The Instagram story

I was shocked at the $1B Instagram acquisition, but then again I'm not exactly up to speed on the latest in iPhone apps or social networking. This Times article gives some background. Although the article stresses founder Kevin Systrom's Stanford connections, it seems like the go to guy was really a Caltecher ;-)

NYTimes: 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.

... For Mr. Systrom, the connections forged at Stanford were crucial.

Mr. D’Angelo, a 2006 graduate of the California Institute of Technology, helped him find engineers, set up databases and flesh out features. Soon after Instagram came out of the box, he put his money into it.