Winner of the 2020 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award * Named Best
Book of the Year by Fortune The Financial Times The Economist Inc. Magazine and NPR In this
sequel to The Social Network (The New York Times) award-winning reporter Sarah Frier reveals
the never-before-told story of how Instagram became the most culturally defining app of the
decade. The most enrapturing book about Silicon Valley drama since Hatching Twitter (Fortune)
No Filter pairs phenomenal in-depth reporting with explosive storytelling that gets to the
heart of how Instagram has shaped our lives whether you use the app or not (The New York
Times). 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. Deeply reported and
beautifully written (Nick Bilton Vanity Fair) No Filter examines how Instagram's dominance
acts as a 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.
