Mike Krieger

“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.”

“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.”

“By 2013, we had 200 million people using 'Instagram' every month and over 20 billion photos stored.”

“When I was a student and rushing to finish a project, my gut instinct was usually to keep adding all kinds of features. It's a way of papering over the fact that you haven't quite nailed your concept yet.”

“People want to share their photos publicly with lots of people.”

“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 2010, the night before we launched 'Instagram v1', my co-founder Kevin and I bet on how many people would download the app its first day in the wild.”

“Working on a startup is a balancing act: being crazy enough to believe your idea can take off but not crazy enough to miss the signs when it's clearly not going to.”

“I love that our engineers are first and foremost 'Instagram' users.”

“Having a scriptable infrastructure requires upfront work but can pay huge dividends in bringing new engineers onto your infra team, as well as helping in disaster-recovery scenarios.”

“Every year, thousands of startups are founded - not only in technology, but increasingly also in health care, education, and energy.”

“Since I was born and raised in Brazil, the steps to becoming an entrepreneur in the United States have not always been easy.”

“Just because you've Googled something doesn't mean you've learned.”

“Focus on doing the right things instead of a bunch of things.”