Part IThe Story
A Design Student at Stanford
Evan Thomas Spiegel was born on June 4, 1990, in Los Angeles, the son of two lawyers, John W. Spiegel and Melissa Ann Thomas. He attended the Crossroads School in Santa Monica and, while still in high school, took design classes at the Otis College of Art and Design. The summer before college he studied at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. He also held an unpaid sales internship at Red Bull. By the time he arrived at Stanford University, he thought of himself less as an engineer than as a product designer, someone interested in how people feel when they use a thing.
At Stanford he studied product design, joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity, and worked a series of internships, including one at Intuit. He also tried a startup that failed. With a fraternity brother, Bobby Murphy, a mathematical and computational science student two years ahead of him, he worked on Future Freshman, a website meant to help high school students with college applications. It went nowhere, but it established the partnership that mattered. Murphy was the engineer. Spiegel was the designer and the one who pitched.
The idea that became Snapchat surfaced in the spring of 2011. By most accounts, including the documents from later litigation, another fraternity brother, Reggie Brown, brought Spiegel the notion of an app for sending photos that would disappear. Spiegel proposed an ephemeral messaging app as a project in a product design class that April. Brown and Spiegel then brought in Murphy, who could write the code, and the three built it over the following months.
By the Numbers
Evan Spiegel and Snap
$3BCash acquisition offer from Facebook that Snapchat declined in 2013
$17Price per share in Snap's March 2017 IPO
0Votes carried by the shares Snap sold to the public
$157.5MSettlement paid to co-founder Reggie Brown, disclosed in 2017
493MSnapchat daily active users in Q2 2026
$2,195Launch price of Snap's Specs AR glasses, September 2026
Picaboo
The first version launched on Apple's App Store on July 8, 2011, under the name Picaboo. The premise was simple: a user took a photo, chose how many seconds the recipient could look at it, and sent it. After that, the image vanished from the recipient's screen. Everything about the prevailing social web, from Facebook's timelines to Instagram's filtered feeds, assumed that posts were permanent and public. Picaboo assumed the opposite.
The partnership fractured almost immediately. Within months of the launch, Brown was pushed out of the company, a decision that would cost Spiegel and Murphy dearly later. In September 2011 they relaunched the app as Snapchat. They kept Brown's ghost mascot, and they focused on making the product work rather than on branding. Murphy, who was working as a software engineer at Revel Systems, used half his paycheck to cover the app's server bills until they could raise money.
Growth came from an audience that the rest of Silicon Valley was not designing for. High school students found that Snapchat let them talk to each other in a way that felt private and playful. There were no likes, no public follower counts, and no permanent record. The absence was the product. In the company's first blog post, in May 2012, Spiegel wrote that Snapchat was not about capturing the traditional Kodak moment but about communicating with the full range of human emotion, not just what looks pretty or perfect. He presented it as relief from the stress of a permanent online record, the frantic untagging of party photos before job interviews and the retouching of candid shots.
In 2012 Spiegel left Stanford shortly before completing his degree to run Snapchat full time. He later finished his remaining credits and graduated in 2018. By the end of 2012 the app had about a million daily active users.
The Teenage Network
Money followed usage. Lightspeed Venture Partners led a seed round of $485,000, and in February 2013 the company confirmed a $13.5 million Series A led by Benchmark at a valuation of roughly $60 million to $70 million. A $60 million Series B led by Institutional Venture Partners followed that June, and Michael Lynton, then head of Sony's American entertainment business, joined the board. A July 2013 report valued the company at about $860 million. In December 2013 it raised another $50 million from Coatue Management.
The speed of the valuation increases reflected something investors could see in the data. Snapchat was not just popular. It was used intensely, many times a day, by a young demographic that advertisers wanted and that older networks were beginning to lose. Snapchat had network effects of an unusually tight kind: people used it with their closest friends, and once a friend group adopted it, the app became part of how that group communicated.
There was still no revenue. Spiegel treated that as acceptable for the moment. He wanted to understand how people used the product before deciding how to make money from it, and he resisted the pressure to put ads in the app before the experience was ready for them.
Saying No to Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg noticed. According to Spiegel's account to Forbes, Zuckerberg flew to Los Angeles to meet him at the end of 2012 and made it clear that Facebook was about to launch a nearly identical app. Spiegel later summarized the message of the meeting as a threat to crush Snapchat. Facebook released Poke in December 2012. It flopped, and Snapchat's usage kept climbing.
In the fall of 2013 Zuckerberg came back with an acquisition offer. The Wall Street Journal reported in November 2013 that Facebook had offered $3 billion in cash, and Spiegel had turned it down. The tech writer Om Malik reported that Google had offered even more. Forbes estimated that Spiegel and Murphy each owned about a quarter of the company at the time, meaning each was walking away from roughly $750 million. The app had no revenue and was about two years old. One prominent venture capitalist told Forbes he could see the strategic value to Facebook but doubted the app was worth anything close to $3 billion.
— Evan Spiegel, Forbes, 2014There are very few people in the world who get to build a business like this. I think trading that for some short-term gain isn't very interesting.
The decision was widely mocked at first. Forbes reported that Spiegel and Murphy had given their team copies of Sun Tzu's The Art of War, and the rejection fit a strategy of fighting on ground the larger rival could not easily occupy. Facebook had failed to copy Snapchat once. Spiegel was betting that the thing people liked about Snapchat, a private, ephemeral, camera-first way of talking to friends, was a culture Facebook could not simply buy and absorb. In 2014 Facebook paid about $19 billion for WhatsApp instead.
The independence Spiegel chose was expensive to sustain, and investors kept paying for it. Snapchat raised a $100 million Series D led by Kleiner Perkins and then a $485 million Series E led by the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, with investors that included Tencent, Yahoo, and NBCUniversal. By 2016 private valuations had reached roughly $20 billion, and in May of that year the company raised about $1.8 billion more in a round led by Fidelity. Business Insider later reported that Google had discussed buying Snap for about $30 billion in early 2016. Once again, the company stayed independent.
Few founders would have said no. Spiegel was 23. The choice defined his reputation as a founder who would take enormous risk to keep control of what he was building, a trait that would shape everything from the company's governance to its product decisions.
Growing Up in Public
The year after the Facebook offer was the most difficult of Spiegel's early career. On December 31, 2013, hackers exploited a flaw in Snapchat's systems and published about 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers. In May 2014 the company settled Federal Trade Commission charges that it had misled users about how completely snaps disappeared and about its collection of users' contact and location data. Snapchat was not fined, but it agreed to independent privacy monitoring for twenty years. The settlement struck at the product's central promise.
The same month, Gawker published emails Spiegel had written to fraternity brothers at Stanford. They contained misogynistic and homophobic language and joked about getting women drunk. Spiegel issued a public apology in which he said he was mortified and embarrassed, that he had no excuse, and that the emails did not reflect who he was or his views toward women.
Then there was Reggie Brown. In February 2013 Brown had sued Spiegel and Murphy, arguing that he had come up with the idea, named the original company, and designed the mascot. Snapchat initially called the suit meritless and described Brown's role as closer to an internship. In September 2014 the company settled. The amount, $157.5 million, became public only in Snap's 2017 IPO filing. As part of the settlement, the company acknowledged Brown's contribution to the creation of Snapchat.
Each of these episodes was a lesson in the costs of moving fast with a small team. The privacy flaw, the overstated claims, and the unresolved co-founder dispute all came from the chaotic early months of a product that grew faster than the company around it.
Stories, Discover, and Lenses
While the company absorbed those blows, Spiegel shipped the features that turned Snapchat from a messaging novelty into a media platform. In October 2013 Snapchat introduced My Story, which let users string snaps into a sequence visible to all their friends for 24 hours. Stories changed the app's economics. By June 2014, snaps shared through Stories had overtaken private snaps as the most-used part of the service. Stories were still ephemeral, but they were broadcast, and broadcast media can carry advertising.
In January 2014 Spiegel explained the philosophy behind the product at the AXS Partner Summit. He argued that traditional social media defined a person as the sum of their published history and that Snapchat took a different view.
— Evan Spiegel, AXS Partner Summit keynote, 2014Snapchat says that we are not the sum of everything we have said or done or experienced or published. We are the result. We are who we are today, right now.
A year later, in January 2015, Snapchat launched Discover, a section of the app where publishers including CNN, ESPN, and others created short, ad-supported editions formatted for vertical phone screens. Live Stories collected snaps from concerts, sports events, and news events into curated feeds. In September 2015 the company introduced Lenses, animated face filters built on technology from its acquisition of Looksery. They became one of Snapchat's signature features and the foundation of its augmented reality business, including sponsored lenses sold to advertisers.
Media partners followed. In September 2015 Snapchat signed a deal with the National Football League to run live stories from selected games, with both sides contributing content and selling ads. NBC brought Snapchat into its coverage of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. In May 2016, 20th Century Fox paid to replace the app's entire set of lenses for a day with characters from X-Men: Apocalypse, an early sign that brands would pay to be part of the camera itself rather than merely appear next to content.
The pattern was distinctive. Where many social apps built around feeds of permanent posts and algorithmic ranking, Snapchat opened to the camera, not a feed, and treated friends' communication and publishers' media as separate spaces. The design was rooted in Spiegel's belief that the camera was becoming the primary way young people communicated.
A Camera Company
In September 2016 Spiegel renamed the company Snap Inc. and announced its first hardware product, Spectacles: $130 sunglasses with a built-in camera that recorded short circular videos and sent them to Snapchat. The company's new website stated its ambition plainly.
— Snap Inc., company website, 2016Snap Inc. is a camera company. We believe that reinventing the camera represents our greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate.
Spiegel told The Wall Street Journal that the company would take a slow approach to rolling them out, and Snap sold Spectacles at first through pop-up vending machines called Snapbots, which created lines and scarcity-driven buzz. The launch also signaled a broader strategic fear. Snapchat depended entirely on phones made by Apple and Google's Android partners. Building its own camera hardware was a way to reduce that dependence over the long term.
By then the company had moved to Venice, California, and was helping to turn the area into what the press called Silicon Beach. In February 2017, shortly before the IPO, The New York Times reported that Snap had about 1,900 employees and had already changed the character of the neighborhood. It had also acquired Bitstrips, the maker of the personalized avatar app Bitmoji, for about $100 million, adding another expressive tool to the product.
The Nonvoting IPO
Snap went public on the New York Stock Exchange on March 2, 2017. It priced its shares at $17 the day before, raising $3.4 billion and valuing the company at about $24 billion. The stock opened at $24 and closed its first day up 44 percent. Spiegel, at 26, was among the youngest chief executives of a major public company.
The structure of the offering was as notable as the price. Snap sold the public only nonvoting shares, the first U.S. company to do so in an IPO. Spiegel and Murphy held about 45 percent of the equity and more than 70 percent of the voting power. Governance experts and index providers objected, and some major indexes later changed their rules to exclude companies without voting rights for public shareholders. Beyond the founders, the largest holders were the venture firms Benchmark and Lightspeed, with about 20 percent between them. Time called it the biggest U.S. tech listing since Facebook's in 2012, and the Los Angeles Times noted it was the largest IPO ever for a Los Angeles company. In November 2017 Tencent disclosed that it had bought a 12 percent nonvoting stake on the open market. Spiegel's view was that long-term control allowed the company to pursue ambitious projects without bowing to quarterly pressure. Critics saw it as removing any check on the founders.
The first earnings report, in May 2017, showed a quarterly loss of $2.2 billion, largely because of stock compensation tied to the IPO, and the shares fell more than 20 percent. In February 2017, Spiegel and Murphy had also pledged to donate up to 13 million shares over 15 to 20 years to arts, education, and youth causes, through what became the Snap Foundation.
Copied
The most serious threat to Snap came from the rival it had turned down. On August 2, 2016, Instagram, owned by Facebook, launched Instagram Stories, a near-direct copy of Snapchat's format. Instagram already had a much larger user base, and many users found it easier to post Stories where their audience already was. Facebook later added similar features to WhatsApp and Facebook itself. Snap's user growth slowed sharply, a risk it acknowledged in its IPO filing.
Spiegel's response made things worse before it made them better. In late 2017 and early 2018 Snap rolled out a redesign that separated friends' content from media content and changed how Stories were arranged. Many users hated it, and about 1.2 million signed a petition asking the company to reverse it. Daily active users fell from 191 million in the first quarter of 2018 to 186 million by the end of the year.
Hardware disappointed too. Snap sold about 220,000 pairs of the first Spectacles and took a write-down of about $40 million on unsold inventory. A second version of Spectacles followed in April 2018 with a more modest rollout. The stock fell well below its IPO price. For a stretch in 2018 the company looked like a cautionary tale: a product pioneer that had invented a format, watched a larger competitor take it, and stumbled trying to respond.
The Rebuild
The turnaround started with engineering rather than with a new feature. Snapchat's Android app had long been slow and buggy compared with the iPhone version, a serious weakness in the markets outside the U.S. where most people used Android. In late 2017 Snap began rewriting the Android app from scratch, a project known internally as Mushroom. When it finished rolling out in the first quarter of 2019, the new app was 20 percent faster to open and substantially smaller. Daily users grew again, to 190 million in that quarter and 203 million by the next.
Growth came increasingly from outside North America, particularly India. Snap added new products, including Snap Map in 2017, which was built on the location-sharing app Zenly that Snap had acquired and let friends see one another on a map, Snap Kit in 2018, which let other apps plug into Snapchat's login, camera, and Bitmoji features, and Spotlight in November 2020, a TikTok-style feed of short public videos for which Snap initially paid creators $1 million a day. The pandemic accelerated usage and advertising. Snap's market capitalization passed $100 billion for the first time on February 22, 2021.
Then two blows arrived together. Apple's App Tracking Transparency changes, introduced in 2021, made it much harder for apps to track users across other apps and measure the results of direct-response advertising. On May 23, 2022, Spiegel warned employees that the economic environment had deteriorated faster than expected, and Snap's stock fell 43 percent the next day, its worst day ever, dragging down other ad-dependent companies. In August 2022 Snap cut about 20 percent of its roughly 6,400 employees and ended its original scripted shows. It also launched Snapchat+, a paid subscription, in June 2022, the start of an effort to reduce its dependence on advertising.
Specs and the Second Act
The years after 2022 were a long grind to rebuild the advertising business and control costs. Snap cut another 10 percent of its workforce in February 2024. In April 2026, Spiegel announced cuts of about 1,000 employees, roughly 16 percent of full-time staff, plus more than 300 open roles, citing a need to move faster and more efficiently and pointing to AI tools that let small teams do more. The company said the changes would reduce its annual cost base by more than $500 million.
By the second quarter of 2026, Snapchat had 493 million daily active users and 971 million monthly users, according to the company. Quarterly revenue rose 19 percent year over year to about $1.6 billion. Subscriptions and other non-advertising revenue, driven by Snapchat+, paid Memories storage, and a Lens+ tier, grew 85 percent to $316 million. The company remained unprofitable on a net basis, though its adjusted operating results and cash flow had improved. Its user growth was concentrated outside North America, where daily users had declined.
The biggest bet was hardware again. After years of Spectacles iterations, Snap launched Specs, standalone augmented reality glasses, at an event in Los Angeles on September 16, 2026. They were priced at $2,195. Spiegel presented them as a wearable computer rather than simple camera glasses, and the company framed the product as the culmination of more than a decade of work. The launch came with an AI assistant called SPECS Intelligence, an optional charging case with cellular service sold through Verizon, and business partnerships with Salesforce, Amazon Web Services, and NVIDIA. Snap also said the glasses would not use facial recognition. It opened a store in a Los Angeles mall where people could try them, starting October 1. Early reviews were mixed, praising the technology while questioning the price. Whether Specs becomes a platform or another expensive experiment will shape how Spiegel's second decade as chief executive is judged.
The Founder's Ledger
Spiegel has spent his entire adult career running one company. Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2014 and 2017, and Forbes identified him as the world's youngest billionaire in 2015. His fortune has swung with Snap's stock: Forbes ranked him 55th on its Forbes 400 in 2021 with $13.8 billion, and estimated his net worth at about $2.5 billion in August 2025. He joined the board of the investment firm KKR in 2021 and the board of the Gagosian gallery in 2022, and he sits on the board of the Berggruen Institute, a think tank focused on governance and philosophy. He has given $20 million to Stockton Scholars, a scholarship program in California, and at Otis College of Art and Design's 2022 commencement he announced that he and his wife, Miranda Kerr, would pay off the graduating class's student debt.
The company's record also includes persistent criticism. Parents, advocacy groups, and regulators have raised concerns about the use of Snapchat by predators and drug dealers to reach young people, and the company has faced lawsuits and government scrutiny over child safety. In 2024 Snap paid $15 million to settle a California Civil Rights Department lawsuit alleging discrimination against female employees in pay and promotion, failure to prevent harassment, and retaliation.
Spiegel's legacy so far is unusual. He invented formats that the whole industry copied: disappearing messages, Stories, vertical short-form media, and face lenses. His company has often failed to capture the full value of those inventions, largely because larger rivals could copy them and distribute them to bigger audiences. He has kept control throughout, which has let Snap make long, expensive bets that a more conventionally governed company might have abandoned. The next few years will determine whether that control was his greatest advantage or its most costly constraint.
Part IIThe Playbook
Evan Spiegel's career offers lessons about invention, control, and competing against larger companies that can copy what you build. The principles below come from his decisions at Snap, including the ones that went badly. Many are double-edged, and the failures are as instructive as the successes.
The principles
- 1.Design for a feeling, not a feature list.
- 2.Build for the users incumbents ignore.
- 3.Refuse the early exit when you see the long game.
- 4.Settle ownership questions early and in writing.
- 5.Turn a format into a business.
- 6.Invent the format, then defend the distribution.
- 7.Fix the foundation before adding features.
- 8.Keep control to make long bets.
- 9.Reduce your dependence on other platforms.
- 10.Change course without abandoning the product's core.
- 11.Build a second revenue engine before you need it.
Principle 1
Design for a feeling, not a feature list.
Snapchat began as a design idea about how communication should feel. Disappearing photos made talking through the camera casual and low-pressure. There were no likes to count and no permanent record to curate. Spiegel's background in product design showed in the decision to build around an emotional experience instead of a list of capabilities.
Removing things created the value. Snapchat stood out because it lacked what every other social app had. That required a clear idea of what the product was for and a willingness to leave out features that would have diluted it.
Tactic: Write one sentence describing how you want users to feel when they use your product. For each proposed feature, ask whether it strengthens or weakens that feeling, and cut the ones that weaken it.
Principle 2
Build for the users incumbents ignore.
Snapchat's early users were high school students, a group that Facebook's permanent, parent-visible timeline served poorly. Established networks were optimizing for adults, advertisers, and public sharing. Snapchat gave teenagers a private place to talk.
This is a classic path for challengers, closely tied to disruptive innovation. An underserved segment is easier to win and often more loyal. It can also grow into the mainstream as its members age and bring the product with them.
Tactic: Identify a group of users that the market leader treats as unimportant or serves badly. Build a product designed specifically for them and resist broadening it until you own that segment.
Principle 3
Refuse the early exit when you see the long game.
Spiegel turned down $3 billion in cash from Facebook for a two-year-old app with no revenue. The decision seemed reckless, and it exposed the company to years of competition from the rival it rejected. It also preserved the chance to build a company that at its 2021 peak was valued at more than $100 billion.
Rejecting an offer makes sense only when you have a clear, reasoned view of why the company is worth more independent. Spiegel believed Snapchat's culture and product would not survive absorption. His view was partly vindicated and partly tested by what followed. The regret minimization test he implicitly applied was about building, not about money.
Tactic: Before responding to an acquisition offer, write down what you believe the company can become independently and what would have to go right. If you cannot make the case in a page, take the offer seriously.
Principle 4
Settle ownership questions early and in writing.
The dispute with Reggie Brown began within months of launch and ended with a $157.5 million settlement. An ownership question that could have been resolved cheaply in 2011 became a nine-figure payout.
Informal partnerships are common in student projects, and they are dangerous once a product succeeds. Clear agreements about equity and roles protect everyone, including the people who eventually leave.
Tactic: On the first day you work with someone on a project that might become a company, write a short agreement covering equity, roles, and what happens if someone departs. Update it before raising any money.
Principle 5
Turn a format into a business.
Private disappearing snaps were hard to monetize. Stories, Discover, Live Stories, and sponsored Lenses were not. Each extended the product's core format into something that could carry advertising while keeping the experience recognizably Snapchat.
A popular product without a business model is fragile. Snap's path to revenue came from formats that users already loved, adapted so that publishers and advertisers could participate, rather than from inserting ads into private conversations.
Tactic: Map how your most-used feature could accommodate a paying partner without degrading the experience. Test the version that feels most native to the product before trying anything more intrusive.
Principle 6
Invent the format, then defend the distribution.
Snap invented Stories, and Instagram copied the format and grew faster with it. The same happened later with short-form video. Snap has repeatedly shown that invention alone is not a durable advantage when a rival with more users can adopt the same idea.
Formats are easy to copy. Distribution, habits, and relationships are harder. Snap's durable strengths have come from its camera-first design, close-friend communication, and position with younger users, which are harder to replicate than any single feature. Building moats means focusing on those.
Tactic: After launching a new feature, assume a larger competitor will copy it within a year. Plan in advance what you will do to keep users who have adopted it, such as integration with your core product or network.
Principle 7
Fix the foundation before adding features.
Snap's return to growth in 2019 came from rebuilding its Android app from scratch, not from a flashy new feature. The old app was slow on the low-cost phones used by most people in emerging markets. Fixing it opened the markets where Snap's growth has since concentrated.
Performance and reliability are features, especially for users with older devices and slower networks. Neglected infrastructure silently caps growth, and it rarely shows up as the cause in a product meeting.
Tactic: Measure your product's performance on the cheapest device and slowest network used by a meaningful share of your target users. If it is poor, fund a dedicated team to fix it before starting the next major feature.
Principle 8
Keep control to make long bets.
Spiegel and Murphy kept voting control through an IPO that sold the public no votes at all. That control allowed Snap to spend more than a decade on camera hardware and augmented reality, a bet that would have been hard to sustain under activist or conventional shareholder pressure.
Control carries its own cost. It removes a check on the founders' judgment and has been criticized by governance experts. It works best when founders use it to pursue a clear long-term plan and remain open to criticism from inside and outside the company.
Tactic: If you have founder control, state publicly the long-term bets it is meant to protect and the milestones by which you will judge them. Report against those milestones every year.
Principle 9
Reduce your dependence on other platforms.
Snapchat runs on phones made and controlled by others, and Apple's 2021 privacy changes hit its advertising business hard. Spectacles and then Specs are, among other things, an attempt to own the device through which people use the camera.
Any business built on someone else's platform is exposed to that platform's decisions. Reducing that dependence is expensive and slow, but the alternative is to live with rules set by a competitor or gatekeeper. The platform business model favors whoever owns the platform.
Tactic: List the external platforms whose policy changes could cut your revenue by more than 20 percent. For each, identify one step that would reduce your exposure and fund at least one of them this year.
Principle 10
Change course without abandoning the product's core.
The 2018 redesign was an attempt to separate friends from media and make Snapchat easier for new and older users. Many existing users rejected it, and growth stalled. Snap kept some of the changes, reversed others, and continued to put the camera and friend communication at the center.
Redesigns fail when they treat a product's core habits as negotiable. The most loyal users experience changes to the parts they use most as a loss, whatever the strategic logic.
Tactic: Before a redesign, identify the three actions your most active users perform most often. Make sure the new design makes each of them as fast or faster, and test with those users before launch.
Principle 11
Build a second revenue engine before you need it.
Snap depended almost entirely on advertising, and the 2022 downturn and privacy changes showed how exposed that left it. Snapchat+, paid storage, and Lens+ grew to more than $300 million a quarter by 2026, giving the company a second source of revenue that is less sensitive to ad markets.
Diversifying revenue takes years, and it is far easier to start when the core business is healthy. A company that begins only in a crisis must do it under pressure and with fewer resources.
Tactic: Identify a group of your most engaged users who would pay for more of what they already use. Launch a small paid tier for them and track its growth separately from your main business.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Absence can be a product. Snapchat was defined by what it left out: permanence, likes, and public metrics.
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Being first is not the same as winning. Snap invented formats that others scaled more successfully.
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Money on the table has a story attached. Every rejected offer becomes the benchmark by which a founder is judged.
-
Speed creates debts. The privacy lapses and co-founder dispute came from growing faster than the company could organize.
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Performance is a growth strategy. A faster app on cheaper phones opened more markets than a new feature did.
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Loyal users defend habits. A product's most devoted customers feel every change to their routine.
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Control is a tool, not a guarantee. It enables long bets but does not make them right.
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Hardware is a slow road to independence. Owning the device takes years, write-downs, and patience.
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Youth is a moving target. The audience that made Snapchat will age, and each new generation must be won again.
In Their Own Words
We have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. We have to be willing to make changes that we think are right for our community, even if they're not immediately popular.— Evan Spiegel
The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that's changing quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.— Evan Spiegel
We are not worried about what other people are building. We are worried about what our community wants and needs.— Evan Spiegel
Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It's about saying no to all but the most crucial features.— Evan Spiegel
People are living with this massive burden of managing a digital version of themselves. It's taken all of the fun out of communicating.— Evan Spiegel
We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right, and we design our products accordingly.— Evan Spiegel
The traditional social media model is about building a profile and accumulating friends and followers. We think that's fundamentally broken.— Evan Spiegel
Snapchat isn't about capturing the traditional Kodak moment. It's about communicating with the full range of human emotion—not just what appears to be pretty or perfect.— Evan Spiegel
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas and throw the bad ones away.— Evan Spiegel
I think if you're going to build a great company, you have to focus on what you're uniquely positioned to do well.— Evan Spiegel
Culture is about empowering people to make decisions that are consistent with your values, even when you're not there to tell them what to do.— Evan Spiegel
Technology is not neutral. The choices we make about how we design and deploy technology have real consequences for how people live their lives.— Evan Spiegel
We want to build technology that brings people together in the real world, not technology that keeps them glued to their screens.— Evan Spiegel
The future of computing is not about making computers more like humans, but about making technology that enhances human capabilities and relationships.— Evan Spiegel
Social media should make you feel more connected to the people you care about, not more isolated from them.— Evan Spiegel
We're not trying to be everything to everyone. We're trying to be the best at what we do for the people who matter most to us.— Evan Spiegel
Competition is good for everyone. It forces us to innovate and build better products for our users.— Evan Spiegel
The companies that win are the ones that focus on their users first, not their competitors.— Evan Spiegel
Building a sustainable business is more important than growing as fast as possible. We want to be here for the long term.— Evan Spiegel
Further reading
- How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher
