Kevin Systrom an American entrepreneur and programmer, best known as the co‑founder of Instagram along with Mike Krieger. For all those who aren’t aware; Instagram is an online mobile photo and video sharing application.

Kevin Systrom’s story starts from his childhood when he loved to play Doom-2 and created his own levels as a child. In his middle school he entered the world of programming and never took his foot off it. He was capable enough to be selected for the ‘Mayfield Fellows Program’ and this enhanced his skills related to technology. His participation in the fellowship program provided him an opportunity to join the company called ‘Odeo’ as an intern. ‘Odeo’ is the same company which developed the social networking site ‘Twitter’.

And his sudden love for photography, inspired from his mother, took him to the lists of millionaires. And that happened with his breakthrough idea called Instagram.The kid Kevin had no plan for pursuing his career in start-ups and technology as he loved becoming a disco jockey when in high school. And his first job was at a recording store.

Being more of a practical guy, he changed his subjects to management science and engineering programming when he went to Stanford. It was during his junior years, when photography grabbed his attention. One of his professor showed him Holga- the cheap camera that took retro style photographs.

He worked with the tech-giant ‘Google’ and then shifted to a startup company called ‘Nextstop’. While working at Nextstop he came up with the idea of developing the new big thing in the world of internet. Initially, he and his associate Mike created an application called ‘Burbn’.

‘Burbn’ had many features such as posting pictures, sharing locations, create future check-ins, and even accumulate points based on their activities on ‘Burbn’. However, the founders soon realised that the application with its enormous features was not user friendly. Thus the duo became instrumental in ushering the latest social networking sensation called ‘Instagram’ and within one month of its launch the application had around 1 million users. Instagram, which is a phone based application, derived its name from the words Instant’ and ‘telegram’.

In 2012, Kevin was awarded with the ‘Founder of the Year’ at the ‘6th Annual Crunchies Awards’. Kevin shared the ‘Webby Breakout Award’ with the co-founder of ‘Instagram’ in the year 2012. He has been a recipient of the ‘CFDA Social Media Award’ in 2015.