Snap: Evan Spiegel

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/2de75948f50e7e81

are contacted by Facebook.
And you and Bobby.
Go meet with Mark Zuckerberg.
What do you remember about that meeting?
Um
We were pretty nervous. He was telling us about working on a new poke app, which ultimately ended up being a copycat of Snapchat at the time.
Did he say?
Do you guys wanna collaborate at that time?
I don't remember the exact substance of the Don't remember of course you remember. You were twenty two. It must have been incredible to be asked to come even'cause it's a validation of what you guys were building.
That's not how it felt at the time. It felt like oh no, there's a really big company that everyone's been warning us about, you know, and has said they're working on something similar.
We knew that a copycat product was coming.
Yeah, and then I think that Christmas it did.
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements.
they built.
I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Evan Spiegel turned disappearing photo messages into Snap.
One of the biggest social media platforms.
on earth.
Here's the story of Snap, once known as Snapchat, that you might have heard.
Evan Spiegel and two friends from Stanford built a social media app in 2011.
And just two years later.
Mark Zuckerberg offers them three billion dollars.
Now this story is true, this really did happen. And if you think about it, it was kind of nuts for Evan to turn down that offer.
I mean, there's a pretty large graveyard of once high-flying tech companies that soon withered out and died.
But Evan had a lot of conviction in his product.
And the data was there to back that up.
Within a year of launching, Snapchat had close to five million daily users.
Today?
That number is over 450 million daily users.
And what is it about Snapchat that makes it so compelling?
Well, as a parent who tries to ban all social media apps for my kids' phones, the one argument I couldn't win was over Snapchat.
Middle and high school kids use Snapchat in the same way adulte messaging.
In other words, Snap has figured out how to build a moat around a major way teenagers communicate.
Now Evan's rocket ship trajectory was not as smooth and seamless as it sounds.
For starters, he was just 21 when Snap launched.
He was, as he admits, really bad at being a CEO in the early days.
He didn't know how to run a business, and the learning curve was really steep.
And during the first few years of Snap's rise, a legal battle with one of the co-founders cast a shadow over the company.
Today, Snap is still one of the biggest players in social media.
And despite a somewhat lackluster performance on Wall Street, the company still has a market cap hovering between 13 and 15 billion dollars.
Lately, the company's decided to roll the dice on another hero product, spectacles.
Augmented reality glasses that will bring much of the Snapchat experience
right into your field of vision.
It's a pretty risky bet given the performance of wearable so far, but
A little more on that later.
For now, what you need to know is that Evan grew up in the Palisades neighborhood in Los Angeles, an area, of course, devastated by the recent fires. Both of his parents were lawyers by training, but his mom eventually gave up Law to take care of the kids. And watching his dad work really, really long hours.
Evan says he knew pretty early on
What he didn't want to be.
One thing I knew for sure was that I did not want to be a lawyer. Um
My dad was always called away from family trips. He would get phalls and you know, that would basically say, Hey, you gotta cancel your trip or you can't go to this thing at you know with Evan or whatever it was. So I I remember thinking growing up, like, I wanna be the guy on the phone calling my dad and telling him that he can't.
Take our family on vacation.
Huh.
Um
So I know you went to Stanford and I mean this is like two thousand eight. I mean you're coming into
obviously this financial crisis, but it's like the beginning of, you know, web two point oh, right?
You know, I think a couple years before you, Kevin Sistram and Mike Krieger graduated and they would go on, of course, to found Instagram. We'll talk about that in a bit.
But there was probably like already on campus.
just conversations around all these amazing things that people were doing, recent graduates were doing.
Do you remember having those conversations and thinking like, This is really cool. It's what's going on?
At that time it was still really early. I mean, when I go to campus now, it feels like almost everybody has a startup. Yeah. Almost everybody's creating a company, but that's not what it felt like at the time. I mean, to your point, it was sort of in the you know, uh around the time of the financial crisis. A lot of folks were still, you know, studying econ. That was a a really popular
major at the time. So it's sort of in that transitional phase between a lot of folks being really focused on on econ to more computer science um and things like that.
So I read a story about
this experience you had. You took this class at the business school and Scott Cook of Intuit, the founder of Intuit.
And I don't know if that was a turning point for you, but if it
What what was
What happened.
You know, when you saw him and met him because I think it did
It was kind of a turning point for you as a student.
Yeah, taking that class. It's called entrepreneurship and venture capital. It's taught by Peter Wendell and Eric Schmidt. It's still taught today, I try to guest lecture uh once a year. And
That class was an absolute
game changer for me. And you know, Scott Cook
was one of the guest lecturers and and gave the whole case study on into it and
During the case study, I guess I I asked a couple of questions in the
in the class about how they were
capitalizing the business at the time or something like that. So we'd had an opportunity to engage a little bit. And after class I talked to him and basically begged him
For a job. And so he gave me an internship at at Intuit that really sort of changed my trajectory because on a very small team of people, we were, you know, I think it was three or four of us. We we made web apps at the time, uh, actually for you know touchpad phones, not touch screens or anything like that. But I learned that with a really small team, you could build software and deploy it.
all around the world. And so it sort of demystified a lot of the process of of building stuff.
So
After doing that, I mean
Did that then kinda set in motion wheels in your head like, Wait, I could do something cool. There's something cool to be done.
Yeah, I I think you know, beyond that, it it just showed that that it wasn't that hard. That with a couple friends that we could make something too um without you know the infrastructure of a huge company and things like you know the cloud were were getting built out at the time. So all this stuff that had been so hard before, needing to rack your own servers.
Invest all this capital, have a huge team. That that wasn't required to create
uh software experiences anymore.
Got it. All right. So while you were at Stanford, you had um you had a friend
Name Bobby Murphy.
who I guess he he lived across the hall from you. And later he would actually become one of your co founders at Snap, and we'll talk about that. But before that, you you guys, you and Bobby started another company at it was completely different. It's called Future Freshman. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Like what what was the business?
We had both experienced the college process that was super complicated. And one of the really challenging parts is all the different requirements of all of these different colleges when you're trying to apply. So it's a massive organizational
project that could be better handled by software. And so we started trying to build really um beautiful software that could do that well. So you would just check
all the box for all the schools you wanted to apply to, we would go out and gather all the requirements, the essay questions, everything, put it all in one place. So it made it really, really easy for you to fill out the application and do that kind of thing. And you guys didn't need a whole lot of funding for this, it sounds like or any? No, we we didn't take any funding at that time. We were just trying to
building a website and trying to build like a a user interface. Yeah, exactly. Were your coding skills good enough to make something nice, like look good? I thought it was really cool. I mean I I did most of the design and Bobby did most of the the coding and you know I think the the software was great. The the big problem was that nobody used it.
How did you try to get people to use it? Uh well at that time both of our siblings were applying to college, so we tried to get them on it to start giving us feedback and you know, we would tell
schools that it was available, but uh that was a big lesson for us because our competitor at the time, they were called Naviants, they were getting distribution through all the college counselors. So if you were in school, your college counselor would tell you and your parents hey use noviants to apply to college. And so they had a massive distribution advantage.
And how long did you guys kind of work on this before you came to the conclusion that
You just were not gonna be able to compete in that space.
Think about eighteen months total.
We invested a lot of time into it. And that was a really painful decision to shut it down. But I think ultimately we just realized you know we didn't have the distribution. And ultimately we were solving a problem where even if we were really successful, our customers would essentially leave us every year. So we'd have to go get more customers the next year. And so
It was just a really, really tough business, I think, to
To get off the ground.
It's like diapers.

Um all right. So
This takes us to roughly to the spring of two thousand eleven. You are I think a
Junior.
At Stanford.
And
Was it sort of like okay?
You know
Let's kinda spitball other ideas, come up with something else.
Yeah, exactly. We we had a a couple other ideas that we were playing around with and working on. Um
at the time, including just really easy ways to connect with friends and share files and this sort of thing.
But it wasn't until we started working on Pickaboo that I think we found something that we were really excited about.
Tell me about the idea for Picaboo. How did that come about?
Well, I had come back from studying abroad in Cape Town. I was living in a dorm back on campus, hang out with a a friend of mine, um, and he was like, Man, it'd be really cool.
To be able to send disappearing photos. We're like, oh, that's a super interesting idea. So we started prototyping like what that could look like and came up with the name Pickaboo. And ultimately I presented it to my design class. And I think the first piece of feedback we got was basically, you know, that's not gonna work because you can always take a screenshot.
And that piece of feedback was really, really helpful because I think early on
There were some other competitors in the space. They were all very focused on like security. But what we found was that what people loved using was just sending pictures back and forth really, really quickly. MMS was really slow. I mean, I think it took more than a minute to send a a photo via text message at the time. And so our friends just started using it to send photos all day.
All right. So peekaboo, right, like peekaboo but spelled like pick pi C peekaboo's this idea.
The idea is
Send you can send a photo that will be ephemeral. It'll just you could just quickly see it'll disappear in ten seconds.
I mentioned this earlier, but two thousand eleven, I mean a year earlier
Kevin Sistram and Mike Krieger, who were on the show nine year eight or nine years ago.
Also Stanford graduates.
They launched Instagram. So
I have to imagine that they were s sort of like kind of legendary status,'cause once they launched Instagram it really blew up.
Um what do you remember about it?
hearing about those guys or talking about those guys or
Was it inspiring to you and to your friends in some way?
Just'cause the parallels are so there's so
clear, you know, it's like two friends
At Stanford a couple years before you.
with the photo app, right? And then that just becomes huge.
You know, at at the time, I think we were we just really felt that like social media was taking itself too seriously. So Instagram and Facebook at the time the the whole focus was, you know, on posting the prettiest possible pictures and getting lots of likes and comments. And there was like a real focus on
You know, how many friends do you have? How popular are you? And and of course, you know, also a a lot of concerns about like the permanence of images. I mean, at the time there are all these stories of people getting job offers rescinded because somebody found their Facebook profile. Yeah. So I I think there was for us just a real need for something different, something that you could actually use to talk with your friends and have fun.
Instagram and and Facebook at that time were were much more focused on
This very public and permanent sort status based social media.
Tell me from the time of the idea.
To the time where you kinda like launch
A version of Picaboo.
I think it's just a couple of months. It's just like four or five months, right?
I think something like that, yeah.
How did you guys build it?'Cause he built it as obviously as an app.
Kind of take me into
Doing that.
Do it on your own at Stanford.
Yeah, we it didn't require any money. We could just do it. But I just sketched out on one piece of paper the screens, um, you know, the different flows. And one of the things we learned from future freshmen is not to build something huge and complex. It was to build something as simple as possible and get people's feedback as quickly as possible. And so
We really just started with a couple key screens, you know, add a friend with their username tap to send them
uh a snap. But there were there were a couple of principles that we really anchored to, like opening up to the camera, uh, for example. So you never missed a moment. You could just open up to the camera and snap really quickly.
And so when you had this prototype, did it look good? Did it look anything like what it would eventually look like?
We thought it looked good. I mean, I think today we m we might say that there was room for improvement, but uh at the time, you know, it was it was fun and playful and colorful and and different. Um and I think that was really the whole point.
And you designed it initially for the iPhone, to work on the iPhone?
Yeah, it was iPhone only to start.
Yeah.
All right, so when you have this app ready.
To launch it.
Was it just to test with friends that you knew or d was it like a public launch where where anybody could use it?
We put it on the app store so anyone could use it, but obviously nobody knew about it except our friends. So uh in the early days it was just our friends, you know, my sister, my cousin, folks just
Trying it and playing around with it with their friends.
And what was the feedback like? I mean who what were people saying to you about it?
Just that it was really fun. I I think, you know, I think it really lowered the bar to you know, in terms of what a picture
was. It wasn't about saving a perfect moment. It was about communicating. And people love that. So they started asking us for all these communication features, right? Like hey, can I add a caption? Can I add a drawing? Um all the you know, in the in the beginning there weren't all these communication tools that we have today. Got it.
Okay, so I I wanna r raise something that is a little bit sensitive, and I know there are things that you can and maybe cannot talk about because there was litigation. So I'm gonna I'm gonna try and fill in some gaps because it's important that we at least
acknowledge. Um
But
Maybe you were working on Picaboo with
two of your classmates at Stanford. It was Bobby Murphy who we've talked about.
um he'd worked with you before on future freshmen. Um
But then there was another classmate in the picture, a guy called Reggie Brown, and he would later file a lawsuit and say he was also involved in building peekaboo.
And from what I understand, you guys had a falling out.
But tell me a little bit about
maybe what happened or what you wish you would have done differently or
maybe the like communication wasn't clear about
the roles that people were playing and who was doing what.
Yeah. Um
you know, really appreciate his contributions. I mean he
Came up with the idea of sending disappearing photos and share that with me. But I think one of the challenging things, you know, Bobby and I had had this history of working together. And we so we had a really strong working relationship, and I think those expectations were really clear. So I think like to your point, you know, and for founders thinking about creating their own businesses, being really clear about those expectations up front, you know, including
Getting a piece of paper that really outlines those responsibilities, uh I think is really important, but it's not something you're thinking about when you're just playing around and trying to create something with your friends. Yeah.

So all right, from what I understand, like
Initially the app really took off among high school students in the Palisades and Malibu area.
So I'm assuming that that was like something that maybe you you were able to do. You were able to bring it to students there and encourage them to use it.
Well, we definitely shared it with our friends and a lot of that growth happened informally. I mean some of the things we tried, you know, like buying Facebook ads and stuff like that didn't work because people didn't understand the service until someone explained it to them, until a friend used it with them. You know, it's only works if you've got a friend to use it with. So I think just the the fundamental
Nature of the service is ultimately what drove its growth because the virality was in built.
Yeah, and it was different than social media virality because social media virality is very network based, right? You want to have the largest graph possible, but the reason why Snapchat was able to grow is because you really wanted to use it with your, you know, one or two or three best friends. And so the the growth trajectory was different than traditional social media, but you know, it still required a f a friend to use it.
In order to use it, somebody else has to have it, so
Then you get this next user and then the next user, and so
It sort of self perpetuates.
I think that's one of the fun things about Snapchat. It's not a single player experience. You've got to do it together uh with a friend. And some of the the changes we made, uh, especially calling it Snapchat, talking about the importance of visual messaging rather than focusing on disappearing photos, that's when people really, you know, sort of understand, hey, this is this is for communicating.
And you had to call it Snapchat because there was another company called Picaboo, right?
Yeah, exactly. We got a cease and desist from uh a peekaboo company and uh maybe one of the best things that ever happened to us. And it happened early enough where your brand wasn't known, so it didn't matter. Yeah, exactly.
So to get to January twenty twelve.
Or you have, you know, thirty thousand users, you could do that with almost no money.
Yeah, exactly this this was one of the huge benefits of cloud infrastructure is we could pay for what we used. But you know, the the server bills started getting more and more expensive. You know, my grandparents had left me$10,000. Bobby had some money um from one of his prior jobs, and so he chip that in. Um my dad, I think, put in maybe five or ten thousand dollars, but
He wasn't quite keen to put in any more uh to help people send photos back and forth. So we had to pretty quickly start uh looking for fundraising'cause the server bills got to be about ten thousand dollars a month.
When you talked about this idea.
you know, to your dad or your mom or
Did anybody was anybody sceptical like
Why would somebody want to do that? Or
This just seems like it's gonna be used by weirdos to send like naked pictures. I mean did I aside from the media, which we'll get to in a minute, but just people you knew.
Did anybody ever
Express skepticism about this?
Yeah, teachers, friends, of course. I I you know, but I I think that
You know, that feedback was helpful and that skepticism actually helped fuel the growth of the product, right? They're like
Wait a minute, I don't understand this, but so many people are using this, or well, my friends are using it. I I gotta check it out and see what this is all about.
Alright, so let's talk about fundraising. You are
A senior, I think, at Stanford.
And you're on campus, so I imagine
It's not.
impossible to make connections between professors and other
people on campus to sources of fundraising.
I mean, just to kind of reveal what happens, in in March of twenty twelve, you get almost half a million dollars in seed funding from LightSpeed, which probably one of their greatest among their greatest investments ever. But tell me about getting that money because we'll
And I should remind people listening, the stories we don't hear about are all the times that LightSpeed and Sequoia and Benchmark and others made five hundred thousand dollars in seed funding and
It went nowhere. They lost it.
We only hear about the times when it worked. So there's a lot of money that they put out there that goes nowhere.
But how did you
Make the case. Was it
Hard? Was it easy to get the money?
We had a lot of unsuccessful meetings with with venture capitalists. I I think the places where we got more traction saw success was anyone whose teams were using the product. Um or or they had friends who were using the product. And so
You know, ultimately Barry, who was a partner uh at LightSpeed, uh, you know, told another one of his partners, Hey, my daughter is using Instagram, Angry Birds, and Snapchat. You know, that's what she's doing all day long. Uh we know about Angry Birds on Instagram. What's the Snapchat thing? Let's go find these guys. So they went to look for you.
They went to look for us, yeah. Oh I got a Facebook message from Jeremy Lou at LightSpeed.
Yeah.
And uh we'd be getting all sorts of messages from folks. Uh that seemed kinda spammy or suspicious, but Jeremy's Facebook profile, he had a photo of himself and Obama in the profile picture. So we were like, Oh, he must be uh legit. We'll we'll respond. And we ended up meeting up
with Jeremy and and I think the thing that really helped them understand the business is we just shared the data. We just shared the retention data and the usage of Snapchat. So we had a lot of data that showed that once people started talking with their friends on Snapchat, they kept doing it. And ultimately I think that's what gave them the conviction to invest. When they put half a million dollars into Snap, what was the valuation?
Four point two five million.
That's a good investment.
I think so. Actually the my favorite part of that story is a a a school nearby invested fifteen thousand dollars.
And ended up making it. I think I think they ended up building a new gymnasium or something. It's pretty cool. Yeah, a school, I guess affiliated with one of the Light Speed folks. I think they were on the board or on the finance committee or something. They were like, We should put it. Yeah, they invested fifteen thousand dollars in the seed round and and ultimately How much money do you think they made out of that?
Tens of millions of dollars, potentially. Enough for a a new gym, I think.
Yeah.
Did you
I mean, so up until that point you didn't need a whole lot of money, right?
But now with five hundred thousand dollars.
I'm assuming like
You've got to build an infrastructure. Like how did you first deploy the money? Like did you start to make hires?'Cause you're still a senior in college at that point, right?
Yeah, the first thing we did was hire friends of ours, Daniel. I was really fortunate enough to meet Daniel, my freshman year, during a product design seminar. And one of his friends, actually I didn't know they were friends at the time, but
I I was visiting a a friend of mine in in her dorm and she was like, Hey, you should meet this guy, David, across the hall. He's a really cool guy, super smart. So I just went and knocked on his door, introduced myself. Turned out he and Daniel were best friends. So David and Daniel joined the team and uh I think there were about five of us there. It was me and Bobby and Dina and David and Daniel.
And who's Dina? She's also a Stanford student.
Yeah. We had been friends in school. She'd helped with future freshmen and you know
Was that investment from light speed?
Is that what prompted you to drop out?
Yeah, that that and just that it was becoming impossible to do both at the same time. I mean I
I felt just a huge sense of responsibility. I mean if fo we thought and eighty five thousand dollars was was like infinity money and you know, we had a huge obligation to our investors. So I mean I can remember I was in a CNC machining class in the back of the class refreshing my Wells Fargo account. And as soon as I saw the four hundred and eighty five thousand dollars, I went up to the professor and I was like
I'm just so sorry. Like I I can't continue.
when we come back in just a moment.
Evan realizes that he should have looked at the terms of that light speed deal a little more closely.
And then later, Snapchat goes head to head with one of the biggest social media companies.
in the world.
Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to how I built this.
Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2012 and Evan has just dropped out of Stanford to focus on his photo messaging app, Snapchat.
He's recruited a group of friends to the company, and they've all moved down to LA
To work.
out of his dad's dining room.
We had the dining room because he has uh an old Mustang that he kept in the garage, like a sixties Mustang. So we were not allowed to to use the garage. That was for the car and we were in the dining room. And he probably liked having you at home. I mean I would love to have my kids at home after they finish college.
I think in hindsight, yeah, when we finally moved out, he was like, Oh actually that was that was really awesome. But you know, there we were working like twenty four seven. At some point there were seven or eight of us there, so it was a lot.
Tell me about your life on a day to day basis.
You'd wake up and you would just work.
All day until late at night and then go to sleep.
Yeah, basically that.
Seven days a week.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And what what were you doing? What do you remember about twenty twelve like?
Were you on the phones, were you in meetings? Were you working on the user experience? What what are were the things you
You specifically were doing.
There were a couple of big things happening at the time. One is we started working on the Android application. So Daniel and David were spending a lot of time doing that. Um the other thing that we were doing was really starting to work on video,'cause at the time it was only photos. And we had invented this really cool idea that, you know
Back in the day, you had to toggle between photo and video on your smartphone. So you'd open the camera app, and then if you wanted to make a video, I just
press the video button, it would flip into video mode. There was a lot of friction. So we had invented this idea that you could just tap to take a photo or hold the button and start recording a video. And that at the time, based on the way the camera worked, was actually quite difficult to engineer. And then, you know,
a lot of time hiring. You know, it one of the challenges we were up against uh around that time, maybe a little bit later, we had decided to stay in LA. But up until then we were in LA, which doesn't have the same sort of tech ecosystem or tech talent that San Francisco or the Bay Area has. So hiring was very time consuming, especially for tech talent and and really trying to convince people to come move
to LA to work on on Snapchat. And then fundraising, of course, at that time was also
A pretty big project.
And then I was answering all the support email uh as well at the time.

Evan, the first time I think I heard of about Snapchat
was when I I used to read the New York Times regularly and you know it was
if you're in the New York Times, right, it's such a big deal.
And I think in May of that year of twenty twelve.
they ran a story about Snapchat and
The story.
implied that, you know, hey, this could be used like
For sexual content or nudity. And that became kind of like a narrative for a while. Like, oh, here's this sexting app and stuff. Tell me a little bit about.
And I've read your responses to that at the time and but I could sense
And your response is just irritation with this.
Tell me about how you felt about that narrative, because it was out there, it was real, people were were saying this is what it's gonna be used for.
Yeah, I I think it was frustrating just because it felt like people didn't understand what was really happening with Snapchat. And you know, we would try to share the data and show that people were sending fifty, a hundred snaps back and forth all day long communicating. And and so, you know, we we felt that kind of pigeonholing us into that wasn't a fair reflection of of what was happening.
So all right.
There's this narrative.
Obviously you're annoyed by it, and look.
People I'm sure we're using it to send nude photos. There's nothing nothing you can do to prevent that. It's like you can have a car company and somebody can speed. You can't
Prevent that.
But was there anything you could do to discourage that in any way, or was it just sort of something that might happen and it wasn't really anything that
You cared about it.
I think what's really important is just continuing to talk about the service as a way to visually communicate and obviously to, you know, discourage folks from doing things that were inappropriate or
Illegal. We invest a huge amount of money trying to stop, you know, illegal behavior or misuse of our
platform and our service. So I think there's a lot that we we do do and that we can do to help keep our platform safe.
All right.
Twenty twelve, this is like your first kind of full year, the year you've dropped out, you've got your first seed money.
And probably by this point.
You have a lot of people approaching you to invest.
Is that happening throughout the year? Are you getting messages? Are you getting investors approaching you?
Yeah, we definitely got more inbound interest in the in the company, uh, for sure. But
We realized very quickly that we had a problem because in our initial convertible note that had been issued from Lightspeed, we had agreed to a right of first refusal. So as we were getting offers from other VCs, we were so excited we took them to LightSpeed and said, Hey, check this out. You know, we got this offer to invest, really high valuation.
And they said, Well, you know, you do know about this right of first refusal thing and we were like, Uh sorry, what? Um What did that what did that mean?
Yeah, the the write of first refusal allowed Lightspeed to buy up to fifty percent of the next round. Um, and because of the way that a convertible note
works, that meant that they would control that series of stock. So they would control the series A of stock. And that meant that other investors weren't interested in leading the series A because the minute that they decided to invest, they wouldn't control the series anyways. Did you know that when you signed that when you got that seed money?
Was that clear to you? Yeah, we we read we read the terms, but at at the time that was our impression that you know they
They were just standard terms and we were so excited that someone was willing to invest in the in the business that that that wasn't as important to us. But I think one of my big takeaways and one of the things I always share with entrepreneurs is just that you know, there's no such thing as standard terms and to be really careful, you know, as you're evaluating the terms of these investments. It's so true. I have seen throughout my life.
and career contracts are like this is just boilerplate. And you're like, well, I don't like the boilerplate. So all right, so I mean I'm sure you're very grateful to Lightspeed, and I I think they subsequently did make more investments, but
Initially you were hamstrung because
The next round they had the right to lead it, which meant that it could discourage other investors from being involved because if they couldn't lead it, they might not want to be involved.
Yeah, and and ultimately by discouraging other investors, that meant that the market for our stock, the valuation, right, right could have come way down. So'cause there was no competition. Exactly. So I mean, how did you get around that?
Well, one of the interesting things about that point in time is that convertible notes were very new. So what we discovered was that the language in the convertible note actually allowed us to convert that note into any type of stock. It hadn't it didn't specify the type of stock that we were required to convert the note into.
And that gave us a lot of flexibility to think about do we just want to convert this node into a different series of stock and ultimately then create a new series that another investor can come into. So it helped us reach a positive and constructive solution with LightSpeed, who, you know, understood, okay.
We'll find a solution here. We understand this this right of first refusal it might not be the best thing for the business.
You know
early VCs
early venture capitalists are actually quite open to having more founder friendly terms early on, right? Because the amount of capital is much lower. And you know, the idea is either, you know, you make something
really, really successful, or you know, it goes to zero. So the what we've always shared with you know our friends who are starting businesses, you know, you can you can you have three things you can optimize for when you're raising money. You can optimize for the people you're working with, like the the venture capitalists,
You can optimize for the terms, you can optimize for the the valuation, but pick two. Um and we, you know, with other investors picked really the terms and the investors. And so that um ultimately I think served us well over time.
Alright.
twenty twelve.
By the end of that year, I think it's in December
Or maybe maybe in the fall of that year.
You are
Contacted by Facebook.
And you are um you and Bobby.
Go meet with Mark Zuckerberg. Was that the first time you had met him?
Uh yeah, it it was.
Tell me what you can tell me about that meeting.
I must have been kind of amazing. I mean
You know.
This is now after I think the social network had already come out.
He was already kinda legendary.
What do you remember about that meeting?
Uh well, I mean it obviously it was really cool to meet such a, you know, accomplished entrepreneur. We were pretty nervous. He was telling us about working on a new poke app, which ultimately ended up being a copycat of Snapchat at the time. Um, so that was our big takeaway was like yikes, he's building something that's that's really similar to to what we're doing.
But he was clearly interested in seeing if you guys wanted to work together, right?
Uh, I think so, yeah. I mean I you know, he's he's had a a great track record of identifying companies pretty early on and and finding ways to
To work with them.
Did he say?
Do you guys wanna collaborate? Do you guys want I mean, we're open to
Bringing this, you know, into our fold.
At that time.
I don't remember the exact substance of the course you remember. And it was a you were twenty two. It was must have been incredible to be asked to come meet him'cause it's a validation of what you guys were building.
Yeah, that it didn't really that's that's not how it felt at the time. It felt like oh no, there's a really big company that everyone's been warning us about who's now really interested in what we're doing, you know, and has said they're working on something similar.
So you left that meeting nervous.
Yeah, we were we knew that, you know, a copycat product was coming. You know, and then I think that Christmas it did.
Yeah, December of twenty twelve. I mean you're just
You know.
full year into this thing.
And Facebook, the biggest social media company.
At that point.
Launches essentially a clone, a snapshot.
Were you worried?
We were we were really worried. But I I now
Talk about it as the best Christmas gift of all time because that Christmas morning we woke up and everyone had been getting their new iPhones. And remember, at the time, the new iPhone had a front facing camera, which was a really big deal because people could take selfies. And so people were getting their new iPhones with front facing cameras and
They were downloading Snapchat, and Snapchat was at the top of the app store. And so that for us was just a huge sigh of relief.
How many people said to you in 2012,
Facebook is just gonna crush you. Because I think it would have been not an unreasonable thing to think. I mean it's a giant and they're launching a clone, they had an order of magnitude more users that they could just basically just send this out to everybody.
How many people
said that to you or implied that.
Yeah, that was
Probably the most common piece of feedback we got from potential investors. I think that was
You know, if you remember back then there was sort of this idea that like if you have a really, really big social network, there are these network effects and no one can compete with a business that has network effects. And at the time people had not yet understood that like if you have a big network, but you're only talking to
three or five or seven
people in that network that actually the size of the network doesn't matter that much. What matters is that those people, those that you talk to all the time are a part of it. And so that's how Snapchat was able to grow. It wasn't focused on being the biggest network. You didn't have to have the most number of friends, but
You know, y your number one best friend or your partner, in my case my wife, is the person you talk to
You know, half the time or all the time. Um, and so if just that person is part of the network, then the network's really, really valuable to you. And so I think back then, though, people didn't understand that you know, you could grow a a another messaging service. They just thought that the person with the largest social network would always win.
When investors were asking you like well
But what's the advantage you have? Everybody's I mean, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, everybody was on Facebook, right?
Who is the person who's using Snapchat?
versus the person who might use, you know, poke or or whatever Facebook might offer in the future.
What would you say?
I think the advantage was just that our vision was very different.
We talked about this a little bit before, but this notion that social media was really for
posting pretty and perfect photos and trying to, you know, collect the greatest number of friends possible to, you know, basically participate in this huge
popularity contest and that Snapchat was actually focused on your real friends, your close friends, your family, and communicating the full range of of human emotion with them as a messaging service, not as a social media broadcast service. So when people would describe it then and now as a social media platform.
Do you like recoil at that?
Idea.
Would you push back and say, That's not really what we are?
We've always pushed back against that.
Some of our services like stories, for example, um, which we really viewed to as like one to many communication with your close friends and family. I think that, you know.
people's adoption of of stories and then ultimately subsequent
platforms also integrating stories as well, led to that feeling that like, hey, Snapchat's like social media, even though on stories there are no public likes and no comments and the stories disappear after twenty four hours.

I mean I'm curious about
By the end of twenty twelve, right. Do you remember how many people you had, was it more than a dozen working with you?
Uh maybe about seven.
Seven, eight. Okay, so ball team. Yeah.
Tell me a little bit about
how you structured it because
When I was like twenty two, twenty three
I went to go
become a foreign correspondent around that time. And I had
a couple people working for me and it was hard. I did not know how to do that. I didn't know to lead a team. I knew how to
Manage people.
I felt like I was a kid.
You know, and I'm curious.
How you felt
'Cause you were the CEO, right? And Bobby was what, the CTO?
Yeah, he's the CTO.
How did you manage that? How did you even know what to do?
How to be a boss.
Well, I I think the best part of not knowing anything is that you get to ask all sorts of questions and just approach every situation as an opportunity to learn and never be embarrassed.
about not knowing. I never had to
be the smartest person in the in the room. No one ever expected me to be experienced because I hadn't ever run a company before. And I I think that was just a massive, massive advantage to just be able to ask questions, ask why. You know, the technology industry is just an incredibly generous industry when it comes to people helping each other out.
Yeah, who who helped you? I mean.
Who are some of the mentors who just just to understand how to
You know, deal with equity or deal with investors, or just deal with things like the beginning that are
Very complex even for a a really intelligent twenty two year old.
Who helps you kind of navigate that?
One of one of my really fond memories was when uh so Erric Schmidt uh got to know through that class entrepreneurship and venture capital. And he was the seat the I think the chairman of Google at the time.
I think s yeah, I think so.
And so he would say, you know, hey, I'm coming to LA, I'll come by, you and Bobby just make a list of all the questions you have, and I'll help you answer them. And you know, at that time our questions were like, Do we need a CFO? Like you know, this kind of thing. And for Eric to just sit down and let us ask all of our
questions and and say like no you don't need a CFO. You're not making any money. That was just really helpful to have that sort of unbelievable expert advice.
I wonder about
Just
personally, right? You're you're working all day, all night.
Seven days a week non stop, right? And there are still stressors.
You know, this other
Co founder Reggie sues the company.
And then you've got this legal dispute. It was settled, and he was given a payment, a payout. But
Did that
create stress for you and Bobby knowing that look this is hovering over us. This is a a real thing.
Was it distracting in any way?
It wasn't so much like the stress of the legal process. It was sad because this this had been one of my best friends in college. So I think that
Like personally, that part of it was terrible.
You didn't reconcile you and Reggie.
Uh personally, uh we haven't talked in yeah in a long time.
Um
Alright.
You guys raise a series A thirteen million dollars, so led by benchmark. So clearly you were be able to work something out with light speed.
Because the round was led by a different firm.
And that's serious. I mean that's a you've got a lot of runway there.
And then a couple months later, several months later, it's a series B.
eighty million.
Right. And now you've got
A lot of
Wind in your sails.
In twenty thirteen, I mean that year you had three rounds
An A, B, and C round.
where you raised a s really a substantial amount of money. So my impression is that your feeling was let's bring in a bunch of money and really try and grow
Big.
Fast.
M, I can't imagine how
Just
chaotically nonstop twenty thirteen would be.
'Cause it's just you've got to grow, you've got to hire people.
You know

Um
But what did you start to think this
thing could be.
Uh at that point we were really just trying to keep up with the growth of the service overall. Um
We had some ideas about how to evolve it, things like stories, uh, for example, and we were playing around with some added value features at the time. Ultimately now we have a service called Snapchat.
Plus, but uh you know, a lot of a lot of the folks at that time was really on building out the team and then ultimately making the decision to really commit to to building out the company in Los Angeles, which, you know, what up until then was kinda up in the air.
And the business model was going to be
P still primarily advertising.
It wasn't clear at the time what the business model was going to be. And one of the things I learned from Stanford and being up in the Bay Area, which was different than how I learned about business growing up
was the real focus on getting to scale and investing to get to scale rather than focusing on profitability early on. And that the more that you can grow and expand your total opportunity over time, ultimately the business can generate
a ton of profit and whatnot down the road, but that that would not be the right thing to focus on early. And so the idea is if you can grow something
that's really big, that's valuable to people that you can figure out how to monetize it later.
By the way do you think that model is is still
Viable today.
Like in the in in terms of starting a business saying, We'll figure out the business model later, let's just get the users.
I think it depends. I I think that that strategy is most effective when it comes to new platforms. So if you look at like the advent of desktop internet, that was really the strategy very early on for players like an Amazon, for example, right, where they were like, We're just gonna invest to grow, we'll worry about profitability. I think the same was true about the mobile platform development, right? Where
Same thing, like, you know, let's let's just try and build really popular scale services and then focus on profitability. So in those moments of big technological change and disruption and new platforms, I definitely think that's the the right approach.
But it's risky, right? I mean and there are lots of examples of
brands and businesses that did get a lot of users and then just didn't work or couldn't monetize it. But I mean the idea here was let's just get people in the door and probably
You know, we could
advertise, we could have a subscription, we could try different things, but once we've got the users who love this product, we can sell them something. We can make this sustainable.
Yeah, and and I I think to be clear, the areas where that typically doesn't work is when
The company is not a tech company. So I think like tech has some very interesting economies of scale in the sense that like we design the app once and we build the app once and it scales to now, you know, more than eight hundred and fifty million people around the world. I think you run into challenges with that sort of grow big first and then monetize model when you don't have those same economies of scale.
Alright.
This has been widely reported. The Wall Street Journal did a big piece on this in twenty thirteen and I wanna dig into it a little bit because it's
It's really extraordinary.
But
That year.
Apparently may may it may have happened in your first meeting with Mark Zuckerberg.
was reported that you were offered a billion dollars to sell the company and then apparently three billion dollars in cash, a cash offer, all cash offer.
to acquire Snapchat.
I mean you were like twenty three
being offered three billion dollars
Instagram and we had Kevin and Mike on the show as I say nine years ago and
You know, subsequently I think they've expressed some regret about what happened and having sold it, but they sold it for a billion dollars a year in, you know. You're like a year and a half in.
This would have been a massive
massive win. I mean a huge exit. All your investors would have done great, you would have done great, your partners
Tell me about
Rejecting that offer.
Well I think as you mentioned, we did have the
benefit of learning from Instagram. And it was very clear that Instagram had sold way too early. And mobile, you know, at that point in time, mobile as a platform was was still mason. I mean it was only just
growing. If you remember there were a lot of questions at the time, like will Facebook be able to monetize on mobile? Will anyone use Facebook on mobile? So it was very, very, very early on. And I think ultimately
Bobby and I just loved what we were doing. We loved working together and we saw a huge opportunity.
for the business, and ultimately we were able to convince our investors that we saw a way bigger opportunity out in you know out in the future. And so ultimately it just made more sense.
To stay independent. And I think, you know, I think there was also just a feeling that the companies were very different. I mean, they have different priorities. We were offering very different products. And I think Instagram really fit into the the Facebook model of social media, but Snapchat was uh really designed to be uh you know an antidote to that, the opposite of that.
I wonder though, I mean, was it a hard decision to make? I mean, you know, we we we had Andrew Mason on the show a while back. He f famously founded Groupon and and famously they were offered up to like six billion dollars for an acquisition from bidders like Google and and Yahoo.
Which of course they turned down, which proved to be a mistake, right? I mean the value of the company is pennies on the dollar today.
Was there any
I don't know, any just
sleepless nights over like maybe we should just do this. Maybe this is just the best
thing to do now.
I I think one of the things that our investors have done very wisely is in one of those early financing rounds, Bobby and I were both able to cash out like ten million dollars each. So we were set for life.
Yeah.
At twenty two, having ten million w with compound interest. Yeah, exactly. I mean four or five percent return every year, you're good to go.
So we I don't think felt that pressure of, you know, or uh as I said, are we not, you know, if this goes to zero, what's gonna happen? We were able to really swing for the fences and try to build something really big.
In that same article in the journal in twenty thirteen, there's a somebody quoted in there w with some skepticism about the decision that you took.
And this person said, Look at the fate Vine has suffered.
You know, Vine was huge.
And again
Proved wrong.
But at the time.
Like there's no part of you at all.
That looked at things like Vine.
And just thought, what if that happens?
Well, uh one of the things that helped give us confidence is we had a roadmap, right? So I think one of the big questions in technology always, and especially when it comes to these acquisitions, is is this a feature or a platform? And it's very important to know, you know, if you're building a feature or a platform. And so
For us, maybe in the early days of Snapchat of photo messaging, that was maybe more of a feature, but by the time we'd added things like stories and you know, we would go on to add, you know, all of our augmented reality lenses, of course, memories, our map later on, all these different pieces of our service that have really diversified it and made Snapchat much more of a
A platform we we had
A bunch of that vision. So we knew that we were gonna be able to continue innovating. We knew that we weren't just gonna be standing still. I mean, one thing for sure in the technology industry is if you're just standing still,
It's really easy for competitors to catch up, especially if they're a lot.
bigger, but we really, you know, believed in our ability to keep innovating.
When you turn down that
Reported second offer from Facebook.
I mean business is business. W this is what our show's about. And business is like war. You know. I'm not
casting any moral judgment. I think a good business leader has to think about
You know, has to
Plan.
to win, right? And so
a company like like Facebook, Zuckerberg has to think how are we going to out compete these guys, which
Eventually they would start to, you know, do things with Instagram, right? Like
Instagram stories and other things, um
That they would put out there.
Did you anticipate that that would happen?
We thought that that
would happen. Yeah. I I think the one thing that we didn't anticipate was that Instagram would actually perfectly copy stories like carbon copy it, because in the past they had sort of tried
different rifts on our products. Like they would take the core idea, but then try to make it better and ultimately that wouldn't work. And so I think that like to have that sort of confidence to just say like, hey, we're gonna take what we see working and put it in our
Service that that you know
Uh that was impressive and not something we'd seen from from Facebook before.
I think I know the answer to this question.
But do you consider yourself to be a competitive person?
I don't actually no, and and I think in fact like I think zero sum thinking or that sort of competitive thinking is very dangerous. And so what we try to do is is run our business differently, which is to create new things, to create new open space, not to think of you know the world or our community as something to
Divide up or fight over.
So when
You know
Instagram.
Does something like that.
Did you take it personally?
Did you think like
Screw those guys.
They're a bunch of assholes.
No we
We admired the audacity. Really? You didn't you didn't take it personally at all? You weren't angry in any way?
You just like whatever.
It wasn't a whatever, it was like, Hey, we gotta take this very seriously and and but I think at the same time a r a real respect that Kevin, you know, had just come out and said, Hey
This thing works really well and we're
We're gonna do the exact same thing.

When we come back in just a moment, Snapchat drops the chat.
and tries to make the leap from your phone.

Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to how I built this.
Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2016, and Snapchat is still growing fast, with another round of fundraising valuing the company at$16 billion.
And despite copycating by Instagram and other competitors,
Evan is locked in on an even bigger, longer term vision for his company.
You guys rebranded to Snap.
you no longer Snapchat in twenty sixteen.
I guess that was

Snap is a camera company.
Tell me about
About that.
One of the things that we really wanted to make clear was that we weren't a single product company, that we had aspirations
Beyond that.
And we've, you know, been working on wearables for a long time. You know, initially starting with the idea of like let's get the camera out of people's pockets and facing out into the world with our camera glasses called spectacles. I think the first version we launched back in in twenty uh sixteen, of course, initially was
used for recording moments with Snapchat, it became, you know, primarily used for communication, which was a huge change in the way that cameras
And I think in the future
And even today with you know the fifth generation of spectacles, cameras are really used to overlay computing on our environment and to better integrate computing with our day to day lives.
I wanna ask you about
about something that's more personal to me about Snap.
And
It's as a parent, right? And you're a parent and I've got
to teenagers and they use it.
And it's the only social media app we allow because
Essentially they their argument was we won't be able to communicate with our friends because they all have it. So we we relented.
But
I remember around this time, around twenty sixteen, n this is not one when they got on Snap, but
Around the time you guys change to Snap.
There was a Ted talk and I was at that Ted conference and it was a talk about
How young people
Yeah.
hooked on social media.
And I say this as somebody who's really
I have to take a look at the
All the social media off my phone every couple of weeks just does not use it.
But something that you guys really innovated was the snap streak.
Where
Every time you snap you get a streak and you don't kids
Or incentivized not to break the streak.
And I wonder
From a business perspective, it's brilliant.
And I I love free markets. I believe in free markets. I don't believe in blaming businesses for the way people use the products, but
I mean it is
It is a way to get kids hooked on it.
And I wonder how you respond to that.
That kind of sentiment or pushback.
Yeah, well I think it's really important to look at the way that streaks work and
With the Snapchat streak, it doesn't change every time you send a snap. It just increments every day that you send a snap back and forth with a friend. And so what it does is celebrate that every day you've been in touch with that person, you've checked in, you've seen what they're
Doing and uh you know, you've I'm sure have seen the research that shows the importance of just staying in touch, even in light ways.
with your close friends and and your family. And I think, you know, just in the way that we often set reminders for ourselves to do something that's important. I think streaks are an important reminder for folks to to just stay in touch with the people that they really care about just once a day.
It's interesting'cause philosophically I just and maybe it's just'cause I'm older, I just fundamentally disagree with that. I don't think people need to be in touch about every detail of their lives all the time. Like I
I have cousins and relatives, I love them, but like
I don't need to tell them about everything that I'm doing all the time. We can talk every few months and it's okay or for every few weeks.
And so I wonder like
I mean you can talk to any parent of a teenager and they will say
It becomes increasingly hard.
to pull your kid away from Snap or
You know, TikTok and and I wonder whether you can
You can see that argument and say I
Uh I hear you on that.
I definitely hear you on that, but I also just recognize that these services work really differently. And that's one of the reasons why in our house, too, we're really supportive of Snapchat and less supportive of other services, because we want our 14 year old to engage with his friends, to talk to his friends. And oftentimes when I'm working late, I'll get a snap from my wife with our kids saying goodnight. And you know, we get to send those snaps.
back and forth and and that's something that really adds a lot of value to my life. So I I think what's really important is that beyond just talking about screen time, we really talk about the way that we're using our screens and what we're using them for, you know, to go a layer deeper and and to really figure out how we can use technology to support things that really matter, like relationships and and friendships.
You know, the c for us as as parents, we just talk about the importance of everything in moderation and having a healthy relationship with technology.
Yeah.
Um, you took the company public in twenty seventeen.
at a twenty four billion dollar valuation and the price of stock prices gonna go up and down and up and down. I think at one point it was like you know eighty dollars over eight dollars a share, or you know, something like that, or so or seventy five a share.
Now it's about, as we speak, about ten, sixty a share.
Market cap seventeen billion. Very impressive.
but lower than the in the IPO and that's just the reality of it.
How do you view that? I mean
Most of your quarters you're not.
Profitable.
'Cause it's all public.
But at the same time, you clearly believe in this business, the future of this business.
Got
hundreds of millions of users, so it's a robust business. But
How do you um

how it's seen by outsiders and investors and how it's valued.
Well, uh what's really important for us is just clearly articulating our vision for the business and, you know, our our just consistent desire to invest in the long term, going after really, really big opportunities and consistency in doing that is key. So as we look at the long term future of augmented reality, for example, and
you know, our our desire to build a new computing platform that better meets people's needs by actually being integrated in the world.
Around them, that's a really big and expensive bet. And the only way we're gonna be able to make progress towards that is if we really invest consistently. And so we've really prioritized going after that long term opportunity.
Compared to short term profitability. And it doesn't mean, you know, we're generating free cash flow. We, you know, Q4, we've generated positive net income. So I
It's not like we disregard our finances. We've actually run a very conservative balance sheet with billions of dollars of capital so that we can consistently
invest over the long term. But I think what's most important with investors in the broader public is to be clear about those expectations. To be clear that we are going to invest in the long term, that we're not gonna optimize for, you know
Yeah.
uh share price and we're just gonna make consistent progress towards our long term vision.
You know, many years ago I interviewed Ken Chenault, the former head of American Express, and he said, you know, when I ran American Express, I always thought
We need to become the business that's gonna put us out of business. And
Look, the reality is in ten, twenty years, maybe five, people may not be sending text messages. People may not be communicating that way. We don't know.
And I say this because as as you know, some members of your team came up here to San Francisco to show me
This new product that you guys are working on.
Uh, which is the latest.
generation of your spectacles, which are these augmented reality glasses. I tried them super cool. You can do some some fun things.
And I know you guys have invested a lot of money in this. I mean there's a lot of technology packed in those glasses.
Is that the future of the business? Is that where you see Snap headed?
I think that's critical to our long term future. I mean, ultimately, if you look at all the products we built, we've tried to make technology work.
better for people. So much of technology in the past, right, has forced people to change their natural human behavior to fit
how technology expects them to behave. That certainly could be said of social media, right? Where instead of having ephemeral conversations in chronological order, social media has everything permanent and r in reverse chronological order. And it feels
Inhuman.
I don't think we should settle for the way that computers
work today for you know staying hunched over these small screens as the best way to get the value out of computing. I think
Computers can do so much more, can be so much more. And ultimately, you know, we were talking a little bit about, you know, wanting to make sure young people in particular have a balanced relationship with technology, but what would it look like to build a computer that you really wanted your kids to use, you know, frequently, because it's the best way to learn, the best way to play together with their friends is something they could actually use outdoors.
These are all the sorts of things that glasses, I think, can really provide people over the longer term.
But
You know, people have been talking about this for a long time, going back to Google Glass, and you know, Meta has released something which is not augmented reality. It's essentially, you know, a very high end quality camera and speakers and AI in your you know, on these on these glasses. But
We've
thought for a long time that this is gonna be how people will use it. Like they'll wear the glasses, they'll be able to see augmented reality, but
So far, we as humans haven't adopted this technology at scale yet.
So
Tell me why why you're bullish about it.
I think because it it allows for a computing experience that can be shared with people, which is really different than the way that we use
computers today. Right now, you know, sometimes computing can feel isolating, even if you're text messaging a friend, it's something that you're doing.
Alone. I I think what's so powerful with glasses is you if you can put on glasses together with your friends and share experiences is is a really powerful benefit of this technology. Of course, having it actually grounded in the real world rather than being a screen uh, you know, that separates you from the real world, I think is a tremendous benefit.
as well. And then, you know, d as you probably experienced, the idea that you can just use your hands and your voice and engage with computers in a much more natural way, I I think is gonna be really helpful to people uh as well and and make computers easier.
much easier to use.
I want to ask you about your place in the sort of the social media ecosystem, even though I know kind of recoil when you hear that with Snap, but it is considered that for better or worse, right?
If you looked at the inauguration, you saw
You know, um Mark Zuckerberg was there, Sundar Bachai was there.
obviously Elon Musk was there, um the TikTok CEO was there. So like Twitter met uh
Google, TikTok, they're all represented there.
What about Snap? I mean do you feel like
You know, is it important for your business?
That you are engaged at that level.
You know, look, we have a different set of uh challenges. We're a a really small company compared to those companies. How many employees? About three thousand?
Uh approaching 5,000 now. But you know, I think one of the one of the reasons why those large companies are engaging um so closely with the government is because they've been accused of monopolistic practices. I mean they represent two of them represent the vast majority of the online advertising business. And so that is a critical issue when it comes to continuing to grow their businesses or trying to
acquire new companies or thinking about uh you know their avenues for growth in in the future. You know, they they are the advertising market. And so I think um it it makes sense that they're dedicating a lot of their time and focus to engaging with the government.
What do you think about
You know, what seems to be I mean traditionally kind of tech.
The tech sector in California.
It's been left of center. Maybe slightly libertarian, but kind of left of center, and that the sort of the the
Momentum seems to have shifted towards
more right of center. Obviously Elon Musk is super influential, right? He's ha has a m massive role
in kind of reshaping government right now.
Is that something that you think is a is an interesting trend or a positive trend, or do you have a any feeling or view on it?
I think what you've seen from technology companies in the past is that they've generally tried to align themselves with, you know, whatever administration um, you know, is is currently serving uh the country at the time and and tried to be helpful. I mean, I think it makes sense. If you're an American company, you know, you want uh our government, our our president to be successful. And I think that's an important part of of business's strategy.
strategies here in the United States. So I would kinda I wouldn't look at it as a new thing. I would look at it as kind of a a constant if we look, you know, over American history and certainly business history. Do you for your
not just for the business, but just for you, Evan Spiegel as a person.
Do you think it's better?
Like obviously, you know, Mark Zuckerberg was a contributor to Democrats for a long time, then stopped contributing to politics and now he's
I think his views on politics have changed.
Do you think it's better for you, Evan Spiegel, to be engaged to be a contributor, or better for you to be a political?
As much as you can.
Well, I I think it's super important to be an engaged citizen.
You know, what you're talking about is sort of engaging at the highest levels of government, but I think civic engagement at all levels of government, especially local government, is really, really valuable and important. And personally I'm I'm a registered independent, which is, I believe, actually the largest party in uh America. Um I I don't do
political giving, although I did give to uh Michael Tubbs, who lived across the hall from me uh in college. Stockton mayor, former Stockton mayor, yeah. Mayor of Stockton. Um and and great guy. But no, I I think for me personally, um, you know, we just try to engage where we
think we can add value. And I I don't think that has to be at the federal level. I think there's a lot of opportunity, even just locally, to help the community.

Evan.
You're so young, but very experienced.
And you have a whole your whole life ahead of you. I mean I mean if you're
If you're like Brian Johnson, you could live until two hundred years old.
Realistically, I mean do you think that Snapchat is
The end of the story for you, Snap is the end. Is that this is gonna be the thing that you're gonna do for the rest of your life, or
Is there a world where one day you could imagine trying something else?
I'm not sure. I I think there's a lot more to do here at Snap and you know, there's a lot
more work to fulfill our vision for augmented reality and for glasses, you know, that we've been working on that for a decade, but it's gonna take quite a lot longer. I mean, if you look at how much computers evolved from the eighties to to today, I mean there's a there's a lot of work to do to fulfill that vision. But you know, over the longer term, I'm definitely gonna look for more ways uh to give back. I mean I think that's that is really the perk.
of building our business and learning a a bunch as a leader is is being able to to give back. I mean that's that's kinda the the whole point, I guess. So
That's what hopefully I can do more of.
When you think about
what happened, you know,'cause if you if you were to just be if you were like to land from Mars and an alien was here and I said, Oh, I'm gonna tell you a story about this guy, Evan Spiegel
He's twenty years old, he comes up with this idea with a friend.
And then within a year they get a billion dollar offer and then and then two years later three billion and they raise all this money. It just it sa it would sound like this very simple, of course
We've talked for a while now, so it's not but it would sound like a very simple like oh he just went from success to success. It was easy for him because he was smart and he went to Stanford and he
Got the money.
And obviously it's much more complicated than that, but when you reflect on where you are now at thirty four
And what's what you've achieved.
How much of it do you attribute to
to your intelligence and the work you put in
And how much do you think?
It has to do with getting lucky.
I think all of it's an extraordinary
Blessing.
Actually the the first time I was ever invited to give a speech, that's how I started the speech. I said, I've been unbelievably lucky, life isn't fair, and it's been extraordinary to have these gifts of you know
Growing up in the Palisades, being able to attend a great school, having the opportunity this safety net to go pursue.
a business. I mean but I I think beyond
luck, there are so many generations of my family that did so much work to enable me to do this. You know, my father, his father, I mean I
My grandfather's dad was one of, you know, uh seven orphans spread all throughout the country after their parents died. You know, he at twelve years old, he was working in the copper mines.
You know, so I just think about all the work that generations of my family have put in to to give me this opportunity. So
one of the most important things is waking up every day just realizing that it's all it's all luck.
All luck.
It's all hard work too, but
But it's luck.
That's Evan Spiegel, co-founder and CEO.
of Snap.
By the way, Evan also happens to be a Francophile. He loves France so much.
He even became a dual US French citizen back in 2018. The French government waives its residency requirements for certain people who it believes will contribute to French culture or the economy.
Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter at guyos.com or on Substack.
This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Ramteen Arab Lui.
It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Catherine Cypher. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Gilly Moon. Our production staff also includes Chris Massini, JC Howard, Casey Herman, Iman Maani, Sam Paulson, Carrie Thompson, Neva Grant, and Elaine Coates.
I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening.
to how I built this.