Focus on doing the right things instead of a bunch of things.
I'm fascinated with being able to travel the world via 'Instagram' and just be somewhere different.
Computer vision and machine learning have really started to take off, but for most people, the whole idea of what is a computer seeing when it's looking at an image is relatively obscure.
You have to tailor yourself to everybody. Sometimes people need a firmer hand; some people you can have a laugh with, and they concentrate more. What they needed was more certainty about the future of the company.
Just because you've Googled something doesn't mean you've learned.
You can't start a product simply by building it. You have to know why you're building it, and you might go down the wrong rabbit hole, waste time, and confuse things. Spending long afternoons with a sketchbook or talking through your ideas with other people can save a year in software development later on.
In May of 2010, I joined Kevin Systrom, my co-founder, and we created 'Instagram', a mobile social network that today has over 15 million users.
My dad worked for different companies that made whiskey for a long time, so we were definitely whiskey drinkers. Growing up, my friends would get toy cars, and I would get swag from whisky companies.
I grew up not liking coffee, even though I'm from Brazil. Then I realized when I moved to San Francisco that it's not that I don't like coffee, I just didn't like the coffee I'd had before. I fell in love with my morning cup of coffee, and my second one at 11 A.M., and so on and so forth.
In high school, one of the things I loved doing was this after-school program where you would teach computer skills to some of the maintenance folks at school.
Since I was born and raised in Brazil, the steps to becoming an entrepreneur in the United States have not always been easy.
It took less time to build 'Instagram' than it did for me to get my work visa. The app was an instant hit, and Facebook agreed to acquire the startup for about $1 billion in April 2012.
Don't spend months building something without any idea if someone actually wants it.
People want to share their photos publicly with lots of people.
I remember, when I was in college, an anonymous donor gave Stanford students a year of 'Yahoo Music Engine'.
Empathy is key in the design process, especially when you start expanding outside of your comfort zone to new languages, cultures, and age groups. If you try to assume what those people want, you're likely to get it wrong.
With 100 million people, somebody is using your product in some interesting way. If you change it... you're going to break some use cases.
Hearing 'no' a lot of times usually tells you either you're crazy or you're on the right track, and you don't know which one it is until you finally launch.
Who I love reading is Jordan Mechner, who wrote 'Prince of Persia.' He put all his journals while he was writing 'Prince of Persia' online.
People want to share photos with only their friends and loved ones.
