No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

Sarah Frier

#1031 of 3,809 books · #16 in Business & Economics

Won the Financial Times and Standard Chartered Business Book of the Year Award (2020).

No Filter won the 2020 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award and was a finalist for SABEW's Inaugural Best in Business Book Award. In 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger released a photo-sharing app called Instagram, with one simple but irresistible feature: it would make anything you captured look more beautiful. The cofounders cultivated a community of photographers and artisans around the app, and it quickly went mainstream. In less than two years, it caught Facebook's attention: Mark Zuckerberg bought the company for a historic $1 billion when Instagram had only thirteen employees. That might have been the end of a classic success story. But the cofounders stayed on, trying to maintain Instagram's beauty, brand, and cachet, considering their app a separate company within the social networking giant. They urged their employees to make changes only when necessary, resisting Facebook's grow-at-all-costs philosophy in favor of a strategy that highlighted creativity and celebrity. Just as Instagram was about to reach a billion users, Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg—once supportive of the founders' autonomy—began to feel threatened by Instagram's success. Frier draws on unprecedented access—from the founders of Instagram, as well as employees, executives, and competitors; Anna Wintour of Vogue; Kris Jenner of the Kardashian-Jenner empire; and a plethora of influencers worldwide—to show how Instagram has fundamentally changed the way we show, eat, travel, and communicate, all while fighting to preserve the values which contributed to the company's success. No Filter examines how Instagram's dominance acts as lens into our society today, highlighting our fraught relationship with technology, our desire for perfection, and the battle within tech for its most valuable commodity: our attention.