Social media is an integral part of our fast paced lives today. We all have dozens of social apps installed on our smartphones but other than using them, have you ever wondered how and who bought these to life. Yeah, we all know Mark Zuckerberg but what about others? Read further to enlighten yourself and people around you.
Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger (Instagram)
Founded in 2010 by this duo, Instagram is a photo sharing platform which for the first two years was iOS exclusive. It was in 2012 when Instagram was introduced to Android and other platforms.
Kevin Systrom started his career as a marketing manager at Google and later to joined Nextstop from where he developed the idea of Burbn with his friend Mike Krieger, a stanford alumnus. They both realised Burbn was a complicated product and thought of something simpler and specific like photo sharing and hence Instagram was born. Systrom made it to the Forbes list of 30 under 30 in 2013 and was ranked a billionaire in 2016.
Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (Snapchat)
Snapchat was founded by a duo from Stanford, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy. They developed this insanely popular app with disappearing messages as a project for one of their classes at Stanford. Evan was the youngest billionaire on the 2016 Forbes 400 list of America’s richest people. Murphy too appeared on the same list. Evan was also the youngest self-made billionaire in the world once. Both of them have appeared on numerous Forbes lists including – Global Game Changers, America’s Richest Entrepreneurs under 40, Forbes 400 and Richest in Tech. Another interesting fact – Evan is married to supermodel Miranda Kerr.
David Karp (Tumblr)
David Karp, a high school dropout, founded a short-form blogging platform named Tumblr. He taught himself to write code at a tender age of 11 and started working as a CTO a year later. He dropped out of high school at the age of 15. In August 2009, Karp was named Best Young Tech Entrepreneur 2009 by Business Week and in 2010, he was mentioned in the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp (Pinterest)
Pinterest CEO and co-founder Ben Silbermann summarized the company as a “catalog of ideas,” rather than as a social network, that inspires users to “go out and do that thing”. Pinterest was founded by this trio in 2010 but Paul left in 2012. Ben is an ex-Google while Evan worked as a product designer at Facebook.
Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn)
LinkedIn was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and founding team members from PayPal and Socialnet.com. Another Stanford alumnus, Hoffman worked at Apple Computer and Fujitsu before creating his first company – SocialNet.com in 1997. Hoffman was also a member of the board of directors during the founding of PayPal. Reid’s list of achievement is longer than anyone can think of. In April 2014, President Barack Obama named Hoffman as a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship. He was also ranked 96 on the The Midas List: Top Tech Investors.
