Behind Instagram’s Success, Networking the Old Way

SAN FRANCISCO — Past midnight, in a dimly lighted warehouse jutting into the San Francisco Bay, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger introduced something they had been working on for weeks: a photo-sharing iPhone application called Instagram. What happened next was crazier than they could have imagined.

In a matter of hours, thousands downloaded it. The computer systems handling the photos kept crashing. Neither of them knew what to do.

“Who’s, like, the smartest person I know who I can call up?” Mr. Systrom remembered thinking. He scrolled through his phone and found his man: Adam D’Angelo, a former chief technology officer at Facebook. They had met at a party seven years earlier, over beers in red plastic cups, at the Sigma Nu fraternity at Stanford University. That night in October 2010, Mr. D’Angelo became Instagram’s lifeline.

“Adam spent like 30 minutes on the phone with us,” Mr. Systrom recalled, “walking us through the basic things we needed to do to get back up.”

Mr. Systrom, now 29, offered this as a parable for the roomful of would-be entrepreneurs who came to hear him talk at Stanford last spring: in the intensely competitive start-up scene here, success is as much about who you know as what you know. “Make sure to spend some time after the talk getting to know the people around you,” he told his audience.

Those people, he might have added, might one day shape your destiny. They might one day press money into your palm. They might nudge you to quit your day job and gamble on a vague idea. This week, barely 18 months after that night in the warehouse, Instagram was scooped up by Facebook for $1 billion, turning Mr. Systrom, Mr. Krieger and several of their friends-turned-investors into multimillionaires.