When Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger created the app that would become Instagram, they rode the wave of a major technological shift by building a simple utility. The iPhone had led to the rapid rise of smartphone photography, so the duo made an app that offered free software filters to improve the way those snapshots looked. The social networking features that will turn Instagram into one of the most successful consumer products of all time came later. “Instagram to a lot of people was a filter app first and a social network second,” Systrom says. “It’s pretty clear to me that the best social networks usually start as a utility doing something else and kind of grow into a social network over time.”

The founders outmaneuvered a handful of similar photography apps and became prominent within tech circles—not to mention rich—by selling Instagram to Facebook in 2012. Almost four years after walking away following agreements with Meta Platforms Inc. chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg over Instagram’s direction, Systrom, now 39, and Krieger, 37, are back together to create something new: a news-reader app called Artifacts.