Mike Krieger Quotes

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.

- Mike Krieger

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.

- Mike Krieger

I remember, when I was in college, an anonymous donor gave Stanford students a year of 'Yahoo Music Engine'.

- Mike Krieger

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

- Mike Krieger

The biggest problem is startups in search of a problem. Chase what you're passionate about; you'll probably already have knowledge in the space.

- Mike Krieger

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.

- Mike Krieger

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.

- Mike Krieger

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.

- Mike Krieger

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.

- Mike Krieger

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

- Mike Krieger

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.

- Mike Krieger

When I came to the United States in 2004 to attend university at Stanford, I was instantly inspired by the stories and advice from startup leaders in Silicon Valley and beyond, who had endeavoured to create new opportunities and improve lives around the world.

- Mike Krieger

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

- Mike Krieger

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.

- Mike Krieger

Innovation happens best when people of different backgrounds come together to solve the world's toughest challenges and, in the process, can create new jobs and opportunities. I'm hopeful that updated immigration policies will encourage entrepreneurs from around the world to help tackle these opportunities in the U.S.

- 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.

- Mike Krieger

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.

- Mike Krieger

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.

- Mike Krieger

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.

- Mike Krieger

I was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and from an early age was interested in technology and engineering.

- Mike Krieger

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

- Mike Krieger

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.

- Mike Krieger

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.

- Mike Krieger

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.

- Mike Krieger

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.

- Mike Krieger

I'm fascinated with being able to travel the world via 'Instagram' and just be somewhere different.

- Mike Krieger

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

- Mike Krieger

I think the biggest challenge over time is that we stay creative and making sure that we continue to launch awesome products that people love.

- Mike Krieger

People want to share photos with only their friends and loved ones.

- Mike Krieger

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

- Mike Krieger

Doing the simple thing first doesn't mean your solution will work forever.

- Mike Krieger

Software is like gardening - one day I'll go behind the shed and clean up. But if nobody ever goes there, does it matter a lot?

- Mike Krieger

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

- Mike Krieger