wired wrote about that earlier this week.
09:24
You should all go take a look at the story.
09:26
But that's something that was a passion project of yours.
09:31
Talk a little bit about that and how it fits into
09:33
the broader questions around content moderation right now.
09:39
I mean, to segue a little bit, I look at what's going on
09:41
on the internet now, and it feels as though
09:43
we've entered this stage of tech maturation.
09:47
Social media was in its youth,
09:49
this sort of very happy thing,
09:51
and now we're dealing with some really big issues.
09:54
How are the tools that you worked on helping in that regard?
09:59
Well, I like the term maturation because
10:03
it's unprecedented to have companies that touch
10:06
this many billions of people.
10:08
We're entering a new world where you've got organizations
10:11
that build tools, and in a fraction of a second
10:14
can be rolled out to billions of people.
10:16
When does that happen in history?
10:19
So we're learning what it means to have that responsibility
10:22
as an industry and not just as a company.
10:24
And when I sat down with my co-founder, Mike,
10:28
and we started talking, we started talking about
10:30
what legacy we wanted to leave.
10:32
This wasn't like we had a date in mind
10:34
that we were gonna leave Instagram,
10:35
but I think it's appropriate to talk about it
10:36
now that we are gone.
10:38
And we were like, what do we want to have accomplished?
10:41
Is it a revenue thing?
10:42
Is it a users thing?
10:43
And it just all felt pretty hollow,
10:46
like, I mean, great, all those things are wonderful
10:48
for a business, but what legacy do you want to leave?
10:54
When my wife got pregnant,
10:55
we knew we were having a daughter,
10:57
I just started thinking someday my daughter Freya's
11:00
gonna grow up and she's gonna use,
11:01
now I don't know if it'll be VR or some device,
11:04
she'll be on some social network.
11:07
I want to make sure that we've started work
11:09
on the main problems of social media today:
11:11
harassment, bullying, freedom of expression today
11:16
so that when she grows up maybe my successor, Adam,
11:20
or maybe someone else.
11:21
Some young entrepreneur who's just getting out of college
11:24
now will be inspired to take that on as a work stream
11:28
in their company so that they develop the tools
11:30
and push it forward.
11:32
That's the type of legacy we wanted to have,
11:34
not selfies and hashtags.
11:36
Like, that stuff's great.
11:37
Trust me, it helped us grow, but what kind of mark
11:41
do you want to leave on the world has nothing to do
11:43
with that stuff and has everything to do
11:45
with social media and the internet more broadly
11:48
because it's going to play a very important part
11:50
of everyone's lives in the future.
11:51
So for you that was AI that helps
11:55
with content moderation.
11:56
Am I describing that correctly?
11:58
Or it helps with specifically bad content?
12:00
What is that legacy, then?
12:02
Well, this is the common misconception.
12:05
Sometimes solutions are a lot easier
12:07
than letting the robots do all the work.
12:09
Sometimes it's about control.
12:11
Most social networks don't let you
12:14
control whether or not someone can reply to you.
12:16
But we made a decision at Instagram,
12:18
and this is a simple example, to just let you
12:21
turn comments off.
12:22
Because where does most of the harassment happen
12:24
on social media?
12:25
It's in the replies, right?
12:27
And we let you block certain words.
12:29
But there was a big debate internally,
12:30
are we hampering free speech?
12:33
Shouldn't you be able to comment on my photo if you want?
12:36
It turns out, as a public figure, the answer's yes,
12:38
but like if we're just users of Instagram
12:42
should you be able to say whatever you want on my photo?
12:44
And we made a philosophical decision, no.
12:48
If you want to delete a comment off your photo, go for it.
12:50
If you want to block certain words, go for it.
12:52
And if you want to just turn it off completely, go for it.
12:55
And that is a simple example.
12:57
It has nothing to do with AI, and robots,
12:59
and image detection, none of that.
13:01
It's just control.
13:02
It's a philosophical switch that says
13:06
you're in control of your content, not us.
13:08
And that felt to me like a big shift,
13:11
and not like what technology do we use.
13:13
Yes, we use that technology to scan things,
13:15
but like, that to me is less important
13:19
and more widespread.
13:20
What's not widespread is allowing users
13:22
to control their experience.
13:24
I think that's very important for all companies to do.
13:27
So what are you doing now?
13:29
Lots of stuff.
13:31
I actually, I feel like I'm busier now
13:33
than I was when I was working.
13:34
Like work is very regimented and, like,
13:36
you show up, you have lots of scheduled things,
13:37
you go home, you're exhausted, you go to sleep, repeat.
13:40
But with lots of free time, and curiosity,
13:43
and creativity, it turns out you end up
13:45
spending your time on a bunch of different things.
13:47
So number one priority: be a great dad,
13:50
which I'm really trying to do, and it's way harder
13:52
than being CEO of Instagram, it turns out.
13:56
What's the hardest part?
13:57
What's the hardest part?
13:58
Well, the sleep schedule's way harder than Instagram,
14:00
for sure, but also just how do we
14:04
want to raise our daughter?
14:06
She's young enough now that she'll see,
14:08
it's crazy by the way, Jony's probably still listening,
14:11
but my iPhone's like sitting over on the side
14:13
and she like knows what the iPhone is already.
14:15
[Lauren] Oh yeah. Like she'll reach for it.
14:17
She's nine months old.
14:20
Haven't you heard that all the top tech executives
14:22
don't let their kids use tech?
14:23
Well, she hasn't used it yet.
14:25
It's more like insert, you know, and chew.
14:28
(audience laughing)
14:30
So it's not really like, she's not using social media.
14:35
On the traditional sense anyway.
14:38
But my point is, those types of philosophical decisions.
14:41
What values to we want to teach her?
14:44
What things do we want to allow her to use, or not?
14:46
And then how much can you actually control?
14:49
That's the hard part.
14:50
But listen, we're in the easy part right now
14:52
where she kinda just crawls around
14:55
and you just spend time with her. So that's number one.
14:58
But I made a deal with myself that when I left
15:00
I was like I'm not going to sit around.
15:02
I know a lot of people who sell their companies,
15:05
and day two they just go sit on a beach somewhere.
15:08
Listen, I had a beach week, don't get me wrong.
15:10
But there are a lot of people who just sit there
15:12
and that's their life.
15:15
Someone once told me the best thing you can possibly
15:18
do between chapters is improve yourself, learn,
15:22
get out there, meet people, be in different worlds,
15:26
figure out which of those worlds you really love.
15:28
Is is that you really love the music industry?
15:31
Is it that you love space exploration?
15:34
Is it that you love social media still
15:37
and you want to do that again?
15:39
Take lessons, do different things.
15:41
So I started flying.
15:42
My wife is very unhappy about this.
15:45
What are you flying?
15:46
Cessnas?
15:46
I flew alone for the first time this past Friday,
15:49
which was like, let's just like think about this.
15:52
With some free time you're like, I'm gonna spend time
15:54
learning one of mankind's most incredible achievements
15:58
which is to fly.
15:59
People shouldn't be able to fly.
16:01
But I'm gonna, like, learn to take off
16:03
and land on my own, and that's cool.
16:06
Instagram started because I took photography lessons
16:08
when I was in Italy and my photo teacher
16:10
taught me to use a little plastic camera
16:13
with square film, and how to tint the photos.
16:16
At the time you could have thought, eh,
16:18
he's never gonna use that in business.
16:20
But it turns out that was the root of Instagram.
16:22
So you know I was talking to Sebastian yesterday
16:28
who has now like a flying car company,
16:31
and he learned to fly from the same guy I learned to fly.
16:33
And like that was a big part of his inspiration, too.
16:36
So you never know where inspiration's gonna come from.
16:39
So if you have some free time, get out there,
16:41
learn, read, do crazy things.
16:45
And that's what I'm doing now.
16:47
I think it's actually a common misconception
16:49
that flying is nerve-wracking the whole time.
16:50
But in reality, it gives you a lot of time to think.
16:53
You're up there, and you're sort of
16:55
putting things on autopilot, and you're thinking.
16:56
I don't know.
16:58
I'm still in the phase of I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die.
17:01
(audience laughing)
17:03
I'm excited for that phase.
17:05
This is what I hear from sources who fly.
17:08
So are you planning on, how much time are you
17:12
going to give yourself to fly, and hang out with
17:15
your daughter, not necessarily in that order,
17:18
and are you planning, are you going to reconnect with Mike,
17:23
your co-founder, and do something with him?
17:25
Is that in the plans?
17:26
I wouldn't say it's reconnect, 'cause we've
17:28
never lost connection.
17:30
He and I are great friends, and like we're ying and yang,
17:33
and he's strong in areas, and I'm strong in other areas,
17:37
and we love working with each other.
17:39
But one, there's no timeline.
17:42
You can't force creativity, you have to go through it.
17:45
You have to discover things.
17:47
I like spending my time learning new things,
17:49
being a good dad, writing stuff.
17:51
I have a writing project that I'm doing just for myself.
17:54
I like have all these things that are going on
17:56
that are creative pursuits that allow me to think,
17:59
okay, what could be next?
18:01
But I love helping other entrepreneurs.
18:03
I've done a bunch of angel investments in the past,
18:05
and now I have the time to sit down
18:07
with the entrepreneurs and ask how it's going.
18:09
It turns out that a lot of what I've learned in the past
18:11
running Instagram is like helpful.
18:13
And that's awesome to feel like we can help
18:16
a next generation of entrepreneurs to something really cool.
18:20
But yeah, that's where I'm at.
18:21
I know there are a lot of things,
18:22
and I should have a more structure answer,
18:25
but I hope you guys are all happy for me
18:26
to be able to do stuff now.
18:29
Well one of the things you said in your exit statement,
18:32
when you left Instagram, was that you wanted
18:35
to give yourself that space to think about,
18:37
I'm paraphrasing a little bit, about the problems
18:39
that you want to address.
18:41
What is a problem right now that piques your interest,
18:44
and you look at it and you say,
18:45
I think I can help solve that in some way?
18:49
I'm gonna answer, well, two things:
18:50
one, I love exit statement.
18:52
I should have titled my document Exit Statement.
18:54
(audience laughs)
18:55
Feels very official.
18:56
It was me writing very, very quickly.
19:00
So I want to talk, I'm gonna answer in a meta way,
19:04
which is no specific problem, but rather the problem
19:08
of problem-solving.
19:09
Reporters love that.
19:10
(audience laughs)
19:12
So do audiences.
19:13
They're laughing, it's okay.
19:16
So the thing I want to say
19:19
is the problem of problem-solving.
19:21
Far too many companies build things at random.
19:25
They say alright team, go have an idea.
19:28
Do a hack-a-thon and have an idea, and we'll see
19:31
what rises to the top.
19:32
And that's one way of doing entrepreneurship,
19:34
and we did it at Instagram, too.
19:36
But the thing I think companies, and humanity in general,
19:39
needs the most is the science of problem-solving.
19:42
Which is to say Instagram solved a problem for people
19:46
at the time it was released.
19:48
Photos were grainy and blurry,
19:49
and people were unhappy about sharing them,
19:52
so we added filters.
19:53
No one uses Instagram filter, well,
19:55
they still use them, but no one, relatively,
19:57
thinks of Instagram as filters anymore.
19:59
But it was critical to succeed.
20:01
It solved a problem for people.
20:02
We allowed people to share photos on multiple networks
20:05
using one app.
20:06
That was a big problem for people.
20:08
It turns out when you as a company or an individual
20:10
focus on the problems that people actually have
20:14
and go and solve those by building product,
20:16
great things happen.
20:17
But far too many companies, and far too many individuals
20:20
think product development is this alchemy
20:22
where you sit around and you draw things on a board
20:25
and someone has an idea, and maybe something good happens.
20:27
And then they wonder why it doesn't work.
20:29
But I actually think it's far more simple
20:31
than we all understand if you just focus on humans
20:35
and the problems that they have.
20:36
So to answer your question directly,
20:38
I worry that we don't have that science as people,
20:43
and we don't understand it, and then therefore
20:45
we spend a ton of time not building great things.
20:47
So I want to reverse that.
20:49
So how do we do that?
20:50
And I don't have the answer for that yet,
20:51
but that's something I'm thinking a lot about.
20:53
Maybe it will come to you as you're flying.
20:55
Yeah.
20:56
No air-cooled Porsches.
20:57
No, no.
20:58
Okay.
20:59
Kevin, thank you so much.
21:00
Thanks.
21:01
(audience applauding)
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