After yet another 12-hour day of coding Kevin Systrom’s nerves were frayed. It was
June 2010, and he had spent seven months working on a Foursquare-like social check-in app that was going absolutely nowhere. Desperate, he and his cofounder, Mike Krieger, decided to chuck the app and make a photo-sharing tool instead. Now they had to convince their founding investor–a guy named Steve Anderson, who wrote their first check, for $250,000, four months earlier. The young entrepreneurs slumped across the street into the appropriately named Crossroads Cafe, a cheapo San Francisco establishment staffed by ex-convicts.
Anderson knew the numbers were bad. They’d been talking about it for weeks. The young founders told him their plan to start fresh, not sure if their backer would be irate, disappointed or sympathetic. Anderson rubbed the ginger stubble on his chin and stared at the table. It didn’t take him long, however, to look up with a grin: “Well, what the hell took you so long?”