In retrospect, Instagram is obvious. Take a picture. Make it better. Share it instantly. That’s all it does, but it does it very well.

There are a mere ten employees at Instagram—only eight of whom are even in the US. Yet in the past year and change it has racked up more than 15 million users, who have uploaded some 500 million photos. The service has pulled in $7.5 million in investments, including money from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

Based on outward appearances, you might think the Instagram crew a relatively quiet bunch—after all, they only have an iPhone app and a placeholder-like website that offers basically no functionality. But since last October, the team has added hashtags and autocomplete functions, completely reworked the comment interface, added email sharing, converted the entire image pipeline to Open GL, created a news view, added support for high res images, tacked on 10 languages, and rolled out a slew of new filters and other features. All this while completely rebuilding the back end to support its exponential growth. Phew.

"The best feature is that it works" explains Systrom. "You compare our history to other social media startups and it’s been very good. We’ve been very careful about scaling."

"To be honest, 15 million is a small fraction of where we want to be, so we have to think 6 months to a year ahead," says Systrom.

 For a company valued at $20 million, with almost a million dollars invested for each employee, the big question is why they haven’t gone out and hired more people.

"We only hire the best of the best."

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