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Instagram’s founder, a marketer who learned to code at night

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Re: Instagram’s founder, a marketer who learned to code at night

#11

Post by hej »

simondlr wrote: post #3

Not entirely true though. He's been coding for a long time. He studied management science and engineering. It's not as if he wasn't technical before he started with instagram.

Today, nearly everyone has been coding for a long time. Everyone learns the basics in school. At college or university many will have a lot of further contact with many computer science concepts. It’s a lot like math, really: everyone knows the basics (or has at least heard them once and promptly forgotten them), but that doesn’t make everyone a mathatician.

(My dad, a construction engineer, learnt programming at college in the freaking late 70s. He never needed it during his long and successful career as a construction engineer, though, and has forgotten all about it. Today, anyone who studies anything to do with social sciences – for example – needs to have some coding skills if they want to do effective statistical analysis.)

There is a difference between that and building your own app.

Re: Instagram’s founder, a marketer who learned to code at night

#12

Post by Maro »

dmk23 wrote: post #2

This just goes to show that the most critical ingredient to success is determination and focus, not any specific training. If you are committed to a goal, picking up any specific hands-on skills (coding included) is just the matter of sticking to it. Something to keep in mind when hiring.

On the other hand, there are plenty of people with determination and focus who aren't successful in the Instagram sense of walking away with $100M+ after 2 years of work.

Re: Instagram’s founder, a marketer who learned to code at night

#13

Post by villagefool »

melling wrote: post #5
dmk23 wrote: post #2

This just goes to show that the most critical ingredient to success is determination and focus, not any specific training. If you are committed to a goal, picking up any specific hands-on skills (coding included) is just the matter of sticking to it. Something to keep in mind when hiring.

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On, has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race." Calvin Coolidge "If you wa…

Is it still true? can you actually do much nowdays (in that scale) on a cheap PC? it seems like heavy machines/cloud access is crucial

Re: Instagram’s founder, a marketer who learned to code at night

#14

Post by brunohq »

Maro wrote: post #12
dmk23 wrote: post #2

This just goes to show that the most critical ingredient to success is determination and focus, not any specific training. If you are committed to a goal, picking up any specific hands-on skills (coding included) is just the matter of sticking to it. Something to keep in mind when hiring.

On the other hand, there are plenty of people with determination and focus who aren't successful in the Instagram sense of walking away with $100M+ after 2 years of work.

still, you can be successful without making millions.

Re: Instagram’s founder, a marketer who learned to code at night

#15

Post by brunohq »

dmk23 wrote: post #2

This just goes to show that the most critical ingredient to success is determination and focus, not any specific training. If you are committed to a goal, picking up any specific hands-on skills (coding included) is just the matter of sticking to it. Something to keep in mind when hiring.

I truly believe that talent helps but it doesn't take you as far as determination, focus, passion and ambition. If you want it badly enough you will make it.

Re: Instagram’s founder, a marketer who learned to code at night

#16

Post by intended »

dmk23 wrote: post #2

This just goes to show that the most critical ingredient to success is determination and focus, not any specific training. If you are committed to a goal, picking up any specific hands-on skills (coding included) is just the matter of sticking to it. Something to keep in mind when hiring.

Success is not reducible to some key rules. His first prototype idea got $500k seed from Baseline and AH. Thats after putting together a basic HTML5 Game mashup of foursquare and mafia wars.

I could interpret the article to say that being determined and focused, while being ready for opportunities, are the critical ingredients to success.

Saying that determination and focus are key ingredients - is just taking an event and looking at it through your own personal lens.

Heck, you could have been the hardest worker, and a genius, but if your name was Nikola Tesla your end result would still be penury.

Re: Instagram’s founder, a marketer who learned to code at night

#18

Post by reitzensteinm »

villagefool wrote: post #13
melling wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On, has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race." Calvin Coolidge "If you wa…

Is it still true? can you actually do much nowdays (in that scale) on a cheap PC? it seems like heavy machines/cloud access is crucial

You can serve insane amounts of users on a single $200 a month server from Softlayer (or EC2). It's not uncommon for many types of businesses (that charge real money) to do $250k-$1m in revenue a year per server as powerful as that.

Some types of free services that go out of their way to build traffic at the expense of revenue, or computation intensive services like real time audio/video may be exceptions to that rule.

Some anecdotal evidence - I ran a cacheless Django site that more than made the server costs back monthly via a single Adsense unit, in the gaming sector where eCPMs are rubbish, and the files you serve are huge, and the server was never at any point at more than 20% utilisation.

By and large, the cloud has lowered the barriers to entry. Unless you're running Justin.tv, server costs are down in the noise. Getting users is the hard part; serving them pages is not.

Re: Instagram’s founder, a marketer who learned to code at night

#19

Post by MatthewPhillips »

dmk23 wrote: post #2

This just goes to show that the most critical ingredient to success is determination and focus, not any specific training. If you are committed to a goal, picking up any specific hands-on skills (coding included) is just the matter of sticking to it. Something to keep in mind when hiring.

My take away was that he had connections that let him pursue his ideas more than just as a weekend project.

Re: Instagram’s founder, a marketer who learned to code at night

#20

Post by pclark »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #19
dmk23 wrote: post #2

This just goes to show that the most critical ingredient to success is determination and focus, not any specific training. If you are committed to a goal, picking up any specific hands-on skills (coding included) is just the matter of sticking to it. Something to keep in mind when hiring.

My take away was that he had connections that let him pursue his ideas more than just as a weekend project.

He just went to a party. He didn't have rolodex of investors or anything.
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