Top 40 Kevin Systrom Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Focusing on one thing and doing it really, really well can get you very far.”

— Kevin Systrom

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2. “Great products sell themselves.”

— Kevin Systrom

3. “If you’ve got an idea, start today. There’s no better time than now to get going.”

— Kevin Systrom

4. “If you’ve got an idea, start today. There’s no better time than now to get going. That doesn’t mean quit your job and jump into your idea 100 percent from day one, but there’s always small progress that can be made to start the movement.”

— Kevin Systrom

5. “You need to fail in order to find the right solution.”

— Kevin Systrom

6. “With Instagram, the focus is on the present tense.”

— Kevin Systrom

7. “I promise you, a lot of it is luck. But you make your own luck by working really hard and trying lots and lots of things.”

— Kevin Systrom

8. “Instagram was created because there was no single place dedicated to giving your mobile photos a place to live and to be seen.”

— Kevin Systrom

9. “What people tell you and how they act is very, very different sometimes.”

— Kevin Systrom

10. “Every startup should address a real and demonstrated need in the world. If you build a solution to a problem lots of people have, it’s so easy to sell your product to the world.”

— Kevin Systrom

11. “Every photo you take communicates something about a moment in time – a brief slice of time of where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing.”

— Kevin Systrom

12. “The best feature is less features.”

— Kevin Systrom

13. “I think Instagram at its best is where you feel like you’re getting the most authentic version of the person on the other side of the camera.”

— Kevin Systrom

14. “I have a pretty random life. I run a business and go all over the world doing things for that business, things that are fairly orthogonal. But my job is to run my company, not to be the best Instagrammer. I’ll let other people be awesome at it.”

— Kevin Systrom

15. “There’s real beauty in pushing yourself to expose the real you in more ways.”

— Kevin Systrom

16. “When people say that college isn’t worthwhile and paying all this money isn’t worthwhile, I really disagree. I think those experiences and those classes that may not necessarily seem applicable in the moment end up coming back to you time and time again.”

— Kevin Systrom

17. “I think not focusing on money makes you sane, because in the long run it can probably drive you crazy.”

— Kevin Systrom

18. “Teens just understand the world in ways I don’t think any of us adults do.”

— Kevin Systrom

19. “Above all else, products spread when they’re useful and they’re usable.”

— Kevin Systrom

20. “The best products in the world have a point of view. The worst products have none.”

— Kevin Systrom

21. “I really value passion for the product above experience.”

— Kevin Systrom

22. “Our goal is to not just be a photo-sharing app, but to be the way you share your life when you’re on the go.”

— Kevin Systrom

23. “People have presences, both online and in real life. You can choose to show everything, meaning all sides of you, or you can choose to be selective.”

— Kevin Systrom

24. “I always look toward teens on Instagram to really understand what’s going on. For some reason, when you’re a teen, you just understand the world better than anyone else.”

— Kevin Systrom

25. “I’m always in awe of people who are artists in their fields – people who understand that simply by taking ideas and translating them into reality, they’ve created value in the world.”

— Kevin Systrom

26. “I really love connecting people, creating communities. As a kid, creation was something that I always loved.”

— Kevin Systrom

27. “In the past, people have looked at photos as a record of memory. The focus has been on the past tense. With Instagram, the focus is on the present tense.”

— Kevin Systrom

28. “I actually think some of my best moments in life have been while I was with people from Instagram – whether it’s super late nights getting a release out or being able to travel to places I’d never visited and meeting some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met.”

— Kevin Systrom

29. “A lot of the earliest Instagram celebrities took really beautiful photos. But you’re starting to see a change where it’s not about beauty; it’s about the story that you tell.”

— Kevin Systrom

30. “The number of people who have either gotten married or had kids or started dating or just made great friends over Instagram is countless. I think we’re the only platform that continues to be successful in bringing people together in real life for these real relationships.”

— Kevin Systrom

31. “I was never as focused in math, science, computer science, etcetera, as the people who were best at it. I wanted to create amazing screensavers that did beautiful visualizations of music. It’s like, “Oh, I have to learn computer science to do that.””

— Kevin Systrom

32. “People interact with their phones very differently than they do with their PCs, and I think that when you design from the ground up with mobile in mind, you create a very different product than going the other way.”

— Kevin Systrom

33. “I really appreciate crafts. I like cooking. I love food and drink. I love owning that through Instagram. Although that can be challenging at times because it doesn’t fit people’s stereotypes of a technical founder.”

— Kevin Systrom

34. “On the intimate relationships, I’d say you can be someone who wouldn’t normally get attention in traditional media and come onto Instagram and build this massive following.”

— Kevin Systrom

35. “Having a company that’s successful is a wonderful platform to do new things. You don’t have to raise money for it; you can take profits from the company and pump them into new business.”

— Kevin Systrom

36. “In my fourth grade classroom, I even instituted a government structure, because I was really interested in people having positions and there being law.”

— Kevin Systrom

37. “People always told me photos have been done. My feeling was, these people are wrong.”

— Kevin Systrom

38. “We just want to build a company that focuses on the love of Instagram.”

— Kevin Systrom

39. “Instagram is a media company. I think we’re about visual media.”

— Kevin Systrom

40. “I’ve always been into taking my photos, cropping them square, putting them through a filter in Photoshop.”

— Kevin Systrom

41. “Obviously, being the CEO, there are a lot of eyes on what you do and what you post and how you post, and I think one of the challenges of Instagram in general is that, as we get bigger, there are just more voices in the room, more eyes on everyone’s accounts.”

— Kevin Systrom

42. “I don’t think you should ever start a business and move in a direction where you can’t see it becoming a business.”

— Kevin Systrom

43. “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.”

— Kevin Systrom

44. “I love challenging the notion that, in order to be a tech founder, you have to be holed up in a dark room wearing a T-shirt and baggy jeans.”

— Kevin Systrom

45. “I believe photos is one of the underlying things in every social network that becomes successful.”

— Kevin Systrom

46. “The major reason why Instagram works is that you can follow anyone out there and start following their photos immediately.”

— Kevin Systrom

47. “I grew up as a photo nut. Every Christmas I would get a new camera. It’s a huge part of my life.”

— Kevin Systrom

48. “We’re just taking people and shifting them from taking photos anyway to taking them on Instagram.”

— Kevin Systrom