Honoring the Dog Who Kicked Off Instagram’s Billion Dollar Business

Co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger recently announced they are leaving the company.

Instagram
Instagram is ruining honeymoons. (Omar Marques/ SOPA Images/ LightRocket via Getty)
LightRocket via Getty Images

This week, Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger announced they were leaving the company, which they started in 2010. The photo-sharing app has attracted a billion users and is said to be worth more than $100 billion. So we wanted to honor the dog who started it all.

Systrom’s photograph of a stray dog sitting near a taco stand in Mexico is the first image shared on Instagram, according to BBC. 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

test

A post shared by Kevin Systrom (@kevin) on Jul 16, 2010 at 2:24pm PDT

The app’s co-founder uploaded the picture with the caption “test” a few months before his idea was launched to the public. The picture now has 93,000 likes.

“Had I known it was going to be the first photo on Instagram I would have tried a bit harder,” Systrom later told The Daily Telegraph.

Systrom and Krieger were inspired by their shared love of technology and photography. They started Instagram as a way to share good-looking, edited photographs.

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