Facebook’s $1 billion purchase of the photo app made Kevin Systrom the latest Silicon Valley cult hero. It happened only because he chose school over Zuckerberg’s startup
Kevin Systrom was working a hissing espresso machine at Palo Alto’s Caffé del Doge in the spring of 2006 when Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg approached the counter with a puzzled look. The previous summer, Zuck had taken Systrom to dinner at Zao Noodle Bar on University Avenue and asked him to ditch his senior year at Stanford to develop a photo service for his nascent social network, The Facebook. Systrom declined. Now, Facebook was worth $500 million—en route to a valuation more than 100 times greater—and making hundreds of headlines. Systrom was making cappuccinos.
“I had been like, ‘No, I don’t want to work at this thing,’ and here I am working at a cafe,’” Systrom, 28, tells me over our $4.50 cups of artisan coffee in the warehouse-like room of Sightglass Coffee in San Francisco’s SoMa district. In opting to stay at Stanford, he turned down what surely would have amounted to tens of millions in Facebook options. “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,” shrugs Systrom. “I’m sure in retrospect it would have been a nice deal, but it’s funny where you end up.”
Systrom, a lanky 6-foot-5, loved technology well before college. At 12, he was pranking his friends in Holliston, Massachusetts, over AOL with programs that allowed him to control their cursors or knock them offline. He applied to Stanford to study computer science, but after enrolling in an advanced programming course in his freshman year, Systrom found himself spending 40 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 taught me how to be an investment banker.”
These feats of server acrobatics will likely end once the Facebook deal goes through—FTC approval is still pending—and the Instagram team can tap into Zuckerberg’s massive network infrastructure. Systrom says he’s barred from going into detail about the Facebook deal until the regulators approve it. But he did tell me the acquisition happened during a frenzied week in April after he returned from a UK vacation. That Wednesday, Instagram was wired $50 million in a series B round from VCs, including Greylock, Sequoia and Thrive Capital that valued the company at $500 million. On Saturday, Zuckerberg invited Systrom to his Palo Alto home. This time, Systrom accepted. By Monday, the billion-dollar deal—including $300 million in cash—was done.
(This story appears in the 14 September, 2012 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)