Remember back in 2012, when Facebook stunned the world by spending $1 billion to buy the 13-person startup Instagram'The purchase seems almost quaint now, when the Valley is overrun with billion-dollar startups, but it blew the minds of Silicon Valley at the time.Itwas also the turning point in the career for one early Facebook employee, Pete Hunt.Today Hunt is the cofounding CEO of a security startup called Smyte.But he is better known as one of the fathers of a Facebook-born technology for programmers called React. React is one of the most popular open source projects Facebook has ever released and it turned Hunt into a star in the web development world.All thanks to Instagram. And while his startup isn'tbased on React, its early success is a direct result of howhe turnedReact's initial hatersinto fans.The Facebook droneBack in the summer of 2012, Hunt became known inside of Facebook forworking onits photo and video features. He and his team had spent the previousyear thinking of Instagram as the enemy.Then Instagram was suddenly a massive and controversialpart of Facebook andHunt was assigned to bring Instagram into the Facebook fold."I was the first engineer to go over from Facebook to Instagram. I was the corporate drone," Smyte tells Business Insider. "They were super nice. But it definitely was like I was the first externalperson dropped into their tight-knit team."Hunt was tasked with building Instagram's first website.The first step wasbringing it into Facebook's "trust and safety" systems ' the tools that protect usersfrom bullies, and fraud, as well aswatching for evidence of hate speech or crimes.The second step was tosolve a serious technical problem. The company'sdatabase was struggling under the load of all those photos, so to build a website that could grow as Instagramgrew, he couldn't just add more computer servers. He was going to have to build the app using JavaScript, which makes thePC do most of the work of rendering the photos, not the servers.He started exploring the best ways to do that and came across another Facebook employee,Jordan Walke,who had been working on a "cool" side project to do this, Hunt describes.It wasn't a polished tool but he betInstagram's website on it anyway. This became React. Hunt was hooked on React and kept adding features and improvements. Word about React grew at Facebook."More and more products inside Facebook had this same set of problems and wanted to use this technology. This includes mobile search and ad placement," he says.By 2013, React had become really popular inside of Facebook and Huntwas known as one of its gurus. The React team decided to share their creation ' free and open source ' with the world at a big Javascript developers conference."By this time, this technology had been through the ringer. We knew it was awesome and everyone was super excited about announcing it," he said.But when they showed it off, people hated it.Chasing down the hatersWhile the team was on stage demonstrating React,the reaction wasmerciless, Hunt recalls."Everyone was being super mean on Twitter and Hacker News," he says.That's because React involved a new way to organize a web project that involved mixing and matching code written in different formats, something that was always considered to bea major, sloppy no-no.And the team was skewered for it.It was demoralizing.Hunt, who knew how React was helping Facebook,wasn't having it.So he created a talk that addressed all of the criticismsand hit the road giving that talkat otherJavascript conferences.He also took on thehaters directly onTwitter and Hacker News."I read every comment and replied to every one," he said.After a while, other people startedreplying as well, and posting the YouTube link to histalks.React took off. And he became a very popular speaker."I was flying around the world todifferent countries every month giving talks. I was flying business class, theconferences were paying for me to come. I felt like a rockstar," he said.Until one night, when he was at a conference party in Barcelona at 4 a.m. and he looked around at his adoring fans and realized "It was me and a bunch of nerds. And I was like, 'well, I sort of made it.'"He knew he wanted to do something bigger. The startup bug had bit.Meeting a cofounder at a toga partyHe decided his startup would not be based onReact but on trust and safety, the first thing Instagram had had to figure out."There's a trail of dead companies because they couldn't do trust and safety.Yik Yak, Secret, and Twitter is struggling with this too, the abuse problem," he said.Hissuccess with React and Instagram "was enough for me to have courage to leave Facebook. But I didn'tthink I was the guy to build it. I needed a cofounder to help me. But even as a so-called celebrity rockstar, I couldn't get anyone to quit their job and join me," he said.He knew the cofounder he wanted, too: Julian Tempelsman. He had met him on the stairs of his apartment wearing a Toga when they all attended a party in his apartment building. It turned outTempelsman was working on similar security systems at Google and they spent that evening talking about a potential startup.ButTempelsman didn't want to leave Google. After almost a year of pestering, Hunt told him,"I'll quit my job and we'll do the fund raise and if it doesn't happen, youdon't need to quit your job. If it does, you can still come in as an equal partner" he said.He met his other cofounder,Josh Yudaken, at Instagram.Yudaken was itching to go out on his own, got curious and when Hunt quit Facebook, he jumped in.It didn't take long for Tempelsman to join, too. And it didn't take long to find some seed money."The seed founder was a friend of a friend of a Google cofounder. I had lunch with him and he wrote a check," he said.Smytegot accepted into the startup factory known as YCombinator and quickly raised another $2.25 million from a number of backers including Instagram VC Steve Anderson at Baseline. Itjust raised another $4 million A round last month.Hestill contributes to React. And it turns out that his fame in that world, and the way he chased down the haters is helping Smytewin business."My classic move to get into companies [for a sales meeting] is I see question on Stack Overflow," he says, referring to the website where developers ask each other questions. "I tell them, 'I'm happy to go in and give your guys a tech talk on React, and since I'm doing you a favor, can I meet with your team for 20 minutes' It gets me in the door."While the startup isn't profitable yet the tactic is working. "Wehave over tripled our revenue in the past 6 months. We have dozens of customers, and around 100 million monthly active users and monitor tens of thousands of events per second," Hunt said.Smyte formally launched its product in 2015 and has landed such customers as Indiegogo, GoFundMe, Quora, Medium, Meetup, Task Rabbit and others.SEE ALSO:How Cisco bought a $900 million startup for just $610 millionSEE ALSO:The founders of a $1.3 billion startup raised $250 million while keeping over 50% of the company for themselvesJoin the conversation about this storyNOW WATCH: People are outraged by this shocking video showing a passenger forcibly dragged off a United Airlines plane
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