Kevin Systrom

Instagram became the world’s filter.

- Stella Bugbee

The man who unleashed Instagram on the world stands six-foot-five-inches tall and has the careful demeanor of someone who knows people are listening closely to what he’s saying. Talking to him, one gets the sense that he’s a step ahead—that for him, conversation is a game and he’s mapping out potential outcomes. That’s why, for example, he won’t be baited into reckless proclamations about impending class wars or Mark Zuckerberg’s complicated relationship to politics. At the same time, he possesses the excited curiosity of a kid discovering the solar system. This is a man who co-founded a company at 26 that made him a billionaire by the time he was 32 (today he’s 35). Even after a decade that has left many people confused by the role of social media in our lives, Kevin Systrom holds fast to the original premises of Silicon Valley: Technology can improve our lives, connecting people helps humanity, and tech guys aren’t just in it for the money.

What does it feel like to see the world changed by Instagram?

It’s really strange to me to walk down the street and see people using a product that I remember very clearly making. When we launched, 1 I think it was 24 hours later, there was someone using the subway on the way home. I was blown away. But we didn’t set out to change the world; we just set out to make a good product. We got fairly lucky in that, it turns out, what we wanted, a lot of other people wanted. That’s not lost on me, but it is kind of lost on me.

One recent concrete example of how it changed culture is that I went to a music show and they confiscated our phones.

Yeah, I went to a comedy show once, where they put them in these secret bags.