Kevin Systrom was working behind a hissing espresso machine
at Palo Alto’s Caffé del Doge in the spring of 2006 when Facebook Chief Mark
Zuckerberg approached the counter with a puzzled look on his face. The previous
summer Zuck had taken Systrom to dinner at Zao Noodle Bar on University Avenue
and asked him to ditch his senior year at Stanford to develop a photo service
for his nascent social network, The Facebook. Systrom turned down the offer.
Now Facebook was worth $500 million—en route to a valuation more than 100 times
greater—and making hundreds of headlines. Systrom was making cappuccinos.
“I had been like, ‘No, I don’t want to work at this thing,’
and here I am working at a cafe,’” Systrom, 28, tells me over our $4.50 cups of
artisan coffee in the warehouselike room of Sightglass Coffee in San
Francisco’s SoMa district. In opting to stay at Stanford he turned down what
surely would have amounted to tens of millions in Facebook options. “Working
at a startup to make a lot of money was never a thing, and that’s why I decided
to just finish up school. That was way more important for me,” shrugs Systrom.
“I’m sure in retrospect it would have been a nice deal, but it’s funny where
you end up.”
In Systrom’s case, the place you end up is exactly the place
you turned down—Facebook….
Wait...wait...there's more at http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2012/08/01/instagrams-kevin-systrom-the-stanford-millionaire-machine-strikes-again/
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