Kevin Systrom Quotes

I'm an engineer turned entrepreneur who's passionate about connection.

Business is about people. It's about passion. It's about bold ideas, bold small ideas or bold large ideas.

In my view, it's irreverence, foolish confidence and naivety combined with persistence, open mindedness and a continual ability to learn that created Facebook, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft, Apple, Juniper, AOL, Sun Microsystems and others.

When my co-founder and I first had the idea for IronPort, an email security company, we triangulated a list of the 20 most relevant people in email - former CEOs, open source technologists, investors and thought leaders.

Steve Jobs didn't seek solace among minimum wage workers. He sought it from highly educated men and women who understood and shared his focus on growth, technology, and company-building.

I like to be an idea person. I like to pull different people together and find new talent.

Other than playing the game I love, my passion is investing in innovative companies and helping the entrepreneurs behind them succeed.

I think of entrepreneurship as a way of creating value.

What I've learned running Pixar applies to all businesses.

Founders are exceptional, and they all want to go back to creating. And I feel privileged to be able to do that.

Like many of my fellow entrepreneurs, I didn't create Hearsay Social with my co-founder Steve Garrity because it would be fun and easy, but because we're at our best when faced with enormous challenges.

I have a great team who has helped me build Biocon, I was very fortunate to be able to share my vision with a group of people who really were as excited about challenges as I was.

The recipe for success is a tried and true one here in Rhode Island - innovation, reform, public service.

One of the things that I've always loved to do is brainstorm ideas with friends and get together and talk about what they're building... Essentially, my day-to-day is just going around and meeting entrepreneurs and talking to them about what they plan on launching.

I've helped some of my classmates on how to strategize to get to the next level of their businesses. And it's interesting, because here I am sitting there from the entertainment industry and the fashion industry, and I'm giving a billionaire that has a business that's been in his family for 300 years - I'm giving him advice about strategy!

My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There's a lot of that in Silicon Valley.

My job is such that I get to run new things every day, and I get to run new markets and new technologies. I enjoy that quite a bit.

I've always liked the fact that anyone with a great idea, access to the Internet, and an unrelenting will can spark a world-beating company simply by standing up code on the Internet and/or leveraging the information and relationship network that is the web. That's how Facebook started, after all.

You know how people always talk about how vision is the key to entrepreneurship and perseverance and really seeing what other people don't see? We can actually redeem a fair amount of that folk wisdom.

If there's ever an example of the importance of making bold bets and focusing on what you love, it's Twitter.

Your kids are going to do well in the workplace of the future if they can bring creativity, if they can bring some innovation, if they can bring some entrepreneurialism.

You can have a phenomenal technology with bad people; you're not gonna have much success. You can have mediocre technology with great people; they'll figure out a way to make a buck.

Science and vision are not opposites or even at odds. They need each other. I sometimes hear other startup folks say something along the lines of: 'If entrepreneurship was a science, then anyone could do it.' I'd like to point out that even science is a science, and still very few people can do it, let alone do it well.

I called up a bunch of the CEOs of Silicon Valley companies and said, 'Hey, can I come and see you? And I'd like to learn about what you're doing.' And I don't know, most of them said yes.

Innovation is so hard and so frustrating; it takes the intersections of people with courage, vision, and resources.