And you became the world's youngest billionaire at the age of 25.
You got Mark Zuckerberg offering you $3 billion.
That was a fateful day, for sure.
But we decided that we'd rather go to Roam.
Was there ever a day where you doubted that decision?
Evan Spiegel is the co -founder behind one of the world's biggest social media platforms, Snapchat.
He turned disappearing messages into a multi -billion dollar empire, redefining how we connect online.
Evan, you don't do many podcasts, do you?
I don't do much public speaking at all, But I wanna share a bit more.
So let's go back to those early days.
So I was an introvert growing up and I loved to build stuff.
In school, I had built my own computer.
And once you start realizing that things that look really complicated on the surface aren't that difficult, you start wondering, what else you can build?
So that led to building Snapchat at 21.
I was an undergrad at Stanford and we'd raised $485 ,000, sort of $4 .25 million valuation.
What a fucking deal.
But back then, there were a lot of apps that would get popular really, really quickly and then sort of fade away.
And a lot of people told us that we should sell it.
they said, you're just sending photos back and forth.
And I was just going to grow for the long term.
But the growth of Snapchat was atypical, to say the least. It was like this virus.
And it was reaching 75 million users on a monthly basis.
So I wondered if you had any advice on the fundamental principles of success.
How much people care about what they do, and the ability to move quickly, is the predictor of success.
And at Snapchat, we have a really small design team.
It's nine people who are constantly generating an incredible number of ideas, and products, and features because 99 % of ideas are not good, but 1 % is.
I want to know what they teach at StampFin because the success rate of creating some of the world's preeminent entrepreneurs is really really high.
There were a lot of very good lessons.
The first one is. I want to keep the Dye of a CEO free and not behind any kind of paywall or subscription model forever.
And the way that we do that is that you guys choose to follow and subscribe to this show.
So if you're listening to the show right now, you might have been sent the episode.
You might have listened to a couple before.
Can you do me a favor?
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Thank you so much. If you do that for me, thank you so much. So I really appreciate it.
Back to the episode.
Evan. When you look back over your earliest years and you try and make sense of the dots that connected in hindsight, I guess as Steve Jobs once said, what are those dots?
There were a couple of fateful choices that my parents made that I think had a huge impact.
One was that they never let me watch TV.
So they never let me watch TV.
Didn't want me to spend my time doing that.
but at the same time would allow me to get whatever book I wanted.
And that was a really, I think formative experience for me.
And reading a book, you get to use your imagination a lot, to try to paint the characters in your own mind.
And that was really helpful.
And because I wasn't watching TV, I had a lot of time on my hands.
And so I like to build stuff.
I mean, when I was young, I would make a little fake hotel in our living room and have a guest experience where my parents could come and try to stay at our hotel.
and I got to use my imagination a lot at home, and my parents never made me feel bad about turning the house upside down, moving chairs around to express myself and make stuff.
Did you feel like you fit it in when you were a kid?
No, not at all, no. I was more of an introvert growing up, so, you know, I think sometimes that made it harder for me to, you know, feel like I fit in.
And when did computers come into the picture for you?
I guess I was exposed to my first computer, gosh, probably kindergarten first grade, maybe around that period of time.
My godfather brought over one of the early Macintoshs to show our family and I got to try out things like kid pics and stuff like that.
And then I guess later on in school, I went to the computer lab a lot.
I really wanted my own computer, so the big breakthrough was when my mom said, if you build your own computer, if you're a computer, you can have it.
We won't let you connect it to the internet.
But if you build your own computer, you can have it to play with.
So, that was probably by sixth grade, I had a teacher who helped me take all the different pieces you need and put them all together to build a computer.
I think this act of putting together these pieces, turn it on, getting windows up and running, just made me realize why it seems so complicated on the outside.
that when you're just looking at that tower, that box, right?
And you haven't yet opened it up and seen what's inside, I think it can seem really confusing or complicated.
But as soon as you realize it's not that hard to put it all together and to get started, I think there's something really empowering about that feeling.
What does that feeling teach you?
I think, and I think this is much more the case now because if you go on YouTube, you can learn how to do pretty much anything, right?
But I think once you start realizing that things that look really complicated or confusing on the surface aren't that difficult.
You start wondering, you know, what else you can build or what else you can create, or, you know, how else you can experiment with something that seems impossible from the outside but really is just not that hard. And you got bullied in school, right?
Was it sixth grade that you got bullied or was it sometime thereafter?
Middle school was not, I think, not the easiest time for me.
Why? As I mentioned, I had trouble fitting in.
I didn't do a lot of activities that some other schoolmates did, like sports and stuff.
I played a little bit on the tennis team.
I think in the combination of not really playing sports with friends, spending a lot of time in the computer lab, lunch or after school, I think just led to me feeling a bit socially isolated at what is I think a tricky time for lots of kids.
What were you like as a kid?
Were you confident?
I don't know if I was confident in myself, per se, but I definitely was confident in my ideas.
Like, I was willing to take a stand for ideas that I thought were different or I was willing to explore ideas that didn't seem popular at the time.
Because I thought it was, you know, important.
I was talking to my dad who's been staying with us for a while and I was talking with him and I was like, what stories do you think I could tell about growing up?
What do you think? And he was like, oh you should tell them you're definitely like a contrarian.
I was like, what do you mean by contrarian?
He's like, don't you remember you wrote that article that was like an expose of the math program because you had been basically interviewed all these teachers and kids and parents and wrote this whole expose about how the math program could be better.
And he was like, it was sort of like maybe better left unsaid in that environment but the school to their credit supported me and like, let me publish it and I think created an environment where kids could challenge authority which was really, you know, something that I learned was okay.
I guess that's a principle as well of many of the people that I meet like you is that they're okay with pushing against convention.
And certain moments in your life, you make these decisions which one would say are contrarian bets.
I can see them all over your story, but clearly that was something innate in you from a fairly young age as you look back.
You don't do many podcasts, do you?
I don't do much public speaking at all.
It's a 2025 New Year's resolution for me, though, so we'll see.
I'm trying to share a bit more.
Why? I think it's really important that people understand our company and what we stand for, why we make the decisions that we do.
And I think part of that is getting to know me and Bobby and I started this business 13 years ago, and we have made a bunch of different choices along the way.
But I think unless we talk about them, nobody knows.
And so it's really important for us to share, you know, how we make decisions in our design philosophy and that kind of thing.
It's really interesting time I think to be a CEO generally because I think even 10, 15 years ago, CEOs of major companies that so many people use and love weren't doing podcasts.
They weren't, they would maybe release press releases and their marketing team would kind of run the comms but there's been this almost big shift towards leadership transparency.
Now, our leaders are expected to be glassboxes.
I think even beyond that, media has really reshaped to focus on individuals, right?
Individuals are what people are interested in.
They're the ones who have distribution.
So I think that like the center of gravity has shifted away from the entity, like the business, to focus more on the individual characters and storytellers.
So you went off to university, you went to Stanford University which is an incredible university, and you went to ultimately try and pursue product design at Stanford, why did you choose product design at that stage in your life?
What was it that was calling you about that course?
Well, what's really cool about product design, is the basic concept is you don't need to wait around and wait for an idea to fall out of heaven or get struck by lightning.
You can systematically create new ideas by listening to people, empathizing with them, and then, basically, prototyping solutions to the problems that they share with you, and then iterating on those solutions by bringing those solutions back to them and saying, what do you think?
Does this solve your problem?
So for me to be able to combine my love of making things with this process for making things that could be useful to people, making new products, that was really exciting to me.
And the product design school was created by a really visionary guy named David Kelly.
I had the opportunity to take a class from him and it was really just an incredible experience.
What is product design for someone like me that has no idea what they teach in such a course?
Is it because my head says like designing like physical products or?
A lot of the product design school at Stanford is oriented around physical products.
Of course now, you know, it's so much more than that.
But when I was there at the time and it was under the mechanical engineering department, it was very oriented around physical products, understanding materials, but all part of this framework of how do we understand the problems that people are facing?
How do we empathize with them?
And then how do we design solutions that solve those problems?
Did you learn entrepreneurship through this time as well?
Because I think in your sophomore year you took a class on entrepreneurship and venture capital, right?
Yeah, that was really a game changer.
So that class called Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital and the class is a series of case studies basically led by entrepreneurs who come in and present the story of creating their business and lessons learned.
And then it's an open Q &A.
I got to listen to their amazing stories and asked them questions and that was super inspiring to me.
Do you remember anything you took away from those classes that ended up being really important for you in terms of an idea or philosophy or anything?
I think the biggest thing that I took away from my time at Stanford and from that class was the focus on going after really really big opportunities.
And I think one of the things that's so different, growing up here in L .A.
I think a lot of the business community that I was exposed to is more focused on cash flow, right?
Like how quickly can this business turn a profit?
How can we do that really predictably?
How much cash are we gonna generate?
At Stanford, the business culture is entirely oriented around well, how big is that opportunity?
Like, is that a huge opportunity?
Is that opportunity big enough?
Because if you're not going after something that could reach billions of people, that's not that interesting.
And that was a totally different way of thinking for me combined with the venture capital approach, which is really to invest a lot of money early in scale quickly and then build out the business later after you've achieved scale, after you've achieved mass adoption.
I've always wondered what they teach at Stanford, especially as it relates to business, because the success rate of creating some of the world's sort of preeminent entrepreneurs is really, really high.
So you're telling me one of the key ideas is big ambitions.
Yeah, and I think it makes sense because it's so hard to create a business.
Your odds of success are so low.
So it's really important that you go after something really big so that if you're successful that at the end of the day There there's a huge opportunity at the end of the rainbow so my head.
I go well If it's really really big then the chance of failure is probably gonna go up So, you know, I can open a coffee shop, right and my chance of success is pretty decent But if I go after building a new social network, which is something only a psychopath would do Then my odds of success are what one in a gazillion I think what is exciting though about the technology business is the way that it scales.
And so I think what's different than your coffee shop example is once you build a great service once, once we build Snapchat one time, it can scale to 850 million people around the world, right?
Whereas you'd have to go build a new coffee shop, you know, on every street corner to scale the business.
And so once I think you start seeing the world in terms of the potential to scale and the potential to build a product or service that can reach billions of people, it really changes the opportunities you identify or the services that you want to build.
Interesting, so the question that most of us, especially in the UK, we often don't think about building businesses that have the potential to reach huge scale.
In part because we don't have as much of a robust, I think technical track record in terms of building great unicorn tech companies in Europe, as you guys do over here.
I don't know if we want to go down this path and talk about entrepreneurship in Europe, but I think one of the real challenges in Europe is how small the different markets are in each country.
And so I think what's really interesting when I talk to entrepreneurs in Europe, oftentimes they're very focused on growing first in their country and using that market as a stepping stone, but all the countries in Europe are quite different, there are different cultures and different languages.
And so sometimes entrepreneurs can spend too much time trying to grow in Europe.
Rather than what I've seen out of some companies in Australia for example, they're on an island, the first thing that these entrepreneurs are thinking about is like, how do I go grow in the US?
How do I go grow in China?
How do I go grow in a really, really big market and get to scale really quickly?
And then I can go reinvest and grow in Europe or grow in other countries where it might be more difficult to grow.
That is so true. Thinking about my investment portfolio, there's about 40 different companies there, and almost every single one of them without really an exception has adopted the approach of we'll crack the UK first and then we'll go and figure out the U .S. but in that transition to the U .S. they encounter tonnes of challenges with how expensive it is to succeed here, like marketing costs here.
If they're in retail, how difficult it is to get into Target or Walmart here.
Also the founders end up building their lives, their families in the U .K. which means that the founders can't really uproot and move to the US later in the journey.
So most of them try the US, waste a ton of money, get burnt, run back and then I've seen that story play out over and over again.
When you think about penetrating these international markets, do you send core team members there?
Oftentimes, what we've done with Snapchat is actually follow the growth.
So looking for countries where people have already started using the product, already love it, are giving us a bunch of feedback, and then we'll send folks there or where we'll figure out how to sort of build on the momentum or make sure it's localized properly and make sure we're working with local creators so that the content's relevant.
But I think, because our service is based on communication.
Snapchat doesn't really work unless you're using it with a friend, you gotta use it together.
What we look for is just that momentum where friends are using it to communicate with one another and then figure out how to build on top of that with the content ecosystem or augmented reality and those sorts of things.
What was your first idea about failed?
Well, there were a point, I mean, I made an orange juicer at one point, but this, but but I think the biggest, the biggest failure was future freshmen.
Bobby and I, I was really fortunate to meet Bobby, he lived across the hall from me at our fraternity at Stanford. And we, you know, we shared this love of making stuff.
So we, you know, we had kind of worked on a couple social ideas that were interesting.
But the one thing we decided to spend a lot of time on was future freshmen, which was designed to help kids apply to college.
It was something that we'd had direct experience with so we could empathize with how difficult the process is We had siblings who were also applying to college So we spent about 18 months building like a full featured website You could select the schools you wanted to go to it would aggregate all the essay questions and requirements and make it really easy to Apply but it was very clear by the end of that 18 months or so that it was going to be really difficult for us To to win we were up against a company called Naviance Naviance, which had their own software suite, and they had a really good
idea, which is they went to all the college counselors around the US, you know, and high schools and things like that and said, hey, tell everyone to use Naviance.
Make sure your students' parents are using our platform.
And so they got a lot of distribution through all the different schools.
And so obviously you're going to use the platform that's being recommended by your college counselor, not an app made by two kids out of Stanford. And so we had a real distribution disadvantage.
And then we also realized, like, even if we were wildly successful, and we got, you know, a million students, you know, a year who apply to four -year colleges, or, you know, something like that, we would have to then re -acquire another million students the next year.
And so, we sort of had this realization that it was going to be really hard to build a big business and that we really ought to try something different.
And most importantly, try to build something that wouldn't take 18 months to build before we got great feedback.
So to try to build something really simple, um, you know that that people could could try and and that we could collect feedback on faster So two points there.
How do you know when to quit?
You've kind of assembled a couple of principles there but Even it's I think it's difficult in business because you can be getting lots of negative feedback But that doesn't necessarily mean that the idea is something that you should quit Maybe it means you should pivot or iterate or just keep going But how did you know what were these stars that align that told you to quit that business?
I think for us it was that we didn't love the product enough.
I think if you really love the product, and you love what you're building, what you're doing, you can fight through just about anything.
I mean, that was really the case with the early days of Snapchat.
We loved using the product.
We were using it all day with our friends.
So we could really, we just had an attachment to it that we never really developed with future freshmen because we weren't applying to college.
So we didn't have that same, I think connection with the product that we ended up developing with Snapchat.
And why does that end up mattering so much, that, like, love and passion for the thing that you're building?
Because I think that's what, you know, the love and passion for what you're building and the love and passion for the people you're working with, like, that's what allows you to get through, you know, all the challenges that come when you try to build a business.
I think if you don't love what you're doing, I mean, I just absolutely love what I do and the team that we get to work with and, of course, the products that we make, the community we serve.
And I think without that, just love for what you do, it can be, you know, it can be hard. And the other thing you said was, you felt that you should go after a business that didn't take like 18 months, like two years of your time to build before you got it to market?
Why is that for entrepreneurs that are listening that maybe have spent years perfecting something in their bedroom that hasn't gone to market yet?
Why was that insight so important to you for your next venture?
I think getting that feedback from your customers as quickly and early as possible is critical, even if it's on like the back of a napkin, like, hey, here's what I'm thinking, this is what it's going to look like.
What do you think about that idea?
Because it's very hard to know whether or not you have a good idea unless you can put something in front of people and have them use it.
That's almost one of the cardinal rules of the product design program that I guess we willfully ignored.
Which is that you should really rapidly prototype and get feedback as quickly as possible so that you know you're on the right track.
Even in the early day, SnapChat before, it was called SnapChat, it was called Picaboo.
It was more focused on disappearing messages, very quickly we learned that wasn't interesting to people.
They wanted to communicate with pictures, they wanted to talk with pictures.
So when we called the app Snapchat, we explained that it was 10 times faster than sending a photo via text message.
People were like, oh, I want that.
Like, that's something that I'll use every day.
And so it was just really interesting to get the feedback really, really early on with an initial version of the app that took a couple of months to create.
I think this is a really interesting point that a lot of founders don't realise that even companies like yours they start with an initial hypothesis which is nearly always wrong but kind of when you hear these stories you hear like had an idea in my basement and then pursued it and then it became a billion -dollar business but there's something in the like humility and the realization that your initial idea might be wild be often that your job isn't to like be right it is to be successful and they're like two different things right i totally agree and i I think the challenge someone I think this was like one
of those Vanity Fair parties a million years ago, the Souvenir was a lighter and like on one side, it's like the director is always right and on the other side, it's like the customers never wrong.
And I think like, that's like always the interesting challenge with a business that you have to stay true to your vision.
The reason why you're building a product your philosophy, but at the same time, your customers are the people you serve and ultimately, how they feel about your product is right whether or not you agree with it.
So how did you get past Future Freshman to your next business?
What was the journey from there?
So you'd met your co -founder at that point, Bobby, and how did you then move over to the idea of Snapchat?
I think one of the things that was really helpful is that I did a semester, a quarter abroad in Cape Town.
And I think taking a step back and being there sort of gave me perspective about what we were working on.
I was working on it while I was still working on Future Freshman while I was there, but It really gave me like more perspective, and I think, you know, I just realized this is gonna be really hard and I don't really love what we're doing.
We gotta find something else.
And was that more than anything a feeling you had?
Like a feeling of just, I'm not enjoying doing this every day, opening my emails, thinking about this problem?
Yeah, I think it's so important to listen to those feelings, yeah.
Yeah, we were very good at not listening to them.
Think of bigger parents and other pressures, right?
To continue doing something.
So then how did you get from there, from being in Cape Town to the idea for Snapchat?
Well, I came back from Cape Town.
I moved into a dorm at Stanford. One of my buddies who had been, Reggie, one of my friends who had been living in our fraternity before was also in that same dorm.
So we were hanging out.
And one day he was like, man, I wish I could send a disappearing photo.
I was like, that's a super interesting idea.
And we looked it up, there were a couple other apps that were doing some similar stuff at the time, but they were very— they were much more like security focused.
They weren't really focused as much on fun, you know.
So that's a super interesting idea, and you could see really quickly that it was simple enough that we could build it and get feedback really quickly, you know.
And I think there were a couple important design choices that we made at the time.
One was opening to the camera.
We really wanted to be the— you know, the tagline is, the fastest way to share a moment.
We want it to be the fastest way to share a moment.
And at the time, I don't know if you remember, the iPhone had like, a shutter animation, so you would like, tap the camera to open it, and it would take forever to like, open up the camera, super slow, and there was a big toggle you had to choose between the camera and video, right?
So there's all this friction in using the camera.
So we decided we're gonna open the camera, we're gonna get rid of that animation, and you're gonna be able to go straight into capturing what's happening in front of you before the moment disappears.
So I think that was a really important choice that we made.
And then, of course, the choice to let people choose how long they wanted to let someone see their snap.
But with the caveat that you could always take a screenshot.
And that was probably one of the most important pieces of feedback we got in the initial day.
So we built the prototype of the app.
I took it to my design class.
Here's this new app.
It's called Pick a View.
You can send a photo that disappears.
This is really different than social media.
social media is all about permanence and you're trying to look popular and collect all these likes and comments and pretty pictures, that's the 1 % of moments in your life.
And here's Snapchat, this is our peekaboo at the time, here's peekaboo, this is for the other 99%, all the other moments that you might be embarrassed to post to all your friends, but that you want to share with your best friend or your family.
Everyone's like, this is never going to work because you can always take a screenshot.
This makes no sense.
So it doesn't go away, you can take a screenshot.
And I think one of the big inventions and that's why I think it's so important to get this feedback.
One of the big inventions that we made that's later that summer when Bobby and I were working out of my dad's house, we invented a way to detect if someone had taken the screenshot, and so we would send a little notification back that said, hey, you know, your friend took a screenshot.
And I think that was part of what made the service fun, that, you know, you could set how long it would appear for your friend, but if they wanted to save it, they could take a screenshot.
But you would know that they saved it.
And I think that was one of the early feedback loops of the product that helped make people feel comfortable using it for picture messaging.
How long was that journey between you having that conversation with Reggie about wanting photos to disappear and the moment when you knew Snapchat was going to be a big deal?
Like, how long is that gap?
I would say it took until maybe certainly the following school year for me, so over that summer Bobby and I went to my dad's house, worked a lot on the service, renamed it, snapchat, got a lot of feedback.
When we were using it with our friends, everyone wanted like, hey, can I add a caption?
Can I add, you know, can I draw on it?
Because in the original version, it was just a photo, but because people were, you know, use it just, it's just our friend group, using it to communicate.
We needed to add things like captions and drawing.
So I think the Snapchat launch in the app store at about September of 2011, and it probably wasn't until late that fall maybe, or even into the following beginning of 2012, that I remember sitting in the back of my classroom.
And we had a snap counter that would count the total number of snaps ever sent, you know?
And in the early days, it was like hundreds or 1000 or whatever, and I'd refresh the page and the number wouldn't change.
But by that time, by the beginning of 2020, 2012, every time I refreshed the Snap Counter page, the number would go up and it would jump by one or two or 10, so it was clear that people were using the service and communicating, and that's when I was like, this is fun.
Not only are we loving it with our friends but there's more people using it too.
One of the things you said there is that you were using people around you, your friends, to give you feedback on what features you should add next.
You said people wanted to write on it and they wanted to add captions.
As a founder, that must be quite hard because you're getting lots of feedback to change lots of things all the time.
How do you know what to filter as good feedback that you'll implement versus a distraction or bad feedback?
Is there a framework at all that you have you've had to deploy?
So I think all feedback is good feedback.
All feedback is valuable.
I think what you do with it is what matters.
So for example, let's take the use of the the caption tool.
For example, you know we could have added a super clunky caption tool that took forever to use that was like You know like social media where you add the caption at the bottom of the photo and tap it and hashtiles up Well way that we decided to implement Captions to make it easier for people to communicate is all you have to do is tap on the photo Right after you took it, so you'd snap stake the photo.
Tap the keyboard would pop up there was a little caption bar You know the caption bar Well, you know that still allowed you to see the photo behind it instead of it being sort of attached to the photo It was right on top of the photo.
Then as soon as you hit enter, you could jump to the page where you select which friends you wanted to send it to.
I think what was more important than hearing feedback of, hey, I want a way to add a caption or express more on the snap, the way that we implemented that feedback and designed something really fast and easy to use is why that black bar caption is now, I think, synonymous with Snapchat and is well -known around the world.
So it was a year from the idea to the day when you raised capital for the first time roughly?
Yeah, more or less.
And talk me through that.
So how much did you raise?
How did you go about raising the capital?
And what was the business like at that time in terms of users and downloads?
Yeah, I don't remember the exact sort of user statistics, but what was really, really helpful is that we had about a year of data.
So if you remember back then there were a lot of apps that were sort of like a flash in the pan.
They would get popular really, really quickly and then fade away.
Venture investors would jump into these apps and then apps would get really popular and then fade.
When we were raising money, one of the things that really helped us is we had a year's worth of data to basically show, hey, when people start using this product to talk to their friends, they keep doing it, because it's really fun and it's better than text message based communication.
Visual communication is way more fun, more powerful, more expressive than text based communication.
And people use it consistently once they learn how.
And that was really important to the investors who are worried, is this just another flash in the pan type service.
So we really just led, I think we had like three, maybe five slides of just the data.
Do you remember feedback you got from investors at that early stage?
I think this is important, because all founders are going to get the email that tells them that they're not onto something.
Yeah. I think the biggest piece of feedback was just like, hey, this seems like something that these really big powerful tech companies are just going to copy.
And you know, it's they're really tough to compete with.
So, you know, we were not really sure we want to invest in something that's going up against these really, really big powerful tech companies.
I mean, there's some wisdom in that.
Certainly a lot of foresight in that one.
Yeah, because the odds anyway, of building a social networking app, are extremely low.
It's we were saying before we started recording, that you've got to be almost like delusional to think that you can.
I think at that time too, Snapchat came last after Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, like you name it, all of those services had come first. And so I think the idea that that was still at the time when people believed that network effects meant that you couldn't compete, right?
Whoever has the biggest network is gonna win, no one else is gonna be able to compete.
And so I think there was that concern that you know, oh, if these other competitors are much bigger and they have network effects.
How are you ever going to grow and compete?
That was a big piece of feedback and then I think there was just a whole other group of people who didn't really understand what the service was and so weren't that interested.
But Jeremy at Lightspeed reached out.
His profile picture was a photo of him with Obama and I was like, oh, okay, must be like a real, now with AI you never know.
But back then, it was like, okay, must be legit.
So we met up with them and hit one of his partners that I guess his daughter used Snapchat and loves Snapchat And so they understood the service and what it was about and how she was using with her friends and so they ended up investing $485 ,000 at a four point two five million dollar valuation What a fucking deal insight.
How many users did you have at the time when you raised that capital?
I would have guessed about a hundred thousand or something like that.
And you the valuation was four million dollars roughly 4 .25, yeah.
In that first year, up until the point that you raised that money, did you ever doubt that Snapchat was going to work?
And I guess to understand the question a bit more, you almost have to add a goal or ambition to it.
So I'm presuming you wanted it to be and thought it could be a company.
Did you ever doubt that it would be?
Was there anything that ever happened in that first year?
there was one moment where we accidentally took down a Snapchat infrastructure for three days.
So the service stopped working entirely for three days, actually something broke and it took us three days to fix it and we were like, we're done.
I mean, what are we gonna do?
The service has been on down for three days, it's a messaging service, so people haven't been able to talk to their friends, Like, is anyone going to use it?
And when we turned it back on, people just started using it again.
And that gave us a lot more conviction in that we had a product that people really just loved using.
How and why was it growing?
Was it a marketing campaign or was it organic?
The only thing that we ever saw work was friends using it with friends, telling their friends about it, and wanting to learn how to use it.
Because communicating with photos was a new thing.
I mean, people hadn't been talking with pictures before.
And even the way people thought about photos, it was like a photo is for saving a precious moment, right?
Like that's, or like a family photo.
Like that's really how people were thinking about photos at the time.
You weren't able, like that was just coming out of the digital camera, like plug it into your computer and upload the photos era.
So there was this massive, I think behavioral change of people realizing like, wow, like no, a picture is worth a thousand words.
And now that I can take it instantly on my phone and send it with my friend and, you know, a couple hundred milliseconds, like we can talk with pictures instead of just use pictures to save memories.
I don't think we really remember that.
Isn't that crazy that we don't remember?
It wasn't that long ago.
I know, but we just don't remember.
Like, as you were saying, I was like, fuck yeah, you couldn't send a photo to your friend and talk.
I was like, I was trying to think of the app that I could have used back then to do that, and there just isn't one.
Yeah, but now I'm dating myself, you know, it's terrible.
Yeah. No, that's crazy.
We forget that because it's so commonplace now on every app, you know, and I guess they they ultimately got that from you, copied that from you.
I've got this photo from the early days.
Do you remember this photo?
Ah, this is awesome.
This picture? That is just great.
What is this picture?
Where are you? What are you doing?
Who is that? Well this was actually our first office, which was great.
It was called the Blue House in Venice.
Five, two, three ocean front walk.
And actually, you know, things sort of had reached a breaking point in my dad's house.
I think there were seven or eight of us living there.
You know, one night his girlfriend at the time, now wife, came in and one of our teammates was like sleeping on the couch with a blanket she had bought him for Christmas.
And she was just like, I think there's like, we've had enough here.
So we had to get an office and move out.
And we were going to dinner in Venice and we walked past this old blue house and it had a four lease sign on it.
And we were like, wow, this would be wild.
We could have an office on the beach, on the Venice Boardwalk.
Let's call them and we call them.
They wanted a crazy amount per square foot in rent.
We couldn't afford it at the time, but we ultimately waited a bit longer and we're able to negotiate that down quite a bit and moved in to the Blue House.
And I think the best thing about the Blue House was that the Venice Boardwalk is one of the most popular tourist destinations in California, maybe even the world.
I mean, it's more than ten million people a year come to the Venice boardwalk, and we had a big ghost logo, our big app icon outside, and all day long people would come up and talk to us about the app or give us feedback or need help with their account.
And so we were just immersed in people from all over the world who were using Snapchat and wanted to come talk to us about it.
Ultimately it became like a little too much, but in the beginning, it was just so amazing to be right there on the boardwalk with so many people.
So how many people could fit into the blue house?
I think, you know, at max capacity, it's 20 something.
I think we were 20 something people by the time we moved out, maybe 30.
It was pretty crazy, I mean, I was playing footsie with people under the table.
We were pretty smooshed.
And how many users did you have at that time, for people to be coming up on the Broad Walk and having conversations, you must've been pretty popular?
At that point it must've been millions, I would guess, yeah.
And you've dropped out of university by that point, obviously?
Yeah. Tell me about that decision.
Because I know the app's growing and everything, but to drop out of a prestigious university can't be a super easy decision.
I really felt I had no choice.
I didn't have enough credits to graduate.
I mean, I was doing the project design program, the engineering program, had a lot more classes that I had to finish.
And ultimately, we'd raised $485 ,000 from investors.
And you know, I was spending all day trying to pass these, you know I was taking I think 20 credits at the time or something and trying to trying to work on our business I just couldn't do both at the same time So I was like, you know, hopefully one day I'll be able to go back I actually did end up going back and got my degree in 2018, which was awesome.
And But I just couldn't do both at the same time.
Why did you get back into your degree?
I really did not want to have that debate with our kids where they're like, you know, I mean where they're like but dad, like, you know what I mean?
Like, you dropped out, you don't have a degree, like, why do I need one?
I think colleges can be really valuable.
It's not for everybody, but it made a huge impact in my life.
So I wanted to be able to show how important that is to our kids.
I was thinking earlier when we were talking about college slash university.
The world was different when you went to university in college and you've got these four boys now, the oldest, I think, is 14 years old.
And if he wants to be like Dad, say he wanted to follow in your footsteps, is there anything else based on how the world is currently that you'd be advising him to learn before the age of like 21?
Are there any topics or degrees that you would be pushing him towards now if he wanted to be like Dad, if that was his decision?
I think one of the most important things today is really nurturing creativity.
I mean, I think creativity is really the X factor, certainly in the age of AI, right?
And so I think nurturing creativity, finding ways to develop those skills.
For example, Flynn is 14, he loves drawing.
Unbelievably talented at drawing.
And I think sometimes he's like, well, I don't know if there's a career in drawing, but I think sometimes he doesn't see that drawing is just the way that he's expressing creativity.
Drawing is the beginning of that journey of exercising those muscles in your brain that allow you to visualize something that other people don't see, right?
And that's one way.
That's one tool, one skill he can use to express what's in his brain.
But I think exercising that muscle, that creativity, is so important.
And I think creativity is just becoming more and more rare ultimately because so much of our society is oriented around things we can measure.
Creativity is so hard to measure.
And so I think it can be really tough to find the dedication to invest in developing creativity when it's uncertain what the outcome is.
But that's really what I would encourage him or so many people to do.
We're all born creative, we're all born with this ability to express ourselves.
And it's only over time I think that we stop practicing that ability or we become fearful of expressing ourselves.
And I think that can be overcome.
Because we think through job titles at that age, don't we?
We think what's the job title that I should be aiming at?
So doctor, lawyer, et cetera, versus we don't necessarily think as much about collecting useful long -term skills, I'd say.
My girlfriend's little brother now, he's like racking his brain, trying to pick a job title for the next 60 years of his life and make it don't work like that, you know.
And the world is changing so quickly now as well.
It's probably makes more sense to try and get some fundamental skills that will translate.
Plus job titles are totally ridiculous anyways.
In the early days, we would just make up, anyone who joined the team, we would just make up their title, I would have nothing to do with anything.
So job titles are ridiculous when the team is small, right?
Just in general, right?
Because I think people anchor to job titles to confer status, right?
And I think ultimately, amazing impact, creativity, great ideas come from anywhere, right?
And the more that you focus your organization around hierarchy, I think the less you're focusing on the right things, which are, how are we making sure great ideas are coming from anywhere, getting surfaced, you know, and being built?
But hierarchy comes into place when things start to get big and we need to put processes and reporting lines in place.
How do you defend against that?
I think you're getting at the fundamental problem that all companies end up having and I think there's a great book called Loon Shots, which I really love, that actually gets at this issue directly.
And basically, what the author Safi Bakal found was essentially that very big companies, once they get a lot larger, they have a lot of customers to serve, they need to build all this organizational infrastructure, and ultimately that comes with hierarchy.
But the ones that continue to innovate that are very successful at innovating consistently over long periods of time also have very small, very flat teams that don't have any hierarchy at all that are really, really focused on innovating and on trying new things.
And ultimately, the companies that are really successful find a way to build a relationship between the huge organization that is supporting all these customers and needs to be operationally rigorous and metrics focused, builds a relationship between them and this very small group of people who are trying crazy things.
And he gives a lot of examples.
You know, one of the ways that the United States was able to win World War II, they had this crazy group of scientists that were trying new things like radar and stuff like that at the time.
But then they were taking those ideas, bringing them to the military, which is a huge, very structured hierarchical organization, and saying, what do you guys think about this?
How can you play with this?
What are your ideas?
What are your feedback?
Take this into battle.
Put it on an airplane to see what happens and then give that feedback back to this very unstructured, flat, small group of inventors and scientists.
And by really focusing on the relationship between those parts of the organization, ultimately companies can figure out how to build a strong relationship between the two and then innovate over time.
So how have you done that at Snapchat?
At Snapchat we have a really small design team.
I think it would surprise people.
it's nine people. It is totally flat, so there's no fancy titles.
Everyone is a product designer.
The way that the team works is very focused around making things.
That's the entire job.
In fact, your very first day when you start, we have design critiques once a week for a couple of hours, your very first day you have to present something.
So you have to make something and present it.
And what that does that I think is really interesting and powerful is that ultimately, of course, on your first day, when you have no context for what the company's working on, no idea what's going on, how on earth are you supposed to come up with a great idea?
I mean, it's almost impossible, but you have to show an idea your first day.
And so ultimately, on your very first day, your worst fears come true, that we're sitting there altogether and we're looking at an idea that's ultimately not that great.
I mean, sometimes they're pretty good, but ultimately not that great.
And that, I think, opens the door to creativity because you've already, it already happened, you already failed, the idea wasn't good.
And what ultimately happens on our design team is that 99 % of ideas are not good, but 1 % is.
And we really abide by that idea of like, you know, or the concept, that like the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
So the team is just constantly generating an incredible number of ideas and products and features and that sort of thing.
And ultimately, our job is to try to figure out what the great ones are, and then, most importantly, build a strong relationship between this little team that's coming up with all this stuff all the time and our much bigger engineering organization, our bigger product organization, who also have all sorts of amazing ideas and are also innovating in their own way and build a flywheel between the two where we can ultimately make a lot of new products and then consistently make them better.
So many questions that I'm very, very curious about.
The first one is, do you measure the amount of ideas is that small design team are producing.
No, but I do know when we need more.
Okay, fine, okay. So you've got a sort of intuitive feeling.
It's small team, you can stay close.
And then how do you get the bigger organization to cooperate with this smaller design team when the bigger organization have their own incentives, they have their own planning cycles.
They have their own egos, as all humans do.
How do you get them to work together?
For us the bridge organization is probably our product organization.
And they really help connect the dots that's between the engineering folks and the design folks.
And a lot of this stuff actually mirrors the relationship that Bobby and I had in the very early days, where I was more design focused.
I had a bit of an engineering background and had taken some CS, but I was more design focused.
And Bobby is an unbelievable computer scientist, right?
He took math and computer science at school, but he also loved design.
And so, we had this really powerful relationship where I could talk with him about new ideas and design and he could talk about the engineering constraints.
So for example, when we were inventing this notion that you would tap to take a photo and hold to record a video.
At the time that was a really big deal, right, to help people more easily use their cameras.
Now every camera on a smartphone is tapped for a photo, hold for video.
But the engineering complexity that was required to enable that design was something that we really talked about and worked through because the way that the design and the animations had to work and the way that you held your finger really mattered with the way that ultimately we were flipping between the video feed or capturing a still image.
And it was that dialogue that ultimately ended up resulting in a new product and a new thing that people could use.
So we mirrored a lot of that and tried to build that relationship across the organization constantly over time where there's a real dialogue and an understanding and an appreciation both for design and engineering, you know, that oftentimes is facilitated by our product organization.
In terms of that small design team, you said you have a critique session once a week.
What is a critique session?
So it's just where we look at work.
That's all we do. People just share new work.
So for a couple of hours, we'll just look at all the new ideas.
That have come out of that small team?
And new designs that have come out of the last week from that team.
And these can be anything?
Really anything, yeah.
Oftentimes, they're oriented around on solving a problem.
So kind of coming back to that product design philosophy, like what problem are we trying to solve?
How can we empathize with our community?
Okay, our creators are having friction posting to Snapchat.
It's confusing the way that they're reading their story replies, or that's not working the right way.
How can we make that easier?
And then we'll just look at a ton of ideas.
And are these, we said there's 8 or 9 people.
Are they working in isolation within that team?
Or are they working as one team?
They very often are getting feedback from one another, oftentimes are tackling projects together in small teams, but all come together on a regular basis.
I love this point you were making about the key thing that you've discovered is that the game is more ideas, not trying to find a perfect idea.
More ideas, more feedback.
More ideas with more feedback.
You increase your failure rate, you get more feedback.
It does go contrary to what people think when they're building a business.
They think the game is to have the perfect idea.
But those are all people who have never built a business before.
Yeah, because eventually you learned you learned something right you learn that you're not that good at guessing.
Yeah and I think ultimately you have to maximize your rate of learning.
I mean that's that's just critical.
Maximize your rate of learning.
Let's go back to those early days.
You're in that office when you think about the people in that photo that were part of the First Order 20, how important in hindsight is hiring?
I think it's everything.
I think it's everything and these were really, really just wonderful people.
I mean still you know in many cases close friends and I think interestingly there was a moment I realized, David, Daniel, Bobby and a couple other of our original engineers, all of them you know original engineers were musicians as well and it was really interesting this moment you know because the early folks who are working on the engineering side of Snap were unbelievably creative, and unbelievably talented.
It was an interesting like aha moment, because I think often times people think of the disciplines as separate.
Oh, there's designers, and then over there there's engineers.
And I think so much of the magic actually is when those disciplines combine or cross over, or people who really love and appreciate both.
Especially for a company that's aspiring to be creative in everything that it's doing.
On this point of hiring, did you make any hiring mistakes in those early days?
Oh, absolutely. And what were those mistakes?
Not necessarily people, but the frameworks were off or the way that you've hired these people or what caused the mistakes?
I think occasionally in the early days, we almost like over indexed on the wrong types of experience, if that makes sense.
So one of the things we really wanted to do was bringing people who were very, very experienced leaders who had run much bigger teams. That was like, if we want to build a big company we got to find people who have run big companies and big teams. And so one of the early engineering leaders who joined our team, I think he was coming from working on a team of 300 or something like that at Amazon, was coming to like a team of eight at Snapchat.
But we were really thinking ahead about like, how can we hire people who can actually help us scale here and build something really big.
And I think that sort of focus on leadership experience and experience leading at scale was really valuable.
I think what was often times a bit less valuable in those early days was almost more people who had very specific domain expertise.
So there were people who had come for an interview or something like that and be like, well, I think what you guys should do is add likes because every other platform has likes.
So if you just add likes, then people will use your service more and not really coming coming with the same open mindedness and curiosity about, why is Snapchat doing it differently?
Like why don't you have likes and comments?
Like what, how are you thinking about the service differently and how can I change and grow and adapt to the way that you're thinking about it to help you grow faster?
And so I think now one of the things we're always looking for in the interview process is adaptability, right?
It's amazing to have prior experience, but the question is how do you apply that prior experience to a new context and change and adapt the way that you see things, change your perspective, to be able to meet the needs of our business, which is different than other businesses.
What are the other factors?
If you were to make a perfect Snapchat employee now, what would their personality be?
Their psychology, their attributes?
We have three values and three leadership behaviors.
Three values are kind, smart, and creative.
That's been, those have been the values since the very beginning, really, because Bobby and I were just having a conversation.
Like, what kind of people do we want to work with?
Kind, smart, creative.
Like, great. But since then, and we can spend some more time talking about this, I think what was really fascinating over time was to learn, and by the way, 10 years ago, people were not talking about kindness at work.
I mean, people will be like, sorry, what?
No, kind, smart, creative.
Like, why kindness?
What we found was that with, that the relationship between kindness and creativity is really, really important.
Because unless people feel comfortable coming up with crazy ideas.
Unless they feel comfortable that if they say they have some new idea and it, actually, isn't that great, that they're not gonna be laughed at that they'll be supported, right?
Unless you have that supportive culture, it's very hard to be creative.
And so we learned over time, that actually, wow, kindness is kind of the essential ingredient if you want to have a creative culture.
But anyways, kind of smart, creative, smart, pretty, self -explanatory.
And then when it comes to leadership behaviors, there's three leadership behaviors, or attributes we look for.
I just want to pause on that point of kind.
Do you make a distinction between someone being nice and being kind?
Because in your environment, you also mentioned that you do these critique sessions and you're giving people critical feedback and if a culture gets a little bit too kind, then isn't that going to inhibit innovation and feedback?
We always differentiate between kind and nice.
There's a couple examples that I think help with that.
For one, I think it's really kind to tell somebody that they have something stuck in their teeth.
If you have something stuck in your teeth, you want to know about it, right?
It might make you feel awkward. Certainly as the person pointing it out, it's a little awkward, right?
If you just want to be nice, you pretend nothing's going on, and you just say, oh, you know, nice to meet you, whatever, but if you're really being kind and you want to help that person you say, you know, you've got something stuck in your teeth, you got to take care of that.
And I think that helps distinguish between niceties and being kind and really wanting to help somebody.
I think another great example is if somebody who's really struggling, you know, at work or they're struggling to grow or they're struggling to perform their duties at Snap, the nice thing to do is maybe just make them feel good about it.
Oh, don't worry. I'm sure it'll be OK.
The kind thing to do is really help them succeed, right?
Say, hey, this isn't working because you're doing X, Y, and Z, here are some things to do to think about that differently, provide that really direct feedback.
That allows people to grow.
And that's the kind thing to do rather than just making them feel good about not meeting expectations.
leadership values. You said this.
Leadership values. Okay, there's three of them.
The first one is T -shaped leadership.
So we talk a lot about T -shaped leadership.
What we mean by that is that you have a real depth of experience, a depth of expertise in a given area and then a real breath of understanding of the business overall and an ability to connect with lots of different types of people who think different ways.
Because you need to be able to connect your expertise to all the different areas of our business to really drive impact as a leader.
I mean, I think that's one of, like, almost the hallmarks of running a business today, is it's basically impossible to do anything interesting without a team, right?
The way that the world works there is very complicated and it's really important that you have folks who have deep expertise, but then they have to apply it to all these other cross -functional areas, you know?
So they have to have a familiarity with it and an ability to relate to people with different viewpoints or other, you know, areas of expertise.
And as we proceed with this, these leadership principles.
Are you saying that, in order to become a leader at Snapchat, you need these three things?
Or are you saying everybody at Snapchat needs these three things?
We think everyone is a leader, so we do apply it broadly.
But of course, I think it's really important as we're thinking about hiring or bringing in a new leader that this is something that we talk to folks about.
So if someone's not quite T -shaped, if they're a little bit eye -shaped, is there something they can do to become a bit more T -shaped?
Yeah, that's almost maybe the easier one, right?
But if you can build on a real depth of expertise by going engaging with folks maybe outside of your comfort zone or in different parts of the business and build that curiosity and understanding, that helps develop, I think, that breadth of understanding.
I think what's harder is if you're a generalist and you don't have that deep skill set or that deep area of expertise, it's really, really hard to bring enough value to the team, right?
And I think that's where people get frustrated with the idea of middle management, right?
Where it's like, oh, this is just a person who knows a little about a lot, but can't really help me solve this problem because they don't really know the details.
They don't really understand how to help me grow as an individual or solve this tough technical problem.
And so I think that's why that area of expertise is so important because it's so hard to inspire people that you're working with if you don't know a lot about the area that you're working in.
And do you need to be a T -shaped leader at Snapchat now and when there was 10 of you in the bedroom or in your dad's house?
has it always been important or is that a function of being bigger?
That's a great question.
I wish we had been more thoughtful about the leadership values and characteristics we were looking for back then I think you know when you're working on a team of 10 or a team of 20 you're not thinking as much about what what leadership characteristics are really important to us it's more about like how do we survive tomorrow you know but but I think over time as we learned what leaders were really successful at snap we were able to you know to kind of look at those attributes and say okay you These are the leaders who really succeed here and drive a lot of value for our business.
Before we move on to the second two, if this Evan could have gone back to the Evan that was running a team of 10 and he could have pulled them aside and said, listen, here's some advice that you're going to need to know about leadership in building this team, the most critical advice I could give you at this time.
And this is for all the entrepreneurs out there that are building it.
They're laying the foundations of a potentially very big company right now.
What would you have whispered in his ear?
I would have said everything's going to be OK.
Really? everything's gonna be okay.
I think sometimes people are too focused on making the right decision and not as focused on fixing it if they're wrong.
And I think what I would have put more emphasis on is just how quickly are you changing your mind when you receive new information?
How quickly are you fixing a problem or a mistake if you didn't make the right decision in the first place?
And that's the feedback loop that is so mission critical to building a business in the early days.
It has very little to do.
Obviously, there's existential decisions.
Those can create some big problems for your business.
But most decisions are not existential decisions.
The more important thing is to make a decision.
Then if you're wrong, fix it.
I think it's the when you're wrong fixing it part that deserves most of the attention.
Also, how you can identify who your great leaders are, who really talented folks on the team are.
because they're very quick to point out, I don't think we did that right.
I think we should take this path, this other path that we maybe hadn't considered the first time, and I think it takes courage to say that in an organisation, rather than just say, oh, we're doing a great job.
Mm -hmm. And when you're back there and you've made a mistake, there's something you've done wrong.
In hindsight, did you know in your chat?
Because one of the things that I think of when I was a first time founder building a student notice board was I would get feedback, and the feedback would be saying, you're wrong about this, you need to change.
And I think that sometimes there was a part of me that knew but I was like too scared to act upon it.
So I kind of like gaslit myself to just keep going.
And I think a lot of founders do that.
I know this because they come to me in my portfolio and they say, ah Steve, there's this guy we've hired and he's been there now for a year and he's just not cutting it, I'm like, why the fuck are you telling me?
And they're procrastinating avoiding the conversation but clearly they know, clearly they know it's not right.
It's funny you say that because anytime someone comes to ask me about like that type of people advice, like what do you think we should do?
You know, do you think that I'm like, it sounds like you've already made up your mind.
Yeah. So yeah, I think it is really important to, you know, act on that feedback.
Not be afraid to change direction quickly.
If, you know, you realize that you made a mistake.
But as you point out, it's hard to do.
And sometimes it is worth seeing if, you know, your bet, you know, plays out.
don't want to thrash the team and change your mind all the time.
So sometimes, it is sometimes we're seeing things through a little bit before you change.
Is there anything else you would have said to that younger Evan in your dad's house?
Advice? At that point before we had scaled to a lot of thousands of people, I think we could have been much more clear on the culture, the kind of smart creative piece and really embedded that and the team prior to scaling.
Because one of the biggest challenges that we confronted was as we went from 20 people to 2 ,000 people, we basically imported all of these different cultures from all sorts of different companies.
We imported an Amazon contingent, who they really loved their six page documents.
We imported a Google contingent and they're very focused on consensus based decision making.
We imported a contingent from Meta as well.
And I think we were too slow to be really clear about what our values were and what that looks like in practice what those behaviors looked like and I think if we had Earlier and faster.
What so when we're evaluating performance we look at our values kind smart creative.
We have specific behaviors attached to that that are actually Research -backed and whatever we did a whole study to understand which of those behaviors are really tied to performance in those values but that gives people a really clear framework for the expectations for how to behave at Snap and our unique culture.
And there was a moment in time where I felt like we were losing control of our culture and I wasn't happy with our company and the team.
I remember I was complaining to a friend of mine, this is probably like your story of folks coming to you and saying, oh it's not working.
I was complaining to a friend of mine and I was just like, man I just don't, like I don't like it, like I don't like my job, I don't like what our companies become, and she just looks at me and she's like, then fix it.
Great point. I think that it had changed and grown so quickly that it was really hard to stay true to our values.
But I think I really took that advice to heart and just started trying to fix it with our team, getting really clear about the values, getting really clear about the behaviors, holding a higher bar and saying, hey, if you're not into the kinds of more creative thing, that's okay, there are other companies with different cultures, but that really matters to us here.
So this would have been a pretty remarkable thing to do, but do you wish you had made, like, a culture Bible in the early days, and then, like, I'm thinking practically, what should a founder do then, if they're at that stage when they've got a small team now, to prevent what happened to you in terms of the culture becoming a little bit too pick and mix?
So I think it's less about the culture Bible and more about how you apply whatever your values are to your hiring processes, to your promotion processes, to whether or not people still work at the company.
And so we were too slow to embed those values in our performance evaluation.
And so I think if we had been way faster at just saying, hey, these are our values and what we stand for.
This is what it looks like in practice.
And if you're not living up to that, this isn't the right home for you.
Like that would have helped shape the culture a lot faster.
Also because immediately people see, oh wow, if they're serious about their values and they're asking people to leave if they won't live up to their values, well, then I better get on board with the values or find another culture that fits my personality better.
It just doesn't seem like a priority to founder's culture.
I think it's such a priority, but it's hard to understand what it means.
I had so many people telling me you've got to really focus on the culture, focus on the culture, like what do you mean by culture?
It's actually just how people behave. I mean, that's really what we're saying, Like, what is the collection of group behaviors that are acceptable or norms in your company?
So I think instead of using this big culture word, which I was hearing a lot, but not understanding how it was, like, tactically connecting to our business, I think when we're talking with founders, we should just be more specific about how people are living the values of their company every day through their behaviors.
And that's dictated essentially by the incentives of the organization.
Because what you said is you basically introduced incentive structures that you're going to be exited or you're going to be promoted?
And getting really real about that and serious.
But, you know, the tough conversations come where it's like, wow, that person's a superstar, you know, but they're not really living our kindness value.
And Bobby I think is so, was so great on this.
Bobby is like, Evan, there's no such thing as a brilliant jerk.
If you're really brilliant, how could you possibly be a jerk?
I mean, it just meant you know and you're like, damn, I love that.
So, I think this concept that like, yeah, if you're really that smart, how could you possibly be a jerk to people?
I mean, what? That I think really informed our approach to building out our team.
And I think it gives you that clarity in those moments where you're like, wow, but they're so smart or they're so talented.
It's like, yeah, but if they're that smart and talented, why can't they just be kind to people?
What was the worst advice you got in those early years?
We talked about some of the good advice and the good advice you'd give now, but was there any really bad advice that you got that seemed to make sense but was terrible advice?
Well, I think a lot of people, in the early days, told us that we should sell it.
I mean, there was one embarrassing moment, I remember, I joined a conference call early with some of our lawyers, and I don't think they had known.
I had joined and they were talking about, you know, this thing is basically going to zero.
I mean, this was in the early days.
Like, it's just a fad, you know, da, da, da, da, and I'm like, oh, hey guys, you know.
They didn't know you were on the court.
They hadn't known I'd joined, because I'd joined a minute or two early, or something like that.
So I think there was a lot of skepticism in the early days.
And a lot of people who said, you know, hey, sell now while you can.
You know, you're competing in a really, really tough industry with a lot of big players, and you don't know if people are going to continue to love this product.
But I think what they missed was our vision for the future, right?
They only saw what was in the public.
We were working on all sorts of, and still are, working on all sorts of amazing new products that give us conviction in the future and our ability to make products that people really love, but I think from the outside when you were looking at Snapchat you're like people are just sending photos back and forth.
I mean how is this ever gonna be a business?
How is this ever gonna grow for the long term?
But you do end up getting an offer of a very famous offer when you're 23 years old from Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook.
Yeah that was a fateful, faithful day for sure.
How did how does that story begin?
Is it an email, a phone call, an introduction?
I think it was an initial email.
And I think we met at some point, and they were interested in what we were doing, and at that time they were working on a competitor called Poke, and so they were talking with us, hey, we're exploring this space kind of thing, what do you think, and maybe you want to join Facebook.
I think they had just acquired Instagram too, like a year earlier or something like that.
And our view was that Instagram had been wildly undervalued in that acquisition and ultimately had given up like a massive, massive opportunity.
Instagram was sold for a billion, was it?
A billion, yeah. And WhatsApp was 19 billion roughly, I think.
Yeah, I think so. You're 23 years old at that point.
You've got Facebook Mark Zuckerberg offering you a lot of money.
I heard that it was $3 billion they offered?
We never talked about it publicly, but yeah.
Is that the number?
That's not technically the number, but it's what's been reported publicly, so we can go with that.
Okay, but did you get an offer?
There was a real conversation about what it would look like to join forces, but ultimately, And we talked with our board and our investors.
We decided that we'd rather go to loan so.
I'm trying to understand as a 23 year old, if someone offers me $3 billion for an app that I've started, you said you're probably still at your dad's house or in the blue office at that point?
Yeah, I think we were definitely my dad's house.
You're in your dad's house and someone's offering you $3 billion for an app.
What wisdom do you have that enables you to turn that down?
I wish I could say it was wisdom.
I think it was just that Bobby and I loved what we were doing.
We loved what we were working on.
We believed in the future of it.
And ultimately, we were able to convince our investors as well that, like, our opportunity was much bigger over time.
And, you know, so I think that's what gave us, I guess, the confidence in making that decision.
Did you ever get to meet with Mark or speak to Mark about it?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I've known Mark for a long time.
And was he – he was keen to buy it?
We had some interesting conversations about what it could look like for us to work at Facebook.
I want to be so sensitive to those conversations that I don't want to speak out of term, but he's very strategic and very good at identifying.
At the time, they had a piece of software that was identifying sort of what are the fast -growing apps so that they could pursue them for acquisitions.
I'm just so interested to see how those things play out.
It's almost, it sounds like something you'd see in a movie where you get this call from someone like Mark Zuckerberg who's built this massive empire, and it feels like you get summoned.
I would imagine you get summoned from your dad's house to come and meet him, and you went to Facebook's offices to meet him, I'm guessing in person.
I think at one point, I went up there.
He came and met us at, we met at Cheryl's condo in Santa Monica or something like that.
Cheryl had a condo there, and so I think that's where we first met, Bobby and I met him.
And did he tell you that he was gonna copy you if you didn't sell he just explained that he was working on poke and That you know, it was For picture messaging and that kind of thing And I'm guessing you didn't want to join a big company at that point It was less so like not wanting to join a big company.
I think fundamentally We Wanted to build a business that was different I mean you go back to our first blog post and the way that we talked about wanting to offer an alternative to social media.
That we felt like social media was about being pretty imperfect and we wanted a way to communicate with our friends.
It was fun. The company ethos, the values, the visions were so divergent.
It was very hard to imagine that like we could keep doing what we love and the way that we loved doing it, like as a part of that organization because they're just oriented in a very different way.
Was there ever a day where you doubted that decision?
No. Not even a moment.
Not a moment No Was were all of the boards supportive yeah, all of our investors were supportive I they would have made a lot of money.
Yeah, but they did something very smart early on and like a prior Financing round around that I guess around that time before then Where we were Bobby and I were each able to sell 10 million dollars of stock so we each had 10 million bucks and we were like Wow, like we made it like we you know what I mean and we have enough money forever, and that allowed us to just swing for the fences.
I mean, you know, at that point you're like, let's just go for it.
So there wasn't that feeling of like, oh no I'm not gonna be able to buy a house, I'm not gonna be able to like, you know, have a family.
We were like, we each got 10 million bucks, like let's go for it.
I mean there's a lesson in there as well for founders who are considering taking, as they say, taking some off the table.
I got a voice note from a, I was actually listening to it this morning and I responded to her this morning, a friend of mine, whose business was, I think it was at the top of the market in 2020, was set for an IPO.
And her board and investors and everyone was telling her that it's going to be a billion dollar business and that she should carry on going.
She approached me and asked me if I would buy some shares off her.
I took a look at the business and I valued at a quarter of a million, sorry, a quarter of a billion, so 250 million for different numbers.
And our investors around her were telling her it's worth something else.
So she'd sent me a voice note, which is now four years later, this morning, saying, Thank you for that Stephen because although we didn't end up doing a deal with you, you put this idea in my head that I could be being basically having a story sold to me.
So what I ended up doing a couple of months after our conversation is I sold some shares.
And obviously you know what happened in 2020 with the markets and eventually everything comes crashing down and she says, I would be losing my mind now because the companies struggling and obviously the markets have changed if I hadn't have taken some off the table.
And she was sending a voicemail four years later to say, thank you for putting that seed And I hear the same with you.
I hear that you took some money off the table, it changed your decision framework, but also you just never know.
Yeah, and I think you have to be to your point, you have to be careful about approaching these situations as like zero sum, like either we're going to like go big or, you know, and with the risk that we'll lose it all or, you know, we'll sell the company, I think you know, there are all sorts of creative solutions that allow founders to take some money off the table, take care of their families and still swing for the fences and build a big business.
Venture capitalists are really aligned with the swing for the fences philosophy, growth investors may be less so as the business gets bigger but when you venture capitalists they are looking for 10X, 100X return so I think to find a formula that works for founders that allows them to take care of their families, but also swing for the fences is, I think, a valuable approach. Are you and Mark friends?
You said, you know him.
Last time I saw him was at the Senate hearings, I think what, last year?
Those look fun. She tried sometimes.
No, if I can turn a chance, no chance.
By 2014, when you were 24 years old, 40 % of U .S. adults were using Snapchat every day and by 2015, Snapchat was reaching 75 million users on a monthly basis.
At that point what's life like for you as a CEO, as a founder?
This was 2015? 2014, 2015.
2014, 2015. You became the world's youngest billionaire at the age of 25 just four years after launching Snapchat with an estimated net worth of $4 billion at the time.
Life was pretty good.
I met my wife in 2014, which was a game changer for me.
Why now? She's an incredible, just an incredible woman and really gave me a huge sense of stability and a massive amount of support.
She really cares about wellness.
That's something that she's really passionate about.
So it's like, I live with a wellness coach basically every single day.
And to have that sort of stability and support system while going through building our business was just profoundly helpful.
How do you manage that though?
How do you manage a romantic relationship when you are piloting a rocket ship?
I think one of the things that was really helpful is she's incredibly accomplished herself.
She has her own business that she is working on called Core Organics, which is an organic skin care business.
So she really understands that it's hard to be an entrepreneur and was always really supportive of my work and my commitment to my work and our team.
And so I think that was almost something that brought us together, not something that pushed us apart.
And I think it's interesting.
I talk to a lot of people who, you know, sometimes say, hey, my relationship's been under strain because I'm working so much. And what I realize when I have those conversations with people is very oftentimes they met their spouse when they weren't working as much. They met their spouse 10 years ago, 15 years, 20 years ago, you know, when they were just getting started in their career.
And I think, you know, it can be difficult when you have a much bigger job and it's all time, you know, all consuming and your spouse is like, remember, when we first met and you weren't working all that much and you were spending more time with me.
from the minute I met my wife, we were both working flat out.
And so I think this expectation that we both work all the time to support our business, support our family, do what we love to do, was just built into the relationship.
But then how would you make time to see each other?
Do you need to put systems in place to make sure that you're not just both at the office the whole time?
One of the things that's really been helpful that we started doing a couple of years ago is just having Sunday family day, always family day.
And that means everyone's at home.
And so if our kids wanna have friends over, or whatever, that's totally fine, but they're not going to their friends' houses where everyone's together.
And, you know, just dedicating that time to our family is really important.
What role does she play in giving you feedback?
Oh wow. She gives very candid feedback.
Which is a gift, right?
That's a gift. Yeah, and I think she's really passionate about areas that are different than what I'm passionate about.
And so, she's able to give me feedback in different areas or things that I really even wouldn't consider.
Is there any tough feedback that she shared with you that you can share with me?
I think one of the challenges that I have sometimes is I can have a very harsh tone.
Even if what I'm saying is really, I'm trying to be helpful or kind or whatever.
I was raised by, and my dad was a litigator, my mom was a tax lawyer.
Like I grew up listening to my dad have very intense conversations on the phone all the time.
And so like in business mode, I can be very direct.
And I don't think it's helpful, and I don't think people want to listen when you have a sharp or aggressive tone.
And so I think she, she's always just encouraging me like, Hey, you could say the same thing, but in like a slightly different way and people will hear it.
You know - My girlfriend says that to me.
Cause I think sometimes I, I failed to context switch out of work Steve to then and you know cause you'll be getting emails and texts at home sometimes, my girlfriend might come up and she might say something and the way I respond is almost how I would respond as if I was at the office.
But she, and it just, and I have to say she's always right because there is a part of my tone which I think was conveying the emotion I was feeling from the thing I was doing to her to try and get her to leave me alone.
This is something we can both work on!
It's crazy it's crazy that Matt is so much at home the way you say something and having an empathy and a kindness.
And you've had four children as well, which is something that I've not had, so for me that's an extra responsibility on top of the rocket ship of Snapchat, the relationship and now four kids as well.
Yeah, but it's the greatest in the world.
I mean, the greatest thing in the world to have kids.
Really? Literally nothing better on the planet.
I mean, I have not found anything close.
Because the love and connection that you have with your children is unlike anything else that you'll ever experience.
I mean, it's profound, you know?
How do you both juggle the four children, the businesses, the relationship?
Well, I think Miranda probably juggles it better than I do, I think.
and she's really committed to spending time with our children.
I mean that's something that's so important to her and it's important to me.
I don't think, I spent a lot of time actually over the years just, I found people who are extremely successful and just like asked them like, hey, how do you raise great kids, like you've been extremely successful, how'd you do it?
And my basic takeaway from like a hundred of these conversations was basically that parents that are actually committed that can spend that time with their kids and do it themselves, engage with their kids themselves, they tend to have really fruitful relationship with their kids, and their kids seem to turn out really great, and it breaks my heart that there are so many parents that can't spend that direct one -on -one time with their kids, or, I guess, in my case, one -on -four time, with their kids, because that seems to be kind of the key ingredient, is that connection with your parents.
Being there. Yeah. Do you own a business, or do you work in marketing?
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I saw your LinkedIn page.
I saw your bio. Do you I'm going to say.
I think so, yeah. In your LinkedIn bio, it says that you're the, I think, VP of product at Meta?
It's not my joke. We appropriated that joke from, I think, Kara Swisher, who originated it, but I think now that they've copied ephemeral messaging and stories, a lot of the stuff we've done in augmented reality, of course, now they say they're working on glasses, which we've been working on for over a decade.
I think I've earned that title.
I don't know. That must piss you off.
Can someone piss me off?
Like I can sit on a podcast and I can say now I wouldn't be bothered, you know, the thing is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But no, that would piss me off because you just told me that there's a lot of people that are going to great creative lengths to think of these ideas.
They're having thousands of ideas.
You're fighting to find one.
And then you have that moment where you present it to the world.
The world says this is interesting.
You know the guy that came up with it.
You sit next to him.
One of the things that's incredibly irritating about it is they repurpose our inventions to make products that make people feel unhappy and bad about themselves.
One of the things that was so fascinating just in the last year, there was a study out of the Netherlands, totally independent study out of the Netherlands.
We weren't involved.
Another one out of Australia and it was comparing like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat.
And it basically found that Snapchat, there are no negative, the study determined, there were no negative health, mental health implications of using Snapchat, but there were negative mental health implications of using Instagram and TikTok.
And in fact, I think the study in the Netherlands found Snapchat actually promotes wellbeing and helps promote your relationships as well.
And so I think what's really frustrating is when people think because they've copied some of our features that the products are the same or that they do the same thing.
When our product is designed in a way that's very different, that's designed to support your relationships with your close friends and family, and ultimately is something that supports your wellbeing.
And so, what we never want anyone to think is if they're using stories on Instagram, that that's the same as Snapchat.
And even though they stole the name of the product or some of the functionality of it, the way that Snapchat is designed on the whole is something that can have a really positive impact in people's lives, and that's not something that people feel when they use Instagram.
Did you ever consider sending Mark an email or a message or a phone call when they first started copying some of your core features like the story feature?
We didn't do that. I think one of the things I really admire about Kevin Systrom is when they copied the stories feature, they stopped pretending that they were doing anything different.
With things like Poke, they tried to sort of pass it off as their own creation.
Oh, we're doing it a little bit differently.
With stories, Kevin Systrom came out and just said, hey, we think this is a really great feature or this a really great product.
And like we're going to steal it and put it in Instagram and we think you're going to love it.
And, you know, I think the, the honesty at least was admirable.
Is there, do you feel a sense of injustice when someone steals your idea like that?
No, not at all. I mean, that, that is sort of the, the I, you know, I'm sure, you know, the saying like, you know, great artist steal.
I think like one of the things about our industry is that people are constantly being inspired by one another.
I mean, in the very early days, I went to visit bite dance when they only had Toutiao, the app Toteo, which was a news feed app, essentially.
But it was backed by AI, by ML.
And when I saw that, that was really inspiring to me.
And we made a big change to our product.
We actually separated out all of the creator and publisher content from stories from friends.
And we said, hey, unlike social media where you're seeing content based on what your friend's like or what your friend's comment on, on Snapchat, we're gonna do ML -driven recommendation.
So, you'll have content from your friends, but then you're going to have this whole other world of content from creators and publishers that's going to be recommended based on your interests and what you're passionate about.
So I do think like drawing inspiration from other companies and other businesses is part of innovating.
So I think it's a part of the game, but it definitely showed us that if we're going to innovate, if we're going to make new products, we ought to make things that are really difficult to copy that take a long time to copy that are really hard to do because if you go after really difficult and hard things it's much harder for these large companies to just copy them because I'm thinking about so many founders that I know that have started businesses and it might be anything from a t -shirt company to maybe it's a podcast and they're dealing with people copying their ideas and sometimes they react
really badly and they take to social media and they post both and say look this person copied us and they tagged the brand.
What advice would you give to founders that are being knocked off?
I think it's really important to very, very quickly evolve from being just a product or just a feature, to becoming a platform or an ecosystem.
And so what I mean by that is if I compare the early days of stories where people just were posting stories for one another, it's relatively easy to copy that feature.
You can code that up pretty quickly.
Probably with AI now, you can code it up very quickly.
When I look at what we've done with augmented reality, right, we have Lenscore, which is our own rendering engine for augmented reality that runs on the phone, but also on our glasses.
We have a tool called Lens Studio that's an incredibly sophisticated tool that developers can use to build these AR experiences.
We have a huge, you know, hundreds of millions of people who are using these AR experiences on the phone, and we have hundreds of thousands of developers who are making all of these AR experiences.
When you have that sort of very complicated technology that's hard to copy, and you have an ecosystem of people that are using it, both in terms of developers, creators, and also our community who love those AR experiences, it becomes very, very hard to copy the four million lenses that developers have created for our platform, or move the hundreds of millions of people who are enjoying augmented reality on Snapchat to a new platform.
And so especially in the technology business, The faster you can evolve from being a feature or a product to a real platform, I think that's where the value is created over the long -term.
It's almost that this relationship between how hard and complicated the thing was to build and create is sort of inversely correlated to how easy it is to copy.
I think so, and then, how much of an ecosystem it is in terms of other people using it, right?
Almost more of like a marketplace, right?
It makes it very difficult to migrate both sides to the marketplace.
Do you think that the technology companies that exist now, those trillion dollar ones, those big social platforms, are monopolies, and should be broken up?
Because there was a big call originally to break these companies up.
And you've been, I guess you could say, a victim to the strength of a monopoly, being able to swoop in, copy, replicate, steal an innovation?
I think what matters more about whether or not there are monopolies is sort of, what do we think is going to happen next?
I mean, if you remember, there was a period of time when everyone thought that Microsoft was going to take over the world.
They were caught up in a lot of antitrust legislation, antitrust inquiries and lawsuits and whatnot.
And ultimately, as a result, maybe of being distracted by the lawsuits, but I think also just a function of how they thought about their business at the time, they miss the entire mobile cycle.
I think people are looking at Google right now and saying, is there a similar moment happening for Google?
Google is subject to a lot of these antitrust inquiries, is chat GBT for example, coming along and with AI, actually going to make it a lot harder for Google's core business to compete.
And so I think given just the longevity of the regulatory and litigation cycle, I mean, you're talking 10 plus years, it almost doesn't matter so much if the government thinks that it's a monopoly or not because there's not much, it seems like that they're able to do about it.
So what I think matters a lot more for small technology companies is thinking about what fundamental innovations, fundamental technologies can we work on, can we develop that ultimately can help us grow our business and maybe you know, one day catch one of these larger companies on a back foot.
I want to talk about that, but my last question on copying was if you were in Mark Zuckerberg's shoes, would you have copied Snapchat?
I think given their market position, it's a very effective strategy.
They basically have an enormous cash pile.
I think they're investing $20 billion a year right now just into the AR Glasses stuff and some of their VR stuff.
AR Glasses stuff is largely copying what we've been doing.
And then outside of that, they have $10 billions and all sorts of other investments, including copying chat GPT and all of the progress on large language models.
So I think it's quite an effective strategy if you're at that scale generating that much cash to just deploy that capital across a bunch of different bets and wait and see what companies are successful and what they make and then try to throw a ton of capital and hoping that those companies don't get to scale.
Was there a hard day for you amongst all of this copying?
Was there a hard disk day that you can recall?
There was a lot of concern when Instagram stories first launched that Snapchat would essentially be obsolete, and they did a very good job talking about how many people were using stories and we got a lot of questions and pressure about is Snapchat ever going to succeed?
And people didn't, I don't think they realized at the time, that folks were using Instagram mostly for content creators and influencers and that sort of thing.
And they were mostly using Snapchat for their friends and family.
So, we had really focused on this friends and family use case that was not really what Instagram was going after, they were much more focused on influencers.
I think it was really only because Snapchat had started growing with those influencers.
if you remember, you know, DJ Khaled and some of those early snaps.
There were influencers who were starting to join Snapchat just to use Stories, right?
To use it differently than how we had initially designed it for friends and family.
And I think that's what really got Instagram's attention.
So it was really frustrating in those moments where people were saying, well, how's Snapchat gonna survive?
Because they didn't understand that Stories on Instagram is for a totally different purpose than, you know, Stories on Snapchat.
You must see that coming because people start leaking that there's this new feature coming.
I was running a social media business at the time And there were hackers that can kind of look into code bases and see what features are about to come, and then it's leaked out to the blog.
So as a team, you're managing the emotions of a group of people, and that group of people, they're all hearing that the biggest player in the game is about to launch a central feature of your proposition.
How as a leader do you manage the emotions of the people through that?
Well, I think that can be something that is, you know, energizing for a team, right?
If you have some of the biggest companies in the world validating what you're working on, that can be really energizing if you approach it that way, right?
So I think rather than just saying, oh, no, it's game over, but it might as well shut the thing down and give up, I think if you say this is really evidence that we're on the right path here, that we're building products that people love, that they're getting the attention of some of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world, let's build on that.
Let's continue to go build products that billions of people all over the world will use.
And I think ultimately to this point of, can you hire and retain really talented creative people?
I think it's pretty cool if you're a designer at Snap that the things you're making are not just used by the 850 million plus people that use Snapchat, but billions of people that use all sorts of other products because people get so much inspiration from our design team and what they build.
I think that's pretty cool.
One of the use cases that emerged pretty much out of the blue, I think, for Snapchat was— and this is something I was only thinking about yesterday— is you at some point have to make a decision about adult content on the app, And only fans have built this massive business now.
And they're basically in the adult content business.
At some point, you must have had been challenged on that by investors or by users, whether you were going to allow adult content to be on the platform.
Because that would have been, presumably that would have been a growing user base and use case.
Yeah, we proactively scan for pornography and remove it.
I mean, it's against our content guidelines.
We've been doing that for a really long time.
So yeah, I mean that's just not how we think about our core business.
I also think when you think about self -expression, the importance of self -expression, the environment that you're in really matters.
And that's why we have content guidelines because we want people to feel like they're in an environment where they can express themselves.
And I think some of the conversation about different content guidelines or having content guidelines or not having them has been really interesting because I think people are missing the broader point.
And if you have a platform with no content guidelines and it's full of people yelling at each other or saying really mean or offensive things or posting a lot of pornography, that's a really uncomfortable thing for most people.
That's uncomfortable, you say, maybe this platform isn't for me, maybe I don't feel comfortable expressing myself here because all the stuff I'm seeing isn't really appropriate or aligned with my values.
And so one of the things we discovered really early on is if you wanna create a platform where people feel comfortable expressing themselves, feel comfortable communicating with their friends and family, having content guidelines is really helpful because it means that the content experience is one that that feels more comfortable but isn't that people would say well that censorship I'm thinking now of the video that Mark Zuckerberg released about Metis change to their moderation systems moving to Texas realizing that I think he said that they'd over indexed with their moderators in terms of left
-leaning politics so a lot of the right -leaning content had been censored what do you make of that argument for content moderation, that we don't want a sense of people.
I think it's a misunderstanding of the first amendment and how it applies.
If we look at our country, the way, at least here in the United States, with the first amendment, that really focuses on the way that the government interacts with content creators or content publishers.
It says, hey, it's not okay for the government to interfere with individuals or publishers self expression, that's not allowed. But one of the things the First Amendment also does is say, you know, platforms or individuals can make choices about what sort of content they want to promote or want to have on their platform.
That's part of the First Amendment.
You can't force the Wall Street Journal to, you know, put this article or that article or accept any article from any author all around the world.
The Wall Street Journal as a paper can decide what, you know, what authors, you know, it wants to include on its pages.
And that's part of the protected First Amendment expression we have here in this country.
So this whole notion of censorship doesn't apply to companies that are private businesses that actually have a First Amendment right to decide what content is on their platform.
And they may want to decide we're open to literally anything, anything goes, no problem.
And it seems like some platforms are making that choice.
But other platforms, like ours, say, hey, in order to have a healthy set of discourse across our platform, in order to make sure people feel comfortable when they're viewing content on our platform.
We don't want people to come across pornography, for example, or violent content or hateful content.
That's not something that makes people feel good.
And we actually want to make sure that that content isn't on our platform because it doesn't comply with our guidelines.
And that may be one of the reasons why in some of these studies, it shows that people feel better when they use Snapchat because they're not encountering really violent content when they're using Snapchat.
Is there an issue that if you're geographically based in Los Angeles or California, then your content moderation perspective is going to be very left leaning versus if you're based in a red state and that might not be representative of the world?
Or do you just not care?
Do you just think, well, these are our values as a company?
I don't think so, because I don't think saying extreme violence is not something you want on our platform.
I don't think that's political.
I think that's a values -based decision.
or saying we don't we don't want to serve as pornography to our community.
I don't think that that's you know political choice.
I think that's a values -based decision.
So I think unfortunately right now in our culture there's actually a real temptation to politicize things that are actually quite common sensical and so I think we have to avoid that that temptation instead focus on you know what are the values or the business choices that people are making?
Why do you think matter have rolled back their moderation policies?
I'm not sure. I think you know the there's a moment in time when they seem to have a lot support to do it?
I think it'll be challenging for them in Europe, for example, where there's a lot of rules and regulations about prohibiting things like hate speech, for example, or terrorist content, and I think it'll be interesting to see how they navigate that.
It's certainly a lot less expensive to avoid moderating content.
It costs money to moderate content, and that could be a consideration as well.
If you don't moderate content, does engagement go up?
That's a great question.
I've seen some reports and some studies that show that if content is moderated engagement can go down.
Certainly there are studies that show that negative content spreads much further and faster on social media for human reasons.
But I'm not sure in this particular instance.
How are you feeling about those social media landscape?
It's changed so much in the last six months.
It's just not even six months.
I'd say 12 months since I think Elon bought Twitter, now called X.
There – it's almost like this domino effect has happened in terms of content moderation, in terms of the types of voices on social media, in terms of this big movement around censorship and free speech. There's also been this splintering of social media, where lots of people are now like leaving certain platforms and going to Blue Sky and threads and, you know, Rumble was the only sort of big right -leaning platform just a couple of years ago.
And now, I don't know, it seems like it's all changing before our eyes.
I don't read too much into it, to be honest with you.
To me, it feels like more of a continuation of almost, at least in the case, I think we can use meta as the example, just because they are essentially the social media market, and what's really interesting about their choices is what they've tended to do is follow the political wins.
When Biden was president and Marx has been very public about this, they did a lot of very proactive content moderation.
And that was something that apparently, I guess the White House at the time was asking them to do very proactively.
And now it seems like with the new administration, this new administration has a different approach to content moderation, and Meta is following that.
And so what I've seen mostly from Meta over time is that they're quite willing to sort of navigate the political landscape and really follow the lead of politicians here.
Is that something to be admired?
No, I think it's definitely a survivalist approach for sure when you're such a large and powerful company.
If you look at Meta, they have so much litigation with the government right now.
The government is scrutinizing so many different aspects of their business.
When you're at that scale, and you're controlled by a single founder, I think it's a survivalist instinct.
That means that depending on who is in the White House, you change your policies.
Are you optimistic about the next four years in America?
I'm incredibly optimistic about our country.
I love our country so much. I think that Americans across our country have an incredible spirit that has allowed us to overcome extraordinary challenges together.
more recently, the COVID pandemic.
You know, longer ago, things like World War II, you know, where we came together, not only as a country, but more broadly in the world to confront, you know, the horror of the Axis powers, I think our country, in very critical and important moments, comes together in really powerful ways.
And that's something that really inspires me.
Your oldest child is 14, you said?
He's at that age now where he's going to be getting increasing pressures to join social media.
Are you gonna let him join Instagram?
He's on Snapchat. I… He's on Snapchat, certainly on YouTube and Roblox, which he likes a lot.
So, that's sort of the current situation.
You must have thought about this.
There's so much conversation at the moment around the impact that social media has on kids, anxiety, all of the sort of toxic things around comparison and becoming more isolated.
Have you developed an agreement with your wife, with your kids, with your family about social media usage going forward?
I think in general our view, you know each of our children are so different they're gonna develop in different ways.
So I don't think like a one -size -fits -all model is the right approach, here I think it really depends on where each of our kids are at, at any given point and who they are and what they want to do.
I think one thing I would really encourage them to be their privacy, especially as young people.
And I think there are a lot of young people at a very young age who are posting a lot of public content.
And I think it's very important to be thoughtful about those sorts of decisions because once you've posted something publicly, you can't get that back.
And I think it's really important as we talk about technology that we focus on the healthy and constructive ways that Flynn, for example, at 14 can use technology, like staying in touch with his friends and family.
I think the real watershed moment for us as a family was, up until the COVID pandemic, we didn't allow Flint to have a phone.
We really didn't allow him to use a computer.
When the pandemic happened, he had to stay in touch with his friends.
He had to be connected with his friends.
We knew that that was vitally important for his well -being, right?
And I think the challenge we have is almost the whiplash that young people are experiencing, because throughout the pandemic, they were told you can only talk to your friends on the computer.
You coming out of the pandemic, what they're hearing a lot from adults now is, Stay off your phone, don't use your phone at all.
I think both extremes are unusual.
And for us as parents, we think a lot about what's a healthy relationship with technology.
Of course, we want you to go run cross country and hang out with your friends, or go for a walk, go to the mall and just talk.
But we know when Flynn's not with his friends, when they're spread out all over the world, or they're after school trying to meet up.
Like, it's helpful to use technology.
It's helpful to message your friends.
And so, I think we have to find this right balance of saying, cultivate a healthy, engaged lifestyle with all of your interests, your hobbies, your passions, and then if you wanna use your phone to stay in touch with your friends or watch entertaining content or play a game to relax, like, that's healthy too.
Even if Finn says, I wanna watch, I want TikTok, Dad?
That might be a bridge too far.
That's what he was saying.
Because TikTok's like, I don't even use TikTok myself, personally, because from what I hear, it's like crack cocaine for people.
They're just on there for like three or four hours a day, scrolling mindlessly.
If Finn came home and said, I wanna use TikTok, dad, you'd say no. We would probably say no, we have said no, historically, although he hasn't really pressed the issue.
TikTok was gonna be banned, and then Trump swooped in and seemed to save the day.
Is that a good thing?
As a CEO of Snapchat, was part of you hoping that it was banned, because then maybe more people would come over and you'd snap?
Did you think about that?
I think it would be quite good for our business if they were banned.
I think the bigger picture that we really have to figure out as a country in terms of our relationship with China is to figure out the areas where businesses are going to collaborate and do business across the United States and China and areas where they are not.
So you're probably familiar.
Many technology companies cannot operate in China Now for a variety of reasons, maybe they don't have a license, they haven't been allowed to operate, et cetera.
But they are allowed to operate here in the United States where we have an open market, a free market.
And I think we have to be very thoughtful at this point in time as a country because being an open market has always been a massive strategic advantage for the United States.
It's something that the United Free Trade, things like that have been massively supportive of our economic growth.
But we're now at a moment where I think we need to be thoughtful and say with some countries, free trade in some areas makes a lot of sense.
So if it we're talking about kids toys or diapers or you name it right like let it rip that that's good for both countries and both countries I think can do business in those areas but when it comes to other areas like you know information services or maybe it's critical critical minerals maybe it's some types of pharmaceutical you know compounds or ingredients.
Those are areas where the countries aren't going to be able to collaborate because ultimately they have very different goals ideologies, visions for the future.
And I think the issue that the business community has right now is there's not enough clarity in that regard. So the more clarity the government can create, and say, the United States and China working together can say, hey, we agree these areas are open for business, and these areas are areas where we're going to compete and we're not going to collaborate, that would help the business community.
Because I think what's so frustrating, imagine being a Chinese entrepreneur right now, building this really successful company and then the US government saying, hey, you know, given our country and our values and the strategic relationship we have with China, it's not going to work.
It sounds like Trump wants to buy it, which was a really very interesting suggestion.
And it's worrying because it sets a bit of a precedence that potentially, an app like Snapchat, the UK might decide, listen, we don't know if we can trust you because you're an American.
So we want to buy the UK version in order for you to have Snapchat be in the UK.
That could set a worrying presidents around the world.
I think there's already some early flavors of that with folks really focused on data localization and whatnot.
And that's sort of my point around, I think, we need to get really clear about with which countries are we going to have open free flow of data and trade and which countries, are there areas where that might not work as effectively.
Snapchat eventually goes public.
Running a public company is difficult, to say the least, because the share price can go up and down really irrespective of what you're doing and what you're building, and it's really a reflection of the broader market, people's emotions and vibes, but you have to manage that as a CEO. Not easy, I imagine.
You know what? A lot of people warned us about going public, and they said there were a lot of There's going to be a lot of pressure to be short -term -oriented and this sort of thing that the quarterly scrutiny would be challenging for our business.
Ultimately, I think the transition from being a private company to a public company was challenging.
It's quite different.
Now, I really think the discipline and the rigor around the quarterly performance, the need to forecast your business really effectively and then compare how you're tracking to your forecast, helps the company run in a much more effective way.
That sort of scrutiny, I think can be really helpful for the leadership team and then the broader team in terms of running the business.
Now, where it can get difficult is when it comes to long term investment and innovation.
For example, right now, interest rates have gone way up.
For example, folks are discounting cash flows at a much higher rate as a result.
And so there's a huge focus on profitability for many, many businesses across all sectors.
What we know is true for long -term innovation is that consistency really matters.
You can't just flick a switch and turn on and off innovation, turn on and off investments and new products.
It's very difficult and disruptive to do that.
And so, we've made a decision through this period of time, even though we've made some really difficult and painful decision to shut down some of our projects, we're still investing at a higher rate right now through this period of time, even though we know that that means that our share price might be lower because people are discounting our cash flows differently due to higher interest rates.
So, I think, that's when it gets challenging, the actual reality of continuing to invest through, you know, challenging periods of time or periods where interest rates have gone way up.
When I think about sitting in your shoes or sitting in your seat, I think about all the things you could do as a public company.
I think that you could do anything.
You could go after any game.
And at some point, as you said there when you use the word painfully, you're going to have to make a decision to focus on something.
And even at the level I'm at with the businesses I run and so on, the hardest thing for me, especially when you're somewhat creative, etc., is to pick something and to say no to everything else.
And I've looked at your philosophy and I know saying no and focus is so central to your sort of leadership style, but also how you think as an entrepreneur.
Tell me about those painful moments where you had to kill something that you didn't wanna kill.
Yeah, there are a bunch. That piece of advice was so helpful to us, especially in the early days of our business.
One of our first venture investors was like, hey Evan, you got to get really good at saying no. He's like you have almost no resources.
I think we're a team of four people at the time.
And you're going to get all this inbound because the company's growing.
People are going to want to do partnerships or do an interview.
And if you can just get really good at saying no and stay focused on your community, stay focused on your customers, that's the secret.
And that focus has really helped us over the years.
But as you point out, there have been times where we've had to refocus or we've had to reassess areas of our business.
I think one good example were mini games.
we had an amazing hundreds of people using our mini games.
And people loved them, it was an amazing platform.
You could play like real -time multiplayer games together inside of Snapchat, and ultimately, it was just clear that that was not going to be a really, really big business for us, at least at that time.
And so we had to make the really painful decision to shut down our mini games business.
So how do you think about what to go after?
There's all these new technologies, there's these buzz words, there's AI.
Now there's AR, there's VR, there's headsets, there's wearables, there's all these things.
How do you decide what bet is your bet?
I think that's a really good question.
That is, to some degree, where intuition plays an important role, but it's also where feedback plays a really important role.
And that's why, for example, with our last generation of spectacles that we announced last year, the fifth generation of Spectacles, our goal is just to get it into developers' hands as quickly as possible so that we can listen.
And here, OK, so what sort of things do you want to build with Spectacles?
What tools are available?
What isn't there? What do you think would be really interesting?
Because the faster that we can learn from people actually using our product, the faster we can make it better and find that product market fit that's so important.
And you also don't know the time horizon for when the world will sufficiently change in the direction that your bet has been placed.
I think about Google Glass, which was...
I don't even know, it was like a decade ago that people were saying, okay, we're going to be wearing glasses and Google had this Google Glass thing and it just seemed to vanish and disappear.
And then I think about when Meta bought Oculus and we thought, okay, no, so this is now when everyone's going to be wearing VR headsets and it still kind of not really happened.
So you could make a bet, you could be right, but you could be 15 years off.
You have to be very careful in technology, I think, because things change slowly and then they change very quickly.
And I think that was certainly the case with chat GPT.
People felt like, wow, this new technology came out of nowhere, but no, they'd been working on it for what, a decade?
Consistently trying to make progress.
I think, as long as you find something that you really believe can make a positive impact that people can use in a really compelling way, you're right that sometimes you have to be patient, but other times you can invent new things that bring that timeline in.
I think a lot of times our team is thinking about, like, okay, yeah, sure, on the current trajectory, that could take a really long time.
but what if we thought about it differently or invented some new piece of technology that could help us accelerate our vision to glasses that help people share these experiences that overlay computing on the world, and that's part of the fun too.
And Meta launched the rayband ones, which I've heard about.
I think I watched the video of it, which seemed to be again, copying Snapchat.
What, did that piss you off?
The only thing that frustrated me was that the Luxotica guys had actually come to us Probably back in 2017.
Exceller Luxottica is the company that makes Ray -Bans.
They had come to us in 2017 saying, Wow, it's so awesome.
What you guys are doing with Spectacles.
We love it. We should find a way to partner.
So we talked with them, of course, all about everything that we were doing.
And then they went radio silent and decided not to partner with us.
And then obviously resurfaced, doing this with Metha.
So I think ultimately, it's something like that.
I think ultimately, you learn a lot, I think, growing a business and really understanding how people do business.
And I think it shows you a lot about the world.
And I think it's so important for entrepreneurs to really know that if they've got a really compelling idea, they've got an amazing service that they can compete, that they can build really compelling businesses, even though it seems impossible with such giant companies, whether it's Essler Luxottica, which is the giant in the glasses base, or Meta.
That I think Snapchat hopefully can be an example of a company that's been able to stay independent and compete with these really, really large businesses.
Artificial intelligence has become, I mean, the most talked about technology over the last couple of years as it's, in many respects, thanks to chat GPT.
How are you thinking about the future of artificial intelligence in terms of how it's going to fundamentally change human connection?
You've got four boys you must be thinking about.
You know, we talked about earlier, the kind of jobs that are going to exist in the future.
There's a big narrative saying that knowledge jobs like lawyer and accountant aren't going to be the same.
In fact, even when you think about how your kids are going to be educated, your youngest child is one years old — are they going to go to a school or are they going to go to a large language model?
Like, how are you thinking about that future?
Are you scared? I really love that you jump to education because I think it's so profoundly powerful.
I mean, even in my own experience, my ability to learn such amazing things in such a short a period of time and connect different ideas together.
It's an incredible tool for discovery and for learning.
And so, I can't wait for our kids to use these sorts of tools.
I'm sure Flynn does to some degree.
But as a thought partner, AI is just incredibly powerful.
So I do think, especially for creative people, it should be an unbelievably powerful tool to be able to iterate, to get feedback, to explore different ideas, explore different options.
Even when I'm writing something and I'm stuck, I'm like, yeah, this just doesn't feel right.
And I'm like, can you just give me 10 options?
It's really helpful to brainstorm, to find that right word. I was wondering the other day when I was using ChatGBT or one of the programmes a couple of days ago.
I was wondering if I'm gonna get worse at writing because this thing's now doing it for me.
And writing is such a wonderful way to think and understand.
So therefore am I gonna get worse at understanding things because I'm now deferring the process of thinking through something logically to this computer.
Whereas back in the day, I'd have to like really think deeply about what I was trying to say myself?
I don't know, I think it's going to be really important that obviously people continue to write and oftentimes like my first draft is on a piece of paper right?
So I do think that that is going to be important but I think the bigger question for me is whether or not AI will help people get better at asking questions because ultimately asking a great question and having someone who can help answer it is the key to learning.
I mean that's I think you know perhaps the greatest blessing of having a great teacher or a great mentor or a parent is that you get to ask all sorts of great questions right and and get those answers and so I think if we're now in a you know a modality that really is all about asking the right question and doing that really repeatedly.
If that can train us all to ask questions more effectively, that would be a very big deal.
I've not thought about that.
I don't know if I'm getting better.
I don't really know.
It's really because there's always a trade -off with new technology.
And the problem as we saw with social media is we often don't discover the trade -off until 15 years, 20 years time when it's really weird, it's ugly head because it's slow, then it's fast. So I'm trying to understand if you're looking around the corner or looking over the horizon now to think through the trade -off of us hurtling into something which just like social media made something better, faster, cheaper, easier, but came with an unintended consequence.
I think generally speaking, as we have looked historically at the evolution of technology, these sorts of foundational technologies, you're right that they have been disruptive, positive.
But they ultimately have massively positive and beneficial effects.
I mean, I think if you look at a foundational technology like the internet, a foundational technology maybe like the motor vehicle, an airplane, these are the sorts of foundational technologies that I think can really change the trajectory of the world and ultimately make people's lives better.
I think the key will be, how do we navigate that change together?
And that'll be something that will be really important to do thoughtfully.
And I think, you know, in many ways, the good news about this sort of technological change is it's always governed by people.
I mean, folks, I think almost overly fixate on new technology developments and don't think enough about what is actually the human adoption curve look like?
How are we making this something that's easier to use, easier for people to understand, easier for people to integrate into their lives, into their workflows.
And so I think a lot of the work for a big foundational technology like AI is going to be much more around how humans are interacting with it, interpreting it, understanding how it fits in their lives.
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What season is Snapchat in, in terms of its company's life?
You know like you were in that startup phase, you're in your dad's bedroom phase, where you're scrappy and you're growing quickly.
Then you went to the blue office, you know, you had a metathmeteoric growth, you had the IPO, what season is Snapchat in, as we sit here today in 2025, how would you, like, summarize it if you had to poetically describe the psychology of the business now.
In some ways it feels like we're emerging from a two -year winter into an early spring.
The last two years have been really challenging.
We had to rebuild our entire ad platform, change the way that we go to market, really help advertisers find more success, and at the same time do a lot of that for creators, as well.
We've seen a tremendous growth in terms of, I think last quarter, the creators posting grew something like 40 % year -over -year.
There was a billion public posts a month on Snapchat.
And that's an area we've invested in a lot as well.
But it's been a very challenging last two years.
So I would almost say maybe very early spring, you're starting to see some green shoots, and the frost is melting.
Have you had any acquisition offers since that conversation with Mark Zuckerberg once upon a time?
Do people still try to buy the company like these days?
No. I think, given the voting structure of the company, you know, Bobby and I have voting stock and non voting stock is what's publicly traded.
I think generally, you know, sometimes people will say, hey, if you guys ever, you know, want to retire or something, keep us in mind.
But I think, you know, in terms of, you know, kicking an offer over the, over the sill or something, that doesn't make a ton of sense given our company structure.
Another thing that I admired when I was reading about the way you run Snapchat is this idea of having a council.
Oh, amazing! Well, OK.
Can you tell me about this because I might want to steal?
Please, take it. OK, good.
Council is something that I stole from the school that I went to growing up called Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences, which is quite a unique school.
And one of the things that they have at Crossroads is council.
And, you know, basically, starting in middle school, you get together with a group of, let's call it, 10 or 12 classmates, and you sit in a circle.
And there are three rules.
It's, you know, speak from the heart, listen from the heart and be spontaneous.
And it's essentially turn -based storytelling where you go around the circle and it can be anything as simple as like, how was your weekend or what's a rosebud and a thorn from the last week.
And it really creates an opportunity A, for people to listen to one another because you're taking turns going around the circle.
But B, you get to know people in a very, very different way.
And I saw how powerful it was in middle school.
middle school was a tough time, was a tough time for me, but in council, I was able to connect with my classmates in a really thoughtful and maybe deeper way that you wouldn't just kind of around the water cooler or whatever at the office.
For us ultimately, when we came to LA and we were in the blue house, one of the big decisions we were confronting at the time was whether or not we should move the company from LA to the Bay Area.
There was a lot of pressure.
Hey, all the tech talent is in the Bay Area.
It's really important for you guys to be up there for the talent.
And so we just got our team together and they had our first counsel and everyone went around the circle and shared their thoughts.
So should we stay in LA or not?
How did they feel about that?
What did they think?
And what was so clear coming out of that conversation, we didn't even need to make a decision.
It was just obvious that we believed in LA and wanted to be in LA and the team thought it was actually something really important to our business, to our identity, to actually the way that we hired talent because people had to really commit to moving to LA to be a part of the company.
So that was the first time we used council at Snap.
And I saw how effective it was in the workplace setting.
And then as the business got a lot bigger and it became much more important to connect with people who were new to the company or worked in a different area of the company, council became just a really useful tool for doing that.
And so at Snap, we have council facilitators whose job it is to run these councils, and now many more companies are interested in doing this.
And we also help train companies or offer sessions for other companies to help help help them bring their team members together.
What is the essence of it?
It's just get a small team in a certain department around a table, and let everybody speak from the heart, listen from the heart and be spontaneous.
Yeah, and it's usually not sitting around a table.
It's usually sitting on the floor, in a circle, which, again, I think helps create that feeling.
You know, when you're sitting in a circle, everyone is situated equally, which I think is a really important thing.
As you mentioned, companies have a lot of hierarchy.
I think it feels really different in a company when everyone sees around a circle and everyone's voice is important and everyone's voice is heard. Whether it's just saying, wow that was a really tough weekend or actually I had an amazing time I went out to dinner with my wife it was fabulous.
And I think people find new points of connection that they maybe wouldn't have found otherwise without it.
As a leader, how do you know in those situations whether to listen to your team or not to listen to your team?
because, you know, it sounds quite risky for a founder, I'm not saying this is what you do, but for a founder to run their company on consensus, i .e. making sure everybody agrees on something.
And we're actually seeing this in the post -pandemic world with this whole like remote work debate where some companies originally were, okay, everybody's going to be remote, and then it went back to, a lot of companies are like, no, come back into the office.
And I mean, if you ask a team, they're probably not going to all say, let's run back to the office, But as a CEO, you have to make a call.
And what is the remote policy with SNAP at the moment?
We are more than four days a week in the office on average.
More than. And is that by policy?
Or is that just what's happening?
That is by policy and also what's happening.
OK. And did you ever move on that?
Was there ever a moment in the pandemic where you thought?
During the pandemic, I thought I would never go back to the office.
I was like, you know, going into the pandemic, I was waking up before our kids woke up.
I was getting home after they were asleep.
There was a moment I was like, what am I doing with my life?
I'm never seeing our kids.
What am I gonna do?
And the pandemic happened and it was like a miracle.
I'm like, oh my God, I get to see our kids every single day.
I get to wake up and see our kids.
And I have an open door policy.
If I'm working from home, in my home office, our kids can come in anytime.
It was only a problem once, when one of our boys came in fully nude with two Oreos.
Which actually prompted me to consider going back to the office.
But I really, I thought it was important for our kids.
hey if I'm at home I'm not like shut away in my office you can come in any time you know with anything and and i'll help you out.
Sometimes it meant they spent a lot of time sitting on my laps and sitting on my lap and in meetings but in any case there was a period of time in the pandemic where I was like why would I ever go back to the office i'm here with my family and - but I think you know that the adrenaline and the teamwork that happened you know during the pandemic when we were all able to work together really effectively remotely that was only possible because we had been working together physically for such a long period of time.
We had all that trust built.
We had all that shorthand built.
We had that long roadmaps of ideas we had come up with to get physically together, and that really sustained the company through that period of time.
It became clear to me that the culture was starting to fray.
People don't learn the culture as quickly when they're alone and remote separated all around the world.
I was really worried about our ability to consistently be creative, which is so important to our business if we weren't physically together.
So ultimately, especially after that Oreo incident, we thought it was pretty important to get back to the office.
How was that received?
One of the things that we tried to do that helped team members is just give a pretty long runway.
We made that decision pretty early on, and then gave team members quite an extended period of time, I think it was like six or nine months for folks who had extenuating circumstances.
We would grant exceptions, and over time that allowed people to adapt their lives.
Sometimes they'd rented a house or bought a house somewhere else and needed to move back to one of our hub office locations.
So we wanted to give people enough flexibility to do that, not just have them wake up one morning and say, come back to the office.
That's not super thoughtful.
For any entrepreneurs that are out there now listening to our conversation, and they're at the very beginning of their journey, and they're thinking about so many different things, so many different problems, their products aren't working, their customers are complaining, when you think about the principles of being successful as an entrepreneur, that are transferable across all industries.
Have you defined what these principles are in your mind to be successful in any endeavor?
We talked about some of them already.
We said about culture, we said about hiring.
Is there anything else that you've come to learn in your wisdom that entrepreneurs like me should be thinking a lot about as fundamental principles of success?
To me, it seems like the biggest differentiator is how much you care.
I mean, that just seems day in and day out I meet entrepreneurs and people working on businesses, how much do you care about your business, your team, your customer?
And those are the entrepreneurs, I think, that are really successful.
They go that extra mile.
And that care can come from different places, right?
It can be about the impact that people want to make in the world.
It can be about something that people really want to invent.
It can be their love of their customers and seeing the smile on their customers' faces.
But how much people care about what they do seems to me to be quite a large predictor, if not the predictor of success.
Can you care too much?
I don't think so. It sounds stressful, though, caring that much. I thought in your book, you talk about...
Don't talk about me!
I'm not disagreeing.
I'm just thinking I was advocate.
That's one of the things I loved about your book, is you said, hey, people are thinking about stress wrong, which I thought was really, really powerful.
I wish more people had talked about it that way, because I think...
You just... Anyways, you wrote it.
You don't have to...
No, no, no, no. It's a good point.
It's something I was going to ask you about, is the stress of being you?
And do you have techniques to manage that stress, especially running a public company?
I just think it's psychotic.
Well, what I thought was hilarious.
So this has been one of my hilarious findings from my ring over the last couple of days trying it out.
I finally had enough days that it gave me a stress score or whatever.
And I'm just not stressed during the day, which really lines up with how I experience work.
I don't find work to be very stressful.
I think a lot of it has become very normal because over the years we've grown our business and encountered all sorts of wild situations that, at this point, it's just a daily normal thing.
Do you celebrate? Do you get really happy when you have professional moments where I don't know you launched a new feature and it's well received?
Do you get really happy?
No. It's something that I need to work on, especially celebrating our team as well.
Just providing more of that really positive feedback, that's not something I do a ton, especially around like outcome focus goals.
When I see a great idea, if I see a great new idea, then I get really happy and excited.
I love it. But you know, to me, some of these big corporate milestones, like the growth of the community is cool.
I was talking to someone the other day, they're like, you should throw a party when you guys reach a billion people.
I was like, oh my God, what a great idea, why didn't I think of it?
So I think we should celebrate things like that.
I wonder if that there's an element of defense to this because I was speaking to a lot of founders recently and they were telling me how they've over time And with maturity, they almost just develop this calm within all the chaos where they're not moved up or down.
And some of them make the case to me that if you are moved up by something that happens externally, it's impossible, therefore, not to be moved down when something bad happens externally.
So founders develop this almost like coldness to them.
That would be a real problem for me because so much of creating products is about connecting with people and listening to people and being able to empathize with them.
So I absolutely, under no circumstances, can cut off my emotional response.
I think I pick the things or the things that make me feel really happy or things like being with our children or something or Hart did really well on his math test the other day and I was like, awesome, you know what I mean.
I got super excited about that.
But I think to your point, one of the things I do regret at some point is not celebrating some of those great moments.
I think, sometimes, as an entrepreneur, when everything is going up and to the right and going super well, you're always like, what's gonna go wrong, what could go wrong?
And so, you don't think about celebrating that great moment because you're thinking about the next day or what you could be doing differently to make sure the business can keep growing.
And I think breaking out of that, like, what could go wrong, which actually is quite helpful.
That paranoia is probably pretty helpful.
But celebrate those moments is important.
So, that's a good takeaway from our chat.
Was there a hardest day for you, a day when you were challenged the most as the CEO of Snapchat?
And I think that comes to mind when I say that.
I think some of the hardest days, the painful days have been when we've had to make changes to our company structure or things like things like layoffs.
I mean, I feel like just a huge sense of responsibility to our team members.
And so when we let them down like that, those days are the worst. I mean, that's, that's, you know, of course, you know, in many cases worse for them.
And I, you know, but as a leader, that sense of shame, I feel when we have to make a decision like that, that's, you know, that sucks.
Do you ever have imposter syndrome?
Because I think about the odds of you, the odds of launching a social media communications application, as we said earlier, like a billion in one or something, great.
I don't know this. It's staggering, and I guess it's not a billion.
There's not been a billion of them.
but the odds are just against you.
So when that happens, and it explodes, and it becomes this major global app, is there not any feelings of imposter syndrome?
I don't like the word imposter syndrome because it doesn't sound very nice.
And I think imposter syndrome is actually a good thing in the sense that it means that you feel like there's more to learn.
And so, for me, as I approach any situation or any meeting or anything that we're trying to do out in the world, I'm always trying to think, what else could I learn here?
I obviously, this is an opportunity for me to really listen, to learn, to figure out how I can grow.
And so I never wanna feel like, oh, I've got this.
I always wanna feel like, what else could I learn?
What could I be doing differently?
How could I grow? And I think sometimes when we call it imposter syndrome, like it's not super helpful.
I think we should be telling people, hey it's a good thing if you feel like you've got more to learn.
It's a good thing if you feel like hey, maybe this isn't totally normal to be running a big company, right?
Maybe it's a good thing to stay open to different ideas or ways of doing things.
If SnapChat goes away today, what does Evan end up doing?
Starting a new company?
I would probably continue a lot of the work that we've been doing as a family to give back.
I think that's been the greatest blessing of this whole Snap experience, is being able to give back.
We've done a lot as a family, we've done a lot with Snap and the Snap Foundation And that to me is hopefully the rest of my life is that story.
You wouldn't want to start another tech company?
Never in a million years.
Really? No chance. No chance.
Why? It's way too hard. Way too hard. I told you it was psychotic.
I could have told you that when you started it.
You should have asked me.
Whenever I meet a serial entrepreneur, I'm like, what?
Like what? What, when you say it's hard, this is, I ask this question, I pause on it because I actually posted about this on my Instagram on my snap this morning, about how hard it is and how nobody talks about that.
And so when you experience the hardship as a founder, you kind of look in the mirror and think it's you.
Do you know what I mean?
You think, oh this is evidence of my inadequacy.
But it really, I mean, why'd you say that?
Because it sounds like you have PTSD.
No, it's more, I think, like the the hard ...
kind of to your point about how do you turn stress into something positive, right?
The hard is a good thing in the sense that, like, what makes it so fun but also so challenging is the rate at which you have to change and grow.
Like, that is what has been so unbelievably hard, right?
That, you know, the business at four people is really different than the business at 100 people, the business when we're supporting a million people is different than the business supporting 850 million people using our service And they have to change so much over that period of time, to have to grow so much over that period of time.
That's what's hard. Because you just have to force yourself to change and grow and think about what you...
How do I need to adapt to be the person that our business needs six months from now, which inevitably will be different than who I am today?
So do you think you could run Snap for the rest of your life?
I would certainly be an honor.
I mean, I'd love that.
Maybe you'd leave Snap and then you'd get bored and then you'd start some new company, who knows.
And we have a closing tradition on this podcast where The Last Guest leaves a question for The Next Guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for, and the question that has been left for you, oh, interesting.
I feel like I may have asked this before, but you're going to have to do your very best. What is the hardest thing you ever had to overcome?
Yeah, I think the hardest thing, And I think maybe this is a good segue from what we were just talking about.
The hardest thing I've ever had to overcome is myself, right?
I've constantly had to force myself at every stage to grow and change and be different and evolve to meet the needs of our business and our community or my family.
And I think, you know, that's the battle with yourself to become a better version of yourself every day.
That's a tough one.
Self -awareness. I was thinking about that, as you're just saying that, about the idea of self -awareness as a CEO and how you develop that?
Because it's such an important thing when there's so much counting on you being aware.
So I don't know how you think about self -awareness as a leader and if there's any system you've had to cultivate that awareness that's been productive.
I love that you said that.
I think it's so challenging and it becomes harder and harder, I think as the business grows and you grow as a leader, A, because you become busier So it's harder to tune in and really connect with people, right, in the way that you really need to understand how they really feel or what they're thinking, and to create a trusted relationship, so they feel like they can tell that to you.
As the company grows, you know, I think people become very focused on curating the information that you're receiving.
So you're constantly getting a lot of reporting that, you know, shows leaders and their teams in a very positive light.
And so you have to think about proactively breaking that, because that will be the default that the organization, I think, will do.
All of a sudden they will just try to make sure you're receiving information, right?
That shows them in a great light because they wanna be successful, it makes perfect sense.
But I think you have to really do a lot of work to break that and to get out deeper in the organization and just talk to people and I think there's no substitute.
I wish there was but there's really no substitute to just walking around and talking to people and I found that that's an unbelievable way in our organization to just get great information really quickly and then you see as a CEO, someone's working on a presentation, they're like, oh yeah, this presentation will get to you in like six weeks, but yeah, sure, I can show you a little bit of it right now, because the way that calendars work as a CEO and business reviews work and that sort of thing, all this sort of information, I think ends up flowing in a way that's just slower than it did at the beginning
of the company. So I think really taking the time to connect with people, inform those trusted relationships, being really proactive about breaking the information system that will form around you.
Right? If you're not more deliberate about going and getting other sources of information, that's really important.
And then, I think just that empathy and intuition really helps, because sometimes people feel uncomfortable saying how they really feel.
And it's only because you just notice something in their eye or their affect or whatever it is that you're like, is that really how you feel?
Or should we really be doing this differently?
And I think the ability to really understand how people feel and create a space for them to actually share their perspective, it just is so, so valuable.
Do you ever find yourself feeling a little bit impatient with your team?
Cause I get this a lot.
I'm always trying to make things move faster and I think maybe there's a point of privilege where as the leader of an organization you know you can just break everything to make things happen but maybe the intern in the office doesn't feel like they've got that permission but urgency as a leader, speed, you talked about increasing the learning speed of the organization.
Do you ever feel impatient as a leader?
I'm extraordinarily impatient.
Like, and I think it's in my DNA.
I mean, like my father would not like the idea of waiting.
Like if you want to just like punish my father, you put him in a line for anything.
Like he will go, bliss, like it's just like he, the thought of waiting in a line for him would just drive him crazy because he's a very impatient person.
I think I have some of that, some of that impatience.
If I asked your team members, what's Evan like as a leader what do you think they'd say?
Oh my goodness. I don't know, they might all have different perspectives because I really try to bring out the best in our team members by showing different parts of myself.
I'm not the same leader to every individual.
That would be terrible.
I think so much of being a leader is trying to figure out for each individual in each person what sort of communication style will bring out the best in them and their unique abilities.
So the way I engage with our CEO Derek is different than in the way I engage with Betsy, who's our chief brand officer, or is different than the way I engage with our design team, and that's important.
If I asked them what you're good at, what would they say?
I think I'm good at a couple things.
I think I'm quite good at really understanding human needs and wants and figuring out how to reflect that in our product.
I mean, oftentimes, one of the competitions I like to have with our team is a lot of times in engineering people like to run A -B tests.
So they'll run four A -B tests and they'll sort of pick the one that performs the best. And like, this is the case for a text string or something like that.
If they want to put a text in the app, they'll write four different variants of it, or whatever.
And what I really like to do is figure out can I write the variant that will win the A -B test without them having to run it?
I think that sort of intuition of what people will respond to, what makes sense to them, what's clear in terms of communicating through our product, our features, that sort of thing.
I think that's something that I can offer the team.
And part of that's just because I've been doing it for 13 years, right, every week or almost every day, looking at work with our team and trying to figure out what will resonate with the people that use our products.
So I think I'm good at that.
I also think, maybe this, to my earlier point, I really work hard to bring out the best in people.
And I think, you know, hopefully if I've done my job really well, people say like, wow, I didn't think I could do that, or I didn't know I could do that, or I didn't know that I was a really creative person, but you showed me that I'm actually a really creative person.
That's so cool! Thanks.
I think oftentimes it's by giving people the courage and the space to be creative, and also to show them the different ways that creativity applies.
So, for example, I think a lawyer might think, how could I be creative as a lawyer?
But if you have a conversation with a lawyer, as we did early on in our business, and say, the problem today is all these privacy policies that are written, they make no damn sense.
I don't know if you've ever tried to read a privacy policy on one of these Internet companies.
It doesn't make sense.
What if we were creative, and we actually wrote a privacy policy that people could understand?
Wouldn't that be cool?
How could we solve this problem differently and have a different set of expectations?
And then people say, well, that's interesting.
Let's try doing that.
And they do it and they're like, oh, wow, no, I am creative.
We can solve this problem differently.
We don't need to just have another privacy policy just like everybody else.
We can work really hard to put it in human terms and that would be better.
And so I think showing all sorts of team members across our company the way that their work can be creative in service of our community or in service of our advertising partners, that's something that I hope to bring to our team.
And conversely, what are you not good at?
If I'd asked all of them, I said, what's the other not good at?
Almost everything else.
I mean, that's the challenge.
There's got to be some defining traits that you're like if I you ask my team after this they'll tell you what I'm not good at They'll say what I'm good at but I'll also tell you what I'm not gonna and they'll all agree they'll have total consensus No, but but I do mean that seriously that like in almost every area of our business whether it's HR or legal or You know finance or whatever.
I'm certainly far from the best I mean, we are our team members are extraordinarily talented at what they do across our business and by nature I'm just not very good at those things and so I think for me the real like you know secret I guess or not not a secret the focus of what I've tried to do over the years as so many entrepreneurs do is say how can I spend more of my time doing what I'm good at you know collaborating with our team trying to create new products be creative and then you know have a team around me that's so much better at everything else that you know I couldn't possibly be better
at? Especially as being a younger CEO, I think that's probably even more important than it is for other people to be able to have that self -awareness and humility to say, I don't know all the answers.
Cause you start at this company at plenty, what, like 21 years old, 22 years old.
So you've never done running a public company before.
So there, I think humility is probably even more important for someone like you at that stage, I'm right.
Interestingly, it is the strategic advantage, right.
to be 20 years old and to not know anything so that you can ask any question and not look like an idiot is the greatest gift in the world.
I was almost always the youngest person in the room, almost always.
And that was such a blessing because everyone's like, oh, what are you working on?
Oh, an app? That's cool.
And I'd be like, yeah, actually, would you mind talking to me about the best ways to prepare your company to be public?
And people are like, sure.
You know? So I think you know being able to use that naivete as the fundamental advantage to be able to learn quickly is so important.
But have you lost that now?
Hopefully never. I mean that's the whole that that's like what I love to do is the curiosity of asking questions.
Evan what is the this is my last question.
What is the most important question for entrepreneurs that are listening to this conversation now Based on everything that you know and have done, that will help them that I didn't ask.
I think they should really ask themselves if they love what they're doing, and if they really love what they're doing, that will be the fuel that will carry them the whole way.
But there are so many people who are trapped building businesses or in jobs that don't really love what they do, who haven't found how to use their special gifts in a way that applies to the business world.
And I think so much of life is trying to figure out what is that thing that I can do that I just love that brings out the best in me and my talents.
And I think not giving up in pursuing that is just so important.
Evan, thank you so much. Thank you so much for doing this today.
I know you don't do a ton of podcasts.
I was particularly honored that you'd come and sit here with me and hopefully it wasn't a nerve -wracking experience.
Well I had a lot of fun And thank you for helping me with my 2025 resolution.
I'm going to try and make some progress.
I'm so keen to know who in your life has been nudging you to get out there more.
Because there must be someone.
Unfortunately, like everybody, which is why I've caved.
Well, thank you so much. And it's so wonderful to get to know you more and understand how you're thinking about all of these things.
And thank you for the wisdom that all of the entrepreneurs, the founders, that listening to this conversation have gained from you.
And I do encourage you to do more of this kind of thing, because there's so many of us that are so curious about the ups the downs and everything in the middle of being an entrepreneur building a company like you have in a world that is changing absolute light speed.
So it's a real service to all of us to get to know you, to get to know the thinking of the company, but also to be able to learn from the experience you've had and I'm real excited now to go and try these spectacles.
Awesome, let's do it.
We launched these conversation cards and they sold out, and we launched them again and they sold out again, we launched them again and they sold out again, because people love playing these with colleagues at work, with friends at home and also with family and we've also got a big audience that use them as journal prompts.
Every single time a guest comes on the diary of a CEO, they leave a question for the next guest in the diary and I've sat here with some of the most incredible people in the world and they've left all of these questions in the diary and I've ranked them from one to three in terms of the depth.
One being a starter question and level three, if you look on the back here, this is a level three, becomes a much deeper question that builds even more connection.
If you turn the cards over and you scan that QR code you can see who answered the card and watch the video of them answering it in real time.
So if you would like to get your hands on some of these conversation cards, go to the diary .com or look at the link in the description below.
