Before Instagram was Instagram, it was Burbn. And before Burbn was anything at all, Kevin Systrom was a Stanford graduate working at Nextstop, a travel recommendations startup, writing code at night for a check-in app he couldn't stop thinking about.
Burbn — named after Systrom's love of whiskey, particularly bourbon — launched in 2010 as a location check-in app with social features. You could check in at places, make plans with friends, earn points for hanging out with people in the real world. Think Foursquare with a social layer. The app had a photo feature, almost as an afterthought.
Systrom met Mike Krieger, a Brazilian-born engineer who had just finished his master's at Stanford's Human-Computer Interaction program, through mutual connections in the startup scene. Krieger joined as co-founder. Together they raised $500,000 from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz — the funding round that made the project real.
The Pivot That Happened Over a Walk on the Beach
Burbn wasn't getting traction. The app was cluttered — too many features, no clear identity. Systrom and Krieger looked at their usage data and saw something unexpected: people weren't really using the check-in features. They were using the photos. Specifically, they were using the photo sharing with filters.
According to multiple interviews Systrom has given over the years, the decision to pivot was made during a walk on a beach in Mexico where he and his girlfriend were vacationing. She mentioned that she didn't use the app as much as he did, and when he asked why, she said she didn't feel comfortable posting photos because they didn't look as good as her friend's. Her friend was using another app to add a filter that made the photos look more polished before sharing.
Systrom went back to the rental property, opened his laptop, and wrote the first version of what would become the X-Pro II filter. When he showed it to her, she took a photo of a dog sleeping next to a sandal and posted it. It was Instagram's first filtered photo — before the app even existed, before it had a name.
Where the Name Came From
Systrom and Krieger stripped Burbn down to its core: a fast, beautiful way to take photos, apply a filter, and share them. Now they needed a name that captured what the app actually did.
The naming session was brief by most accounts. Systrom wanted something that conveyed immediacy — the instant nature of the app, like a Polaroid instant camera. He also wanted something that referenced the concept of a telegram, the old technology of sending short messages quickly across a distance. Mobile photo sharing was, in a sense, a visual telegram.
Instant camera + telegram = Instagram.
The name was decided quickly. It felt right — it had the "instant" quality of Polaroid, the "gram" suffix that sounded modern and digital, and it was simple enough to be a viable handle across platforms. The domain was available. Systrom registered it.
The "gram" in Instagram has double resonance: it references "telegram" (the rapid communication technology it metaphorically replaced) and "-gram" as a suffix meaning something written or recorded (as in "diagram," "program," "pictogram"). Whether this was intentional wordplay or coincidence depends on who you ask.
Launch, Growth, and the $1 Billion Moment
Instagram launched on October 6, 2010. It was iPhone-only. In the first 24 hours, it gained 25,000 users. In the first week, 100,000. Within three months, 1 million. By the time Facebook acquired the company in April 2012, Instagram had 30 million registered users and had never made a dollar in revenue.
The acquisition price — $1 billion in cash and stock — was widely called insane at the time. Instagram had 13 employees. It had no business model. Mark Zuckerberg personally negotiated the deal over a weekend, outside of Facebook's normal M&A process, because he was convinced Instagram was a genuine threat to Facebook's position in mobile photo sharing.
The $1 billion looks different now. Instagram has been valued independently at over $100 billion in various analyst estimates, representing the vast majority of Facebook/Meta's value in mobile social advertising. Systrom and Krieger stayed for eight years before resigning in 2018, citing creative differences with Facebook's management. They've been quiet about the specifics ever since.
Trademark Note
Meta Platforms, Inc. (formerly Facebook, Inc.) holds trademark registrations for "Instagram" and the camera glyph logo across multiple classes internationally. U.S. registrations cover Classes 38 (telecommunications/social networking services), 42 (software), and 45 (social networking). The camera icon has evolved from a skeuomorphic Polaroid-inspired design (which was covered by trade dress as well as trademark registration) to the current gradient glyph introduced in 2016. The 2016 redesign was controversial; the original camera icon had become one of the most recognized app icons on mobile platforms, and its distinctive appearance likely qualified for trade dress protection that Meta chose to abandon in favor of a cleaner gradient design.