Super excited to talk to you.
We've been talking a bunch before we started recording.
I did a podcast on you like almost 10 years ago.
It's episode 22 of Founders based on this book on how to turn down a billion dollars.
The thing that stuck out to me the most that when I read that book because a lot of that story takes place when you're still in college
And you're talking about two of your entrepreneur heroes.
And Steve Jobs makes sense, my entrepreneur hero too.
But you mentioned this guy named Edwin Land.
And I'm reading this and I'm like, how the fuck does a 21-year-old kid even know who Edwin Land is?
I've done like 10 podcasts on him, read every single biography.
Tell me how you discovered Edwin Land and what you admired about him.
Yeah, I think he's so central to the history of photography.
And so, as we've set out to try to reinvent the camera and how people express themselves with the camera, we studied a lot about the evolution of the camera over time.
I mean one of the funny stories that we found out the first selfie ever was taken by a guy named Robert Cornelius.
And my co-founder, Bobby, his name is Robert Cornelius Murphy.
So, like we found, just like by unpacking, like the history of photography, a lot of interesting similarities and parallels.
And we've learned a ton from founders like Edwin Land, who transformed photography really by focusing on building amazing products and thinking about you, know how to make sure those products fit into people's lives and uplifted humanity.
I think you know, if you look at instant photography and the role that that played in people's lives, Edwin thought of the camera as something that was incredibly personal right.
And I think...
As we've looked at the sort of trajectory of technology over the long arc of time.
Technology gets more and more and more and more personal.
And so I think, as technology gets more deeply interwoven in our lives, the founders who are thinking about making technology more personal and how the things they're inventing fit into and support humanity, I think that's a real advantage.
But how does a 21-year-old kid decide?
Because you even said it in the book that you're like I want to build a company at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.
What was happening that you were interested in doing that?
Part of it was my background growing up.
So I went to school in Santa Monica here at a school called Crossroads.
Crossroads, the full name for Crossroads is actually Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences.
So it actually is the intersection of science and art together.
A lot of what the school is focused on is developing empathy, building empathy, and they have this thing called council, for example, where you sit with about 12 other students and, you know, speak from the heart and take turns expressing yourself, and the school is really oriented on how you build strong relationships, build empathy with other people.
And so I grew up at a school that was so focused on the intersection of art and science, but then also wrapped all of it in a commitment to humanity, to understanding one another, to building relationships, to giving back.
I mean, the school is very anchored in community service.
Three of our kids go there now, which is fun.
Some of the teachers are still there.
But I think a lot of it was from my upbringing and that being a real focus.
And then as I got a bit older and I got into things like graphic design and I built my own computer.
I was always sort of working at that intersection of art and technology.
Yeah, I think the perception of you is like you're like this cool, like you know designer, but you were actually self-described as like a nerd growing up.
My wife and I always joke it's cool to be uncool.
So I definitely don't think of myself as cool.
And my background really was, you know, in the computer lab.
I mean, it's one of the things that also inspired a lot of the work that we do because, as I reflect on growing up, one of my frustrations or disappointments with the way that computers have been built over time is that they actually pulled us away from one another.
So, growing up during lunch rather than being on the recess yard running around with my friends, I was so inspired by what computers could do.
I was obsessed with computers.
So I was in the computer lab all day long.
And computers, I think, whether it was the mainframe or the desktop, you know have have sort of pulled us away from one another, away from society, brought us indoors right into this very like single player uh experience.
And so a lot of what i've thought about and a lot of what has inspired me is, like how do we take all these extraordinary benefits that computing bring to the, brings to the world, but actually use it to support our connections with one another, our connections to the world?
Can we build a computer that brings us outside right, that we use together with friends?
Because I think you know, one of the side effects of my love of technology growing up was that it pulled me away from you know more social relationships or just running around playing on the schoolyard.
So you had that philosophy even back then when you were in your 20s?
Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of what inspired how we thought about the evolution of Snapchat.
I mean, even basic things like opening into the camera, right?
It opens into your experience of the world, right?
Not a feed of content from other people, not a messaging feed alerting you to what other people are sending you.
It literally opens into your experience.
And so, from the very beginning, we've thought about how do we ground your experience of computing in what is right in front of you in the present moment and inspire you to create from that.
Why do you think that the way computing was before, it would just isolate you?
So essentially you're just staring at a screen, getting materials pushed to you.
I think the early versions of computers just given their physical and technological constraints, right.
Like whether it was a mainframe, you had to go to like a building to use a computer, right?
Or a desktop that you had to keep plugged into the wall.
I think those physical constraints pulled you out of whatever environment you wanted to be in.
I think the laptop and the mobile phones are representative of this continuum of computing getting more personal.
But I think today people feel like you know.
I think they're spending seven or eight hours on average staring at screens.
They feel like screens are pulling them out of the moment or away from friends, or when they're at the dinner table, they're looking at a phone instead of connecting with one another.
And so to me, there's this big question of like How do we get all these amazing benefits of computing, but in a way that actually connect us with one another, connect us to the outdoors, connect us to the world?
And that's so much of what we're working on.
If you like just came to, if you were an alien, you came to earth.
I remember like walking, like to pick up my daughter from school.
You could either sit in the car line right
Or you could get out and like pick them up.
And this is like many years ago.
And so I was like, I'm going to walk.
And I passed by 30 cars and every single person in the line waiting to pick up their kid was staring at the phone.
I'm like, that's an addiction.
That is a crazy thing.
I was walking on the beach here the other day.
This lady almost ran into me.
This is a beautiful freaking beach.
And she almost ran into me because she was looking at the phone.
I was like, there's mountains and the Pacific Ocean here.
What are you doing?
That's a crazy thing to do.
Is there anything else from Edwin Land that inspired you or that you think you used either in the beginning of Snap or now?
Before we jump into Edwin, two things you said just like really inspired me.
The first was like school drop off.
Like our kids insist that I walk them in every day.
I'm like, I'm used to doing the long walk in while everyone's in the carpool line.
But I think to your point.
What's fun about that is you get to connect with everyone and say hi to.
You know other parents and teachers.
And, you know, as I mentioned, some of the teachers that actually taught me when I was there.
But the second thing you said, which is so funny my daydreaming right now, especially as we think about glasses and the future of computing, is really like what if aliens are watching Earth right now?
And they're like terrified that smartphones have like taken over humanity, that like we're spending all day long like caring for these things and like plugging them in and like tending to them, and like our lives are all oriented around.
Right. like these little screens and like, what would aliens do?
And so, like part of my imagination has been like what if aliens are sending specs, sending these glasses to save people from you know, their lives that I think, have become so oriented around screens?
So it's funny that you, it's funny you mentioned that.
I love thinking about that, like the alien perspective of humanity right now.
I think for Edwin Land, I mean, there's a couple other things that like really stood out to me.
One, he was a statesman, right?
And like behind the scenes, people really relied on his advice and he gave it freely.
I mean he was a big supporter of the US government, for example, was very thoughtful behind the scenes and providing advice to the US government, including technological advice.
And so I liked that he had a commitment beyond, just like you know, his customers and creativity and these sorts of things.
He really wanted to participate in building a better world and took that really seriously.
And then I think if you look at a lot of his, you know a lot of the investments he made around his laboratories and around his innovation.
He was famous actually and back then this was quite unique famous for uplifting women in those research roles, right.
And I think like he was a real champion of talent.
He saw talent very clearly.
And I think, at a time when people weren't as focused on that, weren't investing as much in that, he was really focused on uplifting the best possible talent, regardless of folks' background.
I was just on stage at an event with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp.
When I looked over to my right I noticed that on the sleeve of Eric's jacket it said we win when our customers win.
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We're both in L.A.
We both kind of avoid San Francisco.
And we were talking, it's like...
The people I admire the most.
Like Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs was trying to create technology that enhanced humanity.
Some of these weirdos in San Francisco are creating technology to eliminate humanity.
Why is it so important for you to build technology that actually enhances humanity?
Well, I think fundamentally like my source of inspiration is humanity, right?
Like I'm inspired by other people.
I'm inspired by, you know, the extraordinary world that humans have created.
I'm inspired by the relationships between people and my relationships with other people.
And so so much of what motivates me and animates what I like to do is about making people's lives better, right.
And solving their problems.
I mean, that's, you know, we all get to choose what we do when we get up in the morning.
Like, that's what I... like to do and what I want to contribute to the world.
And I think the challenging thing I think is sometimes, when you're working on new technology, it's so exciting and inspiring that you can lose focus on its impact on people.
And I think we try to start with people and really listen to people and what they respond to, how they're feeling about the products they're using.
I mean, that was the core inspiration of stories, was people were saying why is my social media feed in reverse chronological order?
Why is it permanent?
Why am I feeling judged all the time by how many likes or comments I have?
That made us realize, like the way that people have told stories forever?
Right is in chronological order.
They're not, you know, permanently saved forever and publicly judged and liked and that sort of thing.
And so it was just very easy for us to you know, develop a you know a product where you know everything.
All the images and videos were in chronological order.
They deleted after 24 hours.
You could start your day fresh the next day.
They didn't have these likes and comments which opened up this whole new world of self-expression.
Right, because instead of just trying to post what would look pretty or popular or perfect, people were sharing this whole range of human emotions.
So so much of what we do and what we're inspired by is just, you know, by the way people feel, what they share with us and and really, this desire to help people build stronger relationships with one another.
I read this book about you, the one i did the episode on you know, eight years ago.
I think it's like how to turn down a billion dollars or something.
He said something funny in the.
There's a quote from you in the book.
You're like whoever invented internet, why they decided to make everything permanent.
It's completely opposite.
It's like this conversation we haven't been recording it, but the conversation we just had earlier it's like that wasn't recorded.
It was just a moment in time.
We'll have memories of it, like different interpretations of it, but then we just move on to the next.
I think that's a really good example of the way technology ends up shaping human behavior.
So if we're not thoughtful enough about the technology we're building, it can have unintended consequences.
So in this case, one of the reasons why everything was saved forever is because hard drives disk-based hard drives were expensive to write over.
And so it was actually more expensive to go back and write over something enough to delete it than it was to just leave it there and write over it again, maybe sometime in the future when you want to save something new.
And so no one was thinking about how to erase things, because it was just much easier to leave it there and maybe write over it when you had something new to save.
A lot of the early work we even did with Snapchat was asking about how we can be certain that everything is deleted right and how we can make sure that everything is being written over, because that wasn't a consideration for a really long time.
So, in a very edwin landian um way, you seem to like observe what everybody is doing and you have like this natural inclination inclination to like go your own path, but you had it at the very beginning.
How old were you when you started peekaboo, which turns into snapchat?
I think i was probably, i think, 20.
Where did this, this desire to like do something different, come from?
My dad was always pushing me to get a job when I was younger.
Like if I was ever around the house, he'd be like, what are you doing here?
Like get a job, right?
So I interned at Red Bull, for example.
I interned at Abraxas Bioscience.
I mean, this was back in the day when we were racking GPUs to do like early stage drug discovery.
I mean, that was like my first experience with GPUs like however many you know when I was in high school.
You know, and then I...
I had a couple other really cool internships, but really my first more serious job was working at Intuit and working on this service called TextWeb, which was basically designed to help people with touchpad mobile phones build little micro websites, essentially and access them, primarily in India at the time.
And so I had learned all these.
You know really interesting things about business during these internships.
But fundamentally, I didn't really want to have a boss.
But until I saw how possible it was to build something amazing, like with TextWeb.
I think there was like three of us on the team I did the least out of the team members but the three of us on the team or four of us on the team were actually able to build and launch a service in India.
I was like wow, it's actually a lot easier than I thought to build things and to create things that can reach millions of people.
And so that really inspired me.
And simultaneously, you know, I lived across the hall from Bobby, who I ended up starting Peekaboo Snapchat with.
And he also, you know, he had a job at the time, too.
And we both just loved building things.
So we started working on this thing called Future Freshman, which was designed to help people get into college.
It was like a total failure, but we had loved working together.
This is an important part.
Can you say why?
Because I think you took an idea from there for your next business, why it failed.
Yeah, I mean, there were a number of reasons why it failed.
I think, first of all, we really focused on building the perfect product for way too long before we got feedback.
So you know, I think we worked for like 18 months to build this perfect full-featured, which was in direct contravention to how I was always taught to build things, which is build a prototype, build an MVP, get in front of people, learn as quickly as possible.
But we had spent all this time building this perfect piece of software and we hadn't thought enough about distribution.
And so, while we built this great piece of software our competitor at the time called Naviance, which I think still today is probably the leader in like this college application sort of software world they had secured distribution through all the different college counselors.
So what piece of software are you going to choose to help your kid get into college?
The one recommended by the college counselors or the one from two kids at Stanford?
I mean, I think it's a pretty easy choice.
So we just saw very early that we had no distribution advantage.
And even if we loved our software, that people weren't going to use it because we didn't really have a scalable way to get in people's hands around.
That time, when we saw the emergence of the App Store on iPhone and all this sort of thing, it was very clear that that was a distribution channel that we could really use and benefit from, but that we also needed to build things that we could build quickly, things that we really were going to use together with our friends, so that we could be the first early customers and ultimately ultimately, Peekaboo and Snapchat, you know, represented that.
Yeah, because in the book you talked about, we build a product, no one used it.
It's tough when no one uses it, except my mom.
Move on to the next thing.
So is Peekaboo, which turns obviously Snapchat, was there anything in between those two?
Or was it...
There were a couple other failed experiments, I would say, in between that.
We were playing around with different ideas for more private I wouldn't say social networks, but more private groups and social sharing and things like that.
But nothing that really.
But it seemed like it was a direct counter to the existing social networks at the time.
Yeah, I mean, the problem that we were experiencing was that you know the way that everyone was socializing at the time on Facebook and I think Instagram was sort of just getting started at the time but the way that everyone was socializing on Facebook was like a giant popularity contest.
So it wasn't fun.
Right.
I mean, everyone was competing for how many friends they had, how many likes they had.
Everything was about pretty photos.
And in college, like we wanted to have fun with our friends.
But the alternatives, you know, at the time with text messaging, for example, were so clunky.
I mean if sending and people forget, like sending an image via text message back then took like a minute, two minutes to send MMS
It was crazy.
And so part of the core invention of Snapchat was actually just making it really fast to send images, which made a huge difference in people's ability to use images to communicate.
Because back then, you know, images were for documenting things.
They were for saving memories forever, right?
And the reason why, like photography has exploded and the you know, I think there are more selfies taken on Snapchat than on iPhone in total right.
Which is a crazy stat. but that's because people are using images to communicate.
And so, like we, you know, in inventing Snapchat in response to kind of this documentary culture around photography and this feeling of public and public pressure about the way that people were expressing themselves and communicating online.
Snapchat really, especially because the camera was on the smartphone transformed the way that people communicate by allowing them to communicate with images.
So did you think you were building a messaging app or a social network?
I mean, it's a messaging service.
But even back then?
Yeah, yeah.
We thought about his messaging app.
Yeah, and we talked, I mean, it only had messaging for the longest time until we introduced Stories.
I mean, it was only a messaging.
Stories has gotta be one of the best inventions ever. in terms of like the apps that we use.
Like how, I mean, now obviously everybody, like it's on every single app.
Like you were the first one to come up with that.
And it's, I think there's like stories on LinkedIn and like Pinterest or some shit now.
Like it's just places they shouldn't be, it's there.
Going back to the early days of the smartphone.
If you remember, Apple was really talking about like hey, when you're going to watch video on your iPhone, you're going to turn the phone sideways right and watch horizontal video.
And a lot of you know the first.
You know several years of Snapchat.
Almost all video online was like horizontal video in the feed.
And so when we came out with vertical video and we said no, we think everyone's going to watch video the same way.
They hold their phone all day long, right?
Vertically, where people were like, what?
You know, we had we spent you know, a ton of money back then without AI, right?
Like just helping advertisers recut their video to make it vertical.
And we had to convince them, showing them that like the completion rate was nine times higher when they use vertical video instead of these little like postage stamp size horizontal videos.
But for us, like it was just obvious, right?
That people were going to want to watch video the same way they hold their phone.
They don't want to turn their phone to watch the video.
But do you see what I keep trying to get to?
And like, this is not normal though.
Like, you're very comfortable.
I'm trying to figure out, because the whole point of me having these conversations, like this entire show, is just like who am I intensely interested in talking to?
And there's something interesting like I still don't understand where the hell did this, like confidence in your own judgment and disregard for the need to conform come from.
Because it's obviously still there today.
Like, let me give you some background.
I remember the first version of Spectacles, the ones you bought in a... in a vending machine.
I bought them.
I wanted them so badly and you were out of stock.
I bought the ugly fucking blue color.
I did not want bright blue fucking glasses.
I'm a grown ass man.
But I was like, this is so weird.
This is so interesting.
And you were like 10 years ahead of everybody else.
Where the hell does that come from?
You know, I'm not sure exactly.
You know, I think like a lot of this stuff just like really appears obvious to me and to us, right?
Like it was obvious to me that you know, if you looked at the evolution of computing, holding this tiny little screen in your hands was not the future of computers.
Like it makes absolutely no sense, especially for humans that want to like live and work hands free.
Right.
They want to be able to see one another and like interact with the world.
And so I think, when like things like that just seems so, just seems so obvious and and we're fortunate, right to be able to invest consistently behind that vision, because I think the hard part is not necessarily seeing what the future could look like
I think a lot of people have different visions for the future.
I think the thing that's been maybe different about Snap or Snapchat is our determination and consistency in pursuing that vision.
I mean, with stories, right? the first six months of stories, no one used it.
I mean, I remember sitting in a board meeting and we were like we think stories is gonna be a big thing.
You know what I mean?
Like this is the, you know.
We think this is like the future of how people are gonna, you know, wanna share, you know, on internet services, on Snapchat, the board's like well, no one's using it, you know.
And we're like, okay, but it's new.
So it's gonna take time.
So like, let's give people time to discover it, to learn about the future.
And then you know, maybe by the next board meeting or the one after that, like it was growing super rapidly.
So I think, you know, the hard part is not necessarily having the vision for the future.
And oftentimes it's just seems very obvious that the hard part is delivering it right.
Getting there.
Were you disagreeable when you were a kid?
I think so, probably.
If I ask him, the people you have working with you, is Evan disagreeable, would they say yes?
Strong opinions loosely held.
No, I think yeah, I think, like I think I've always felt comfortable seeing something differently or advocating for something different.
Would people that work with you describe you as uncompromising?
I think so, yeah.
Okay.
There's a Steve Jobs element.
Yeah, but at the same time, like we've tried to build a really different culture because, like one of my you know that you've mentioned the Walter Isaacson book like that book broke my heart right.
Because I think that that book, you know that book essentially called Steve a bad father, which I thought was not only unfair but it also, you know, sort of made the case that like Steve believed that like you could only achieve these sorts of things if you were uncompromising, but uncompromising with a taste of mean essentially,
And for me, watching Steve and seeing how people spoke about him and you know there are plenty of stories of, you know, folks who felt really close to Steve and felt really inspired by Steve, and also stories of people who felt like Steve was me right.
And my big question to our team was like, could we... achieve something really extraordinary?
Could we build a culture that was incredibly creative, but at the same time is kind, right?
So with our three values, it's kind, smart, creative, and kind is the first one for a reason.
And what we really wanted to do was create a culture that's uncompromising but, at the same time, very kind and supportive, because we think that that is the best sort of, and most fertile ground for, creativity.
If people feel afraid, it's very, very hard to be creative.
I mean, fear is almost like the opposite of creativity.
There's actually.
Did you ever read Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar, his autobiography called Creativity?
No, I always wanted to.
Okay, that's another book.
I just gave you one book.
I'll give you another one.
But you can.
Ed's actually doing the show and I can't wait to talk to him, because he worked for Steve Jobs or worked with Steve Jobs longer, more consecutive years than anybody else.
I think they worked together for like 24 years.
I would just buy the book today.
And just skip to the end, there's like a 20-page afterword called The Steve We Knew.
And his whole point after the Isaacson book came out, he's like, that's not the Steve I knew.
And his point was that earlier in his career, there was a lot of these stories.
Yes, he was like that, but he learned and evolved on how to be a better leader.
And so in that like 20-page afterword, Ed is telling the story of how he evolved over time.
Fucking.
45-year-old Steve Jobs is not, of course, not going to be the same as 21-year-old Steve Jobs.
So I think that's like a very important point to make.
How do you reconcile, though?
Because...
Like there's a lot of people that are famous about this.
Like Elon.
I just heard somebody was telling me a story.
Michael Moritz from Sequoia said the same thing.
Like you actually, camaraderie is dangerous and kindness is dangerous for your teammates because you can't deliver honest feedback and like tell them if their work isn't up to par or whatever.
How do you balance that?
Like be kind but also honest if the quality of the work isn't there.
Well, I think there's a big difference between kind and nice.
Okay, explain.
Huge difference.
When you're being kind, it means you really want the best for somebody, right?
And sometimes that means a tough conversation.
Sometimes that means saying, we're just not there yet on this project we're working on.
Or...
Hey, the way that you deliver that like really isn't working or whatever it is.
Nice is about making people feel good, right?
Kind is about wanting the best for them.
And so I think, for us, our culture is oriented around kindness, which is a much deeper expression of care for somebody else and involves tough conversations.
One of the great things about having a best friend or a partner is that they're honest with you about your shortcomings and help you evolve and make you better.
And that comes from a place of love.
And so I think kindness in many ways is essential because it allows people to hear that feedback.
So one of the big problems I think you know in a more hostile work environment is people are more resistant to feedback because they don't hear it coming from that positive place of wanting you to grow and develop.
And I think that expression of kindness for us is one of the things that helps people grow fast, right.
And ultimately at a company like Snap.
Our goal is just help people grow as fast as humanly possible, you know, so that we can meet the needs of our customers and evolve our business, et cetera.
Who plays that role for you?
Who tells you the truth?
My wife is brutally honest in a very loving way, in a very loving way.
And it's super important.
But I also, you know I grew up with and one of the things I love about being in LA is a lot of my high school buddies are here right.
So I have friends who, you know, I've grown up with, who've always been real with me.
And you know that's a huge benefit of being here in LA, because when I get to hang out with my friends and talk to them about what I'm going through or what's going on like, I can count on them, you know, to be honest,
I think I like what Charlie Munger said.
He says anybody engaged in complex work.
This paraphrase of his quote, anybody engaged in complex work.
It's very useful to find somebody to help organize your thoughts with, and i think he was referencing, really you know the, the role he played with buffett where, you know, buffett was the main guy obviously, was a hundred times richer than Charlie, but Buffett knew that Munger was special and he let Munger shape his mind.
Do you have anybody like that?
Not like a high school friends are different.
Like they were more like peers or have like an understanding.
You have a very unique lived experience for somebody that's still in their mid thirties.
Yeah, I think Bobby, who's my co-founder, has really been that for me.
And I think we approach the world differently and see the world differently.
So I think that's really valuable.
But I would say I rely on our leadership team and broadly, our company.
Help me do that.
I mean, that's that's the fun part about innovating is.
It's a dialogue, right?
It's not like issuing command, like let's go build this.
It's like having a real intense debate and dialogue about what's best for our customer and what we should do, what we should prioritize.
So I think, like for me it would be a real shame if I only got that from you know, maybe if it was Charlie Munger I'd feel differently, you know.
But I think for me what's so important is to make sure I'm getting that sort of feedback and having that kind of dialogue with lots of members of our team or mentors as well.
You know, that's hugely valuable.
What does the leadership team look like?
It's probably on the Snapchat side, it's roughly 10 or so people.
It's funny, even in the architecture of our building, we have a circle table for a reason.
I really like everyone to sit around a circle and have a dialogue where we're all talking from an equal position around that table right.
So it's that sort of mentality where everyone is expected to contribute, everyone has an equal seat around the table, that you get that sort of really helpful dialogue.
Are these people that started at Snap and Like, got through the ranks?
Are they former founders?
The reason I ask you is because one of the most interesting ideas, or surprising ideas I've had so far in having these conversations is I talked to Toby Luque, the founder of Shopify, which was like.
That conversation blew my mind the way this guy thinks.
And he was going through a very difficult time, and he didn't know what to do.
And he actually tells a story on the podcast, I think, where he's like he went to a Slack channel and they had like former founders and he's just like.
I need your help.
And he essentially built very much like Rockefeller did, built the team around him as just founders.
Is that what yours look like?
Is it people that you poach from other companies?
What does this look like?
I would say it's incredibly diverse set of backgrounds.
Some folks are from other companies.
Some folks have spent their entire career at Snap, more or less.
Some folks around the table are founders who joined Snap.
So there isn't like a one-size-fits-all model.
I think we're really fortunate to draw from lots of different backgrounds.
Is there a lot of turnover?
I would say at points in Snap's history, there has been a lot of turnover.
Not currently, I mean, knock on wood, but the business changed so quickly, right?
I mean, there were periods of time when we went from, you know, having a hundred people to over a thousand people in like 18 months, right.
And like the skill sets that we were slow to build what we needed to support that scale of a team.
And back then there weren't the AI tools that are available today that make a lot of those things easier to operate at that scale and that quickly.
But yeah, there are periods where the company has just changed a lot and it's required a different skillset.
And during those periods of intense we have seen turnover.
I mean sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional, because folks you know maybe are misaligned with where we're trying to take the company.
Yeah, the reason I ask is, I think, conversations like these the other podcast Founders Podcast that I'm doing I think it's important for entrepreneurs to realize there's not one right way to do things.
Toby told me, he's like, there's probably 100 right answers here.
You got to do the one that's best for you.
And so I'm just curious do you have a philosophy on turning over the top people at the team?
Because if you look at Larry Ellison you read biographies of him.
He thought the fact that he kept the core product team the core product team on Oracle together for multiple decades was a huge advantage.
His person, he mentors.
If you ask Elon who he admires, he says Larry Ellison.
He's like I want fresh blood.
I think is the term over and over again.
Do you have an opinion here?
I think it's different in different parts of the organization.
If you look at the core product and design team, that's a very small team.
I mean, i think it's like currently like nine people.
It usually fluctuates between like eight and twelve people um, at any given time.
Many of the folks on that team have been at the company for an incredibly long period of time and they usually join out of school, like right out of high school uh, or sorry, right out of college.
I don't think we've had, we've had, some interns, but no one joined right out of high school.
They typically join right out of college and you know we spend a huge amount of time investing in their growth and building things together.
And so I think it's really important to have that you know longevity, because those are folks who really understand how we build products at Snap.
And that's something that, like, I think really has to be learned.
I haven't found anyone who just been able to like enter Snap, and you know, And I mean certainly folks can contribute right away, but it takes time to learn what makes Snap.
Say more about that.
That's interesting.
Why does it take so long?
Because ultimately, like...
I think the way that we build products at Snapchat is just fundamentally different than anywhere else in the world.
And so I've yet to see someone come into Snapchat with all the skills and all the understanding necessary to be able to like, really deliver value in that role.
The closest we come are probably folks out of art school, because they're used to such a rapid iteration process and are used to making things in extremely high volume.
And so they are a good fit for the design culture at Snap, which is really about very rapid idea generation and creation.
I mean, every week I'm with our design team for several hours and we're just looking at new work.
I mean, new work every week, hundreds of ideas, right?
Hundreds of concepts, you know, iteration, etc.
And really, you know, kind of together as a group working through like a critique process.
And so I think you know the art school folks are probably adapt the easiest to that culture because they're used to such a rapid velocity of work.
But at the same time we're really trying to overlay that deep empathy for people right, that deep connection with how our community feels and what they're looking for.
Um, you know we're we're also trying to cultivate like a very positive and fun environment around that.
Like we're laughing half the time in these design meetings, right?
And playing around with ideas.
And I think creativity can really thrive in that environment of like levity and fun.
And so I think that combination and that velocity of creativity and product development is something that people have to adapt to typically when they come to Snapchat.
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If I was to sit in on one of these design meetings, you said there's like 9 to 10, 12 people and you like what would I see?
You would just be looking at a ton of work.
I mean we would just be talking through a huge volume of ideas across the service, or maybe even ideas for new services and that sort of thing, for a couple hours.
These last a couple hours.
When you say volume, like hundreds of ideas?
Yeah, easily.
In a few hours?
Yeah, yeah.
And are you leading this discussion?
Yeah, but we're all contributing, batting stuff around, laughing and iterating.
Why is the volume part so important?
Because the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
It is critical.
And the most toxic thing you can have is people attached to attached to an idea instead of constantly thinking about like ideas are free, right.
There should be a zillion of them.
And if we can do that and create that culture where there's like just an endless flow of ideas, you're very lucky.
You're much more likely to get lucky by finding good ones.
So how many of these do users of Snap ever see?
Tiny, tiny fraction.
I mean, less than 1%, probably.
Maybe 1%.
And what's the process?
Like comes up.
Like how soon from An idea comes up in the meeting to you like it, it gets in front of one of your users.
Well, now that's happening incredibly quickly because designers can ship code with all these new AI tools.
So the whole world of design is changing, I think very rapidly, because now many of our designers are just empowered.
If they've got something, we think it's cool, let's get it in the app and test it.
Immediately.
So I think design to code is happening way faster than ever before.
So there's an intense design culture at Snap.
There always has been.
You describe yourself as a designer?
Yeah, I think, I mean, that's my background.
Yeah, and that's what you described, like when you started, that's right.
And so talk a little bit about like what you think AI will do to a company like yours, where it seems to be like a design-first culture.
I think AI is like probably the best thing that's ever happened to Snapchat, which is great.
I think the reason why is because we've always had a ton of ideas and a deep connection with our community and our customer, but we've always had very limited resources and we're up against monopolistic, And so we've essentially been engaged in like trench warfare with monopolies for 15 years right.
And I think what's so funny.
Like you look at the last 15 years, we learned very, very early on that there's no moat in software, which was an incredibly powerful lesson, right.
All of our ideas, the things that we invent, people just try to copy right away.
And it's easy to do that with software.
But what's fascinating about the world today is that it has never been easier, right?
I mean, almost instantly you can copy nearly any piece of software.
And so, because we learned that lesson very early on, we've evolved our business to really focus on the things that are hard to copy, right.
A network effects business of people communicating with one another, these platforms, right?
Like our augmented reality platform or our content ecosystem right that are not just pieces of software that you can easily copy, but ecosystems of people communicating with one another, or creators making content that people are watching, or people building augmented reality experiences.
All of those sorts of things are very hard to copy.
So from over the last 15 years, we've really honed our business perspective for this moment, right?
Because we saw how easy it was to copy software.
So, in terms of our business and the way it meets our customers, I think we are well positioned for the huge transformation that's happening.
At the same time, our core business is software development.
So we're able to get a lot of the benefits of the extraordinary transformation in software development without the same risk to our core business, because we build network effects over time and you know thought about how to position ourselves for for this this moment.
So AI is changing every single team at Snap.
It's changing the way that everything gets done at Snap.
And because our core business is software development.
I mean, in the last three months there's been profound change.
But to imagine, I mean 18 months from now the way that Snap operates will be completely different than the way it operated last year.
There's so many founders and I don't know how many, almost none of them are saying this on the record that they tell me.
They're like, I'm trying to figure out, I should not be running my company anymore.
I'm trying to figure out how to build AI to run my company.
They are trying to literally replace themselves.
They're like, it's just going to be so much better than I am at doing this.
It should be doing this.
I should not be doing this.
I think that's certainly true in terms of the operational lift, but at the same time, the vision and creativity and connection to your customer has never been more important.
And so I think, if anything, it's gonna enable founders to run teams that are much more operationally effective and require less of their time to operate the business and instead hopefully, you know, pivot more time towards that sort of creativity and ideation and, you know, meeting customers where they're at.
What's one of the most surprising ways that AI has changed how Snap operates internally?
I don't necessarily think this is like a surprise per se, but I do think you know, and I feel like this is old news because everyone in the world has been saying it but like, the change in how software is written since the beginning of this year is profound, for our core business is writing software.
And now that these models are good enough to write more and more complex pieces of software on their own, like the job of a software engineer at Snap, is like profoundly and forever changed right.
And I think the more that we can embrace that and make that easier and teach people how to do that really effectively, it's just transformational for our core business.
Because, as I mentioned, we have been up against companies who don't have new ideas, but have infinite resources right.
And we've got lots of new ideas, but very limited resources.
And that's been a real challenge.
And so it's been hard to see a path forward for Snap up against these giants without AI tools.
And now with AI tools, you're like wow, we basically have an infinite number of engineering resources.
Like that's a pretty profound change for Snap.
And the rate at which that I guess I would say the rate at which that has happened, has surprised me.
You said something very interesting.
You said you realized a long time ago that software has no moat.
The experience that taught you that lesson?
Was it stories?
No, the first time the big sort of wake-up call was when you know, Facebook at the time carbon copied Snapchat to make poke.
Do you remember this?
Yes.
And Mark Zuckerberg recorded like him saying the word poke is the notification sound.
He was like so excited about this.
And we were like, wow, like, okay, this is a good, you know, this is a really good lesson for us.
It ended up being super helpful to Snapchat.
In the book, you call it the greatest Christmas present you ever received.
Ever.
The nervousness going into that holiday period, right?
I mean, they literally put it, download Poke at the top of every single Facebook app, right?
And it was just a clone of Snapchat.
And then, to you know, on Christmas day, see Snapchat number one in the app store.
In that context was it was huge, huge for us.
But that was the first time we realized like okay, We're going to have to be really smart about how we build this business and invest in the things that are hard to copy.
Do you remember how old you were when this was happening?
When would that have been?
That would have been 2012, 2013, so 22 probably.
You were super young, super young to take on.
That had to be terrifying.
I mean to be living in my dad's house with like three of my buddies from college, you know, and like this huge company you know, set their sights on us.
I mean, you know, it was definitely a formative experience, I would say.
So then realizing software has no moat, is that direct insight leads to deciding?
Bizarre decision, I think correct in hindsight for a what people consider a social network app or a messaging app to get into hardware and make glasses.
Those two things are related?
Absolutely.
And I think, but even before that, right, a real focus on messaging.
So the other key, like the other key foundational insight of Snapchat that really changed the company was was at that time, if you recall, people were very focused on like a very simplistic model of network effects.
And their very simplistic model was basically the more nodes you have in the network, the more valuable the network is.
Right.
And what we realized was that wasn't really true if you weren't using those network connections.
So actually, what reflects the value of the network is are the people that you actually talk to and communicate with, especially the ones you communicate more frequently?
Are they a part of your network?
And if they are, then you can accrue the vast majority of the value in that network very, very quickly without having the same scale or the same size right.
So what Snapchat showed was that if you just have one good friend on Snapchat right, they might represent half of your communication, right?
Because they're super important in your life.
So you don't need 500 friends on Snapchat, you just need your best friend on Snapchat.
And that's what helped the service really grow and take on these much larger, these larger competitors.
What really prompted the work on glasses in the beginning was the feeling that we were always competing with that lock screen camera button right.
What do you mean?
Do you know on the iPhone there's a lock screen camera button?
So Snapchat opens to the camera, right?
And we always want you to choose to open Snapchat to share a moment with your friends and your family.
And you're making a choice between having to unlock your iPhone and go and open Snapchat and take a snap, or just using that lock screen camera button.
And that lock screen camera button is on your phone and it's in your pocket.
And so you know, when we were trying to reinvent the camera and change how people were using their camera to help them communicate, one of our fundamental questions was, like how do we get the camera out of your pocket, right?
Off your phone to make it easier for you to you know, share and express yourself, or communicate your point of view, or communicate what you're doing.
That was really the prompt that led us to explore glasses, because back in the day, you know, we just made camera glasses.
But I think, as part of that journey and as part of starting to work on camera glasses, not only do we realize, first of all, that the market for camera glasses is very small, that ultimately, your phone is very good for taking photos.
Even if you're on a jet ski or even if you're rock climbing, people still use their phone to take a photo.
So that meant that we had to push way harder and faster to our full vision for glasses.
When did you learn the market was small because you couldn't even keep these things in stock.
I told you I had a big ugly blue color, like it was a fine color, but you know what I mean?
Yeah, but I think even you know.
I think we were shipping like hundreds of thousands of units.
You know, I think 100000 units in hardware is kind of like the first threshold of like okay, you've got a product people are interested in and want to buy.
But even at a couple hundred thousand units, I just didn't see a path to it being like a you know hundreds of millions of units.
Because ultimately, at the end of the day, the bar that we set for any product we develop is that it has to be 10 times better than the next best alternative.
And when we looked at how people were using specs at the time, It just wasn't 10 times better than pulling your phone out of your pocket.
And maybe in some use cases it was if you really wanted to be hands-free or that kind of thing.
But it just wasn't 10 times better than the amazing camera you had on your phone.
And so we really then set out to try to push towards, as fast as we could, our true vision for computing.
That was how many years ago?
That would have been 20...
Like 2016, 2017, we were really pressing into the more advanced parts of augmented reality glasses.
And I think if you look at the step-by-step approach we took, the first generation had one camera, right.
The second generation had two cameras with depth.
The generation after that added a display.
The generation after that added an operating system and developer platform.
That's the version that's currently What's the generation I used yesterday?
That came out in 2024.
That's generation four or five?
Four or five, yeah.
And that was the first time we really offered a developer platform so that folks could start building and creating all these experiences.
Okay, so can you explain your evolution of glasses?
You said basically you don't think of it as glasses, it's just another form of computing?
So to go all the way back, the initial thesis was let's get the camera out of your pocket, right?
But at the same time, you know, on the phone, we were so constrained in what we could build, right?
I mean, you have this tiny little screen.
We're watching augmented reality just take off on the phone.
Hundreds of millions of people every day are using these augmented reality experiences on this tiny little screen.
Let's pause real quick there, because this is another, I think, example of what I was trying to freaking figure out about you earlier and I kind of went crazy.
But we still haven't figured it out.
I know.
It might take a few more conversations.
You're talking about all these people using augmented reality.
You're talking about the filters you added, the lenses and stuff, to Snapchat.
Yeah.
Did you get that idea from another company?
Where did that come from?
We bought a startup called Luxury that was working on those lenses.
And then Bobby really... the vision of turning that into a platform.
And once we turned it into a platform and built these developer tools called Lens Studio so that anyone could build lenses, then it just took off.
That's what got me using Snapchat, because it was a little older than like the typical people using it.
But did this launch after Stories?
That must have launched after stories, yeah.
So how many years into Snap do you think that you've added this other feature?
Probably three or four years or something.
Oh, that's actually way sooner than I thought.
That's way sooner than I thought.
Because you've been working on Snapchat for how long?
15?
About 15 years.
Okay, 15 years.
Okay, so go back to what you were saying.
Then you found hundreds of thousands or millions of people now using?
Hundreds of millions of people are now using it every day.
But back then...
They're engaging with AR through this feature, but this is before you did the glasses.
Yeah, sort of concurrent with the glasses and maybe concurrent with the second generation, I want to say by the time we really had an augmented reality platform.
But you know, the original thesis behind creating lenses was just people.
A lot of people thought it was weird to just take a selfie, right.
Tons of folks were taking selfies to express themselves but, like a lot of people were like, why would I just take a selfie?
I don't want to be reminded what I look like.
Could put some dog ears on me.
So, you know, or vomit a rainbow, right?
So people had a reason to... I was covering people in flowers.
That's fun.
So I think lenses really gave people a reason to express themselves and to share with their friends.
But then, after we built out the Lens Studio, developer tools and this kind of thing, the platform just exploded.
Now people have made millions of lenses, all sorts of different ways for people to express themselves, not only with selfies, but also lenses that changed the world, as you experienced.
And we just found that people were incredibly constrained by this tiny little smartphone screen and needing to use their thumbs to interact with augmented reality.
And it was so clear that we needed to embed it in the world for it to be successful.
And we were going to need to create the device to do that, because no device even came close to the vision that we had.
So we've really just pushed over the last decade to make that vision possible.
And then later this year, we're launching the first consumer version, which will be a big step for us.
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You used the word vision when we were talking before we started recording.
I think this is interesting.
You literally see it, see what you want.
You said like you have a problem designing a product if you can't see it in your mind.
Can you explain more about that?
Yeah, I think in general with my life thus far, like with the things that we build, I see them very, very clearly, even before we've built them.
And I kind of know what I want.
I know how I want it to work.
And I also know that if I can't see it, then we're off track.
And so I think really trying to stay true to that, that feeling and that vision and that focus, is just so, so important.
And that doesn't mean not being like open to other people's ideas, other people's creativity, et cetera.
But like, I think, you know, yeah, I just very, very vividly can see what we're trying to create.
I'm gonna explain or describe an experience that I read about.
You tell me if it's similar to the one that you experienced where, when that legendary meeting that happened when Edwin lands 70, Steve Jobs is 25 they're sitting across.
They're in a conference room, sitting across a table from one another.
And they talked about, they're like, they don't really consider themselves inventors.
It's kind of funny because Edwin Land had the third most patents in human history.
They said they discovered products that they would literally be looking at an empty table and see the final form of what they're doing.
And then they reverse engineer from that and essentially, you know, prod their entire organization to invent the technology, to invent the product.
Is that the similar experience you're having?
I really, really like that, because I think what they're describing is technology in service of a product vision.
So, instead of chasing a technology, being crystal clear about what you're trying to create and then organizing everyone to invent everything needed to create that product,
So yeah, I mean—
Yeah.
Yes, I guess.
Yeah.
Is that not what you've been doing the last decade with the glasses?
Because you made a choice.
You're like.
Other people are partnering with existing companies like Luxottica, who I think is a very fascinating story.
I told you before I did this crazy episode of Founders Podcast I think it's episode 394 on Leonardo DiVecchio, which was just one of the crazy.
He's an orphan and he built one of the most you know to this day, most powerful and like such a dominating companies in his industry.
But you chose not to do that.
There's a lot of reasons why I don't think that's right.
Let's go into them.
We don't have an end here.
As much as you can share that.
You know I'm very interested in your philosophy behind the decisions you're making is what I'm trying to get to.
I think there's a number of challenges.
Obviously, I think it's much more harmful for Luxottica than it is for Meta.
I think Meta needed to partner with Luxottica because the Meta brand, I think, is not something that people want to put anywhere near their face.
So I think that Meta really needed it.
I think what's challenging for Luxottica is they took the most iconic, crazy high margin product and they destroyed margin and then they associated it with meta.
So like, i think like that, like we'll see if that pans out over, like a longer period of time, if that was the right brand choice uh, for them.
But i can definitely see why meta needed needs to camouflage their brand, which i think a lot of people don't resonate with and don't like with.
You know the ray-ban uh brand.
But i think People are misreading, I think, the dynamic of what's happening.
When you have meta Ray-Bans on the shelf next to a regular pair of Ray-Bans and they're both about the same price right, i love to just walk into a sunglass hut or whatever and talk to them hey, what's going on?
What's selling?
What sounds like?
Well, you can get the meta ray-bans that have a camera for about the same price as the regular ray-bans.
Why don't you?
You know, try it out for your upcoming vacation.
I think That's a smart strategy if you want to move a lot of volume, but I don't know if that builds a durable business over time.
The reason why I don't know if that builds a durable business over time is, if I look at successful hardware companies over a long period of time, we can look at Apple, we could talk about Tesla, for example.
Early adopter is the wrong term, but they really try to start with premium or even luxury, positioning around a very passionate early adopter group that believes in their vision.
Think like the Tesla Roadster or the early iMac or the early iPhone.
And they build a brand by starting with those early enthusiasts who believe in the electrification of the world, the transformation of the power grid, how we're going to move things around.
Or in the case of Apple, a revolution in the personal computer.
Right.
That everyone's been doing phones wrong and that, like you know, having this, you know personal computer in your pocket, you know, would be really transformational.
And they really activate that that passionate group of enthusiasts.
And then over time they work with that really passionate group of enthusiasts to you know, grow into the mass market while preserving their premium value positioning, which means high gross margins.
Then they take those high gross margins and they reinvest in RD, which widens their lead.
And like that is the story, I think, of successful hardware companies.
And I think it's very, very hard to start with a super broad-based, low margin consumer product and try to work your way into premium positioning.
So I think if you look at specs and like what we've tried to do, even like your early experiences with the brand, right
We're innovative and different.
And again oriented around a group of enthusiasts and early adopters who want to see the world differently, who want to participate in the cutting edge of technology.
And I think if we're able to build the brand that way and build our own brand around that, that will allow us to sustain our margins over time, which will allow us to reinvest, which ultimately will give us a big competitive advantage.
I want to go back to wanting to control most of like actually building your own hardware.
You said something, even the marketing, though I think like you got to give you credit to the marketing you guys were doing back in the day for the first Spectacles where, like there wasn't like a store you could just walk into.
It's not the experience you described.
It's like you would like airdrop these vending machines.
And then I remember there's like a website and I'm not a fucking power user of Snapchat.
I was just like, I want these glasses.
And I would be like refreshing the website to figure it's like, oh, okay, here's a new drop.
And you'd have like a countdown, like it's dropping and you wouldn't say where it is.
And I'm on like Miami at the time.
It's like, all right, it's dropping in Venice.
I'm like, God damn it.
And then I wind up.
The way I got them is you did a drop in New York and a friend of mine, I called him, and he went and stood in line and got them for me.
It was like really unique and fun.
Like you just made it.
I like this idea of.
I was just talking to Brian Armstrong about this founder of PornBase where he's like Everybody has shareholder letters.
Everybody has to write a shareholder letter.
Everybody has to do these analyst calls.
He's trying to find a way to, like, make them fun and, like, kind of, like, internet native.
And, you know, there are forms of marketing.
They're not just analysts that are reading these things.
Like they could.
If you think about them and like and think about like doing creative marketing, you could just drastically increase the amount of people that are getting information about your company.
Why is it so important to you though, to control so much of the hardware that you're making?
Control of the hardware is necessary to deliver an extraordinary customer experience in this space.
And the intersection between the hardware and the software to deliver that customer experience is essential.
So, as we look at how other people are approaching this space, trying to cobble together components from a ton of different manufacturers and get them to all work really well in a super small, lightweight form factor that's incredibly performant is just really really hard to do.
And so I think for us, if we want to really deliver you know this cutting edge computing experience doing that requires us to have a very high degree of control of the areas we can really differentiate.
So for example, for us, the display components are an area where we really differentiate.
We have an incredibly performant wave guide, which is like the glasses part of the lens, right?
Basically the lens of the glasses, and we've developed our own projector that's incredibly small, that beams light into this wave guide.
That's a big strategic advantage for us, because the display components draw a lot of power right.
They're really important in terms of having that immersion and being able to have a very wide field of view.
When you're using the glasses, you can interact with the world.
And then, of course, like the resolution, the sharpness, like those are the things that really, really matter.
And so for us in order to push those boundaries.
There's no one that comes close to our ability to deliver on that project experience
So, by doing it ourselves, I think we've created, you know, a competitive advantage that will show up in the product that the consumers will experience.
Say more about that line where you said it's important to control the parts that you can differentiate on, essentially like you're gonna burn yourself out if you try to control everything, right.
So it's really important to identify very early on, like where are the strategic points where you can create a totally unique customer experience by really investing and doing things differently?
And for us we've really thoughtfully picked out where can we play and do something that's really hard and do it differently.
That creates a sustained competitive advantage because it delivers such an awesome customer experience.
So the display components are one I can talk about that because it's public.
But, like later this year, people will see a lot of these areas where we've invested and invented you know, fundamentally invented new ways of doing things that I think consumers are going to love.
Another thing that, like, Edwin, like, again, people should study Edwin Land.
They should study all these history skills entrepreneurs, because you just realize they can come up with ideas too.
We were talking earlier.
It's like he wanted.
He realized like if he did not have control because he started, he wanted to be an inventor, not an entrepreneur.
He had to learn to be an entrepreneur just so he could actually make money on his invention.
Therefore, he only wanted to make money so he could invent more things.
He was not after just having piles of money.
Anytime he tried to outsource one, he let other companies get in between him and the end consumer, which he fixed that when he did Polaroid and the cameras, the manufacturing, the factories were in Massachusetts, for God's sake.
He was manufacturing high-end technology in America.
And his whole point was just like he didn't want to be a manufacturer, but he needed to control the things.
So not only to get the cost down, but to be able to influence the end unit of the product.
Yeah people, I think, would be stunned to learn that we manufacture core components in the US and the UK, right in our own facilities which allow us to do this really advanced RD, to push the boundaries of what's possible with these components.
Yeah, it's the same exact idea.
So how are you going to distribute them?
I can't share all of our secrets, but we can regroup after the launch and deep dive into all of it.
Okay, but I have a sense that you want to control that too.
Uh, I think it's, it's important in terms of the customer experience.
What a surprise.
All right.
You just, you described, uh, you wrote this like, uh, I think it was your annual letter recently.
Um, and I forgot the term you're basically the way you're positioning snap is not like a little brother, but you described essentially like you have the scale of some of these big players, but you don't have the trillion dollar market cap, right?
And you were, I think.
At least once in this conversation you described that you've been engaged in trench warfare.
Why do you call it trench warfare?
And tell us some stories about this.
Yeah, I mean, I think the term I used in my letter was like the middle child, right?
Because we're so much bigger than you know smaller competitors like Reddit or Pinterest or something like that, right.
But we don't have- Did you just call Reddit small?
From like a, you know, we're almost a billion folks using our service.
If you look at like our daily active engagements, about like half a billion folks.
So I think like just in terms of the scale of engagement.
So there's half a billion people using Snap every day?
About half a billion every day, yeah.
And a billion overall?
And a billion about, you know.
So how many other services are that size?
Maybe 10, maybe.
Okay.
Seven to ten.
Depends if you include China.
No, we don't.
America, baby.
All right.
So wait, you're the—I keep saying little brother.
You're the middle child.
Say more about that.
I'm the middle child.
And I think— you know, I think what's interesting about that is like that, the you know, and it's funny, we've got four kids at home, right.
So part of it was like, based on my own experience with our kids were like a lot of attention is paid to the the eldest child right, and they've gotten so much bigger and they've grown up or 15-year-old and then the baby is growing so fast.
It's so exciting.
And then I think somewhere in the middle and hopefully this isn't the case in our house there's like this period where you know you're changing and evolving and people don't know what are you becoming right?
Maybe in the case for Snap, right?
People are trying to understand what is this glasses thing they've been doing for 12 years that they're about to like launch to the world.
What is the role, you know, Snap's core, Snapchat's core business is evolving.
We're growing this huge direct revenue business that's growing really, really rapidly.
And we're diversifying, you know, our advertising business with small medium customers.
So we're in this period of like very intense growth change, I think, for Snapchat.
And, as I mentioned, we're not as big as the giants and we're not as small as our smaller competitors.
And so it's that really interesting moment that I think you know middle children also, you know maybe experience where there's all this change happening and you know you're sort of stuck in the middle.
Is this a stressful time for you?
You know, it's so funny.
My wife like loves the Oura Ring, like she's obsessed.
You know, she like, you know, markets this thing to like everybody, right?
Wants to like compare scores and all this kind.
So she finally like years and years later was like, I'm gonna try the Oura Ring.
And she was like shocked to learn that, like you know, there's sort of like the relaxed and stressed state.
And I'm just like in the relaxed state, like all day long.
And so I like wore it for a week and it basically was like you know, I sleep like seven or eight hours.
I'm in the relaxed state all the time.
Like she was like, how, like what?
So I think like, I really love like periods of intense change.
Like I'm inspired by it.
I enjoy it.
And so like, well, you know, yeah, it is like stressful to some degree.
I think, like you know, the question is like, how do you turn that stress into like opportunity, into growth into – change?
But I think what's really important is for our entire team in our organization to know what a high stakes moment this is for our business right.
Like at this moment in time, you know, what will we become?
We are in a transitional And that's super, super exciting.
And it means every second, every minute counts.
I would say more exciting than stressful, but it's a really cool moment for our company.
When you write something like that, obviously is it more aimed at the broader investor community or is it aimed for internal consumption?
I always wrote them internally, but then they kept leaking and people liked them.
So then I was like, you know, we'll just publish it publicly going forward.
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I had this great conversation with Michael Dell, who's just awesome like a great human being.
Absolute love that I get to spend time with him.
I can't believe it.
And he has that thing where it's like he actually thinks it's important to, even if you don't have a crisis, to like induce one, like to create one.
And he gave this fantastic, you know, he's reimagined his company.
I mean, have you spent any time with him?
I have, yeah.
Okay, yeah.
So like, that's probably, if I was you, I'd be like picking his brain.
I'm friends with his son, Zach.
And, you know, everybody has access to like the Bloomberg terminal.
And Zach's like, I got the dad terminal.
And it's just like I get to like type in any question and get some crazy you know response from this 40.
Essentially, he's been a world-class entrepreneur for four decades.
And so like, I have an issue with supply chain.
Well, guess what?
Dale's seen everything about supply chains and he's like, can be very helpful.
But his whole point was like he knew that he, his company, was on inflection point a few years ago and he stood up and gave this this uh, I guess it's talk.
I think it was a talk and you might have wrote it down.
It was just like you know.
There's a company out there that is, you know, going to be faster than us have better products, have cheaper products.
And, you know, essentially they're going to come for us.
It's like that company's us.
Like we are going to reinvent.
We're going to figure out our weaknesses and, you know, Instead of waiting around to be somebody else's meal, we're going to figure out how to reinvent our company.
And on the podcast, the episode we did together he was just like if you don't have a crisis, you need to find one.
I would say yes, with the caveat that I don't want our team to always feel like they're in crisis mode.
I think I always try to be really cognizant of where the team is at and when we should sprint and run hard and when we actually need to take a step back and adjust.
So I think staying in touch, especially at our size, right?
We're like 5,000-ish people.
You can really stay in touch with the feeling of the organization and knowing when to really really push and when it's better to create a little more space for ideation or experimentation.
So 5,000 people serving a billion users.
You mentioned you have a bunch of different revenue lines or ones that are growing.
Tell me about the ones that are new.
One of the new ones is our subscription business, which is growing really, really rapidly, called Snapchat Plus.
And I think it's a really good fit for Snap's culture.
You know, we adopted the advertising model very early on.
I think it's like well understood.
It's a huge opportunity and we have a ton of engagement on Snapchat.
So advertising is a big opportunity for us and allows us to offer our product for free, which is great.
But I think the heart of Snapchat and our company is about building stuff that people love and that they want.
And we were getting so many requests for all sorts of, you know, new and different features from the most passionate members of our community.
And we can never really find time to resource and invest in them, because we were focused on things that everyone would use, not just like our most passionate, not just the most passionate Snapchatters.
We decided to build Snapchat Plus, which essentially gives you access to like new fun features on Snapchat.
We listen to our community and the things that they want and we'll test stuff and release new things for Snapchat Plus.
And for like four bucks a month, you can join Snapchat Plus and get access to all these new features.
That's now grown to like 25 million subscribers, which is like ESPN scale of subscribers.
And I think in the last quarter, it was growing 60% year over year.
Don't make me do public math.
Is that a billion run rate?
We're doing like a billion run rate growing 60% year over year.
That's incredible.
And it's a really good fit for what we're great at, which is making new stuff that people love and want to pay for.
So I think it's like culturally been a great fit for our company.
It kind of ties to what we were talking about when your design meetings earlier.
We're looking at hundreds.
How often are you doing these design meetings, by the way?
Once a week.
Okay.
So every week, you're going through hundreds of new ideas, some of which wind up for features for Snapchat.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, so that's perfectly in touch.
What did you say earlier about?
What else are you going to do with?
Do you think like you're going to add to that or do in the future, if you want to talk about it for the subscription business?
I mean, we got a zillion ideas in the backlog, so we're just going to keep shipping new, you know, new additions and features.
Do you think you eventually increase the price?
Maybe, but I think it's so early right now.
Yeah, we have done tiering, so one of the things that has been really popular, we released something called Lens Plus.
So I think Snapchat, the camera itself it's probably the most used like gen AI camera service, like in terms of like image video generation, this kind of thing, just because of how many people are using our camera every day.
So we release a bunch of these Gen AI lenses, and we give a number of uses for free.
But then if folks want to upgrade to Lens Plus because they're loving it and using them all the time, they can do that.
And that's grown nicely for us too.
Um so lens plus is at a slightly higher price here and then we have, you know, the platinum plan or whatever, that you can get rid of ads and you know, unlock more features, that kind of thing.
What did you change about the advertising business?
You said something about you just basically adopted at the beginning of what was there and available and maybe known, and how has that changed over time?
There's been a couple of huge shifts for us in the past couple of years.
So you know the core of our advertising business from the early days really grew around.
You know a small number in the.
You know in the hundreds of large customers in the United States really built around a brand business.
And it grew very, very quickly throughout the.
You know the history of the company, but our advertising mix almost looked like the inverse of a Google or a Meta.
Google or Meta.
The vast majority of their revenue comes from small and medium-sized customers and a small amount of their revenue comes from large customers, especially here in the US.
We had like the inverse.
We had most of our revenue coming from this small group of large customers and then a very small amount of money coming from small and medium customers.
Part of that was because at the time, many years ago, we didn't have a really robust lower funnel advertising business where people can optimize against events that happen in their app or people making purchases on their website.
And we hadn't really built out a lot of those capabilities.
And small and medium customers really care about that.
They want to see their return on ad spend right away.
So, despite having this enormous scale and all this engagement, the ad offering, especially in the lower funnel, was immature.
So over the past couple of years, we built out that entire lower funnel advertising offerings.
We can really drive performance for small and medium customers and we've been really rapidly growing that small and medium customer segment.
We're doing like this really difficult transformation to make our sort of inverted you know, mostly large US customers advertising around upper funnel and brand goals into, like mostly small medium customers, advertising against lower funnel goals.
And that's just been a transformation of like every part of our advertising advertising business the way that we go to market on the sales side, the engineering and product work that's happening.
Yeah, I'd be curious like what that looks like.
Because if you were doing the inverse, you have these giant brand deals.
I'd have to imagine giant brands spending a ton of money right?
I'd have to imagine that you have to employ a ton of salespeople, right?
In a way that Google and Facebook do not.
Yeah, that's certainly one part of it for sure.
So they'd be more profitable too because they kind of have like a self-service product.
Yeah, and I think, you know, large customers rightly want a lot of bespoke service as well.
So our engineering team was spending a huge amount of time building bespoke solutions for really large customers who want to measure things in a specific way or want a really unique integration or unique offering.
And now our engineering team is spending a huge amount of time serving lower funnel customers at scale right.
And so rather than doing like- Building a product they need to adapt to.
Yeah, that small medium customers can really easily sign up for unused.
Are you getting rid of the bespoke?
We're doing a lot less bespoke, but we also find that these large customers, they want to drive lower funnel outcomes too.
So a lot of it is teaching our sales folks who were used to living in this more brand upper funnel oriented world to sell into lower funnel objectives for large customers.
There's actually a weird idea that just came to mind because I just did this episode called How SpaceX Works.
So there's this guy named Max Olson who he still needs permission to publish a book, but essentially he's like hey, I want to tell the story of the history of SpaceX as it happened, and I'm going to use their internal memos to do so.
So he's got access to like the first 10 years.
I hope SpaceX allows him I've seen a copy of like the advanced copy that you can't sell yet.
It's called SpaceX Foundation.
So he's like well, in the meantime, I'm going to write an essay that tells the story of why this is important.
And so I read the essay like three times, like this is fucking crazy.
So I just did an episode of Founders on it.
And one of the most interesting things I never thought of is like essentially the aerospace industry.
Everything was bespoke.
Everything was custom to the customer.
And it's just like, well, if you do that, you can't scale.
And Gwynne Stratwell was a huge driver behind this.
It's like, we're going to build a basic, good enough, launch system that you adapt to.
And then it took a while to educate them to adapt to it.
But once they're adapted, then they just I mean now they're doing I think most launch providers would do two to four launches per year, that they do one every like two days.
They did more load last year than every single other launch provider in, like China Russia America, everywhere else combined.
And that one idea where it's like, we can't do bespoke, we have to get this uniform if we're going to scale this and we can't get to our goals if we don't scale it.
And to take it a step further, they didn't have to deal with all the political pressure that NASA is under to put you know a certain factory here or a plant in this state.
You know what I mean?
I think like just out the gate they were able to deliver rockets at a tenth the cost, you know, of a NASA or something like that.
Did you intentionally invert where you're like Google and Facebook are doing it this way, we're going to try a different way and then realizing oh, we need to change.
Like back then, did you make that decision consciously?
We saw that like if we really wanted to grow the ads business to be, you know, double digit billions over time, that we needed to have a lower funnel business with a diversified set of small.
Did you hope that wasn't true at the time at the very beginning?
No, I just think we grew really fast on large customer brand advertising.
They can move dollars very, very rapidly.
That's one of the benefits.
If you're working with a large customer, they can move millions of dollars very quickly.
If you have a couple hundred of those customers, you can build a very large advertising business very quickly.
The question is, how do you build a diversified...
Very, very big one over time.
Okay, so you can get big, but you can't get huge without it.
Oh, okay.
And you needed to get big.
That was almost like stage one.
You had to do it that way.
And I'd say almost all of these platforms, stage one looks like that.
Okay.
Right?
I mean even Facebook.
In the early days it was display advertising, right um, and then over time they built out way more advanced systems, optimizing against lower funnel goals.
I'd argue like a reddit or a pinterest today.
I mean, you know, to some degree pinterest is building out lower funnel objectives and this kind of thing, but a lot of it is still, you know, large customer upper funnel.
So I'd say almost all ad platforms start with that, because you can grow very quickly and then you use that to invest in building out much more sophisticated systems.
Yeah, and at the beginning you said you really thought you were building a messaging app, not a social network.
You studied the way messaging apps in other countries monetized.
I feel like you have a lot of soul.
And so you prefer I don't know if you could say this, but you would prefer almost if you had like an all subscription business, because the incentives are more aligned.
I really love the subscription business.
I wish we had done it earlier.
I just, I love it.
I love the direct connection to our customers.
I love that it's directly related to the value that we provide them.
And I think it's been really exciting to see that.
Like you know, I think, unlike some of these other internet services, people are getting a ton of value from Snapchat.
So much so they're willing to pay for it, right?
And I think that's, you know, it's also a sign to me that we're building something that's valuable.
I spent a lot of time with the Spotify team, Daniel, Gustav, Alex, the top three people there.
And they just have this like soul in the game and they're really trying to build an app.
Their whole thing is just like when you're done using Spotify, do you feel good?
And I'm like, well, you know, I spent an hour listening to music.
I feel great.
I spent an hour listening to, you know, Founders podcast or any other podcast.
I feel great.
Now they have audio books.
So you feel great.
They're actually trying, it wouldn't have worked any other way.
Like they obviously have some.
They have somewhat of an ad business, but I think they told me they're the second most paid subscribers in the world, I think, behind Netflix.
And, you know, they did that in a relatively short amount of time.
Like, I'm friends with Jimmy Iovine.
He was on the show.
And he told me some outlandish shit.
He's just like, when Apple bought us, Spotify only had 3 million paid subscribers.
I want to take a run at them.
And now they think of, like, 250 million.
But there is something about like if you do have this soul, if you are trying to put something good into the world that is not just trying to maximize – usage on an app that's not good for you.
It's just more aligned.
I didn't ask you that before, but I just got the sense that that's how you work.
Do you have any idea the size that you think it could get to?
Because you have how many pages?
You said 20?
25 million subs.
And when did you start it?
Was it two, three years ago, something like that?
Still, it's pretty goddamn fast.
Let's see.
I'm excited.
It's obviously growing quite rapidly, and I think it'd be a big revenue driver for us.
All right, let's go back to the more difficult times in Snapchat's history.
I want to know more about this trench warfare.
That's a great line that you had.
I think given that we're up against such large monopolistic competitors, like every day is a fight.
Every day is about putting one foot in front of the other because they just have so much scale.
And I think for us, you know, creativity has been historically the force multiplier that's allowed us to break through and take ground right.
But I think, as I look towards the future, what makes me so excited and the reason why I brought that up is like creativity combined with AI should allow us to move incredibly quickly in this environment and overcome a lot of the resource constraints that we've had historically.
And that's something that's really different about the next decade for Snap.
Do you ever foresee the hardware being a separate business?
It essentially is.
So it's a wholly owned subsidiary today.
The brands themselves, they're adjacent to one another, but they're different brands.
In many ways, it's a different customer, although not entirely different.
So I do think that they'll grow in different ways over time.
Why did you make the decision to start a separate company with it?
The hardware business at its core is just so different than the internet service business that we operate with Snapchat, and even requires a different execution style.
With hardware, you cannot make a mistake, right?
The things that we are doing today will show up in two years from now And if we made a mistake, it's a huge problem and it will cost us another year or whatever to fix it.
I mean it's – that type of precision and operational rigor is just night and day different than Snapchat, right?
Where if like we break something today because we're moving quickly, like it's fine.
We'll fix it this afternoon, right?
And move on.
And so culturally they're very – they have to be different companies and different operating styles.
And then I think, in terms of the brand and where we're trying to take the, the specs brand, i think snapchat has always tried to be fun and whimsical, to make sure that you feel comfortable expressing yourself right.
Snapchat never takes itself too seriously and while i don't think specs is going to like take itself seriously uh, you know necessarily, in a way that's like weird or not true to who we are, what we're trying to do is incredibly serious.
We are trying to reinvent the computer.
We think that the way that people have, and trying to make it more human.
And we think the way that people have designed computers for the last 50 years is like robbing us of who we are and like our humanity.
And that people are gonna want a new type of computer.
They want a computer that allows them to use AI and access AI in different ways.
That brings them closer together with their friends and the world.
And so That vision and mission, I think, deserves real focus and dedication.
And, in some ways, while it shares that same root and philosophy and idea that animates Snapchat, it's approaching it from a very different perspective.
When did you in your mind realize that this had to be two separate companies?
In a lot of ways, they've operated quite separately, right?
They have the same sort of GNA support, but SnapLab, which you know it was the precursor to Specs Inc.
Has operated as an independent, relatively independent, part of Snap for a long time.
Different location?
Separate? not shared office space?
Explain the organization.
Nearby, in some cases, shared office spaces.
In some cases, definitely not, depending on what we're working on.
Leadership team, all that sort of stuff, historically has been quite separate.
Yeah, did you ever read about?
I'm sure you did, but Steve Jobs was very adamant about when he was inventing something new it could not be in the same building.
Had to be a completely different team.
I don't think they separated it out.
I don't think he spun out different entities inside of Apple, but he's like you can't even be in the same building.
That was really, really important.
Yeah, it makes sense to me because I think focus is just so critical when you're trying to build something new.
And differentiation.
You don't want the opinions of other people outside of the people working on it.
What was Snap Lab?
Snap Lab really incubated a lot of the spectacles and specs stuff.
Why did you make the decision to start something like Snap Lab?
It was to house all the hardware development.
Okay, so it's not like SnapLab was created and then you realize, hey, let's do hardware.
It was the vehicle to do hardware?
I think it was sort of concurrent.
I mean when we started working on Spectacles back in the day.
That was really the genesis of SnapLab.
I mean, that's what it was called initially.
Do you still have some kind of like RD, separate thing to like, dream up new products, or you just only focus on the app and the glasses?
You know, one of the things we're thinking a lot about now and this is sort of what I mean about the sort of force multiplication of AI and creativity.
The core Snapchat business is really well positioned to launch new app categories today, right?
Because we have a massive amount of distribution.
We've got tons of great ideas and brilliant creative people.
And now with AI, we actually have the resources to make that possible.
So inside of Snapchat today and in our design team, we're thinking a lot about what types of new apps and services, internet services.
But a separate app from Snapchat.
A separate app from Snapchat.
But we can use Snapchat as a launchpad for these new services, because it reaches almost a billion people.
Do you have any other apps?
I don't even know.
There's an app called Saturn, which we acquired, which is a totally new way to think of calendaring.
So if you, if you look at calendars today, not only are they kind of really entrenched into like the business world, but because they are, it makes it almost impossible to easily share calendars with friends, right?
And calendars are all today oriented around email right, rather than your phone number and your text messages.
But all of your planning and the way that you're working together with your friends is happening in your text messages right and around your phone number.
And so the Saturn team has had a lot of really great insights about what the future of a calendar should look like.
And so that's a separate app that's now owned by Snapchat, that's integrated integrated with Snapchat and gets distribution through Snapchat, but as a standalone service.
Why would people use it?
Like give me a use case.
Because it's a calendar built for your friends.
So like it is so difficult.
I mean, I don't know if you've experienced this with your, but with my wife, like it's so hard to get my work calendar to match with her work calendar.
It's like almost impossible.
And let alone get that to map to our 15 year old's calendar, right?
And you know, everything he's got going on after school.
And so I think All of a sudden there's a solution that like works really well for our 15-year-old, who doesn't have like a whole corporate email and whatever, but like wants to share his calendar with friends, right.
We can have visibility into each other's calendar, and it all works centered around your phone and your mobile number, right.
So it actually is a social calendar rather than being like a work-oriented calendar.
And that just makes things easier.
How much do you use email?
All the time.
I push everything to text or WhatsApp.
Really?
I push everything to email.
You probably have like an army.
I use email like text message.
There's no army.
No, I use email like text.
How do you balance focus?
Obviously, Snapchat's working, the app. specs working and will continue to, like, grow.
How do you balance, like, inventing new things with focusing on what you already have?
Like, how do you think about that?
Or you just need to invent new things?
You have, like, a compulsion for this?
Um...
It's a really great question.
I see a huge amount of opportunity in the products and services that we have today.
And I think we need to continue to constantly iterate and evolve them and make them better.
And that ultimately that's what our customers, our community expects, right?
They want us to constantly innovate for them to make their lives better.
So I think we have to tirelessly do that.
At the same point, there's nothing more valuable than focus.
Like focus is.
I mean arguably my primary role in our company is helping to drive focus and prioritization.
So I almost don't see them necessarily as like trade-offs, but like as just an ongoing part of running our business, right.
Making sure that we're being really clear about focusing on the areas where we see the biggest opportunity.
Yeah, if somebody asked me like okay, you've read 400 of biographies on history's greatest entrepreneurs.
They always want to like, give me like a top 10 idea list.
And I was like, I can do one better.
I can distill everything down to one single word.
Focus.
And so, while you were talking, I was just looking up, because I save all my notes and highlights for every single book I read.
I have a personal AA that is only trained on all the transcripts for my podcast, every single highlight from every book, every single note.
And Edwin Land, one of my favorite quotes of his.
He says my whole life has just been trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had.
He was obsessed with focus.
The reason I ask you this is because you spent any time with Tony from DoorDash?
Not a lot, no.
Okay, we just recorded this intense conversation.
And I'm gonna have to do it again, like every six months, because I still can't.
The guy has got so many ideas.
I don't buy individual stocks.
I don't really give a shit about anything but making podcasts and try to do this intense focus.
So I don't think about investing.
I don't think about anything else.
Just do what I'm doing every day.
Wake up and do it seven days a week.
But I don't know anything about the finance of Jordache.
All I can tell you is he's, I think, 41 years old.
I've never come across another person that gives me like young Jeff Bezos vibes.
And I'm so tempted to just like back up the truck.
I'm like, I'm just going to vibe.
I'm going to vibe investors because everybody's like, oh yeah, you know, you got 60%.
I think right now he has 60% market share of food delivery.
You're out of your goddamn mind if you think that that guy is just thinking about food delivery.
He's going to build, and he already is.
I think they launched six new products, including their own hardware.
There's something about this conversation that's reminding me of this, where it's just like he's gonna be focused on what they're excellent at, but he's got grandiose ambitions, to the point where, just like there's no way in hell, Bezos was gonna stick with books and CDs and movies.
It's impossible for that kind of personality type to be that way.
So yeah, I was just curious if there was something in you that basically like your level of ambition.
I think ambition is the wrong word.
I do think like, I think like creation and problem solving is really what I, what I love to do.
I think you're right.
Ambition is the wrong word.
It's like there's they see a series of problems and they think they can solve it better than anybody else.
Yeah, and I think there's something so incredibly gratifying about doing that.
It's awesome.
And to see the way it makes people's lives better, the way they respond to it, that's the best.
It's awesome.
Your focus basically every day when you wake up is like you're attacking.
What you feel is like the biggest problem in Snapchat.
Is that how you organize your day?
Like how do you go about this?
I heard you on another podcast say that like you kind of get turned on.
You didn't use these words, but like you're like attracted to hard problems.
Like you want like difficulty.
You want to spend your time solving the hardest problems.
I think it's absolutely essential for us to go after solving hard problems, especially as we look at like the long-term success of the business.
I think that ultimately like that is where value is created.
So I think a huge amount of what I'm thinking about is like how can we make our community, our customers' lives better better, and what are some really really hard problems that we think we can uniquely solve?
I meant more about like the existing problems in like how you spend your time, how you allocate your time is a better word.
Like the existing problems in the business.
How do I allocate my time across the existing problem?
So like Elon's famous for like, what is the bottleneck here?
And like, I'll find out in my entire empire where the bottleneck is.
I'm going physically there and I'm going to sit there and like dedicate all our resources.
In that essay I told you, I read about the history of SpaceX.
There's a NASA guy, a guy from NASA visiting SpaceX, and they're like, like when there's a problem, there's like a flash mob appears.
So Elon has a very specific way.
And I heard you on another podcast saying like you're attracted to problems.
I'm just curious, like I'm not talking about problems you could solve, like in future product development.
I'm saying literally like there's, you're running a giant company.
There's all kinds of stuff that's not going well.
Yeah, so my Monday morning, for example, is like two to two and a half hours in the specs business going through the risk independencies red yellow red orange yellow, green.
What are we doing to solve it right?
And what progress are we making and how can I help?
I mean, that's how I start my week.
You and I were looking at this book I gave you before we started recording and it was a photographic history.
I think it's called like Fearless Genius or something or Ferocious Genius.
And it's about Steve Jobs and you opened to a page and Steve had a shit list.
And you're like, I have a shit list too.
It's like the five hardest problems he's gotta solve.
And many of them don't have solutions yet.
So it's similar to that.
Yeah, and I think what's most important for me is creating a culture where people are raising their hand and bringing those problems early and often right.
Like that is mission critical across the organization.
Like we can't solve a problem that we don't know about.
We can't solve a problem that someone isn't escalating quickly.
And so I think it's really beyond just like making sure that we're staying focused on the issues that we need to get resolved and launch blockers or whatever they are.
Culturally.
We have got to make sure that, like that is how the team is operating all day, every day, throughout the organization.
How do you ensure that information gets to you though?
I think one of the things that's really, I stole this from Walmart, which I thought was great.
They have a Friday meeting called in it to win it.
They have their leaders from across the company, not just like super senior leaders, but leaders from across the company around the world all get together for about an hour.
And they essentially raise their hand and say Hey, the shopping cart ball bearing is not working properly.
We got to get this thing fixed.
And who's ever in charge of the shopping cart ball bearing can raise their hand and give a response, or they can say I'll get back to you, or whatever it is.
But that's multiplied across the entire company.
And the thing that they found was like their leaders would go out into stores, into the community, and they would hear about problems.
And then they'd solve the problem just for the store, but they wouldn't solve it for the company.
And so in it to win, it allows them to solve these problems company-wide.
And so we do the same thing for specs, for Snapchat, like bring the problems forward, right?
I mean, you can.
Also the even simpler way to do it I love to just walk around and talk to our people, right?
And just hear about what's going on, hear about the issues impacting them.
But I think unless you create these like structures and processes in the company to actively surface it and build that culture, It's hard to do that.
And I think, you know, it's just so important.
So I heard you describe the design team as like a very flat, there's like no hierarchy.
Is the rest of the company like that?
Like, how do you actually organize?
I'd say the rest of the company is certainly flatter than most, but you know the design team is actually flat right.
Everyone's got the same title, like that kind of thing.
But I think what's so important for Snap is that we're like a ruthless meritocracy.
You know we like in the beginning of the early days.
You know it's kind of silly now, but in the early days we would just make up people's titles like just make them hilarious.
Like you could come and join Snap and like make up whatever you wanted to be called, because the whole point was like, Who cares about your title?
And if you're focused on your title, you're focused on like the exact wrong thing, right?
Like that, like we are going to die if, like we are a company that's focused on title and hierarchy and you know getting ahead right.
Rather than focusing on the customer.
I mean, I think that's like a huge, huge problem.
So I'd say the company, yeah, of course, we've got great leaders.
We invest a lot in our leaders.
But one of the things that I think makes Snap so unique is no matter who you are, where you are in the company, you can have a huge outsize impact.
I mean, it was fun.
I got some great intern feedback.
One of our interns came to me and was like, you know, it's funny.
I came to Snap and wasn't even really clear who my manager or leader was, because everyone was so helpful and everyone was guiding me and providing mentorship and working together with me.
And so I think That sort of like one team feeling is really important.
So how do you make sure that anybody in the company can make a major impact though?
First of all, setting that expectation.
Like that's what we expect at Snap.
It's not just like, you know, that we try to enable it.
That's like if you see a problem and you can fix it, you can solve it.
Like we're going to celebrate that and lift that up and not be – precious like oh, this is my thing, my territory.
Like, that is, I think, you know, I think people respond really negatively to that in our culture.
So I think, you know, sometimes that creates problems because the swim lanes are less clear.
I mean, people are solving problems across the organization, across teams are working together.
And I think you know, just making sure that we have culture and leaders who are rewarding that and reinforcing that behavior is so important.
Have you studied how Jensen organized his company?
Not in depth.
I mean, you would be the expert, I'm sure.
Not nearly, but I did do two podcasts on them.
There's a great book called In Video Way that goes into this.
But yeah, I haven't found anybody else that, especially that size, that has like a completely flat, you know as flat an organization as possible.
I think he's got like 60 direct reports, like, it's pretty wild.
And he describes this as like people are worried about like being able to manage, like AI that's smarter than them and AI agents that are smarter than them.
He's like, I do this every day.
All my 60 direct reports are smarter than me in their domain and I would be able to manage them and orchestrate them perfectly.
It's very fascinating.
I'm always curious.
Again, I think the founder-led companies are a reflection of the personality of the founder.
The founder is the guardian of the company's soul, and it only works if it is built around who you are and the philosophy that you have.
Yeah, and I think, generally speaking, I would expect the world to move towards flatter structures and much larger spans of control because, like the communication and organization tax, today is like night and day, what it was 20 or 30 years ago.
Like.
So I think companies are still thinking in this like sort of industrial mentality where communication was very high friction.
That doesn't make a lot of sense in terms of the way that companies are organized and operate today.
So I would imagine that more people will move to much, much wider spans of control, much flatter organizations.
And I think that'll be helpful.
I'm not really interested in people's first company.
I'm interested in their last company.
You feel like this is your life's work, this is your last company?
I think Specs is probably my last company, I would guess.
I always said I would never do it again, and now I find myself doing it again with Specs.
And it's just, you know...
I hope that in the not too distant future, I can also think about more ways to give back to society.
I mean, our family does a lot.
We have a family fund.
We've got the Snap Foundation.
We are constantly thinking about how to support LA, you know, and hopefully in the future, like you know more broadly.
I love charity, but the best way to be charity is to build a company and a product and make somebody else's life better.
I think that's one way to contribute for sure.
But I think there are lots of ways to contribute to making the world better.
The biggest problem that I see today is people spending seven or eight hours a day on their computer and spending their life operating a computer.
I think that is a disaster for our society.
And I think we have to change that.
And if we don't, we are headed in a really bad direction.
So I think specs, if we can attack that problem and even shift two hours of the eight hours a day you're spending hunched over like this to you, looking out at the world and going for a walk and spending time with your friends and playing together with them.
That's massive for the world.
So I think like I really want to like land the solution to that problem for sure.
But I think there's a lot of problems out there.
And I think you know, over a longer period of time, I want to think about, like more ways that I can make an impact.
You just reminded me.
I want to go back to this interesting decision for you to go in on AR at a time when almost everybody was thinking that VR was the path.
And I've heard some funny, you say some funny things about that.
So don't let me forget that.
But I guess this line of questioning that I'm on right now is really what I'm trying to get to is just like you're famous for turning down billions and billions of dollars real fast to sell the company.
I think the book that I read on you eight years ago was called how to turn down a billion dollars or something like they made reference to it.
I'm trying to get into, like, what is motivating you?
Like, you know, I study entrepreneurship.
Obviously, my entire life is founders.
During the day, I make founders podcasts.
At night, I hang out with founders.
This is my whole life.
And I think the common misconception is that entrepreneurs are driven by money.
And I would argue they're driven by control.
And if you're talented and you want to build a product that makes somebody else's life better and you maintain control, you wind up with money anyways.
But their primary motivation is not money.
Clearly, your primary motivation was not money.
I think there's a line in the book said that you would never work for anybody else like take us through the decision of just like i don't give a about your billions of dollars.
I want to do this.
Well, i think you know I I would never like underestimate the fact that, like Bobby, our investors were smart.
They allowed Bobby and I to both sell 10 million bucks of stock very early on.
Obviously, that would have been worth maybe a lot more now, but like, but very early on, which meant that, like you know, we were able to see uh Just, you know, support a family, buy a house, like whatever it was right.
So I think like very early on, money like was no longer a consideration.
But $10 million is not a billion.
But $10 million is more than enough money to live a really great, comfortable life.
But you see what I mean here?
Like.
It's still an unusual decision on your part, especially when you were.
How old were you when you make the first time?
You turned on a multi-billion dollar acquisition offer.
Probably 20, I don't know, you know, long, young twenties.
Yeah.
Okay.
Don't downplay it.
Like that's another – we've gone over a series of unusual decisions that you keep making.
So like explain to me like why – I wouldn't do it either.
Like I'd hope I wouldn't do it, because I guess the work I'm trying to do on Founders Podcast to give you – like I want to like – to the degree that there is any influence that the podcast has on future generations of entrepreneurs.
It's like –
Right now the entrepreneurship ecosystem.
They celebrate because the incentive structure is fucked up.
They celebrate start, scale, sell.
You started, you scaled, you didn't sell.
The 400 biographies.
There's not a single biography that I've read where it's like guy started a company.
Two years later he sold it for billions of dollars and he spent the rest of his life as a as an investor.
I'm sorry, almost throw up in my mouth at the thought of this.
They don't write books about that.
Why do you take yourself out of the game?
Like the whole point, like Elon's the richest person on the planet.
You think he'd ever do that?
No, he like puts his chips back in there.
He wants to build shit.
This is one of the things I admire about you.
So like, how the hell do you make that decision at 22, 23, 24?
Well, I think we loved what we were doing.
I mean, Bobby and I just loved working together.
We loved making stuff.
We saw a huge opportunity for the service and fundamentally, the service was so different than what else was out there.
And it was very clear that, like we would have had to compromise on our vision and values if we sold the company,
I mean you think about, almost every choice was the opposite of what was happening at the time, right?
It was like permanent, public social media on a feed.
We were doing like private messaging, private ephemeral messaging, right?
No public likes and comments, right?
With, like opening into the camera, not a feed, investing in things like augmented reality when everyone was investing in virtual reality, thinking that people were actually going to like wear a TV on their face.
Like it's insane.
Like it was insane.
And I think like It makes no sense.
And I think we looked at that and we were like wow, if that's the direction people want to go, that's scary for the world.
Now, it's great in many ways that all of these services have adopted our inventions.
I mean, when we talked about, I mean, in 2012, I think.
2013, the importance of privacy, people looked at us like we were insane.
I mean, literally, they were like, what are you talking about privacy?
Like, what?
Remember that was like the world?
Remember Mark Zuckerberg being like the world's going to be open and connected.
Everyone's going to share everything.
Like, What?
And it was just so wrong in terms of the direction of the world and what people actually wanted.
And so I think you could imagine a world without Snapchat, without these inventions, I think the world would be a worse place.
It's so interesting.
Right now there's a lot of concern about social media and the way that it makes people feel right.
What's fascinating is when Snapchat is studied separately from social media.
There's study after study, independent studies that show that Snapchat makes a positive impact on people's friendships, on their wellbeing.
That is fundamentally different from social media.
Because in those same studies it shows that Instagram TikTok whatever, make people feel bad right.
And so...
What I find so interesting is that Snapchat itself represents something different and a connection to your friends and family that actually makes your life better.
And so, even though it's challenging to continue operating a business to compete with these folks who have a very different worldview and a very different direction for how they want the world to move, I worry about a world without Snapchat.
I worry about, you know, a world that doesn't try to fight for this different set of values and this different way of thinking about things.
One of the benefits of reading a biography is, you see, like the evolution of an idea over time where, like your decision not to sell, as a young man in his early 20s right
You might have had like a faint idea that you know.
First of all, I think you love being an entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurs need businesses.
What is an entrepreneur that sold his business?
Nothing.
You're just sitting on the sidelines doing nothing.
You shouldn't ever sell your best idea.
That's what I said back in 2018 when I made the first podcast about you.
I think you even said this.
I don't think I'm going to come up with a better idea than this.
So I'm going to now dedicate my life to working on my second best idea.
How the hell does that make sense for money that I'm going to get anyways in the future?
And most of which I won't even spend in my lifetime.
But you have that kernel of the idea.
But now you just this great articulation of that.
It's like that idea almost like grew.
And solidified over time.
And then there's things in the future that had to happen that you didn't know were going to happen.
And you realize that was the right choice.
Such as social media gets a really bad rap.
It has terrible PR.
You know all the polling is like.
You know people, even though they're addicted to these things, they seem to not make their lives better.
We're like...
If you separate that out and you've built something where people are actually happy and feel good about using the product, that's worth more than money.
A hundred percent.
Yeah.
And you get to have an impact at the scale of a billion people around the world who use our service to talk with their friends and family.
Build stronger relationships.
Like that's inspiring to me.
There was two conversations I had on this podcast that surprised me.
The first one was a Dan York of Spotify.
And the next one was Toby Lekay of Shopify.
I get those. back, confused all the time.
Daniel said something interesting, where he was even willing at the beginning.
He thought Spotify needed to exist in the world, that he didn't want to sell it, but if he thought selling it would increase the likelihood that it continues on in this world, then he was willing to do so.
And then, so that shocked me.
And then Toby Luque said something that was fascinating, where he thought, if it was not for this new invention of AI in its current format that he was close to finding, he didn't think he would be the best CEO of Shopify.
So he would find somebody else to do that.
Because in both cases, they wanted what was best for the company.
I think for me, I see Snapchat as the best possible vehicle to reinvent the computer.
So, if you think about Snapchat, we have this core cash-flowing, profitable business in Snapchat that we're able to then use to reinvest in what has been a very long-term speculative project to reinvent the computer.
And Snapchat has really been, in addition to changing the world in its own way, a real vehicle for enabling this evolution of computing.
And so I think for me, That's one of the real benefits of running and controlling Snapchat today is that we've been able to very consistently invest in advanced technology and RD over an incredibly long period of time to build a real competitive advantage, but also to build a world-class product that we wouldn't have been able to do without Snapchat.
Oh, I never even thought about that.
I like that.
So you've used Snapchat as a means to reinvent computing.
It's an incredibly important part of it because without a hugely profitable cash flowing I mean Snapchat's almost a 7 billion revenue business right.
Almost in the Fortune 500.
People, you know, make fun of us for not being profitable enough.
We're taking a lot of that core cash flow from Snapchat and using it to reinvest in winning this future of computing.
What's very unique about Snapchat is we've been able to do that now, for you know, we've invested in glasses for 12 years.
We've been able to very consistently invest in a way that no VC would ever in a million years support.
Would there ever have been a world where you only built software?
There's too much of like this art design background with you.
And then I'm sitting here as you're talking and describing this to me, and I didn't even think about your business in those terms yet, which is why it's valuable to sit down and have conversations like this.
It's like this guy's two heroes built the best hardware of all time in both of their industries.
Yeah, I think ultimately- And Jobs is famous for saying if you want to build great software, you have to control the hardware.
100%.
Yeah, I think.
Ultimately, if you think about the customer experience you're trying to create or what you're trying to create in the world, ultimately you realize that hardware is a necessity in realizing that vision.
Essentially,
So the answer is no.
There is no world in which Evan only builds...
So think about how early we started doing it.
I mean, this was back in 2014.
We started investing in hardware.
Yeah, I think you're really misunderstood.
Because, like, I did an entire podcast about you.
I've listened to all your interviews and I'm still like learning things right now from talking to you.
That's fun, right?
No, it's definitely a lot of fun, but, like, we need to do a better job of telling the story, man.
Well, I think the best way to tell the story is through the product, right?
And I think that's what's so exciting about this year and why I articulate it as a crucible moment because we are inflecting and transforming Snapchat at the same time that we're launching a whole new product category that we've invented.
So this will be a seminal year for our company.
So what does your schedule look like during a year like this?
It's insane.
It's completely insane.
Untenable.
This is like a seven-day-a-week job.
How do you balance that, though?
Because you have young kids at home, and i heard in very intense times you were talking about sometimes you had to get up before they were awake, and you went home every day after they were asleep.
There's a lot of days like that.
Right now, i mean, i'm back in, definitely in that mode.
I always try to keep sunday.
You know, we go to church as a family, we go to brunch, and then I spend the afternoon with our kids, and that's super important to me.
But other than that, you know, it's full on.
So early mornings, late nights, all the time.
Yeah.
And your biggest issue is that you're redesigning, you're inventing new hardware.
Because I don't want to diminish Snapchat, but it sounds like it's at scale.
It's profitable.
You're adding a lot of product features.
With Snapchat.
We do need to re-accelerate the advertising business, but I think, given the transformation we've undertaken over the last three years of the advertising platform, that is coming right.
We're seeing the growth in the small and medium customers.
We're diversifying the advertising business.
We've built this direct revenue business.
So I look at Snapchat and I see a path to a lot more revenue over the coming years.
And so I think that certainly has been a huge focus of the last several years.
And then, I think, the core specs business.
This year will mark the real beginning of the next chapter of that story, as we transition from being a developer platform to a consumer product, which is a really challenging thing to do.
All right, so you have an insane schedule.
I have a feeling based on you have like the simmering intensity about you.
Like, are these actually your favorite times to be running the company?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Why?
Because every decision, the way you spend every minute really matters.
And I think That's exciting because I think we're at a real inflection point in the company in terms of, you know, if you think about the last 12 years of my life that I've invested in, you know, creating this new vision for what a computer can be.
And, you know, and I almost said the number of days.
And in some number of days, we're about to share that with the world.
And like, that's incredibly, incredibly exciting.
How do you handle the stress though?
Huge on meditation.
Kriya meditation changed my life.
What's it called?
Called Kriya.
Okay.
Unbelievable.
Meditation was like never like a fit for me.
You know, I was like, they're like, try TM, like learn your mantra.
Like it just like never clicked.
Kriya is like incredibly energizing, you know, involves like breath work.
And it's like, to me, it's like a...
I mean, wow.
You know, it's like, it's super powerful.
Is this like a daily practice?
When I can.
Yeah.
And I try to exercise every morning.
You know Korea as much as I can.
You know a couple of days a week.
Um, and obviously playing with our kids and hanging with my wife, like that's the.
That's the stress management regime.
Yeah, I feel like all the great entrepreneurs.
It's like The best quote I've ever heard describe this kind of mentality was this guy named Herb Keller, who was the founder of Southwest Airlines, which is the most successful airline?
And think about it, he's selling a commodity product, right?
Most successful airline of all time.
I think it was profitable for 40 straight years.
And he was asked one time, they're like, how do you handle the stress?
It's like, I don't handle it.
I like it.
He's like, I'm not doing this.
I wouldn't start a company in a hugely competitive environment if I wanted to take an easy path through life.
But I think what he did there and how he explained that, what's really powerful about that and I think this is what a lot of founders do is they reframe it right.
If you can reframe stress as an opportunity, it's gonna be great.
I mean, in the early days, I hated speaking publicly when we created our company.
I didn't like it.
My innate nature, i mean this goes back to like growing up in the computer lab, right like.
I just did not want to do public speaking.
I didn't want to do company-wide q a, you know like, if i want to communicate with the company i'll send an email, kind of thing.
Right like crazy.
And one of our board members was like Evan, it's your job.
Too bad.
Figure it out.
And literally, I was like, okay, I'm going to learn how to love it.
I'm going to learn how to love public speaking.
I'm going to learn how to love doing a live Q&A with our team.
And I do now.
I love it.
I love doing Q&A. with our team.
And so I think that ability to like reframe things that like appear like a challenge or feel like something you're uncomfortable with, like that's really important.
Yeah, you'll see this in the history of entrepreneurship.
Thomas Edison, Henry Kaiser, Edwin Land.
They viewed it as problems are just opportunities and we're close.
It's like this is an opportunity.
We just have to get to work to actually do it.
There's been this new thing that's popped up, where I'm glad you actually developed a skill set and to tell your own story, to communicate this because – companies are trying to hire like a chief storyteller.
It's like, yeah, that's the founder.
Like Edwin Land, go back again.
We talked about Edwin Land and Steve Jobs a lot today.
It's like, they would tell you the person that is best able to tell.
And it's not even going to have to be that articulate.
It's just, you care more about anybody else.
You know more about anybody else.
Just educate us on what it's, why your product exists and what makes it special.
And who else could do that but the person that was there when it was just one person, two people and a laptop.
I'll never forget when I was a lot younger, I was starting the company, I had the opportunity to meet President Clinton.
And his advice was like, the job is explainer in chief.
That is the job.
You got to go around and explain this stuff to everybody so they understand their role at Snap or Snap's role in the world.
And I think that's super valuable.
Well, you're doing a good job.
I appreciate you taking the time for this.
I do want to end on one of my favorite quotes.
This is from the book that I read about you almost a decade ago.
I guess I'll give a little context here.
You dropped out of Stanford with five classes, six classes left, but you decided to walk for an empty diploma, right.
And you regretted it.
And then you told this beautiful, this is a direct quote from you.
It says.
It only recently occurred to me, while preparing this, how totally absurd this whole charade was.
It reminded me that oftentimes we do all sorts of silly things to avoid appearing different.
Conforming happens so naturally that we can forget how powerful it is.
We want to be accepted by our peers.
We want to be part of the group.
It's in our biology.
But the thing that makes us human are those times we listen to the whispers of our soul and allow ourselves to be pulled in another direction.
It's very obvious that you listen to the whispers of your soul.
I'm very glad that people like you exist.
Thank you very much for taking the time to have this conversation.
Thanks so much for having me.
Yeah, awesome, man.
Thanks.
