Technology History | Pier 38, San Francisco — The App Called Burbn Was Doing Nothing, So They Threw It Away

Just after midnight on 6 October 2010, Kevin Systrom signed into his Apple App Store control panel and made Instagram public.

Twenty-five thousand people signed up before the day was out, and keeping the servers standing became the whole job.

A few months earlier the product had been something else entirely. Burbn was a check-in service with photos, plans and points attached, funded by a US$500,000 seed round from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz in early 2010.

Mike Krieger joined that spring. Watching what the small Burbn beta actually did, the two of them cut the product down to the single feature people used — photographs — and rebuilt it over the following weeks.

That work happened here, at desks inside Dogpatch Labs, the shared space Polaris Venture Partners ran in the shed on Pier 38. TaskRabbit, Formspring and Automattic were working in the same building.

Which makes this pier the right place for a correction. Guinness World Records still lists Systrom's photograph of a golden retriever at a taco stand in Todos Santos, Mexico, as the earliest image uploaded to the app.

Krieger's came first. He posted his on the morning of 16 July 2010, shooting the marina outside the window from his desk; Systrom's dog, captioned "test", went up hours later that afternoon.

The pier's tech years ended abruptly. The Port of San Francisco red-tagged the building over code violations and ordered every tenant out by 30 September 2011, and Dogpatch Labs decamped to Palo Alto.

The bulkhead building still stands inside the Embarcadero National Register Historic District. The Port has been in exclusive negotiations with Pacific Waterfront Partners since 2021 over a 247,000-square-foot rehabilitation of Piers 38 and 40.

Decay has moved faster than the paperwork. In May 2025 the Port put the pier's red-tagged south apron out to tender for demolition: 169 timber piles, 6,325 square feet of decking, a US$450,000 estimate.

What survives at the Embarcadero is the bulkhead front, the same arched facade the Historic American Buildings Survey photographed with PIER 38 lettered into its pediment. The water Krieger shot that July morning is South Beach Harbor, immediately north, and it is still full of boats.

Cover: Historic American Buildings Survey photograph of the Pier 38 and 40 bulkhead buildings, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. It shows the building decades before the startups arrived, when Service Engineering Co. had the sign over the door.