00:00:00
You became the world's youngest billionaire at the age of 25. You've got Mark Zuckerberg offering you $3 billion.
00:00:06
That was a a fateful day for sure, but we decided that we'd rather go it alone. Was there ever a day where you doubted
00:00:13
that decision? Evan Spiegel is the co-founder behind one of the world's biggest social media
00:00:19
platforms, Snapchat. He turned disappearing messages into a multi-billion dollar empire, redefining
00:00:24
how we connect online. Evan, you don't do many podcasts, do you? I don't do much public speaking at all, but I want
00:00:29
to share a bit more. So, if let's go back to those early days. So, I was an introvert growing up and I loved to
00:00:35
build stuff. At school, I had built my own computer. And once you start realizing that things that look really complicated on the surface aren't that
00:00:41
difficult, you start wondering, you know, what else you can build. So, that led to building Snapchat at 21. So, I was in undergrad at Stanford and we'd
00:00:47
raised $485,000 at a $4.25 million valuation. What a deal. But back then there
00:00:53
were a lot of apps that would get popular really really quickly and then sort of fade away. And a lot of people told us that we should sell it. They
00:00:59
said you're just sending photos back and forth. How is this going to grow for the long term? But the growth of Snapchat was atypical to say the least. It was
00:01:05
like this virus and it was reaching 75 million users on a monthly basis. So I wondered if you had any advice on the
00:01:11
fundamental principles of success. How much people care about what they do and the ability to move quickly is the
00:01:17
predictor of success. And at Snapchat we have a really small design team. It's nine people who are constantly
00:01:23
generating an incredible number of ideas and products and features because 99% of
00:01:28
ideas are not good, but 1% is. I want to know what they teach at Stanford because the success rate of creating some of the
00:01:34
world's pre-minent entrepreneurs is really, really high. There were a lot of very good lessons. The first one is
00:01:41
this has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the
00:01:47
show. So, could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way
00:01:53
that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do
00:01:58
everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests
00:02:05
that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so [Music]
00:02:11
much, Evan. When you look back over your earliest years and you you try and make
00:02:18
sense of the dots that connected in hindsight, I guess, as Steve Jobs once said, what are those dots?
00:02:24
There were a couple fateful choices that my parents made that I think had a huge impact. One was that they never let me
00:02:31
watch TV. So, they never let me watch TV. It didn't uh want me to spend my time doing that, but at the same time
00:02:37
would allow me to get whatever book I wanted. And that was a really uh I think
00:02:42
formative experience for me and and reading a book you get to use your imagination a lot you know to try to
00:02:48
paint the characters in your own mind and that was really helpful and because I wasn't watching TV I had a lot of time
00:02:53
on my hands and so I like to build stuff I mean when I was young I would make a little fake hotel in our living room and
00:02:59
you know have a guest experience where my parents could come and you know try to stay at our hotel and I I got to use
00:03:06
my imagination a lot at home and my parents never made me feel bad about turning the house upside down, moving
00:03:11
chairs around to to express myself and and make stuff. Did you feel like you
00:03:16
fitted in when you were a kid? No, not not at all. No. Um I I was more of an introvert um growing up. So, you know, I
00:03:25
think sometimes that made it harder for me to, you know, feel like I fit in. And when did computers come into the picture
00:03:31
for you? Uh I guess I I was exposed to my first computer. Gosh,
00:03:37
probably kindergarten, first grade, maybe around that uh period of time. I
00:03:42
my godfather brought over one of the early Macintoshes to show our our family
00:03:47
and I got to try out things like Kidpics and and stuff like that. And then I guess later on in school, I I went to
00:03:53
the computer lab a lot. My I really wanted my own computer. So the big breakthrough was when my mom said, you
00:03:59
know, if you build your own computer, you can have it. uh we won't let you connect it to the internet, but if you
00:04:04
build your own computer, you can have it to to play with. And so that was probably by sixth grade, I had a teacher
00:04:09
who helped me uh you know, take all the different pieces you need and and put them all together to to build a computer. And I think the this act of
00:04:17
you know, putting together these pieces, turning it on, you know, getting uh you know, windows up and running, um just
00:04:23
made me realize why it's it seems so complicated on the outside when you're just looking at that tower, that box,
00:04:29
right? or you know and you haven't yet open opened it up and seen what's inside I think it can seem really confusing or
00:04:35
complicated but as soon as you realize it's not that hard uh you know to to put it all together and and to get started I
00:04:41
think there's something really empowering about that about that feeling what what does that feeling teach you I
00:04:48
I think you know and I think this is much more the case now because you know if you go on YouTube you can learn how to do pretty much anything right but I
00:04:54
think uh once you start realizing that things that look really complicated or confusing on the surface aren't aren't
00:05:00
that difficult. Do you you start wondering, you know, what else you can build or what else you can create or, you know, how else you can can
00:05:06
experiment with something that seems impossible from the outside, but really it's just not that hard. And you got
00:05:12
bullied in school, right? Was it sixth grade that you got bullied or was it
00:05:17
sometime thereafter? Yeah, middle school was not the I think not the easiest easiest time for me. Why? Um, you know,
00:05:24
as I mentioned, I sort of, you know, had trouble fitting in. I I I didn't do a lot of activities that some other
00:05:31
schoolmates did like you know sports and stuff. I played t you know a little bit on the on the tennis team. Um but so I
00:05:36
think you know the combination of not really playing sports with friends, spending a lot of time in the computer lab uh you know at lunch or or after
00:05:43
school I think you know just led to me feeling a bit socially isolated at you
00:05:49
know at what is I think a tricky time for for lots of kids. What were you like as a kid? Were you confident? I don't I
00:05:55
don't know if I was confident in myself per se, but I definitely was confident in my ideas. Like I was willing to take
00:06:01
a stand for ideas that I thought were different or I was willing to explore ideas that didn't seem popular at the
00:06:07
time because I thought it was, you know, important. I I was uh I was talking to my my dad's has been staying with us for
00:06:13
a while and I was talking with him. I was like, "What do you know, what stories do you think I could tell about growing up? What do you think?" And he
00:06:18
was like, "Oh, you should tell them. You were definitely like a contrarian, you know." I was like, "What do you mean by contrarian?" He's like, "Don't you
00:06:24
remember you wrote that article that was like an expose of the math program because you were, you know, you you
00:06:30
basically interviewed all these teachers and kids and parents and, you know, uh, wrote this whole expose about how the
00:06:36
math program could be better." And he was like, you know, it was sort of like maybe better left unsaid in that
00:06:41
environment. But the school to their credit supported me and like let me publish it. And uh you know I think
00:06:46
created an environment where you know kids could challenge authority which which was really uh you know something
00:06:53
that that I learned was okay. I guess that's a principle as well of many of the people that I meet like you is that
00:06:58
they're okay with pushing against convention and you know certain moments in your life you make these decisions
00:07:04
which one would say are contrarian bets. I can I can see them all over your story, but clearly that was something
00:07:11
innate in you from a fairly young age as you look back. You don't do many
00:07:16
podcasts, do you? I don't do much public speaking at all. It's it's a 2025 New Year's resolution for me, though. So,
00:07:23
we'll see. You know, I'm I'm trying to trying to, you know, share a bit more. Why? Um, I think it's really important
00:07:30
that people understand our our company and what we stand for, why we make the decisions that we do and and I think
00:07:37
part of that is, you know, getting to know me and Bobby and I, you know, started this business 13 years ago and
00:07:43
we have made a bunch of different choices along the way. But I think unless we talk about them, nobody knows.
00:07:48
Um, and so it's it's really important for us to share, you know, how how we make decisions and our design philosophy
00:07:54
and and that kind of thing. It's a really interesting time I think to be a CEO generally because I think even 1015
00:08:00
years ago CEOs of major companies that so many people use and love weren't
00:08:05
doing podcasts. They weren't they would maybe release press releases and their marketing team would kind of run the
00:08:11
coms. But there's been this almost big shift towards leadership transparency now where leaders are like expected to
00:08:16
be glass boxes. I think even beyond that media has really reshaped to focus on individuals,
00:08:24
right? Individuals are the are what people are interested in. They're the ones who have distribution. So I think
00:08:30
that like the the center of gravity has shifted away from the entity like the business to focus more on the individual
00:08:36
characters, right, and storytellers. So you went off to university um you went to Stanford University which is an
00:08:42
incredible university and you went to ultimately try and pursue product design at Stanford. Why did you choose product
00:08:48
design at that stage in your life? What was it that was calling you about that course? Well, what's really cool about
00:08:54
product design is the basic concept is like you don't need to wait around and you know wait for an idea to fall out of
00:09:01
heaven or get struck by lightning. You can systematically create new ideas by listening to people, empathizing with
00:09:08
them and then basically prototyping solutions to the problems that they share with you and then iterating on
00:09:14
those solutions by bringing those solutions back to them and saying, "What do you think? does this solve your problem? So for me to be able to combine
00:09:20
um my love of making things with this process for making things that could be useful to people making new products
00:09:27
that was really uh exciting to me and and the product design school was created by a really visionary guy named
00:09:32
David Kelly. I had the opportunity to take a class from him and it was it was really just uh an incredible experience.
00:09:40
What is product design for someone like someone like me that has no idea what they teach in such a course? Is it cuz
00:09:45
my head says like designing like physical products or a lot of the product design school at Stanford is
00:09:51
oriented around physical products of course now you know it's so much more uh than that but when I when I was there at
00:09:56
the time and it was under the mechanical engineering department it was very oriented around physical products
00:10:02
understanding materials but all part of this framework of how do we understand the problems that people are facing how
00:10:08
do we empathize with them and then how do we design solutions that solve those problems. Did you learn entrepreneurship
00:10:15
through this time as well? Because I think in your sophomore year you took a a class on entrepreneurship and venture capital, right? Yeah, that was that was
00:10:21
really a gamecher. So I that that uh class called entrepreneurship and venture capital and the class is a
00:10:28
series of case studies basically led by entrepreneurs who come in and present the story of
00:10:34
creating their business and lessons learned and then it's an open Q&A. I got to listen to their amazing stories and
00:10:39
and ask them questions and and that was super inspiring to me. Do you remember anything you took away from those
00:10:44
classes that ended up being really important for you in terms of an idea or a philosophy or anything? I think the
00:10:52
biggest thing that I took away from my time at at Stanford and from that class was the focus on going after really
00:10:58
really big opportunities. And I think one of the things that's so different and growing up here in LA, I think a lot
00:11:03
of the the business community that I was exposed to is more focused on cash flow, right? Like how quickly can this
00:11:09
business turn a profit, you know, how can we do that really predictably? How much cash are we going to generate? At
00:11:14
Stanford, the business culture is entirely oriented around well, how big is that opportunity? Like is that a huge
00:11:21
opportunity? Is that opportunity big enough? Because if it if you're not going after something that could reach billions of people, that's not that
00:11:27
interesting. Uh and that was a totally different way of thinking for me combined with the venture capital
00:11:34
approach which is really to invest a lot of money early and scale quickly and then build out the business later uh
00:11:40
after you've achieved scale after you've achieved mass adoption. I've always wondered what they teach at Stanford
00:11:46
especially as it relates to business because the success rate of creating some of the world's sort of pre-minent
00:11:51
entrepreneurs is really really high. So you're telling me one of the key ideas is big ambitions. Yeah. And and I think
00:11:58
it makes sense because it's so hard to create a business, your odds of success are so low. So it's really important
00:12:04
that you go after something really big. So that if you're successful that at the end of the day there there's a huge
00:12:10
opportunity at the at the end of the rainbow. So my in my head I go, well, if it's really really big, then the chance of failure is probably going to go up.
00:12:16
So you know, I could open a coffee shop, right? And my chance of success is pretty decent. But if I go after
00:12:22
building a new social network, which is something only a psychopath would do, then my odds of success are what, one in
00:12:29
a gazillion. Yeah. I I I think what is exciting though about the technology
00:12:34
business is the way that it scales. And so I think what's different than your coffee shop example is once you build a
00:12:41
great service, once once we build Snapchat one time, it can scale to 850 million people around the world, right?
00:12:48
Whereas you'd have to go build a new coffee shop. uh you know on every on every street corner to scale the business. And so once once I think you
00:12:55
start seeing the world in terms of the potential to scale and the potential to build you know a product or service that
00:13:00
can reach billions of people it really changes you know the opportunities you identify or the things that you know the
00:13:07
services that you want to build. Interesting. So the question that most of us especially in the UK we we often
00:13:13
don't think about building businesses that have the potential to reach huge scale.
00:13:19
um in part because we don't have as much of a robust I think technical track record in terms of building great
00:13:25
unicorn tech companies in Europe as you guys do over here. One of the I mean I don't know if we want to go down this
00:13:31
path and talk about entrepreneurship in Europe, but I think one of the real challenges in Europe is how small the
00:13:37
different markets are in each country. And so I think what's really interesting what I when I talk to entrepreneurs in
00:13:43
Europe oftentimes they're very focused on growing first in their country and using that market as a stepping stone.
00:13:48
But the all the countries in Europe are quite different. They're different cultures and different languages. And so sometimes entrepreneurs can spend too
00:13:55
much time trying to grow in Europe rather than what I've seen out of some companies. In Australia, for example,
00:14:00
they're on an island. The first thing that these entrepreneurs are thinking about is like, how do I go grow in the US? How do I go grow in China? How do I
00:14:06
go grow in a really really big market and get to scale really quickly? And then I can go reinvest and grow in
00:14:12
Europe or grow in other countries where it might be more difficult to to grow. That is so true. Thinking about my
00:14:18
investment portfolio, there's about 40 different companies there and almost every single one of them without without
00:14:24
really an exception has adopted the approach of we'll crack the UK first and then we'll go and figure out the US. But
00:14:30
in that transition to the US, they encounter tons of challenges with how
00:14:36
expensive it is to succeed here, like marketing costs here, if they're in retail, how difficult it is to get into
00:14:41
Target or Walmart here. Also, the founders end up building their lives, their families in the UK, which means
00:14:46
that the f the founders can't really, you know, uproot and and move to the US later in the journey. So, most of them
00:14:53
try the US, waste a ton of money, get burnt, run back, and then I've seen that
00:14:58
story play over and over again. When you think about penetrating these international markets, do you send core
00:15:04
team members there? Often times, what we've done with Snapchat is actually follow the growth. So looking for
00:15:09
countries where people have already started using the product, already love it, are giving us a bunch of feedback,
00:15:14
and then, you know, we'll send folks there or we'll figure out how to sort of build on the momentum or make sure it's
00:15:19
localized properly, make sure we're working with local creators so that the content's relevant. But I think, you know, because our service is based on
00:15:26
communication, it, you know, Snapchat doesn't really work unless you're using it with a friend. You got to use it
00:15:31
together. uh what we look for is just that momentum where friends are are using it to communicate with one another
00:15:36
and then figure out how to build on top of that with the content ecosystem or augmented reality and those sorts of
00:15:41
things. What was your first idea that failed? Oh my well there there were I mean I made an orange juicer at one
00:15:48
point um but this but um but I think the biggest the biggest failure was future
00:15:53
freshman Bobby and I I I was really fortunate to meet Bobby. He lived across the hall from me uh at our our
00:15:58
fraternity at at Stanford and we you know we shared this love of making stuff. So we you know we had kind of
00:16:04
worked on a couple social ideas that were interesting but the one thing we decided to spend a lot of time on was
00:16:09
future freshmen which was designed to help kids apply to college. It was something that we'd had direct experience with so we could empathize
00:16:15
with how difficult the process is. We had siblings who were also applying to college. So we spent about 18 months
00:16:20
building like a fullfeatured website. You could select the schools you wanted to go to. it would aggregate all the essay questions and requirements and
00:16:26
make it really easy to apply. Um, but it was very clear by the end of that 18
00:16:32
months or so that it was going to be really difficult for us to to win. We were up against a company called
00:16:38
Naviance which had their own software suite and they had a really good idea which is they went to all the college
00:16:44
counselors around the US you know and high schools and things like that and said hey tell everyone to use Naviance
00:16:50
uh make sure your students parents are using our platform and so they got a a lot of distribution through all the
00:16:55
different schools and so obviously you're going to use the platform that's being recommended by your college counselor not you know an app made by
00:17:02
two kids uh out of Stanford um and so we had a real distrib contribution disadvantage. And then we also realized
00:17:07
like even if we were wildly successful and we got, you know, the million students, you know, a year who applied
00:17:13
to four-year colleges or, you know, something like that, we would have to then reacquire another million students the next year. Uh, and so we sort of had
00:17:20
this uh realization that it was going to be really hard to build a big uh a big business and that we really ought to try
00:17:26
something different and most importantly try to to build something that wouldn't
00:17:31
take 18 months to build before we got great feedback. So to try to build something really simple um you know that
00:17:37
that people could could try and and that we could collect feedback on faster. So two points there. How do you know when
00:17:43
to quit? You've kind of assembled a couple of principles there but even it's I think it's difficult in business
00:17:49
because you can be getting lots of negative feedback but that doesn't necessarily mean that the idea is something that you should quit. Maybe it
00:17:55
means you should pivot or iterate or just keep going. But how did you know what were the stars that align that told
00:18:01
you to quit that business? I I think for us it was that we didn't love the
00:18:06
product enough. I think if you really love the product, you you know, and you love what you're building, what you're doing, you can fight through just about
00:18:12
anything. I mean, that was really the case with the early days of Snapchat. We loved uh build, you know, using using
00:18:20
the product. We were using it all day with our friends. So, we could really we just had an attachment to it that we never, you know, really developed with
00:18:26
future freshmen because we weren't applying to college. So, we didn't have that same, I think, connection with the product that we ended up developing with
00:18:31
Snapchat. And why does that end up mattering so much? That like love and passion for the thing that you're building? Because I think that's what
00:18:37
you know, the love and passion for what you're building and the love and passion for the people you're working with, like that's what allows you to get through,
00:18:43
you know, all the challenges that come when you try to to to build a business. I think if you don't love what you're doing, I mean, I just absolutely love
00:18:50
what I do and and the team that we get to work with and and of course the the products that we make, the community we serve. And I think without that just
00:18:56
love for what you do, it's it can be, you know, it can it can be hard. And you
00:19:01
the other thing you said was you felt that you should go after a business that didn't take like 18 months, like two
00:19:07
years of your time to build before you got it to market. Why is that for entrepreneurs that are listening that
00:19:14
maybe have spent years perfecting something in their bedroom that hasn't gone to market yet? Why was that insight
00:19:21
so important to you for your next venture? I think getting that feedback from your customers as quickly and early
00:19:27
as possible is critical, even if it's on like the back of a napkin. and like, "Hey, here's what I'm thinking. This is
00:19:32
what it's going to look like." What do you think about that idea? Because it's very hard to know whether or not you
00:19:37
have a good idea unless you can put something in front of people and have them use it. I mean, that's almost one
00:19:42
of the cardinal rules of the product design program that you I guess we will willfully uh ignored, which is that you
00:19:48
should really rapidly prototype and get feedback as quickly as possible so that you know you're on the right track. I
00:19:53
mean, even in the early days, you know, Snapchat before was called Snapchat was called Pickaboo. It was more focused on disappearing messages. Very quickly we
00:20:00
learned that wasn't interesting to people. They wanted to communicate with pictures. They wanted to talk with pictures. So when we called the app
00:20:06
Snapchat, we explained that it was 10 times faster than sending a photo via text message. People were like, "Oh, I
00:20:11
want that. Like that's something that I'll use every day." And so it was just really interesting to get the feedback
00:20:16
really really early on, you know, with the with an initial version of the app that took, you know, a couple months to
00:20:21
create. I think this is a really interesting point that a lot of founders don't realize that even companies like
00:20:26
yours, they start with an initial hypothesis which is nearly always wrong. But kind of when you hear these stories,
00:20:32
you hear like had an idea in my basement and then pursued it and then it became a billion dollar business. But there's something in the like humility and the
00:20:38
realization that your initial idea might be wild be off and that your job isn't to like be right, it is to be successful
00:20:47
and they're like two different things, right? I I totally agree and I think the the challenge someone I I think this was
00:20:53
like one of those Vanity Fair parties a million years ago. The the the souvenir was a lighter and like on one side it's
00:20:59
like the director is always right and on the other side it's like the customer is never wrong, you know? And I think like
00:21:05
that's like always the interesting challenge with a business that you have to stay true to your vision, the reason why you're building a product, your
00:21:11
philosophy, but at the same time, your customers are the people you serve and and ultimately how they feel about your
00:21:16
product is is right, whether or not you agree with it. So, how did you get past um future freshmen to your next
00:21:24
business? What was the journey from there? So, you'd met your co-founder at that point, Bobby. And how did you then
00:21:30
move over to the idea of Snapchat? I think one of the things that was really helpful is that I did a semester a
00:21:36
quarter abroad uh in Cape Town and I think taking a step back and being there
00:21:42
sort of gave me perspective about what we were working I was working on it while I was still working on future freshman while I was there but it really
00:21:49
gave me like more perspective and and I think you know I just realized this is going to be really hard and I don't really love what we're doing we got to
00:21:55
find something else and was that more than anything a feeling you had like a feeling of just I'm not enjoying doing
00:22:02
this every day opening my emails thinking about this problem. Yeah. I think it's so important to listen to those feelings. Yeah.
00:22:10
Yeah. We were very good at not listening to them. Think because parents and other pressures, right, to continue doing
00:22:16
something. So then how did you get from there from being in Cape Town to the idea for Snapchat? Well, I came back uh
00:22:24
from Cape Town. I moved into um a dorm at Stanford. One of my buddies who had
00:22:29
been Reggie, one of my friends who had been living in our fraternity before, was also in that same dorm. So, we were
00:22:35
hanging out and, you know, one day he was like, "Man, I wish I I could send a disappearing photo." I was like, "That's a super interesting idea." And we looked
00:22:42
it up. There were a couple other apps that were doing some similar stuff at the time. Um, but they were very they
00:22:48
were much more like like security focused. They weren't really focused as much on on fun, you know? So, that's a
00:22:55
super interesting idea. And you could see really quickly that it it was simple enough that we could build it and get
00:23:01
feedback really quickly, you know, and I I think there were a couple uh important design choices uh that we made at the
00:23:08
time. One was opening to the camera. Um we really wanted to be the, you know, the the tagline is the fastest way to
00:23:14
share a moment. We wanted to be the fastest way to share a moment. And at the time, I don't know if you remember, the iPhone had like a shutter animation.
00:23:20
So you would like tap the camera to open it and it would take forever to like open up the camera super slow. Oh, and
00:23:26
there was a big toggle. You had to choose between the camera and and video, right? So, there's all this friction in
00:23:31
in using the camera. So, we decided we're going to open the camera. We're going to get rid of that animation and you're going to be able to go straight
00:23:36
into capturing what's happening in front of you before the moment disappears. So, that I think that was a a really
00:23:43
important um choice that we made. And then of course the choice to let people
00:23:48
choose how long they wanted to let someone um you know see their snap, but with the caveat that you could always
00:23:54
take a screenshot. Um and that was probably one of the most important pieces of feedback we got in the initial
00:24:00
in in the initial day. So we built the prototype of the app. I took it to my design class. Here's this new app. It's
00:24:06
called Pikaboo. You can set a photo that disappears. You know, this is really different than social media. Social media is all about permanence and you're
00:24:12
trying to look popular and collect all these likes and comments and pretty pictures. You know, that's the 1% of moments in your life. And here's
00:24:18
Snapchat. This is or Peek-ab-oo at the time. Here's Peek-ab-oo. This is for the other 99%. Right? All the other moments
00:24:24
that you might be embarrassed to post to all your friends, but that you want to share with your best friend or, you
00:24:29
know, your family. Um, everyone's like, "This is never going to work because you can always take a screenshot. This makes
00:24:34
no sense." So, it it doesn't go away. You can take a screenshot. And I think one of the the big inventions and that's
00:24:41
why I think it's so important to get this feedback. One of the big inventions that we made uh at that later that
00:24:47
summer when Bobby and I were working out at my dad's house, we invented a way to detect if someone had taken a screenshot. And so we would send a
00:24:53
little notification back that said, "Hey, you know, your friend took a screenshot." And I think that was part of what made the service fun that, you
00:25:00
know, you could set how long it would uh appear for your friend, but if they wanted to save it, they could take a
00:25:05
screenshot, but you would know that they saved it. And I think that was one of sort of the early uh feedback loops of
00:25:10
the product that helped, you know, make people feel comfortable using it for picture messaging. How long was that
00:25:16
journey between you having that conversation with Reggie about wanting photos to disappear and the moment when
00:25:23
you knew Snapchat was going to be a big deal? like how how long is that gap?
00:25:28
I would say it took until maybe um certainly the following school year
00:25:35
for me. So over that summer, Bobby and I went to my dad's house, worked a lot uh
00:25:40
on the service, renamed it Snapchat, got a lot of feedback when we were using it with our friends, everyone wanted like,
00:25:45
"Hey, can I add a caption? Can I add, you know, can I draw on it?" Because in the original version, it was just a photo. Um, but because people were, you
00:25:52
know, using just our friend group using it to to communicate, we needed to add things like captions and and drawing.
00:25:58
So, I think the Snapchat launched in the app store about September of 2011. And it probably wasn't until late that fall,
00:26:07
maybe or even into into the following beginning of 2012 that I was I remember sitting in the back of my classroom. And
00:26:15
we had a a snap counter that would count the total number of snaps ever sent, you know, and in the early days it was like
00:26:21
hundreds or a thousand or whatever. um and you'd you know I'd refresh the page and it wouldn't the number wouldn't
00:26:27
change you know but by that time by you know the beginning of 2012 every time I refreshed the snap counter page you know
00:26:34
the number would go up and it would jump by one or two or 10 so it was clear that people were using the service and and
00:26:39
communicating and that's when I was like ah this is this is fun you know not only are we loving it with our friends but there's more people using it too one of
00:26:45
the things you said there is that you were using people around you your friends to give you feedback on what
00:26:50
features you should add next you said people wanted to write on and they wanted to add captions. As a founder, that must be
00:26:57
quite hard because you're getting lots of feedback to change lots of things all the time. How do you know what to filter
00:27:03
as good feedback that you'll implement versus a distraction or bad feedback? Is
00:27:09
there a framework at all that you have you've had to deploy? So, I think all feedback is good feedback. All feedback
00:27:16
is valuable. I think what you do with it is what matters. So, for example, let's take the use of the the caption tool for
00:27:22
example. You know, we could have added a super clunky caption tool that took forever to use that was like, you know,
00:27:29
like social media where you add the caption at the bottom of the photo and tap it and hashtag stuff. The way that
00:27:34
we decided to implement captions to make it easier for people to communicate is all you have to do is tap on the photo right after you took it. So, you'd snap
00:27:40
take the photo, tap, the keyboard would pop up. there was a little caption bar, you know, the caption bar uh well, you
00:27:45
know, that still allowed you to see the photo behind it instead of it being sort of attached to the photo below it. It was right on top of the photo. And then
00:27:51
as soon as you hit enter, you could, you know, jump to the page where you select uh which friends you wanted to send it to. So I think, you know, what was more
00:27:58
important than hearing feedback of, hey, I I want a way to, you know, add a caption or express more in the snap. The
00:28:04
way that we implemented that feedback and designed something really fast and easy to use is why that black bar
00:28:09
caption is you know now I think synonymous with Snapchat and and is like you know well well well known around
00:28:16
around the world. So it was a year from the idea to the day when you raised
00:28:21
capital for the first time roughly. Yeah more or less. And talk me through that. So how much did you raise about raising
00:28:28
the capital and what was the business like at that time in terms of users and downloads? Yeah, I I don't remember the
00:28:34
exact uh sort of user statistics, but what was really really helpful is that we had about a a year of data. So, if
00:28:42
you remember back then there were a lot of apps that were sort of like a a flash in the pan, like they would get popular really really quickly and then sort of
00:28:48
fade away. And so, venture investors would kind of jump into these apps and then the apps would get really popular and then kind of fade. And so when we
00:28:55
were raising money, one of the things that really helped us is we had a year's worth of data to basically show, hey, when people start using this product to
00:29:02
talk to their friends, they keep doing it because it's really fun and it's better than text message based communication. Visual communication is
00:29:08
way more fun, more powerful, more expressive than textbased communication. And you know, people use it consistently
00:29:15
once they learn how. Um, and that was really important to the investors who were worried is this, you know, just
00:29:20
another flash in the pan type service. Um, so, so we really just led I think we
00:29:25
had like three maybe five slides of just the data. Um, do you remember feedback you got from investors at that early
00:29:31
stage? I think this is important because all founders are going to get the email that tells them that they're not on to
00:29:37
something. Yeah, I think the biggest piece of feedback was just like, hey, this seems like something that these
00:29:42
really big powerful tech companies are just going to copy and um, you know, it's they're really tough to compete
00:29:48
with. So, you know, we we're not really sure we want to invest in something that's going up against these really
00:29:53
really big powerful tech companies. I mean, there's some wisdom in that. Certainly a lot of foresight in that
00:29:59
one. Yeah. Because the odds anyway of building a a social networking app are
00:30:06
extremely low. It's we were saying before we started recording that you've got to be almost like delusional to
00:30:11
think that you can. I think at that time too, you know, Snapchat came last after
00:30:17
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, like you name it. All of those services had come
00:30:22
first. And so I think the idea that like, you know, and that was still at the time when people believed that network effects meant that you couldn't
00:30:29
compete, right? Whoever has the biggest biggest network is going to win. No one else is going to be able to compete. And so I think there was that concern that,
00:30:35
you know, oh, if these other competitors are much bigger and they have network effects, how are you ever going to grow uh grow and and compete? So that was a
00:30:42
big piece of feedback. And then I think there was just a whole other group of people who didn't really understand what the service was um and so weren't that
00:30:49
interested. But Jeremy at Lightseed reached out. He had his profile picture was a photo of him with Obama. Uh and I
00:30:57
was like, "Oh, okay. Must be like a real you." Now with AI, you never know. But but back then I was like, "Okay, must be
00:31:02
legit." So we met up with them and and one of his partners that uh I guess his daughter used Snapchat and loves
00:31:09
Snapchat and so they understood the service and what it was about and how she was using with her friends and so they ended up investing
00:31:16
$485,000 at a $4.25 million valuation. What a deal in hindsight. How
00:31:22
many users did you have at the time when you raised that capital? Uh I would have guess about a h 100,000 or something
00:31:27
like that. And the valuation was $4 million roughly. 4.25. Yeah. In that
00:31:33
first year up until the point that you raised that money, did you ever doubt that Snapchat was going to work? And I
00:31:40
guess to understand the question a bit more, you almost have to add a goal or ambition to it. So, I'm
00:31:48
presuming you wanted it to be and thought it could be a company. Did you ever doubt that it would be? Was there anything that ever happened in that
00:31:54
first year? There was one moment where we
00:32:00
accidentally took down the Snapchat infrastructure for three days. So the
00:32:06
service stopped working entirely for three days. Actually it something broke and it took us three days to fix it. And
00:32:12
we were like we're we're done. I mean what are we going to do? You know uh the
00:32:18
service has been down for three days. It's a messaging service you know. Uh so people haven't been able to talk to their friends like is anyone going to
00:32:23
use it? Um, and when we turned it back on, people just started using it again.
00:32:29
And that gave us a lot more conviction and that, you know, we had a product that people really just loved using. How
00:32:34
and why was it growing? Was it a marketing campaign or was it organic? The only thing that we ever saw work was, you know, friends using it with
00:32:41
friends, telling their friends about it and wanting to, you know, learn how to use it because communicating with photos
00:32:46
was a new thing. I mean people were hadn't been talking with pictures before and even the way people thought about
00:32:53
photos it was like a photo is for saving a precious moment right like that's or
00:32:58
like a family photo like that's really how people were thinking about photos at the time you weren't able like that was just coming out of the digital camera
00:33:05
like plug it into your computer and upload the photos era. So there was this massive, I think, behavioral change of
00:33:11
people realizing like, wow, like no, a picture is worth a thousand words. And now that I can take it instantly on my
00:33:17
phone and and send it with my friend in, you know, uh, a couple hundred milliseconds, like we can talk with
00:33:22
pictures and instead of just use pictures to save memories. I don't think we really remember that. Isn't that
00:33:30
crazy that we don't remember? It wasn't that long ago. I know, but we just don't remember. Like, as you were saying, I was like, Yeah, you couldn't like
00:33:35
send a photo to your friend to talk. Yeah. I was like I was trying to think of the app that I could have used back
00:33:40
then to do that and there just like isn't one. Yeah. But now I'm dating myself, you know. It's terrible.
00:33:46
No, that's crazy. We We forget that because it's so common place now on every app. You You can And I guess they
00:33:53
they ultimately got that from you. Copied that from you. I've got this photo um from the early days. Do you
00:34:00
remember this photo? Oh, this is awesome. This picture is great. What is this picture? Where are you? What are you doing? Who is that? Well, this was
00:34:07
actually our first office, which was great. It was called the Blue House in Venice, 523 Oceanfront Walk. And
00:34:14
actually, you know, things sort of uh had had reached a breaking point at my dad's house. I think there were seven or
00:34:19
eight of us living there. You know, one one night, his girlfriend at the time, now wife, came in and one of, you know,
00:34:26
one of our teammates was like sleeping on the couch with a blanket she had bought him for Christmas and she was just like, I think there's like we've
00:34:31
had enough here. So, we we had to get an office uh and and move out. And we were going to dinner in Venice and we walked
00:34:37
past this old blue house and it had a four lease sign on it. We were like, "Wow, this would be wild. We could have
00:34:43
an office on the beach on the Venice boardwalk." Um, let's let's call them. And we called them. They wanted a crazy
00:34:50
amount per square foot in rent. We couldn't afford at the time, but we ultimately waited uh a bit longer and
00:34:55
and were able to to negotiate that down quite a bit and moved in to the Blue House. And I think the best thing about
00:35:01
the Blue House was that the the Venice Boardwalk is one of the most popular destination tourist destinations in the
00:35:08
in California, maybe even in the world. I mean, it's more than 10 million people a year come to the Venice Boardwalk. And we had a big ghost logo, our big app
00:35:15
icon outside and all day long people would come up and talk to us about the app or give us feedback or need help
00:35:20
with their account. And so we were just immersed in people from all over the world who were using Snapchat and wanted
00:35:26
to come talk to us about it. ult ultimately became like a little too much. But in the beginning in the beginning uh it was just so amazing to
00:35:33
be right there on the boardwalk uh with so many people. And so how many people could fit into the blue house? I think
00:35:40
you know at max capacity it was 20 something. I think we were 20some people by the time we moved out. Maybe 30. It
00:35:46
was pretty cra I mean I was playing footsie with you know people under the under the table. We were pretty smooshed. And how many users did you
00:35:52
have at that time for people to be coming up on the broadwalk and having conversations? You must have been pretty popular at that point. It must have been
00:35:59
millions, I would have I would guess. Yeah. And you've dropped out of university by that point, obviously.
00:36:04
Yeah. Tell me about that decision because that's not I know the app's growing and everything, but to drop out
00:36:09
of a prestigious university can't be a super easy decision.
00:36:15
I I really felt I had no choice. I didn't have enough credits to graduate.
00:36:20
I mean, I you know, I was doing the I was doing the product design program, the engineering program. I had a lot
00:36:25
more classes that I had to to finish and ultimately we'd raised $485,000
00:36:31
uh from investors and you know I was spending all day trying to pass these you know I was taking I think 20 credits
00:36:37
at the time or something uh and trying to trying to work on our business. I just couldn't do both at the same time.
00:36:43
So I was like you know hopefully one day I'll be able to go back. I actually did end up going back and got my degree in
00:36:48
2018 which was awesome. Um and uh but um I just couldn't do both at the same
00:36:53
time. Why did you go back and get your degree? I really did not want to have that debate with our kids where they're
00:36:59
like, you know what I mean? Where they're like, but dad, like you, you know what I mean? Like, you you didn't you dropped out. You don't have a
00:37:04
degree. Like, why do I need one? You know, I I think colleges can can be really valuable. It's not for everybody,
00:37:10
but it made a huge impact in in my life. So, I wanted to be able to, you know, show how important that is to our to our
00:37:16
kids. I was thinking earlier when we were talking about college university the world was different when
00:37:22
you went to university and college and you've got these four boys now the oldest I think is 14 years
00:37:27
old if he wants to be like dad say he wanted to follow in your footsteps is
00:37:33
there anything else based on how the world is currently that you'd be advising him to learn before the age of
00:37:39
like 21 is are there any topics or degrees that you would be pushing him towards now if he wanted to be like dad
00:37:45
if that was his decision I think one of the most important things today is really nurturing creativity. I
00:37:52
mean, I think creativity is really the the X factor, certainly in the age of AI, right? And so, I think nurturing
00:37:59
creativity, finding ways to develop those skills. For example, Flynn who's 14, he loves drawing. He's unbelievably
00:38:05
talented at drawing. And I think sometimes he's like, well, I don't know if there's a career in drawing, but I
00:38:10
think sometimes he doesn't see that drawing is just the way that he's expressing creativity. drawing is the
00:38:16
beginning of that journey of exercising those muscles in your brain that allow you to visualize something that other people don't see. Right? And and that's
00:38:23
one way that's one tool, one skill he can use to express what's in his in his brain. But I think exercising that that
00:38:29
muscle, that creativity is so important. I think creativity is just becoming more and more rare ultimately because so much
00:38:36
of our society is oriented around things we can measure. creativity is so hard to measure and so I think it can be really
00:38:43
tough um you know to to find the the dedication to invest in developing
00:38:50
creativity when it's uncertain what the outcome is. Um but that that's really what I would encourage him or so many so
00:38:55
many people to do. We're all born creative. We're all you know we're all born with this ability to express ourselves. And it's only over time I
00:39:02
think that we stop you know practicing that ability or you know uh or we become fearful of expressing ourselves. And and
00:39:08
I think that that can be overcome because we think through job titles at that age, don't we? We think what's the job title that I should be aiming at. So
00:39:16
doctor, lawyer, etc. versus we don't necessarily think as much about collecting useful long-term skills. I'd
00:39:24
say I've got a my girlfriend's little brother now who's like racking his brain trying to pick a job title for the next
00:39:30
like 60 years of his life. I'm like, it doesn't work like that, you know? And the world is changing so quickly now as
00:39:35
well. It's probably makes more sense to try and get some fundamental skills that will translate. Plus, job titles are
00:39:41
totally ridiculous. Anyways, in the in the early days, we would just make up anyone who joined the team, we would
00:39:46
just make up their uh their title. It would have nothing to do with anything. Yeah. Um so job titles are ridiculous
00:39:54
when the team is small, right? Just in general, right? Because I think people anchor to job titles to confer confer
00:39:59
status, right? And I think ultimately like amazing impact, creativity, great ideas come from anywhere, right? And the
00:40:07
more that you focus your organization around hierarchy, I think the less you're focusing on the right things, which are how are we making sure great
00:40:12
ideas are coming from anywhere, getting surfaced, you know, and um being built.
00:40:17
But hierarchy comes into place when things start to get big and we need to put processes and reporting lines in place. How do you defend against that?
00:40:24
Well, I I think you're getting at like the fundamental problem that all companies end up having and I I think there's there's a great book called
00:40:30
Loonshots which I really love that actually gets at this issue directly and and
00:40:35
basically what the author Safi Beall found was essentially that very big companies you know once they get a lot
00:40:42
larger they have a lot of customers to serve they need to build all this organizational infrastructure and ultimately that comes with hierarchy but
00:40:48
the ones that continue to innovate that are very successful at innovating consistently over long periods of time
00:40:54
also have very small, very flat teams that don't have any hierarchy at all
00:41:00
that are really, really focused on innovating and on trying new things. And ultimately, the companies that are
00:41:07
really successful find a way to build a relationship between the huge organization that is supporting all
00:41:14
these customers and needs to be operationally rigorous and metrics focused. Builds a relationship between them and this very small group of people
00:41:21
who are trying crazy things. And he gives a lot of examples. You know, one of the ways that the United States was
00:41:26
able to win World War II, they had these crazy group of scientists that were trying new things like radar and stuff
00:41:31
like that at the time. But then they were taking those ideas, bringing them to the military, which is a huge, very
00:41:37
structured, hierarchical organization and saying, "What do you guys think about this? How can you play with this? What are your ideas? What are your
00:41:42
feedback? Take this into battle. Put it on an airplane. See what happens." and then give that feedback back to this
00:41:49
very, you know, unstructured, flat, small group of of uh inventors and
00:41:54
scientists. And by really focusing on the relationship between those parts of the organization, ultimately companies
00:42:00
can figure out how to build a strong relationship between the two and then innovate over time. So, how have you done that at Snapchat? At Snapchat, we
00:42:07
have a really small design team. I think it would surprise people. It's nine people really. It is totally flat, so
00:42:13
there's no fancy titles. everyone is a product designer. Um the the way that
00:42:18
the team works is very focused around making things. That's the entire job. In
00:42:24
fact, your very first day when you start you we have design critiques once a week for a couple hours. Your very first day
00:42:30
you have to present uh something. So you have to make something and and present it. And what that does that I think is
00:42:38
really interesting and and powerful is that ultimately of course on your first day when you have no context for what
00:42:43
the company's working on, no idea what's going on. How how on earth are you supposed to come up with a great idea? I
00:42:49
mean it's almost impossible. But you have to show an idea your first day. And so ultimately on your very first day
00:42:55
your worst fear has come true that like we're sitting there al together and we're looking at an idea that's like
00:43:00
ultimately not that great. I mean sometimes they're pretty good but ultimately not that great. And that I
00:43:05
think opens the door to creativity because you've already it already happened. You already failed. There's
00:43:11
all the idea wasn't good. Uh and you know what ultimately happens on our own design team is that 99% of ideas are not
00:43:17
good but 1% is. And you know we really abide by that idea of like you know or
00:43:22
the concept that like the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. So the team is just constantly
00:43:28
generating an incredible number of ideas and products and features and that sort of thing. And ultimately our job is to
00:43:35
try to figure out what the great ones are and then most importantly build a strong relationship between this little
00:43:41
team that's coming up with all this stuff all the time and our you know much bigger engineering organization our
00:43:47
bigger product organization who also have all sorts of amazing ideas and are also innovating in their own way and
00:43:52
build a flywheel between the two where we can ultimately you know make a lot of new products and then consistently make
00:43:58
them better. So many questions there that I'm very very curious about. The first one is do you measure the amount of ideas that that small design team are
00:44:04
producing? No, but I I do know when we need more. Okay. Okay. Fine. Okay. So, you've got a
00:44:10
you've got a sort of an intuitive feeling. It's small team. You can stay close. And then how do you get the bigger organization to cooperate with
00:44:17
the smaller design team when the bigger organization have their own incentives, they have their own planning cycles, they have their own egos as all humans
00:44:25
do. How do you get them to work together? For us, the the bridge organization is probably our product
00:44:30
organization. And they really helped connect the dots between the engineering folks and the design folks. And a lot of
00:44:35
this stuff, you know, actually mirrors the relationship that Bobby and I had in the very early days where I was more
00:44:40
design focused. I had a bit of an engineering background and had taken some CS, but I was more design focused. And Bobby, you know, is an unbelievable
00:44:48
uh computer scientist, right? He, you know, took math and and uh computer science at school, but he also loved
00:44:54
design. And so we had this really you know powerful relationship where you know I I could talk with him about new
00:45:00
ideas and and design and he could talk about the engineering constraint. So when you know for example when we were
00:45:06
inventing this this notion that you know you would tap to take a photo and hold to record a video at the time that was a
00:45:12
really big deal right to to you know to help people more easily use their cameras. Now every camera on a
00:45:18
smartphone is tab for a photo hold for video. But the engineering complexity that was required to enable that design
00:45:25
was something that we really talked about and worked through because the way that the design and the animations had to work and the way that you, you know,
00:45:31
held your finger really mattered with the way that ultimately we were flipping between, you know, the the video feed
00:45:38
and or capturing uh a still a still image. And it was that dialogue that ultimately ended up you know resulting
00:45:44
in a in a new product and a new you know uh thing that people could use. So we mirrored a lot of that and tried to
00:45:50
build that relationship across the organization constantly over time where you know there's there's a real dialogue
00:45:56
and an understanding and an appreciation both for design and engineering um you know that oftentimes is facilitated by
00:46:03
our product organization. In terms of that small design team you said you have a critique session once a week. What is
00:46:09
a critique session? So it's just where we look at work. That's all we do. Uh we
00:46:14
people just share uh new work. So for a couple hours we'll just look at all the new ideas that have come out of that
00:46:20
small and new designs that have come out of the last week from that team. And these can be anything. Really anything.
00:46:26
Yeah. Oftentimes they're oriented around solving a problem. So kind of coming back to that product design philosophy like what problem are we trying to
00:46:33
solve? How can we empathize with our you know community? Okay. our creators are having friction, you know, posting to to
00:46:39
Snapchat. It's, you know, confusing the way that they're reading their story replies or that's not working the right way. How can we make that easier? And
00:46:45
then we'll just look at a ton of ideas. And are these you said there's eight or nine people. Are they working in
00:46:51
isolation within that team or are they working as one team? They very often are getting feedback from one another.
00:46:56
Oftentimes are tackling projects together and small teams, you know, um but all come together on a on a regular
00:47:02
basis. I love this this point you were making about the key thing that you've discovered is is that the game is more
00:47:08
ideas, not trying to find a perfect idea. More ideas, more feedback. Yeah.
00:47:13
More ideas, more feedback. You increase your failure rate, you get more feedback. It it does kind of go contrary
00:47:19
to what people think when they're building a business. They think the game is to have the perfect idea. I But those are all people who've never built a
00:47:24
business before. Yeah. Because eventually you learn you learn something, right? You learn that
00:47:31
you're not that good at guessing. Yeah. And I think ultimately you have to maximize your rate of learning. I mean
00:47:36
that's that's just critical. Maximize your rate of learning. Let's go back to the um those early days. You're in that
00:47:43
office. When you think about the people in that photo that were part of the first sort of 20, how important in
00:47:49
hindsight is hiring? I think it's everything. I think it's everything. And
00:47:55
these were really really just wonderful people. I mean still you know uh in many
00:48:01
cases close friends and I think interesting there was a moment I realized um David Daniel Bobby and a couple other
00:48:09
of our original engine all of them uh you know original engineers were musicians as well and it was really
00:48:16
interesting this moment you know because the the early folks who were working on the engineering side of of Snap were
00:48:23
unbelievably creative and unbelievably talented and it it was an
00:48:28
interesting interesting like aha moment because I think often times people think of the disciplines as separate like oh
00:48:34
there's designers and then over there there's engineers and I think so much of the magic actually is when those
00:48:39
disciplines like combine or cross over or people who really love and appreciate both especially for a company that's
00:48:45
aspiring to be creative absolutely in everything that it's doing um on this
00:48:50
point of hiring did you make any hiring mistakes in those early days oh absolutely and what were those mistakes
00:48:56
not necessarily people but the the frameworks were were off or the way that you've hired these people or what what what caused the mistakes? I think
00:49:04
occasionally in the early days um we almost like overindexed on the wrong
00:49:10
types of experience if that makes sense. So one of the things we really wanted to do was bring in people who were very
00:49:16
very experienced leaders who had run much bigger teams. That was like if we want to build a big company we got to
00:49:22
find people who have run big companies and big teams. And so one of the early engineering leaders who joined our team,
00:49:29
I think he, you know, he was coming from from working on a team of 300 or something like that at at Amazon was coming to like a team of eight at at
00:49:36
Snapchat. But we were really thinking ahead about like how can we hire people who can actually help us scale here and
00:49:41
and build something uh really big. And I think that that sort of focus on leadership experience and experience
00:49:48
leading at scale was really valuable. I think what was oftentimes a bit less valuable in those early days were was
00:49:54
almost more people who had very specific domain expertise. So there were people
00:49:59
who would you know come into our come for an interview or something like that and be like well I think what you guys
00:50:05
should do is add likes because every other platform has likes. So if you just add likes then people will you know use
00:50:11
your service more and not really coming with the same open-mindedness and curiosity about well why is Snapchat
00:50:17
doing it differently? like why don't you have likes and comments? It's like what how are you thinking about the service
00:50:22
um differently and and how could I how can I change and grow and adapt to the way you're thinking about it to help you
00:50:28
grow faster and and so I think now one of the things we're always looking for in the interview process is adaptability
00:50:34
right it's amazing to have prior experience but the question is how do you apply that prior experience to a new
00:50:40
context and change and adapt the way that you see things change your perspective um you know to be able to
00:50:46
meet the needs of our business which is different than you know other businesses What what are the other factors? If if
00:50:51
you were to make a perfect Snapchat employee now, what would their personality be? Their their psychology,
00:50:57
their their attributes. We we have three values and three leadership behaviors.
00:51:02
Three values are kind, smart, and creative. That's been the those have been the values since the the very
00:51:08
beginning really because Bobby and I were just having a conversation like what kind of people do we want to work with? Kind, smart, creative. Like great.
00:51:14
But since then and and we can spend some more time talking about this. I think what was really fascinating over time was to learn you know and by the way 10
00:51:20
years ago people were not talking about kindness at work. I mean people would be like sorry what you know no kind no kind
00:51:26
smart creative like why kindness. What we found was that with the that the relationship between kindness and
00:51:32
creativity is really really important because unless people feel comfortable coming up with crazy ideas, unless they
00:51:39
feel comfortable that if they say, you know, they have some new idea and it actually isn't that great that they're
00:51:44
not going to be laughed at that they'll be supported, right? Unless you have that sort of supportive culture, it's
00:51:50
very hard to be creative. And so we learned over time that actually wow kindness is is kind of the essential
00:51:55
ingredient if you want to have a creative a creative culture. But anyways, kind, smart, creative, smart,
00:52:01
pretty self-explanatory. Um, and then uh when it comes to leadership behaviors,
00:52:06
there's three leadership behaviors or attributes we look for. I just want to pause on that point of kind. Do you make
00:52:12
a distinction between someone being nice and being kind? Because in your
00:52:17
environment, you also mentioned that you do these critique sessions and you're giving people crit critical feedback and if a culture gets a little bit too kind,
00:52:23
then isn't that going to inhibit innovation and feedback? We always differentiate between kind and nice.
00:52:29
There's a couple examples that I think help with that. So like for one, um I think it's really kind to tell somebody
00:52:34
that they have something stuck in their teeth. Yeah, you have something stuck in your teeth, you want to know about it,
00:52:40
right? It might make you feel awkward. Certainly as the person pointing it out, it's a little awkward, right? If you want if you just want to be nice, you
00:52:45
pretend nothing's going going going on and you just say, "Oh, you know, nice to meet you, whatever." But if you're really being kind and you want to help
00:52:50
that person, you say, you know, you got something stuck in your teeth. You you got to take care of that. And I think that helps distinguish between, you
00:52:56
know, nicities and being kind and really wanting to help help somebody. I think I think another great example is if
00:53:02
somebody's really struggling, you know, at work or they're struggling to grow or they're struggling with, you know, to to
00:53:08
perform um you know, their duties at at SNAP, you know, the nice thing to do is maybe just make them feel good about it.
00:53:14
Oh, don't worry. Uh you know, um I'm sure it'll be okay. The kind thing to do is really help them succeed, right? Say,
00:53:20
hey, this isn't working because you're doing X, Y, and Z. You know, here are some things to do to think about that differently. provide that really direct
00:53:26
feedback that allows people to grow and that's the kind thing to do rather than just making them feel good about not
00:53:32
meeting expectations. Leadership values. You said there's three leadership values. Okay, there's three of them. The first one is is T-shaped leadership. So,
00:53:39
we talk a lot about T-shaped leadership. What we mean by that uh is that you have a real depth of experience, a depth of
00:53:46
expertise in a given area and then a real breadth of understanding of the business overall and an ability to
00:53:52
connect with lots of different types of people who think different ways because you need to be able to connect your
00:53:57
expertise to all the different areas of our business to really drive impact as a
00:54:02
leader. I mean, I think that's one of like almost the hallmarks of of running a business today is it's basically impossible to do anything interesting
00:54:09
without a team, right? The way that the world works today is very complicated and it's really important that you have folks who have deep expertise but then
00:54:15
they have to apply it to all these other crossunctional areas you know so they have to have a familiarity with it and
00:54:20
an ability to relate to people with different you know viewpoints or or other you know uh areas of expertise. So
00:54:26
and as we proceed with this these leadership principles are you saying that in order to become a leader at Snapchat you need these three things or
00:54:34
are you saying everybody at Snapchat needs these three things? We think everyone is a leader. So, we do apply it
00:54:39
uh broadly. But, of course, you know, um you know, I think it's really important as we're thinking about hiring or
00:54:44
bringing in a new leader that, you know, that this is something that we we talk to folks about. So, if someone's not quite T-shaped, if they're a little bit
00:54:50
eye-shaped, is there something they can do to become a bit more te T-shaped? Yeah, that that's almost maybe the the
00:54:57
easier one, right? If you can build on a if you can build on a real depth of expertise by going engaging with folks
00:55:03
maybe outside of your comfort zone or in different parts of the business and build that curiosity and understanding that helps develop I think that breadth
00:55:10
of understanding. I think what's harder is if you're a generalist and you don't have that deep skill set or that deep
00:55:16
area of expertise, it's really really hard to bring enough value to the team, right? And I think that's that's where
00:55:21
people get frustrated with like the idea of middle management, right? Where it's like, oh, this is just a person who, you
00:55:27
know, knows a little about a lot but can't really help me solve this problem because they don't really know the details. They don't really understand,
00:55:34
you know, how how to help me, you know, grow as an individual or solve this tough technical problem. And so I think
00:55:39
that's why that area of expertise is so important because it's so hard to inspire people that you're working with
00:55:44
if you don't know a lot about, you know, the the area that you're working in. And do you need to be a T-shape leader at
00:55:50
Snapchat now and when there was 10 of you in the in the bedroom or in your
00:55:55
dad's house? Has it always been important or is that a function of being bigger? That's a great question. I wish
00:56:01
we had been more thoughtful about the leadership values and and characteristics we were looking for back
00:56:06
then. I think, you know, when you're working on a team of 10 or a team of 20, you're not thinking as much about what
00:56:12
what leadership characteristics are really important to us. It's more about like how do we survive tomorrow? Um, you
00:56:17
know, but but I think over time as we learned what leaders were really successful at Snap, we were able to, you know, kind of look at those attributes
00:56:24
and say, okay, you know, these are the leaders who can who who really succeed here and drive a lot of value for our business. Before we move on to this the
00:56:30
second two, if this Evan could have gone back to the Evan that was running a team of 10 and he could have pulled him aside
00:56:35
and said, "Listen, here's some advice that you're going to need to know about leadership in building this team. The
00:56:41
most critical advice I could give you at this time, and this is for all the entrepreneurs out there that are building at they're laying the
00:56:47
foundations of a potentially very big company right now, what would you have whispered in his ear?" I would have
00:56:52
said, "Everything's going to be okay." Really? Everything's going to be okay. Um, you know, I I think sometimes people
00:56:58
are too focused on making the right decision and not as
00:57:04
focused on fixing it if they're wrong. And I think what I would have put more emphasis on is just how quickly are you
00:57:12
changing your mind when you receive new information? How quickly are you fixing a problem or a mistake if you didn't
00:57:18
make the right decision in the first place? And that's the feedback loop that is so missionritical to building a
00:57:24
business in the early days. It has very little to do. Obviously, there's existential decisions, you know, and and
00:57:30
those can, you know, create some big problems for your business. But most decisions are not existential decisions.
00:57:35
And the more important thing is to make a decision and then if you're wrong, fix it. Um, and I think it's the when you're
00:57:41
wrong, fixing it part that deserves most of the attention and and also how you can identify, you know, who your great
00:57:48
leaders are, who, you know, uh, who really talented folks on the team are because they're very quick to point out, you know, I don't think we did that
00:57:54
right. I think we should take this path, you know, this other path that, you know, we we maybe hadn't considered the
00:58:00
first time. And and I think it takes courage to to say that in in an organization rather than just say, "Oh, we're doing a great job." Yeah. And when
00:58:06
you're back there and you're you've made a mistake, there's something you've done wrong in hindsight, did you know in your
00:58:13
because because one of the things that I think of when I was a first-time founder building a student notice board was I
00:58:18
would get feedback and the feedback would be saying you're wrong about this. You need to change. And I think at
00:58:25
sometimes there was a part of me that knew, but I was like too scared to act upon it. So I kind of like gaslit myself
00:58:31
to just keep going. And I think a lot of founders do that. I know this because they they come to me in my portfolio and they say, "Ah, Steve, there's this guy
00:58:37
we've hired and he's been there now for a year and he's just not cutting it." I'm like, "Why the are you telling me?" And they're they're procrastinating
00:58:44
avoiding the conversation, but clearly they know. Clearly they know it's not right.
00:58:50
It's funny you say that because anytime someone comes to ask me about like that type of people advice, like, "What do
00:58:55
you think we should do?" You know, do you think that I'm like sounds like you've already made up your mind.
00:59:00
So um so yeah I I think it is I think it is really important to you know act on that feedback not be afraid to change
00:59:07
direction quickly if you know you you realize that you made a mistake but as you point out it's it's hard to do and sometimes it is worth seeing if you know
00:59:14
your your bet you know plays out. You don't want to thrash the team and change your mind all the time. So sometimes you
00:59:20
know it is it is sometimes worth seeing things through a little bit before you change. Is there anything else you would have said to that younger Evan in that
00:59:27
in your dad's house advice? Um at at that point before we had scaled to a lot
00:59:34
of you know thousands of people I think we could have been much more clear on the culture the kind smart creative
00:59:41
piece and really embedded that in the team prior to scaling because one of the biggest challenges that we confronted
00:59:47
was you know as we went from 20 people to 2,000 people we basically imported
00:59:53
all of these different cultures from all sorts of different companies like we imported an an Amazon contingent right
00:59:58
we you know who They really love their six-page documents. We, you know, imported a a Google uh contingent,
01:00:05
right? And they're very focused on consensus based decision-making. We imported, you know, a contingent from
01:00:11
from Meta as well. And I think we were too slow to be really clear about what
01:00:16
our values were and what that looked like in practice, what those behaviors looked like. And I think if we had
01:00:23
earlier and and faster one, so when when we're evaluating performance, we look at our values, kind, smart, creative, we
01:00:28
have specific behaviors attached to that that are actually researchbacked and whatever. We did a whole study to
01:00:34
understand which of those behaviors are really tied to performance and those values. But that gives people a really
01:00:40
clear framework for the expectations for how to behave at Snap and our unique culture. And there there was a moment of
01:00:45
time moment in time where I felt like we were losing control of our culture. And I wasn't happy with our our company and
01:00:52
the team. I remember I was complaining to a friend of mine. This is probably like your story of of folks coming to
01:00:57
you and saying, "Oh, it's not working." I was I was complaining to a friend of mine and I was just like, "Man, I just don't like I don't like it. Like I don't
01:01:03
like my job. I don't like what our company's become." And she just looks at me and she's like, "Then fix it." And I
01:01:09
was like, "Great point." Um and and I you know I think at that it just it had
01:01:15
changed and grown so quickly that it was really hard to stay true to our values but I think you know uh I really took
01:01:21
that advice to heart and just started trying to fix it with our team getting really clear about the values getting really clear about the behaviors holding
01:01:27
a higher bar and saying hey you know if you're not into the kind smart creative thing that's okay there are other companies with different cultures but
01:01:34
you know that really matters to us here. So, do you do you wish you had this would have been a pretty remarkable thing to do, but do you wish you had
01:01:40
made like a culture bible in the early days and then like I'm thinking
01:01:46
practically what should a founder do then if they're at that stage when they've got a small team now to prevent
01:01:53
what happened to you in terms of the culture becoming a little bit too pick and mix. So, I think it's less about the
01:01:58
culture bible and more about how you apply whatever your values are to your
01:02:03
hiring processes, to your promotion processes, to whether or not people still work at the company. And so, we
01:02:09
were too slow to embed those values in our performance evaluation. And so, I think if we had been way faster at just
01:02:16
saying, hey, these are our values and what we stand for. This is what it looks like in practice. Uh, and if you're not
01:02:21
living up to that, this isn't the right home for you. like that that would have helped shape the culture a lot faster
01:02:27
also because immediately people see oh wow if they're serious about their values and they're asking people to
01:02:32
leave if they won't live up to their values well then I you know I I better get on board with the values or find you
01:02:38
know another culture that fits you know fits my personality better it just doesn't seem like a priority to founders culture I think it's such a priority but
01:02:45
it's hard to understand what it means you know I had so many people telling me like really you got to really focus on the culture focus on the culture like
01:02:51
like what do you mean by culture it's like it's actually just how people behave, right? I mean, that's really what we're saying like what is the
01:02:57
collection of group behaviors, you know, that are uh acceptable or norms in your
01:03:03
in your company. So, I think instead of using this big culture word, which I was hearing a lot, but not understanding how
01:03:08
it was like tactically connecting to our business, I think when we're talking with founders, we should just be more specific about, you know, how people are
01:03:14
living their the values of their company every day through their behaviors. And that's dictated essentially by the
01:03:20
incentives of the organization because what you said is you basically introduced incentive structures said you're going to be exited or you're
01:03:26
going to be promoted and and getting really real about that and serious. But it, you know, that the tough
01:03:31
conversations come where it's like, well, that person's a superstar, you know, but they're not really living our
01:03:36
kindness value. And Bobby, I think, is so is was so great on this. Bobby is like, Evan, there's no such thing as a
01:03:42
brilliant jerk. If you're really brilliant, how could you possibly be a jerk? I mean it just me, you know, and you're like, damn, I love that. So, so I
01:03:49
think this concept that like if you're really that smart, how could you possibly be a jerk to people? I mean,
01:03:56
what that that I think, you know, really informed our approach to to building out our team and and I think gives you that
01:04:02
clarity in those moments where you're like, "Wow, but they're so smart or they're so talented." It's like, yeah, but if they're that smart and talented,
01:04:08
why can't they just be kind to people? What was the worst advice you got in those early years? We talked about some
01:04:13
of the good advice and the good advice you'd give now, but was there any like really bad advice that you got that
01:04:19
seemed to make sense but was terrible advice? I think a lot of people in the early days, you know, told us that um that uh
01:04:27
we should sell it. I mean, there there were a lot of there was one embarrassing moment. I remember I I joined a
01:04:34
conference call uh early with some of our lawyers and I don't think they had known I I had joined and they were
01:04:40
talking about you know this thing is basically going to zero you know what I mean this was in the early days like it's just a fad you know da da da da and
01:04:47
I'm like oh hey guys you know you're joking or and they didn't know you were on the call they hadn't known I joined because I joined a minute or two early
01:04:53
or something like that. Um, so I think there was a lot of skepticism in the early days and a lot of people who said, you know, hey, sell now while you can.
01:04:59
Um, you know, you're competing in a really really tough industry with a lot of big players and you don't know if
01:05:05
people are going to, you know, continue to love this product. But I think what they missed was our vision for the
01:05:10
future, right? They only saw what was in the public. We were working on all sorts of and still are working on all sorts of
01:05:16
amazing new products that give us conviction in the future and and our ability to make products that that
01:05:21
people really love. But I think from the outside when you were looking at Snapchat, you're like, people are just sending photos back and forth. I mean,
01:05:27
how is this ever going to be a business? How is this ever gonna grow for the long term? But you do end up getting an
01:05:33
offer, a very very famous offer when you're 23 years old from Mark Zuckerberg
01:05:38
at Facebook. Yeah, that was a a fateful fateful day for sure. How does how does
01:05:44
that begin? How does that story begin? Is it an email, a phone call, an introduction? I think it was an initial email.
01:05:52
Um, and I think we met at at some point and they they were interested in what we were doing and you know at that time
01:05:58
they were working on a competitor called Poke um you know and so they were kind of talking with us hey you know we're
01:06:04
exploring this space kind of thing. what do you think? And maybe you want to join uh Facebook. I think they had just
01:06:10
acquired Instagram too um probably like a year earlier or something like that.
01:06:15
And our view was that Instagram had been wildly undervalued in that um
01:06:20
acquisition ultimately had given up like a massive massive opportunity. Um Instagram was sold for a billion was it?
01:06:27
Yeah. A billion. Yeah. And WhatsApp was 19 billion roughly. Yeah. I think so.
01:06:32
You're 23 years old at that point. You've got Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg,
01:06:39
offering you a lot of money. I heard that it was $3 billion
01:06:46
they offered. Yeah, we never talked about it publicly, but yeah. Is is that
01:06:51
the number? Uh, that's not technically the number, but it's what's been reported publicly, so we can go with
01:06:57
that. Okay. And but did you get an offer? There were there was a real conversation about what it would look
01:07:03
like and you know um you know to to join forces but ultimately you know when we
01:07:09
talked with our board and our investors you know we decided that we'd rather go it alone. So I'm trying to understand as
01:07:17
a 23-year-old if someone offers me $3 billion for an app that I've started you
01:07:22
said you're probably still at your dad's house or in the blue office at that point. Yeah I think we were definitely in my dad's house. you're in your dad's
01:07:28
house and someone's offering you $3 billion for an app. What wisdom do you have that enables you to turn that down?
01:07:34
Um, I I wish I could say it was wisdom. I think it was just that Bobby and I loved what we were doing. We loved what
01:07:40
we were working on. We believed in the the future of it and ultimately we were able to convince our investors as well
01:07:46
that like our opportunity was much bigger over time. Um, and you know, so I
01:07:52
think that's, you know, that's what gave us, I guess, the confidence in in making
01:07:57
that decision. Did you ever get to meet with Mark or speak to Mark about it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've known Mark for a
01:08:02
long time. And was he he was keen to buy it? Um, I you know, I I we had we had some
01:08:10
interesting conversations about what it could look like for us to work at at uh at Facebook. I you know, I want to be so
01:08:16
sensitive to those conversations. I don't want to like speak out of turn, but um you know he's he's very strategic
01:08:22
and very good at identifying you know at the time they had a a piece of software that was identifying sort of what are
01:08:27
the fast growing apps um you know so that they could pursue them for acquisitions. I'm I'm just so I'm I'm so
01:08:33
interested to see how those things play out. It's almost it sounds like something you'd see in a movie where you get this call from someone like Mark
01:08:39
Zuckerberg who's built this massive empire and you almost it feels like you get summoned I would imagine you get
01:08:44
summoned from your dad's house to come and meet him and you went to Facebook's offices to meet him I'm guessing in person. I think at one point I went up
01:08:51
there we he came and met us at uh we met at Cheryl's condo in like Santa Monica
01:08:57
or something like that. Cheryl had a condo there and so we I think that's where we first met Bobby and I met him.
01:09:03
And did he tell you that he was going to copy you if you didn't sell? He just explained that he was working on Poke and that, you know, it was uh for
01:09:10
picture messaging and that kind of thing. And I'm guessing you didn't want to join a big company at that point. It was it
01:09:17
was less so like not wanting to join a big company. I think fundamentally we
01:09:22
wanted to build a business that was different. I mean, you go back to our first blog post and the way that we talked about wanting to offer an
01:09:28
alternative to social media that we felt like social media was about being pretty and perfect and we wanted a way to
01:09:34
communicate with our friends that was fun. The company ethos, the values, the visions were so divergent. It was very
01:09:40
hard to imagine that like we could keep doing what we love in the way that we loved doing it like as a part of that
01:09:46
organization because they're just oriented in a very different way. Was there ever a day where you doubted that
01:09:52
decision? No. Not even a moment. Not a moment. No.
01:10:01
Was Were all of the board supportive? Yeah. All of our investors were supportive. I They would have made a lot
01:10:06
of money. Yeah. But they did something very smart early on in like a prior financing round that I guess around that
01:10:12
time or before then where we were Bobby and I were each able to sell $10 million of stock. So we each had 10 million
01:10:18
bucks and we were like, "Wow, like we made it." Like we you know what I mean? we have enough money for ever and that
01:10:26
like allowed us to just swing for the fences. I mean, you know, at that point you're like, let's just go for it. So, there wasn't that feeling of like, oh
01:10:33
no, I'm not going to be able to buy a house. I'm not going to be able to like, you know, have a family. We were like,
01:10:38
we each got 10 million bucks. Like, let's let's go for it. I mean, there's a lesson in there as well for founders who
01:10:44
are considering taking, as they say, taking some off the table. I got a a voice note from a I was actually listening to it this morning and I
01:10:50
responded to her this morning. a friend of mine whose business was I think it was at the top of the market in 2020 was
01:10:57
set for an IPO and her board and investors and everyone was telling her that it's going to be a billion dollar business and that she should carry on
01:11:03
going. She approached me and asked me if I would buy some shares off her. I took a look at the business and I valued it
01:11:09
at a quarter of a million sorry a quarter of a billion so 250 million very different numbers. Um and her investors
01:11:16
around her were telling her it was worth something else. So she had sent me a voice note which is now 4 years later this morning saying thank you for that
01:11:22
Steven because although we didn't end up doing a deal with you, you put this idea in my head that I could be being
01:11:29
basically having a story sold to me. So what I ended up doing a couple of months after our conversation is I sold some
01:11:34
shares and obviously you know what happened in 2020 with the markets and eventually everything comes crashing down and she says I would be losing my
01:11:40
mind now because the company's struggling and obviously the markets have changed if I hadn't have taken some
01:11:46
off the table. and she was sending a voice note four years later to say thank you for putting that seed in their head.
01:11:51
And I hear the same with you. I hear that you took some money off the table. It changed your decision framework. Um
01:11:57
but also you just never know. Yeah. And and I think you have to be to your point, you have to be careful about
01:12:02
approaching these situations as like zero sum like either we're going to like go big or you know and with the risk
01:12:09
that we'll lose it all or you know we'll we'll sell the company. I think, you know, there are all sorts of creative
01:12:14
solutions that allow founders to take some money off the table, take care of their families, and still swing for the
01:12:19
fences and and build a big business. And venture capitalists are really aligned with the swing for the fences
01:12:25
philosophy. Growth investors maybe less so as the business gets bigger, but when you have venture capitalists, I mean, they're, you know, they're looking for
01:12:31
10x, 100x return. So I I think you know to to find a formula that works for
01:12:36
founders that allows them to you know take care of their families but also swing for the fences is I think a valuable approach. Are you and Mark
01:12:43
friends? You said you know him. Uh last I last time I saw him was at the the uh
01:12:48
Senate hearings I think what last last year. Those look fun. Should try it
01:12:54
sometime. No no no chance. No chance. By
01:13:00
2014, when you were 24 years old, 40% of US adults were using Snapchat every day.
01:13:06
And by 2015, Snapchat was reaching 75 million users on a monthly basis. At
01:13:13
that point, what's life like for you as a CEO, as a founder? This was 2015.
01:13:18
2014, 2015. 2014, 2015. You became the world's youngest billionaire at the age of 25, just four years after launching
01:13:24
Snapchat with an estimated net worth of 4 billion at the time. life was pretty good. I met my wife in 2014 uh which uh
01:13:32
was a gamecher for me. Um and why now?
01:13:38
She's an incredible just an incredible woman and and really gave me a huge
01:13:44
sense of stability and a massive amount of support. She has a she really cares about wellness. That's something that
01:13:50
she's really passionate about. So, it's like I live with a wellness coach basically every single day. And you know
01:13:57
to have that sort of stability and support system while going through you know building our business was just
01:14:03
profoundly helpful. How do you manage that though? How do you manage a romantic relationship when you are
01:14:08
piloting a rocket ship? I think one of the things that was really helpful is she's you know incredibly accomplished
01:14:14
herself. She has her own business that she is working on called Core Organics which is a an organic skincare business.
01:14:21
Um, so she really understands that it's hard to be an entrepreneur and was always really supportive, um, you know,
01:14:27
of of my work and my commitment to my work and our team. And so, um, I think that was almost something that brought
01:14:33
us together, not something that, you know, pushed us apart. And I think it's interesting. I talk to a lot of people who, you know, sometimes say, "Hey, my
01:14:39
relationship's been under strain because I'm working so much." And what I realize when I have those conversations with
01:14:45
people is very often times they met their spouse when they weren't working as much. they met their spouse 10 years
01:14:50
ago, 15 years, 20 years ago, you know, when they were just getting started in their career. And I think, you know, it
01:14:56
can be difficult when you have a much bigger job and it's all time, you know, all consuming and your spouse is like, "Remember when we first met and you
01:15:03
weren't working all that much? You were spending more time with me." From the minute I met my wife, we were both working flat out. And so, I think this
01:15:09
expectation that, you know, we both work all the time to support our our business, support our family, do what we
01:15:14
love to do was kind of just built into the relationship. But then how do you how would you make time to see each other? Do you need to put systems in
01:15:21
place to make sure that you're not just both at the office the whole time? One of the things that's really been helpful
01:15:27
that we started doing a couple years ago is just having Sunday family day. Always family day. Um and that means everyone's
01:15:35
at home. And so if our kids want to have friends over or whatever, that's totally fine. But they're not going to their friends houses or everyone's together.
01:15:41
And you know just dedicating that time to to our family is is really important.
01:15:47
What role does she play in giving you feedback? Oh wow. Um she she gives very
01:15:53
uh very candid feedback.
01:15:58
Which is a gift, right? It's a gift. Um yeah, and I think she's really passionate about areas that are
01:16:05
different than what I'm passionate about. And so, you know, she's able to give me feedback in in different areas
01:16:10
or things that I really even wouldn't consider, you know. Is there any tough feedback that she shared with you that you can share with me? You know, I think
01:16:16
one of the challenges that I have sometimes is I have I can have a very like harsh tone. Like even if what I'm
01:16:21
saying is really, you know, I'm trying to be helpful or kind or whatever. I I was raised by my dad was a litigator, my
01:16:29
mom was a tax lawyer. Like I I grew up listening to my dad have very intense conversations on the phone all the time.
01:16:35
And so like in business mode, I can be very direct. Um, and I don't think it's
01:16:41
helpful. And I don't think people want to listen when you have a, you know, a sharp or aggressive tone. And so I think
01:16:47
she she's always just encouraging me like, hey, you could say the same thing but in like a slightly different way. And people will hear it. You know, my
01:16:53
girlfriend says that to me because I think sometimes I I fail to context switch out of work, Steve, to then and
01:17:01
you know, because you'll be getting emails and texts at home sometimes and my girlfriend might come up and she might say something and the way I respond is almost how I would respond as
01:17:07
if I was at the office, but and it just and I have to say she's always right
01:17:13
because there is a part of my tone which I think
01:17:18
was conveying the emotion I was feeling from the thing I was doing to her to try and con to get her to leave me alone.
01:17:26
This is something we can both work on. It's crazy. It's crazy that Matt is so much at home the way you say something.
01:17:33
100%. And having an empathy and a and a kindness. Um, and you you've had four
01:17:38
children as well, which is something that I've not had. So, for me, that's an extra responsibility on top of the
01:17:44
rocket ship of Snapchat, the relationship, and now four kids as well. Yeah. But it's the greatest in the
01:17:50
world. I mean, the greatest thing in the world to have kids. really literally nothing better in the planet. I mean, I have not found
01:17:56
anything close. Why? Because the love and connection that you have with your children is unlike anything else that
01:18:02
you'll ever experience. I mean, it's it's profound, you know. How how do you
01:18:08
both juggle the the four children, the businesses, the relationship?
01:18:15
Well, I think Miranda probably juggles it better than I do. I think um and she's really committed to spending time
01:18:22
with our children. I mean that's something that's so important to her and it's important uh to me. I don't think you know I I spent a lot of time
01:18:28
actually over the years just I found people who are extremely successful and just like asked them like hey how do you raise great kids like you've been
01:18:34
extremely successful. How'd you do it? And my basic takeaway from like a hundred of these conversations was
01:18:41
basically that parents that are actually committed that can spend that time with their kids and do it themselves, engage
01:18:46
with their kids themselves, they tend to have really fruitful relationship with their kids, and their kids seem to turn
01:18:52
out really great. And I it breaks my heart that there are so many parents that can't spend that direct one-on-one
01:18:57
time with their kids or I guess in my case one on four time uh with with their kids because that seems to be kind of
01:19:04
the key ingredient is that connection with your parents being there. Yeah. Do
01:19:09
you own a business or do you work in marketing? If that's you, listen up for a valuable opportunity from our show
01:19:14
sponsor LinkedIn. I'm an investor in about 40 odd companies and while they
01:19:19
operate in different industries, they all face one challenge. Maybe the most important challenge when it comes to marketing, getting their brand in front
01:19:26
of the right audiences. We can probably all think of times when we've been scrolling on social media and received an ad that absolutely wasn't relevant to
01:19:32
us. LinkedIn has now grown to a network of over a billion professionals, including 130 million decision makers,
01:19:39
which means you can specifically target your buyers by job title, seniority, industry, even company revenue. So, stop
01:19:47
wasting your marketing budget on the wrong audience and start targeting the right crowd through LinkedIn now. And
01:19:52
because you're part of my community, LinkedIn is offering you a $100 credit for your next campaign. Head to
01:19:58
linkedin.com/diary to claim yours now. That's linkedin.com/diary. And of course, terms
01:20:03
and conditions apply and only available on LinkedIn ads. I saw your LinkedIn page. I saw your bio. Do you know what
01:20:10
I'm going to say? I think so. Yeah. In your LinkedIn bio, it says that you're the I think VP of product at Meta. Is it
01:20:18
not my joke? We we uh we uh have appropriated that joke from I think Cara Swisser who who originated it. But I
01:20:24
think now that they've copied ephemeral messaging and stories, everything, you know, a lot of the stuff we've done in
01:20:30
augmented reality, of course, now they say they're working on glasses, um which, you know, we've been working on
01:20:35
for over a decade. I think, um I think I've I think I've earned that earned that title. I don't know.
01:20:42
That must piss you off because that would piss me off. Like
01:20:48
I can sit on a podcast and I can say now I wouldn't be bothered. You know, the thing is that blah blah blah blah blah. But no, that would piss me off because
01:20:54
you just told me that there's a lot of people that are going to great creative lengths to think of these ideas. They're having thousands of ideas. You're you're
01:21:01
fighting to find one and then you have that moment where you present it to the world. The world says, "This is interesting." You you know the guy that
01:21:07
came up with it. You sit next to him. One of the things that's incredibly
01:21:13
irritating about it is they repurpose our inventions to make products that make people feel unhappy and bad about
01:21:20
themselves. One of the things that was so fascinating just in the last year there was a study out of the Netherland
01:21:25
totally independent study out of the Netherlands. we weren't involved. Another one out of Australia and it was comparing I think like Instagram, Tik
01:21:31
Tok and Snapchat and it it basically found that Snapchat there there are no negative they the study determined there
01:21:38
were no negative health imp me mental health implications of using Snapchat but there were negative mental health implications of using Instagram and Tik
01:21:45
Tok and in fact I think the study in the Netherlands found Snapchat actually promotes well-being and helps uh promote
01:21:50
your relationships as well and so I think what's really frustrating is when people think because they've copied some
01:21:56
of our features that the products are the same or that they do the same thing when our product is designed in a way
01:22:02
that's very different that's designed to support your relationships with your close friends and family and ultimately is something that supports your your
01:22:08
well-being and so what we never want anyone to think is if they're using stories on Instagram that that's the
01:22:13
same as Snapchat and you know even though they stole the the the name of the product or the way that you know
01:22:19
some of some of the functionality of it the way that Snapchat is designed on the whole is something that can have a
01:22:24
really positive impact in in people's lives And that's not something that people feel when they use Instagram. Did
01:22:30
you ever consider sending Mark an email or like a message or a phone call when they first started copying some of your
01:22:35
core features like the story feature? No. No, we we didn't do that. I think, you know, one of the things that I
01:22:41
really admire about Kevin Cyrum is when they copied the the stories feature, they they stopped pretending that they
01:22:46
were doing anything different. I mean, with with things like Poke, they tried to sort of pass it off as their own creation. Oh, we're do, you know, doing
01:22:53
it a little bit differently. with, you know, with stories. Um, you know, Kevin Cistro came out and just said, "Hey, we
01:22:58
think this is a really great feature. This is a really great product and like we're going to steal it and put it in Instagram and we think you're going to
01:23:04
love it." And, you know, I I think that the honesty at least was admirable. Is there do you feel a sense of injustice
01:23:10
when someone steals your idea like that? No, not at all. I mean, that that is sort of the the I you know, I'm sure you
01:23:16
know the saying like, you know, great artists uh steal. I think like one of the things about our industry is that
01:23:22
people are constantly being inspired by one another. I mean in the very early days I went to visit bite dance when
01:23:27
they only had Totia the app Totia which was a news a newsfeed app essentially but it was backed by AI by ML and when I
01:23:36
saw that uh that was really inspiring to me and we made a big change to our product. We actually separated out all
01:23:43
the creator and publisher content from our sto from stories from friends and we
01:23:48
said hey you know unlike social media where you're seeing content based on what your friends like or what your friends comment on on Snapchat we're
01:23:55
going to do ML driven recommendations. So you'll have content from your friends but then you're going to have this whole other world of content from creators and
01:24:01
publishers that's going to be recommended based on your interests and and and what you're passionate about. And so I do think like drawing
01:24:07
inspiration from other uh companies and other businesses is is part of innovating. Um so so I think it is it's
01:24:15
uh it's a part of the game, but it definitely showed us that if we're going to innovate, if we're going to make new
01:24:20
products, we ought to make things that are really difficult to copy. Uh that take a long time to copy that are really
01:24:27
hard to do. Because if you go after really difficult and hard things, it's much harder for these large uh companies
01:24:34
to to just copy them. Cuz I'm thinking about so many founders that I know that have started businesses and it might be anything from a t-shirt company to maybe
01:24:41
it's a podcast and they're dealing with people copying their ideas and sometimes they react really badly and they take to
01:24:47
social media and they post both and say, "Look, this person copied us." And they tag the brand. What advice would you give to founders that are being knocked
01:24:53
off? I I think it's really important to very very quickly evolve from being just
01:25:00
a product or just a feature to becoming a platform or an ecosystem. And so what
01:25:06
I mean by that is if I if I compare the early days of stories where people just were posting stories uh for one another,
01:25:12
it's relatively easy to copy that feature. You know, it's you can code that up pretty quickly. Probably with AI
01:25:17
now, you can code it up very quickly. When I look at what we've done with augmented reality, right, we have a Lens
01:25:23
Core, which is our own rendering engine for for augmented reality that runs on the phone, but also on our glasses. We
01:25:30
have a a tool called Lens Studio that's an incredibly sophisticated tool that developers can use to build these AR
01:25:35
experiences. We have a huge, you know, hundreds of millions of people who are using these AR experiences on the phone.
01:25:41
And we have hundreds of thousands of developers who are making all of these AR experiences. When you have that sort
01:25:46
of very complicated technology that's hard to copy and you have an ecosystem of people that are using it both in
01:25:52
terms of developers, you know, creators and also our community who love uh those AR experiences, it becomes very very
01:25:59
hard to, you know, copy the four million lenses that developers have created for our platform. Uh you know, or move the
01:26:06
the hundreds of millions of people who are enjoying augmented reality on Snapchat to a new platform. And so especially in the technology business,
01:26:12
the faster you can evolve from being, you know, a feature or a product to a real platform, I think that's where the
01:26:17
value is created over the long term. So it's almost this relationship between like how hard and complicated the thing was to build and and create is sort of
01:26:26
inversely correlated to how easy it is to copy. I think so. And then you know how how much of an ecosystem it is in
01:26:33
terms of other people using it, right? Almost more of like a marketplace, right? um it it makes it very difficult
01:26:39
to to migrate both sides of the marketplace. Do you think that the technology
01:26:44
companies that exist now, those trillion dollar ones, those big social platforms, are monopolies and should be broken up? Because there was a big call originally
01:26:51
to break these companies up and you've been, I guess you could say, victim to the strength of a monopoly being able to
01:26:58
swoop in, copy, replicate, steal, and innovation. I think what matters more
01:27:03
about whether or not they're monopolies is sort of what do you what do we think is going to happen next, right? I mean,
01:27:09
if you remember, there was a period of time when everyone thought that Microsoft was going to take over the world. They were caught up in a lot of
01:27:15
antitrust legislation or um antitrust um sort of inquiries and and uh lawsuits
01:27:22
and whatnot. And ultimately as a result maybe of being distracted by the lawsuits but I think also just a function of how they thought about their
01:27:28
business at the time they they missed the entire mobile cycle. Um you know I I
01:27:34
think people are looking at Google right now and saying is there a similar moment happening for Google? Google is subject to a lot of these antitrust um
01:27:41
inquiries. Is chat GBT for example coming along and with AI you know
01:27:48
actually going to make it a lot harder for Google's core business to to compete? And so I I think given just the
01:27:53
longevity of the regulatory and litigation cycle, I mean you're talking 10 plus years, it almost doesn't matter
01:28:00
so much if the government thinks that it's a monopoly or not because there's not much it seems like that they're able
01:28:06
to do about it. So what I think matters a lot more for small technology companies is thinking about what fundamental innovations, fundamental
01:28:12
technologies can we work on, can we develop that ultimately can help us grow
01:28:18
our business and maybe you know one day catch a catch one of these larger companies on a on a back foot. Want to
01:28:23
talk about that. But my last question on copying was if you were in Mark Zuckerberg's shoes would you have copied
01:28:28
Snapchat? I think given their market position it's a very effective strategy. They basically have an enormous cash
01:28:36
pile. They I think they're investing $20 billion a year right now just into, you know, the the AR glasses stuff and some
01:28:43
of their VR stuff. AR glasses stuff is largely copying what what we've been doing. Um and then outside of that, they
01:28:48
have tens of billions of dollars and all sorts of other investments including copying chatbt, right? And all of the the progress on large language models.
01:28:55
So, I think it's quite an effective strategy if you're at that scale generating that much cash to just, you
01:29:00
know, deploy that capital across a bunch of different bets and wait and see what companies are successful and what they
01:29:06
make and then try to throw a ton of capital uh and and hoping that those companies don't get to scale. Was was
01:29:11
there a hard day for you amongst all of this copying? Was there a hardist day
01:29:16
that you can recall? Um there there was a lot of concern when Instagram stories first launched that Snapchat would
01:29:21
essentially be obsolete and you know they they did a very good job talking about how many people were using you
01:29:26
know stories and we got a lot of questions and pressure about you know is Snapchat ever going to succeed and people didn't I I don't think they
01:29:32
realized at the time that folks were using Instagram mostly for content creators and influencers and that sort
01:29:38
of thing and they were mostly using Snapchat for their friends and family and so we had really focused on this friends and family use case that was not
01:29:44
really what Instagram was going after. they were much more focused uh on influencers and and I think it was
01:29:50
really only because Snapchat had started growing with those influencers. If you remember, you know, DJ Khaled and some of those early snaps, there were
01:29:57
influencers who were starting to join Snapchat just to use stories, right? To use it differently than how we had initially designed it for friends and
01:30:03
family. And I think that's what really got Instagram's attention. So, it was really frustrating in those moments where people were saying, well, how's
01:30:09
Snapchat going to survive because they didn't understand that stories on Instagram is for a totally different purpose than, you know, stories on
01:30:15
Snapchat? You must see that coming because people start leaking that there's this new feature coming. I I was
01:30:20
running a social media business at the time and there were hackers that can kind of look into code bases and see what features are about to come and then
01:30:26
it's leaked out to the blog. So as a team you're managing the emotions of a group of people and that group of people
01:30:32
they're all hearing that the biggest player in the game is about to launch a central feature of your proposition. How
01:30:38
is the leader do you manage the emotions of the people through that? Well, I think that can be something that is, you
01:30:44
know, energizing for a team, right? If you have some of the biggest companies in the world validating what you're
01:30:49
working on, that can be really energizing if you approach it that way, right? So, I think rather than just saying, "Oh, no, it's, you know, game
01:30:55
over, but it might as well shut the thing down and give up." I think if you say, "This is really evidence that we're on the right path here, that we're
01:31:01
building products that people love, that they're getting the attention of some of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world." You know, let's build on
01:31:07
that. Let's continue to go build products that billions of people all over the world will use. And I think ultimately to this point of, you know,
01:31:13
can you hire and and, you know, retain really talented, creative people. I think it's pretty cool if you're a
01:31:19
designer at Snap that the things you're making are not just, you know, used by the 850 million plus people that use
01:31:24
Snapchat, but billions of people that use all sorts of other products because people get so much inspiration from our
01:31:30
design team and what they build. I I think that's pretty cool. One of the use cases that emerged pretty much out of the blue, I think, for for Snapchat was,
01:31:38
and this is this is something I was only thinking about yesterday is you you at some point have to make a decision about
01:31:43
like adult content on the on the app and Only Fans have built this massive business now,
01:31:49
and they're basically in the adult content business. At some point you must have had been challenged on that by
01:31:54
investors or by users whether you were going to allow adult content to be on the platform because that would have
01:32:00
been presumably that would have been a growing user base. Interesting. Yeah, we we proactively scan for pornography and
01:32:08
remove it. I mean it's it's against our uh it's our content guidelines. We've been doing that for a really uh a really
01:32:13
long time. So yeah, I mean that's just not how we think about you know our our core business. And I I also think, you
01:32:19
know, when you when you think about self-expression, the importance of self-expression, the environment that
01:32:25
you're in really matters, right? And that's why we have content guidelines because we want people to feel like
01:32:30
they're in an environment where they can express themselves. And I think some of the the conversation about different
01:32:36
content guidelines or having content guidelines or not having them has been really interesting because I think people are missing the broader point. If
01:32:42
you have a a platform with no content guidelines and it's full of people yelling at each other or saying really mean or offensive things or posting a
01:32:48
lot of pornography, that's a really uncomfortable thing for most people, right? That's that's uncomfortable. You
01:32:53
say, "Uh, this maybe this platform isn't for me. Maybe I don't feel comfortable expressing myself here because all the stuff I'm seeing isn't really
01:33:00
appropriate or or aligned with my values." And so one of the things we discovered really early on is if you want to create a platform where people
01:33:06
feel comfortable expressing themselves, feel comfortable communicating with their friends and family, having content guidelines is really helpful because it
01:33:12
means that the content experience is one that that feels more comfortable. But isn't that people would say well that
01:33:18
censorship? I'm thinking now of the video that Mark Zuckerberg released about Meta's change to their moderation systems moving to Texas realizing that I
01:33:26
think he said that they'd overindexed with their moderators in terms of left-leaning politics. So, a lot of the
01:33:31
right-leaning content had been censored. What do you make of that argument for
01:33:36
content moderation that we don't want to censor people? I think it's a misunderstanding of the the First Amendment and and how it applies. If we
01:33:43
look at our country, uh, the way, you know, at least here in the United States with the first amendment that really
01:33:49
focuses on the way that the government interacts with content creators or content publishers and it says, hey,
01:33:55
it's not okay for the government to interfere with individuals or publishers self-expression, right? That's not
01:34:00
allowed. But one of the things the first amendment also does is say, you know, platforms or individuals can make
01:34:07
choices about what sort of content they want to promote or want to have on their platform. That's part of the first
01:34:13
amendment. You can't force the Wall Street Journal to, you know, put this article or that article or accept any
01:34:19
article from any author all around the world. The Wall Street Journal as a paper can decide what, you know, what
01:34:24
authors, you know, it wants to include on on its pages. And that's part of the protected first amendment expression we
01:34:31
have here in this country. So this whole notion of of censorship doesn't apply to to companies that are private businesses
01:34:37
that actually have a first amendment right to decide what content is on their platform. And they may want to decide.
01:34:44
We're open to literally anything. Anything goes. No problem. And it seems like some platforms are making that choice. But other platforms like ours
01:34:50
say, "Hey, in order to have a healthy set of discourse across our platform, in order to make sure people feel comfortable when they're viewing content
01:34:57
on our platform, we don't want people to come across pornography, for example, or violent content or, you know, hateful
01:35:04
content. That that's not something that makes people feel good. And we actually want to make sure that that that content
01:35:10
isn't on our platform because it doesn't comply with our our guidelines." And that may be one of the reasons why in
01:35:15
some of these studies it shows that people feel better when they use Snapchat because they're not encountering, you know, really violent
01:35:21
uh content when when they're using Snapchat. Is there an issue that if you're geographically based in Los
01:35:28
Angeles or California, then your content moderation perspective is going to be
01:35:33
very left-leaning versus if you're based in a red state and that might not be representative of the world. Or do you
01:35:39
just not care? Did you just think, well, these are these are our values as a company. So, I don't think so because I
01:35:45
don't think saying, you know, extreme violence is not something we want on our platform. I don't think that's
01:35:50
political. I I think that's a values-based decision. Or saying we don't we don't want to service pornography to our community. I I don't
01:35:57
think that that's, you know, political choice. I think that's a values-based decision. So, I think unfortunately
01:36:02
right now in our culture, there's actually a real temptation to politicize things that are actually quite common sensical. And so I think we have to
01:36:09
avoid that that temptation and instead focus on you know what are the values or the business choices that people are making. Why do you think Meta have
01:36:14
rolled back their moderation policies? I I'm not sure. I I think you know there there's a moment in time when they seem
01:36:21
to have a lot of support to do it. I I think it'll be challenging for them in Europe for example where there's a lot
01:36:26
of rules and regulations about you know prohibiting things like hate speech for example or or terrorist content. And I
01:36:33
think um it'll be interesting to see how they navigate that. It's certainly a lot less expensive to to avoid moderating
01:36:38
content. It costs money to moderate uh content and I that could be a consideration as well. If you don't moderate content, does engagement go up?
01:36:45
That's a that's a great question. I've seen some reports and some studies that show um that, you know, if content is is
01:36:52
moderated, engagement can go down. Um certainly there are studies that show that negative content spreads much
01:36:57
further and faster on social media for human reasons. Um but but I'm not sure in this particular instance. How are you
01:37:04
how are you feeling about the social media landscape? It's changed so much in the last six months. It's just not even
01:37:11
six months, I'd say 12 months since I think Elon bought Twitter, now called X
01:37:17
that it's almost like this domino effect has happened in terms of content moderation, in terms of the types of
01:37:23
voices on social media, in terms of this big movement around censorship and free speech. There's also been this
01:37:29
splintering of social media where lots of people are now like leaving certain platforms and going to Blue Sky and
01:37:34
Threads and you know Rumble was the only sort of big right-leaning platform just just a couple of years ago and now I
01:37:42
don't know it seems like it's all changing before our eyes. I I don't read
01:37:47
too much into it to be honest with you. To me, it feels like more of a continuation of of almost, you know, at
01:37:52
least in the case of I I think we can use Meta as the example just because they are essentially the social media uh
01:37:58
market. Um, and what's really interesting about their choices is what they've tended to do uh is sort of
01:38:05
follow the political winds. So, when Biden was president, and Mark's been very public about this, they did a lot
01:38:10
of very proactive content moderation. And that was something that apparently I guess the White House at the time was
01:38:16
asking them to do very proactively. And now it seems like, you know, with the with the new administration, this new
01:38:21
administration has a different approach to to content moderation and Meta is following that. And so I what I've seen
01:38:27
mostly from from Meta over time is that they're quite willing to sort of navigate the the political landscape and
01:38:33
follow um you know really follow the the lead of of uh politicians here. Is that
01:38:39
something to be admired? No, I think it's a it's definitely a survivalist approach for sure when
01:38:46
you're such a large and powerful company, right? You know, if you look at Meta, they have so much litigation with
01:38:51
the government right now. The government is scrutinizing so many different aspects of their business. And so when you're at that scale and you're, you
01:38:57
know, controlled by a single founder. I I think it's a survivalist instinct that that, you know, means that depending on
01:39:03
who is in the White House, you change your policies. Are you optimistic about the next four years in
01:39:09
America? I'm incredibly optimistic about our country. I I I love our country so
01:39:15
much. I think uh that Americans across our country uh have an
01:39:23
incredible spirit that has allowed us to overcome extraordinary challenges
01:39:29
together. more recently the COVID pandemic, you know, longer ago, things like World War II, uh, you know, where
01:39:36
we came together not only as a country but more broadly in the world to confront, uh, you know, the horror of,
01:39:43
uh, the Axis powers. I I think our country in in very critical and important moments comes together in
01:39:48
really powerful ways and that's something that's inspires really inspires me. Your your oldest child is 14, you said. Um, he's at that age now
01:39:55
where he's going to be getting increasing pressures to join social media. Are you going to let him join
01:40:01
Instagram? He's on Snapchat. I I I He's on Snapchat. Um certainly on YouTube and
01:40:09
Roblox, which he likes a lot. Um so that that's sort of the current um the
01:40:15
current situation. You must have thought about this. There's so much conversation at the moment around the impact that social media has on kids, anxiety, all
01:40:22
of the sort of toxic things around comparison and becoming more isolated. Have you developed a an agreement with
01:40:30
your your wife, with your kids, with your family about social media usage going forward?
01:40:36
I I think in general our view, you know, each of our children are so different. They're going to develop in different ways. So, I don't think like a
01:40:42
one-sizefits-all model is the right approach here. I think it really depends on on where each of our kids are at at
01:40:47
at any given point and who they are and what they want to do. I think one thing I would really encourage them to be
01:40:52
thoughtful about is their privacy, especially as young people. And I think there are a lot of young people at a
01:40:58
very young age are posting a lot of public content and I think it's very important to be thoughtful about those
01:41:03
sorts of decisions because once you've posted something publicly you can't get that back. And I think you know it's
01:41:09
really important as we talk about technology that we focus on the healthy and constructive ways uh that you know
01:41:15
Flynn for example at 14 can use technology like staying in touch with his friends and family. I think the real watershed moment for us as a family was
01:41:23
up until the COVID pandemic, we we didn't allow Flynn to have a phone. We really didn't allow him to use a computer. When the pandemic happened, he
01:41:31
had to stay in touch with his friends. He had to be connected with his friends. There were we knew that that was vitally important for his well-being, right? And
01:41:37
and I think the challenge we have is is almost the whiplash that young people are experiencing because throughout the
01:41:43
pandemic, they were told you can only talk to your friends on the computer. You can only talk to your friends on the
01:41:48
phone, right? Right. And then coming out of the pandemic, what they're hearing a lot from adults now is stay off your phone. Don't use your phone at all. I
01:41:55
think both extremes are are are unusual. And I for us as parents, we we think a
01:42:00
lot about what's a healthy relationship with technology. Of course, we want you to go, you know, run cross country and hang out with your friends, you know, or
01:42:06
or go, you know, go for uh go for a walk, go to the mall and and and just talk. But we know when when Flynn's not
01:42:13
with his friends, when you know they're spread out all over the world, uh you know, or they're after school trying to
01:42:19
meet up, like it's helpful to use technology. It's helpful to message your friends. And so I think we have to find this right balance of saying, you know,
01:42:26
cultivate a healthy engaged lifestyle with all of your interests, your hobbies, your passions, and then if you want to use your phone to stay in touch
01:42:31
with your friends or watch entertaining content or play a game to relax, like that's healthy, too. Even if Finn says,
01:42:36
"I want to watch I want TikTok, Dad." That that might be a bridge too far.
01:42:42
We say cuz Tik Tok's like I don't even use Tik Tok myself um personally because
01:42:48
it's from what I hear it's like crack cocaine for people that they're just on there for like three or four hours a day scrolling mindlessly. Um if Finn came
01:42:55
home and said I want to use Tik Tok Dad you'd say no. We we would probably say no. We have said no uh historically
01:43:02
although he hasn't really pressed pressed the issue. Tik Tok was going to be banned and then Trump swooped in and
01:43:07
seemed to save the day. Is that a good thing? Is this as a CEO of Snapchat, was part of you hoping that
01:43:14
it was banned because then maybe more people would come over and use Snap? Did you think about that? I think it would be quite good for our business um if
01:43:21
they were banned. I I think the bigger picture that we really have to figure out as as a country and in terms of our
01:43:28
relationship with China is to figure out the areas where businesses are going to
01:43:33
collaborate and do business across the United States and China and areas where they are not. So you're probably familiar many technology companies
01:43:39
cannot operate in China for a variety of reasons. Maybe they don't have a license, they haven't been allowed to operate, etc. But they are allowed to
01:43:46
operate here in the United States where we have an open market, a free market. And I think we have to be very thoughtful at this point in time as a
01:43:53
country because being an open market has always been a massive strategic advantage for the United States. It's
01:43:58
something that the United free trade things like that have been massively supportive of our economic growth. But we're now at a moment where I think we
01:44:04
need to be thoughtful and say with some countries free trade in some areas makes a lot of sense. So if it we're talking
01:44:10
about kids toys or diapers or you name it, right? Like let it rip. That that's good for both countries and both
01:44:16
countries uh I think uh can do business in those areas. But when it comes to other areas like you know information
01:44:22
services or maybe it's critical critical minerals, maybe it's some types of pharmaceutical uh you know compounds or
01:44:29
or ingredients. Those are areas where the countries aren't going to be able to collaborate because ultimately they have
01:44:34
very different goals, ideologies, visions for the future. And and I think the issue that the business community
01:44:40
has right now is there's not enough clarity in that regard. So the more clarity the government can create and say, you know, the United States and
01:44:47
China working together can say, hey, we agree these areas are open for business and these areas are areas where we're
01:44:53
going to compete and we're not going to collaborate. that would help the business community because I think what's so frustrating imagine being a
01:44:58
Chinese entrepreneur right now building this really successful company and then the US government saying hey you know
01:45:05
given our our country and and our values and the strategic relationship we have with China this is not this isn't it's
01:45:11
not going to work it sounds like Trump wants to buy it which was a very interesting suggestion and it's worrying because it sets a bit of a precedence
01:45:18
that potentially an app like Snapchat the UK might decide listen we don't we
01:45:23
don't know if we can trust you because you're an an American, so we want to buy the UK version in order for you to have
01:45:31
Snapchat be in the UK. That could set a worrying precedence around the world. I think there's already some early flavors
01:45:37
of that with folks really focused on data localization and and whatnot. And and that's sort of my point around I
01:45:42
think we need to get really clear about with which countries, you know, are we going to have open free flow of data and
01:45:48
and trade and and which countries are there areas where that that might not work as effectively. Snapchat eventually
01:45:53
goes public. Um, running a public company is difficult to say the least because the share price can go up and
01:46:00
down really irrespective of what you're doing and what you're building and it's really a reflection of the broader market, people's emotions and vibes, but
01:46:07
you have to manage that as a CEO. Not easy, I
01:46:13
imagine. You know what I a lot of people warned us about going public. Um and
01:46:19
they said, you know, there were a lot of uh there's going to be a lot of pressure to be short-term oriented and this sort
01:46:25
of thing. Um that the quarterly scrutiny would be challenging for for our business. Ultimately, I think the
01:46:32
transition from being a private company to a public company was was uh challenging. It's it's quite different.
01:46:38
Um but now I I really think the discipline and the rigor around the quarterly performance the you know need
01:46:45
to forecast your business really effectively and then compare how you're tracking to your forecast helps the
01:46:50
company run in a much more effective way. So that sort of scrutiny I think can be really helpful you know for the
01:46:56
leadership team and then the broader team in terms of running the business. Now, where it can get difficult
01:47:03
is when it comes to long-term investment and and innovation. So, for example,
01:47:09
right now interest rates have gone way up. Um folks are uh discounting cash
01:47:15
flows um you know at a much higher rate as a result. And so there's a huge focus
01:47:20
on profitability for uh many many businesses across all sectors. What we
01:47:26
know is true for long-term innovation is that consistency really matters. You can't just flick a switch and and turn
01:47:32
on and off innovation, turn on and off um you know, investments in new uh
01:47:37
products. It's very difficult and disruptive to do that. And so we've made a decision through this period of time,
01:47:42
even though we've made some really difficult and painful deci decisions to shut down some of our projects, we're
01:47:48
still investing at a higher rate uh right now through this period of time, even though we know that that means
01:47:55
that, you know, our share price might be lower because people are, you know, discounting our cash flows differently
01:48:01
due to higher interest rates. So I think you know that's when it gets challenging the actual reality of of you know
01:48:07
continuing to invest through you know challenging periods of time or periods where interest rates have gone way up.
01:48:13
When I think about sitting in your shoes or sitting in your seat I think about all the things you could do as a public
01:48:19
company. I think you could do anything like you could go after any game and at some point as you kind of said there
01:48:24
when you use the word painfully you're going to have to make a decision to focus on something. And even at like the level I'm at with the businesses I run
01:48:30
and so on, I find the hardest thing for me is especially when you're somewhat creative, etc., is to pick something and
01:48:38
to say no to everything else. And I've looked at your philosophy and I know saying no and focus is so central to
01:48:44
your to your sort of leadership style, but also how you think as an entrepreneur. Tell me about those painful moments where you had to kill
01:48:50
something that you didn't want to kill. Yeah, I there there are a bunch. I you know that that piece of advice was so
01:48:58
helpful to us especially in the early days of our business. One of our first venture investors was like hey Evan you
01:49:03
got to get really good at saying no. He's like you have almost no resources I think we were a team of four people at the time. Um you know and you're going
01:49:09
to get all this inbound because the company's growing. People are going to want to do partnerships or do an interview or what and just if you can
01:49:15
just get really good at saying no and stay focused on your community, stay focused on your customers. Like that's
01:49:20
the that's the secret. And that focus has really helped us over the years. But as you point out, there's there have
01:49:26
been times where we've had to refocus or we've had to reassess uh areas of our business. I think one good example uh
01:49:32
were mini games. We had an amazing hundreds of people using um our our mini
01:49:38
games and people love them. It was an amazing uh platform. You could play like real-time multiplayer games together
01:49:44
inside of Snapchat and ultimately it was just clear that that
01:49:49
was not going to be a really really big business for us at least at that time. And so we had to make the really painful
01:49:55
decision to, you know, shut down uh our our mini games our mini games business. So how do you think about what to go
01:50:01
after? There's all these new technologies. There's these buzzwords. There's AI now. There's AR. There's VR.
01:50:08
There's headsets. There's wearables. There's all these things. How how do you decide what bet is your bet? I think
01:50:15
that's a really good question. That is to some degree where intuition uh you know plays an important role but it's
01:50:21
also where feedback plays a really important role. And that's why for example with our last generation of
01:50:27
spectacles that we announced last year the fifth generation of spectacles our goal was just to get it into developers
01:50:32
hands as quickly as possible so that we can listen and hear. Okay. So what sort of things do you want to build with spectacles? What tools are available?
01:50:39
What what isn't there? What do you what do you think would be really interesting? because the faster that we can learn from people actually using our
01:50:45
our product, the faster we can make it better and find that product market fit. That's so important. And you also don't know the time horizon for when the world
01:50:51
will sufficiently change in the direction that your your bet has been placed. I think about Google Glass,
01:50:59
which was I don't even know when it was like a decade ago that people were saying, "Okay, we're going to be wearing glasses." And Google had this Google Glass thing and it just seemed to like
01:51:05
vanish and disappear. Uh, and then I think about when Meta bought Oculus and we thought, okay, no, so this is now
01:51:11
when everyone's going to be wearing VR headsets and it's still kind of not really happened. So you could make a
01:51:16
bet, you could be right, but you could be 15 years off. You have to be very careful in in technology, I think,
01:51:21
because things change slowly and then they change very quickly. And I think that was certainly the case with chat GBT, right? People felt like, wow, this
01:51:28
new technology came out of nowhere, but no, they've been working on it for what, a decade? I mean, you know, and and
01:51:33
consistently trying to to make progress. And so I think, you know, as long as you find something that you really believe
01:51:39
can can make a positive impact that people can use in a really compelling way, you're right that sometimes you
01:51:45
have to be patient, but other times you can invent new things that bring that timeline in. And so I think a lot of
01:51:50
times our our team is thinking about like okay yeah sure on the in the current trajectory that could take a really long time but what if we thought
01:51:56
about it differently or invented you know some new uh piece of technology that could help us accelerate our vision
01:52:02
to you know glasses that help people you know share these experiences that overlay computing on the world and that
01:52:07
that's part of the fun too and Meta launched the Ray-B band ones which I've I've heard about I think I watched a
01:52:13
video of it which seem to be again copying Snapchat
01:52:18
Did that piss you off? The only thing that frustrated me was that the Lxodica guys had actually come to us probably
01:52:24
back in 2017. Who's that? Lxodica Lxotica is the company that makes Ray-B bands. They had come to us in 2017
01:52:30
saying, "Wow, it's so awesome what you guys are doing with Spectacles. We love it. We should find a way to partner." So, we talked with them of course all
01:52:36
about everything that that we were doing. And then they went radio silent and decided not to partner with us and then obviously resurfaced doing this
01:52:42
with Meta. So, I think ultimately as a is something like that. I think ultimately um you know you learn a lot I
01:52:49
think growing a business and and really understanding how people do business and and I think it shows you a lot about the
01:52:55
world and and I think it's so important for entrepreneurs to really know um you know that if they've got a a really
01:53:00
compelling idea they've got an amazing service that that they can compete that they can build uh really compelling
01:53:07
businesses even though it seems impossible with such giant you know companies whether it's Luxotica which is
01:53:12
the giant in the glasses space or or Meta um that I think Snapchat hopefully can be, you know, an example of a
01:53:18
company that's been able to stay independent and compete with these really, really large businesses. Artificial intelligence has become, I
01:53:25
mean, the most talked about technology over the last couple of years as it's in many respects, thanks to Chat
01:53:32
GPT, how are you um thinking about the future of artificial intelligence in terms of how it's going to fundamentally
01:53:38
change human connection? You've got four boys. You must be thinking about, you know, we talked about earlier the kind
01:53:43
of jobs that are going to exist in the future. There's a big narrative saying that knowledge jobs like lawyer and
01:53:48
accountant aren't going to be the same. In fact, even when you think about how your kids are going to be educated, your
01:53:53
youngest child is one years old. Are they going to go to a school or are they going to go to a large language model?
01:54:01
Like, how are you thinking about that future? Are you scared? I I really love that you jumped to education because I
01:54:07
think it's so profoundly powerful. I mean, even in my own experience, my ability to learn such amazing things in
01:54:15
such a short period of time and connect different ideas together, I it's it's an incredible tool for discovery and for
01:54:21
learning. And so, I I can't wait for our kids to, you know, use uh use these sorts of tools. I'm I'm sure Flynn does
01:54:28
uh to some to some degree, but as a thought partner, uh you know, AI is just incredibly powerful. So, so I do think
01:54:36
uh especially for creative people, it should be an unbelievably powerful tool to be able to iterate, to get feedback,
01:54:42
to explore different ideas, explore different options. Even when I'm writing something and I'm stuck on like, yeah,
01:54:47
this just doesn't feel right. And like I'm like, give me can you just give me 10 options? Um it it's really helpful to
01:54:53
brainstorm um you know, to to find that that right word. I was wondering the other day when um I was using chat GBT
01:55:00
or one of the the programs a couple of days ago. I was wondering if I'm going to get worse at writing because this
01:55:07
thing's now doing it for me. And writing is such a wonderful way to think and understand. So therefore, am I going to
01:55:12
get worse at like understanding things because I'm now deferring the process of
01:55:18
thinking through something logically to this computer, whereas back in the day, I would have to like really think deeply
01:55:24
about what I was trying to say myself. I I don't know. I I think it's going to be really important that
01:55:30
obviously people continue to to write and oftentimes like my first draft is on a piece of paper, right? Um so so I I do
01:55:36
think that that is going to be important, but I think the bigger question for me is whether or not AI
01:55:42
will help people get better at asking questions because ultimately asking a
01:55:48
great question and having someone who can help answer it is the key to learning. I mean, that's I think, you
01:55:53
know, perhaps the greatest uh blessing of having a a great teacher or a great
01:55:58
mentor or a parent is that you get to ask all sorts of great questions, right? And and get those answers. And so I I
01:56:05
think if we're now in a you know, a modality that really is all about asking the right question and doing that really
01:56:11
repeatedly, if that can train us all to ask questions more effectively, uh that
01:56:17
that would be a very big deal. Interesting. I've not thought about that. I don't know if I'm getting
01:56:22
better. I don't really know. It's really because because there's always a trade-off with new technology. And the problem as we saw with social media is
01:56:28
we often don't discover the trade-off until 15 years, 20 years time when it's
01:56:34
really reared its ugly head cuz it's slow then it's fast. So I'm trying to understand if you're looking around the
01:56:40
corner or looking over the horizon now to think through the trade-off of us hurtling into something which just like
01:56:46
social media made something better, faster, cheaper, easier but came with a unintended consequence.
01:56:53
I think generally speaking as we have looked historically at the evolution of
01:56:58
technology these sorts of foundational technologies you're right that they've been disruptive uh but they ultimately
01:57:06
have massively positive and beneficial uh effects. I mean I think if you look at a foundational technology like the
01:57:12
internet, a foundational uh technology maybe like the the motor vehicle, these
01:57:17
are the you know an airplane, these are the sorts of foundational technologies that I think can really change the
01:57:23
trajectory of the world and ultimately make people's lives better. I think the key will be how do we navigate that
01:57:28
change together and that'll be something that will be really uh really important to do thoughtfully. And I I think you
01:57:35
know in many ways the good news about this sort of technological change is it's always governed by people. I mean
01:57:42
folks I I think almost overly fixate on new technology developments and don't think enough about what is actually the
01:57:48
human adoption curve look like? How are we making this something that's easier to use, easier for people to understand,
01:57:53
easier for people to integrate into their lives, into their workflows. Um, and so I think a lot of the work for a
01:57:59
big foundational technology like AI is going to be much more around how humans are interacting with it, interpreting
01:58:06
it, understanding how it fits in their lives. If you spend most days on your computer, you'll probably want to hear
01:58:11
this. Some recent brain imaging studies have found that handwriting fires up more parts of the brain associated with
01:58:17
creativity and critical thinking. But in digital workplaces, it's easy to lose the cognitive edge of handwriting. So, I
01:58:23
want to introduce you to GoodNotes, a solution that combines both. I've used GoodNotes for a long, long time, well
01:58:30
before they became a sponsor of this podcast. It's what I'm using every single time I'm sat here in the D of Sio
01:58:35
on the iPad in front of me during every recording that I've pretty much ever done in the last couple of years. It
01:58:40
holds my research, which I can annotate in real time, as well as jot down new ideas as they come to me as the guest is
01:58:46
talking. Outside of the studio, I use it to mark up design concepts in meetings whenever I'm brainstorming and to
01:58:51
capture other insights with my team. GoodNotes is like my second brain. It's the tool that helps me to unlock
01:58:57
original ideas and sharper thinking. And their built-in AI lets me build on those ideas, too. For collaborative work, your
01:59:03
team can get a business license or get it yourself. It only costs £9.99 a year.
01:59:09
And they're offering our community a 30-day free trial. Just head to
01:59:15
goodnotes.com/doac to get started. No matter where I am in the world, it seems like everyone is drinking matcha. And
01:59:21
there's a good chance that that matcher you're drinking is made by a company that I've invested more than seven figures in who are a sponsor of this
01:59:27
podcast called Perfect Ted because they're the brand used globally by cafes like Blank Street Coffee and Joe in the
01:59:34
Juice and many, many more. Not only can you get Perfect Ted Matcha in cafes, but you can now also make it at home much
01:59:41
cheaper in seconds using our flavored matcha powders that I have here in front of me. Perfect Ted Matcha is ceremonial
01:59:47
grade and sourced from Japan. It is smooth. It is naturally sweet, not like those bitter grassy matches that I tried
01:59:54
before. Perfect Ted. And if you are one of those people that have told yourself you don't like matcha, it's probably
01:59:59
because you haven't tried our Perfect Ted Matcher. And you can find Perfect Ted Matcher in the UK and Tesco,
02:00:04
Sainsbury's, Holland and Barrett and in Waitros or Albertahheine if you're in the Netherlands and on Amazon in the USA
02:00:11
or get the full range online at perfectted.com where you can get 40% off
02:00:16
your first order with code Steven40. What season is Snapchat in in
02:00:23
terms of its company's life? You know, like you were in that startup phase, you're in your dad's bedroom phase where you're scrappy and you're growing
02:00:29
quickly. Then you went to the blue office, you know, the met met uh meteoric growth, you had the IPO. What
02:00:36
season is Snapchat in as we sit here today in 2025? How would you like summarize it if you had to poetically
02:00:41
describe the psychology of the business now? I mean, in some ways, it feels like
02:00:46
we're emerging from like a two-year winter into an early spring. The last two years have been really challenging.
02:00:52
We had to rebuild our entire ad platform, change the way that we go to market, you know, really help advertisers find more success and at the
02:00:59
same time do a lot of that for creators as well. We've seen a tremendous growth in terms of, you know, I think last
02:01:04
quarter the the creators posting grew something like 40% year-over-year. There was a billion
02:01:10
public posts a month on Snapchat. And that's an area we've invested in a lot as well. But it's been a very challenging last two years. So, I I
02:01:17
would almost say maybe like very very early spring you're starting to see uh you know some some green shoots but you
02:01:24
know um and the frost is melting. Have you had any acquisition offers since
02:01:29
that conversation with Mark Zuckerberg once upon a time? Do people still try and buy the company like these days? No.
02:01:36
I I think given the voting structure of the company, you know, Bobby and I uh have voting stock and non- voting stock
02:01:42
is what's publicly uh traded. I think generally, you know, sometimes people will say, "Hey, if you guys ever, you
02:01:48
know, want to retire or something, keep us in mind." But I think um, you know, in terms of uh, you know, kicking an
02:01:55
offer over the over the sill or something that that that doesn't make a ton of sense given our company
02:02:00
structure. Another thing that I admired when I was reading about the way you run Snapchat is this idea of having a council. Oh, amazing. Wow. Okay. Can you
02:02:08
tell me about this because I might want to steal. I shouldn't. Please take it. Okay. Good. council is something that I
02:02:13
stole uh from uh the school that I I went to growing up called Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences, which is
02:02:19
quite a unique uh school. Um and one of the things that they have at Crossroads
02:02:25
is a council. And you know, basically starting in middle school, you get together with a group of let's call it
02:02:30
10 or 12 classmates and you sit in a circle and there are three rules. It's you know, speak from the heart, uh
02:02:36
listen from the heart and be spontaneous. And it's essentially uh you know turn-based storytelling where you
02:02:42
go around the circle and you know it can be anything as simple as like how was your weekend or you know uh what's a
02:02:47
what's a rose bud and a thorn from you know the last uh the last week and it it
02:02:53
really creates an opportunity a for people to listen to one another because you're taking turns going around the
02:02:59
circle but b you get to know people in a very very different way and I saw how powerful it was in middle school. Middle
02:03:04
school is a tough time was a tough time for me, but in council I was able to connect with my classmates uh you know
02:03:10
in a really thoughtful and and maybe deeper way that you wouldn't just kind of around the the water cooler or
02:03:15
whatever at the office. And so for us ultimately when we came to LA and we were in the in the blue house, one of
02:03:21
the big decisions we were confronting at the time was whether or not we should move the company from LA to the Bay
02:03:26
Area. And there was a lot of pressure, you know, hey, all the tech talent is, you know, in the Bay Area. it's really important um for for you guys to be up
02:03:33
there for the for the talent and and so we just got our team together and you know that had our first council and
02:03:38
everyone went around the circle and shared their thoughts. Should we stay in LA or not? How did they feel about that?
02:03:44
What did they think? And what was so clear coming out of that conversation we didn't even need to make a decision. It
02:03:49
was just obvious that the that we believed in LA and wanted to be in LA and the team thought it was actually something really important to our
02:03:55
business, to our identity, to actually the way that we hired talent because people had to really commit to moving to LA to be a part of the the company. So
02:04:02
that was the first time we used council at at Snap and I saw how effective it was in the workplace setting. Then as
02:04:07
the business got a lot bigger and it became much more important to connect with people who were new to the company or you know worked in a different area
02:04:14
of the company, council became just a really useful tool for for doing that. Um and so you know at SNAP we have
02:04:20
council facilitators whose job it is to to run these uh councils and now many more companies are interested in doing
02:04:26
this and we we also help help train companies or offer sessions for other companies to help um help them bring
02:04:32
their team members together. What is the essence of it? It's just get the get a small team in a certain department
02:04:37
around a table and let everybody speak from the heart, listen from the heart and be spontaneous. Yeah. And it's
02:04:44
usually not sitting around a table. It's usually sitting on the floor in a circle. Um, which again I think helps
02:04:49
create that feeling. You know, when you're sitting in a a circle, everyone is situated equally, which I think is a
02:04:55
really important thing. As you mentioned, companies have a lot of hierarchy. I think it feels really different in a company when everyone see that seat around a circle. Uh, and
02:05:02
everyone's voice is important and everyone's voice is heard. You know, whether it's just saying, "Wow, I you know, that was a a really tough uh
02:05:10
weekend or actually I had an amazing time. I went out to dinner with my wife. It was fabulous." And and I think people
02:05:15
find new points of connection that they maybe wouldn't have found otherwise without it. Interesting. As a leader,
02:05:22
how do you know in those situations whether to listen to your team or not to listen to your team? Because you know,
02:05:28
it sounds quite risky for a founder, I'm not saying this is what you do, but for a founder to run their company on
02:05:34
consensus, i.e. making sure everybody agrees on something. And we're actually seeing this in the post-pandemic world with this whole like remote work debate
02:05:41
where some companies originally were okay everybody's going to be remote and then it went back to a lot of companies
02:05:47
are like no come back into the office and I mean if you ask a team they're probably not going to all say let's run
02:05:54
back to the office but as a CEO you have to make a call and what is this the the remote policy with Snap at the moment we
02:06:01
are more than four days a week in the office on average more than is that by
02:06:06
policy or is that just what's happening? That is by policy and also what's happening. Okay. And did you ever move on that? Was there ever a moment in the
02:06:13
pandemic where you thought during the pandemic I thought I would never go back to the office. I was like, you know, going into the pandemic, I I was waking
02:06:20
up before our kids woke up. I was getting home after they were asleep. I there was a moment I was like, what am I
02:06:25
doing with my life? I'm never seeing our kids. What am I going to do? And the pandemic happened and it was like a
02:06:31
miracle. I'm like, oh my god, I get to see our kids every single day. I get to wake up and see our kids. And I have an open door policy. If I'm working from
02:06:37
home in my home office, our kids can come in anytime. It was only a problem once when uh one of our boys came in
02:06:44
fully nude with two Oreos, which actually prompted me to consider going back to the office. But I really I I
02:06:49
thought it was important for our kids that, hey, if I'm at home, I'm not like shut shut away in in my office. You can come in anytime, you know, with anything
02:06:55
and and and I'll help you out. Sometimes it meant they spent a lot of time sitting on my laps and sitting on my lap in in in meetings. But in any case,
02:07:02
there was a period of time in the pandemic where I was like, why would I ever go back to the office? I'm here with my family and but but I think you
02:07:08
know that the adrenaline and the teamwork that happened you know during the pandemic when we were all able to
02:07:14
work together really effectively remotely that was only possible because we had been working together physically for such a long period of time. We had
02:07:20
all of that trust built. We had all that shortorthhand built. We had that you know many times you know long road
02:07:25
mapaps of ideas we had come up with to get physically together and that really sustained the company through that period of time and it became clear to me
02:07:32
that the culture was starting to fray right people don't learn the culture as quickly when they're alone and and and
02:07:38
remote uh you know separated all all around the world and I was really worried about our ability to
02:07:43
consistently be creative which is so important to our business if we weren't physically together. So ultimately um
02:07:49
you know and especially after that Oreo incident we thought it was pretty important to get get back to get back to
02:07:54
the office. How was that received? One of the things that we tried to do that was you know helped team members is just
02:08:00
give a pretty long runway. We we made that decision pretty early on and then gave team members quite an extended
02:08:06
period of time. I think it was like six or nine months for folks who had you know extenduating circumstances. We you know would grant exceptions and over
02:08:12
time that allowed people to adapt their lives. you know, sometimes they'd rented a house or bought a house somewhere else and needed to move back to one of our
02:08:19
hub office locations. And so, we wanted to give people enough flexibility to do that, not just, you know, have them wake up one morning and say, "Come come back
02:08:25
to the office." That's not super thoughtful. For any entrepreneurs that are out there now listening to our
02:08:30
conversation and they're at the very beginning of their journey and they are um they're thinking about so many
02:08:36
different things, so many different problems, their products aren't working, their customers are complaining. When you think about the principles of being
02:08:43
successful as an entrepreneur that that are transferable across all industries, have you defined what those
02:08:51
principles are in your mind to be successful in any endeavor? We talked about some of them already. We said about culture, we said about hiring. Is
02:08:58
there anything else that you've come to learn in your wisdom that entrepreneurs like me should be thinking a lot about
02:09:03
as fundamental principles of success? To me, it seems like the biggest differentiator is how much you care. I
02:09:10
mean that just seems day in and day out as I meet entrepreneurs and people working on businesses. How much do you
02:09:15
care about your business, your team, your customer? Uh and those are the entrepreneurs I think that are really
02:09:21
successful. They go that extra mile and and that care can come from different places, right? It can be about the impact that people want to make in the
02:09:27
world. It can be about something that people really want to invent. It can be their love of their customers and seeing the smile on their customers faces. But
02:09:34
how much people care about what they do seems to me to be quite a large predictor. if not the predictor of of
02:09:40
success. Can you care too much? I I don't think so. Sounds stressful though
02:09:46
caring that much. I thought in your book you talk about Don't talk about my book. I'm not I'm not disagreeing. I'm just
02:09:53
playing devil's advocate. That's one of the things I loved about your book is you said, "Hey, people are thinking about stress wrong." Which I thought was
02:09:58
really really powerful. Like I I wish more people talked about it that way because I think you know you just
02:10:04
Anyways, you you wrote it. You don't even need to. No, but no, but it's it's a good point. Something I was going to
02:10:09
ask you about is the stress of of being you and do you have techniques to manage that stress, especially running a public
02:10:16
company? I just think it's psychotic. Well, what I what I thought was hilar So, this has been one of my hilarious findings from my ring over the last
02:10:22
couple of days trying it out. I finally had enough days that it like gave me a stress score or whatever, and I'm just
02:10:27
not stressed during the day, which really lines up with like how I experience work. I don't find work to be
02:10:33
very stressful. I think a lot of it has become very normal because you know over the years we've grown our business and
02:10:39
encountered all sorts of wild situations that at this point it's it's just a a daily normal thing. Um, do you
02:10:46
celebrate? Do you get really happy when you have professional moments where I don't know, you launch a new feature and
02:10:51
it's wellreceived. Do you get really happy? No, it's something that I I need to work on, especially celebrating our
02:10:57
team as well. Like I, you know, just providing more of that really positive feedback. That's not something I do um a
02:11:04
ton, especially around like outcome focused goals. When I see a great idea, if I see a great new idea, then I get
02:11:10
really happy and excited. I love it. But, you know, to me, uh, you know, some of these big corporate milestones, like
02:11:16
the growth of the community is cool. I I was talking to someone the other day. They were like, "You should throw a party when you guys reach a billion
02:11:21
people." I was like, "Oh my god, what a great idea." Like that. Why didn't I think of it? Um, so I think we should
02:11:26
celebrate uh things like that. I wonder if that there's an element of defense to this because I was speaking to a lot of
02:11:32
founders recently and they were telling me how they've over time and with maturity, they almost just developed
02:11:37
this calm within all the chaos where they're not moved up or down. And and
02:11:42
some of them make the case to me that if you are moved up by something that happens externally, it's impossible
02:11:48
therefore not to be moved down when something bad happens externally. So founders develop this almost like
02:11:53
coldness to them. That would be a real problem for me because so much of
02:11:59
creating products is about connecting with people and listening to people and being able to empathize with them. So like I absolutely under no circumstances
02:12:06
can cut off my emotional response. I think, you know, I pick the things or I,
02:12:12
you know, the things that make me feel really happy are things like being with
02:12:17
our children or something or, you know, Hart did really well on his math test the other day and I was like, "Awesome." You know what I mean? I got super
02:12:22
excited about that. But I I think to your point, one of the things I I do regret at some point is not celebrating
02:12:27
some of those great moments. I think, you know, sometimes as an entrepreneur when everything is like going up to up and to the right and and going super
02:12:34
well, you're always like, "What's going to go wrong?" You know, what could go wrong? And so you don't think about celebrating that great moment because
02:12:39
you're thinking about, you know, the next day or or what what you could be doing differently to make sure the business can keep growing. And and I
02:12:45
think breaking out of that like, you know, what could go wrong, which actually is quite helpful. That paranoia is probably pretty helpful. But
02:12:51
celebrate those moments um is is important. So that's a good takeaway from from our chat. Was there was there
02:12:57
a hardest day for you? A day when you were challenged the most as the CEO of Snapchat that comes to mind when I say
02:13:02
that? I think some of the hardest days um the
02:13:08
the painful days have been you know when we've had to make changes to our company structure things like things like
02:13:14
layoffs. I mean I I feel like just a huge sense of responsibility to our team members and so when we let them down
02:13:20
like that uh you know that's those days are are the worst. I mean that's that's
02:13:25
you know of course you know in many cases worse for them and I you know um but but as a leader the sense of shame I
02:13:33
feel when we have to make a decision like that that's you know that's sucks. Do you ever have imposter syndrome
02:13:39
because I think about the odds of you the odds of launching a social media communications application as we said
02:13:45
earlier like a billion in one or something great I don't know this it's staggering and I guess it's not a billion there's not been a billion of them but the odds are just against you.
02:13:52
So when that happens and it explodes and it becomes this major global app, is there not any feelings of imposter
02:13:59
syndrome? I don't like the word imposter syndrome because it doesn't sound very nice. And
02:14:05
I I think imposter syndrome is actually a a good thing in the sense that it means that you feel like there's more to
02:14:11
learn, right? And so like for me, you know, as I approach any situation or, you know, any meeting or, you know,
02:14:18
anything that we're trying to do out in the world, I'm always trying to think like what else could I learn here? I
02:14:23
obviously, you know, this is an opportunity for me to really listen to learn to figure out how I can how I can
02:14:28
grow. And so like I never want to feel like, oh, I you know, I've I've got this. I always want to feel like what else could I learn? What could I be
02:14:34
doing differently? You know, how could I grow? And I I think sometimes when we call it imposttor syndrome, like that's
02:14:40
not super helpful. I think we should be telling people, hey, it's a it's a good thing if you feel like you've got more to learn. It's a good thing if you feel
02:14:45
like, hey, maybe this isn't totally normal to be running a big company, right? Maybe maybe it's a good thing to
02:14:50
stay open to to different different ideas or ways of doing things. If um if
02:14:56
Snapchat goes away today, what does Evan end up doing? Starting a new company. I would probably continue a
02:15:03
lot of the work that we've been doing as a family to to give back. I mean, I think that's been like the greatest blessing of this whole SNAP experience
02:15:10
is being able to to give back. Um, you know, we've done a lot as a as a family.
02:15:15
We've done a lot with SNAP and the Snap Foundation. And like that to me is like, you know, hopefully the the rest of my
02:15:21
life is that story. You wouldn't want to start another tech company? Never in a million years. Really? No chance.
02:15:28
No chance. Why? Um, it's it's way too hard. Way too hard.
02:15:37
I told you it was psychotic. I could have told you that when you started it. You should have asked me. Whenever I
02:15:43
meet a serial entrepreneur, I'm like, "What? What?"
02:15:48
What when you say it's hard? This is I I asked this question. I paused on it because I actually posted about this my
02:15:53
Instagram and my Snap this morning about how hard it is and how nobody talks about that. And so when you experience
02:15:59
the hardship as a founder, you kind of look in the mirror and think it's you. Do you know what I mean? You think, "Oh, this is evidence of my inadequacy."
02:16:06
But it really I mean, why' you say that? Because it sounds like you have PTSD.
02:16:12
No, it's more I think like the the hard kind of to your point about how do you turn stress into something positive,
02:16:18
right? The hard is a good thing in the sense that like what makes it so fun but also so challenging is the rate at which
02:16:24
you have to change and grow. Like that is what has been so unbelievably hard, right? that you know the business at
02:16:32
four people is really different than the business at 100 people. The business when we're supporting a million people is different than the business
02:16:38
supporting 850 million people using our service. And to have to change so much
02:16:43
over that period of time, to have to grow so much over that period of time, like that's what's hard. Like, because you just have to force yourself to
02:16:50
change and grow and think about what you you know, how do I how do I need to adapt to to be the the person that our
02:16:56
business needs six months from now, which inevitably will be different than than who I am today. So, do you think
02:17:02
you could run Snap for the rest of your life? I would certainly be an honor. I mean, I'd love that.
02:17:07
Maybe you you'd leave Snap and then you'd get bored and then you'd start some some new new company. Who knows?
02:17:13
And we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that has been left for you
02:17:23
interesting. Feel like I may have asked this before, but you're going to have to do your very best. What is the hardest thing you ever
02:17:31
had to overcome?
02:17:37
Yeah, I think that the hardest thing, maybe this is a good segue from what we were just talking about. The hardest thing I've ever had to overcome is
02:17:42
myself, right? I've constantly had to force myself at at every stage to grow and change and be different and evolve
02:17:49
to meet the needs of our our business and our community or my family. And I think, you know, that that's the that's
02:17:55
the the battle with yourself to become a better version of yourself every day. That that that's a tough one.
02:18:04
self-awareness. I was thinking about that as you were just saying that about the idea of self-awareness as a CEO and how you how you develop that because
02:18:10
it's such an important thing when there's so much counting on you being aware. So I don't know how you think
02:18:16
about self-awareness as a leader and how if there's any system you've had to cultivate that awareness that's been productive. I I love that you said that.
02:18:22
I I think um it's so challenging and it becomes harder and harder I think as the business grows and
02:18:30
you grow as a leader a because you become busier. So it's harder to tune in and really connect with people right in
02:18:36
the way that you really need to to to understand how they really feel or what they're thinking and to create a trusted relationship so they feel like they can
02:18:43
tell that to you. As the company grows, you know, I think people become very
02:18:48
focused on curating the information that you're receiving. So you're constantly getting a lot of reporting that you know
02:18:54
shows leaders and and their teams in a very positive light. And so you have to think about proactively breaking that
02:19:00
because that will be the the default that the organization I think will do. All of a sudden they will just try to
02:19:06
make sure you're receiving information, right? That that shows them in a in a great light because they want to be successful. It makes perfect sense. But
02:19:12
I think you have to really do a lot of work to break that and to get out deeper in the organization and just talk to
02:19:18
people and and I think there's no substitute. I wish there was, but there's really no substitute to just walking around and talking to people.
02:19:24
And I found that that's an unbelievable way in our organization to just get great information really quickly. And
02:19:29
then you see as a CEO, someone's working on a presentation, they're like, "Oh, yeah, this presentation will get to you in like six weeks, you know." Um, but
02:19:36
yeah, sure. I can show you a little bit bit of it right now. You know, because the way that uh you know, calendars work
02:19:41
as a as a CEO and business reviews work and that sort of thing, all this sort of information, I think, you know, ends up
02:19:47
flowing in a way that's just slower than it than it did in the in the beginning of the company. So, I think, you know, really taking the time to connect with
02:19:54
people and form those trusted relationships. Uh being really proactive about breaking the information system
02:19:59
that will form around you, right, if you're not more deliberate about going and getting other sources of information. That's that's really
02:20:05
important. And then you know I think just you know that empathy and intuition really helps because sometimes people
02:20:10
feel uncomfortable saying how they really feel and it's only because you know you just notice something in their eye or their affect or whatever it is
02:20:17
that you're like is that you know is that really how you feel you know we should or should we really be doing this differently and I think you know the
02:20:24
ability to really understand how how people feel and create a space for them to actually share their perspective it
02:20:30
just you know is so so valuable. Do you ever find yourself feeling a little bit impatient with your team? Cuz I get this
02:20:37
a lot. I'm always trying to make things move faster. And I think maybe there's a point of privilege where as the leader of an organization, you know, you can
02:20:43
just break everything to make things happen, but maybe the intern in the office doesn't feel like they've got that permission, but
02:20:50
urgency as a leader, speed. You talked about increasing the learning speed of the organization. Do you ever feel
02:20:56
impatient as a leader? I'm extraordinarily impatient. Like, and I think it's in my DNA. I mean like my
02:21:01
father would not like the idea of waiting like if you want to just like punish my father you put him in a line
02:21:07
for anything like he will go ballist like it's just like he the thought of waiting in a line for him would just
02:21:13
drive him crazy because he's a very impatient person. I think I have some of that some of that impatience. You know
02:21:19
if I asked your team members what's Evan like as a leader what do you think they'd say? Oh my goodness.
02:21:26
Um I don't know. They might all have different perspectives because I really try to like bring out the best in our
02:21:32
team members by showing different parts of myself. I'm not the same leader to every individual. That would be
02:21:37
terrible. Uh I think so much of being a leader is trying to figure out for each individual and each person what sort of
02:21:43
communication style will bring out the best in them and their unique abilities. So, you know, they engage the the way I
02:21:49
engage with our CEO, Derek, is different than the way I engage with Betsy, who's our chief brand officer, is different
02:21:55
than the way I engage with our our design team. And that that's important. If I asked them what you're good at, what would they say?
02:22:02
Um, I think I'm good at a at a couple things. I think I'm quite good at
02:22:09
um really understanding human needs and and wants and figuring out how to
02:22:16
reflect that in our product. Uh I mean oftentimes it's one of the competitions I like to have with our team is, you
02:22:22
know, a lot of times in in uh in engineering people like to run AB tests, right? So they'll like they'll run four
02:22:28
AB tests and there they'll sort of pick, you know, the the one that performs the best, right? And like this is the case
02:22:33
for like a text string or something like that. If they want to put a, you know, text in the app, they'll write four different variants of it or whatever.
02:22:40
And I what I really like to do is figure out can I write the variant that will win the AB test without you know, you know, without them having to to run it.
02:22:46
And I think that sort of intuition of what people will respond to, uh, you know, what makes sense to them, what's
02:22:52
clear in terms of communicating through our product, our features, you know, and that that sort of thing. I think I that's something that I can offer the
02:22:59
team and and part of that's just because I've been doing it for for 13 years right every you know every week or
02:23:04
almost every day looking at work with our team and trying to figure out what what you know will resonate with the people that use our products. Um so I
02:23:10
think I'm good at that. I also think um kind of maybe this kind of to my earlier point. I really work hard to bring out
02:23:16
the best in people. And I think, you know, hopefully if I've done my job really well, people say like, "Wow, I
02:23:22
didn't think I could do that." Or, "I didn't know I could do that." Or, "I didn't know that I was a really creative person, but you showed me that I'm
02:23:28
actually a really creative person. That's so cool. Thanks." How? I think oftentimes it's by giving people the
02:23:34
courage and the space uh to be creative and also to show them the different ways
02:23:40
that creativity applies. So for example, you know, I think uh a lawyer might think, how could I be creative as a
02:23:47
lawyer, right? But if you have a conversation with a lawyer, as you know, as we did early on in our business and
02:23:52
say, you know, the problem today is all these privacy policies that are written, they make no damn sense. And I don't
02:23:58
know if you've ever tried to read a privacy policy of one of these internet, it doesn't make sense. What if we were creative and we actually wrote a privacy
02:24:03
policy that people could understand? Like wouldn't that be cool? like how how could we solve this problem differently and have have a different sort of set of
02:24:10
expectations and then people say wow that's interesting let's try doing that and they do it and they're like oh wow no I am creative we can solve this
02:24:16
problem differently we don't need to just have another privacy policy just like everybody else we can work really hard to put it in human terms and that
02:24:22
would be better and so I think showing all sorts of team members across our company the way that their work can be
02:24:27
creative in service of our community or in service of our advertising partners that's something uh that I I I hope to
02:24:34
bring to our team and conversely what are you not good If id asked all of them, I said, "What's Evan not good?" Almost everything else. I mean, that's the that's the challenge. There's got to
02:24:40
be some defining traits that you're like, if you ask my team after this, they'll tell you what I'm not good at.
02:24:46
They'll tell you what I'm good at, but they'll also tell you what I'm not good at, and they'll all agree. They'll have total consensus. Um, no, but I but I do
02:24:52
mean that seriously, that like in almost every area of our business, whether it's HR or legal or um, you know, finance,
02:25:01
whatever, I'm certainly far from the best. I mean we our our team members are extraordinarily talented at what they do
02:25:07
across our uh business and by nature I'm just not very good at those things. And so I think for me the real like uh you
02:25:15
know secret I guess or not a not a secret the the focus of what I've tried to do over the years as so many
02:25:20
entrepreneurs do is say how can I spend more of my time doing what I'm good at you know collaborating with our team
02:25:25
trying to create new products be creative and then you know have a team around me that's so much better at
02:25:31
everything else that you know I couldn't possibly be be better at es especially as a being a younger CEO I think that's
02:25:38
probably even more important than it is for for other people to be be able to have that self-awareness and humility to
02:25:44
say I don't know all the answers cuz you started this company at bloody what like 21 years old 22 years old so you've
02:25:49
you've never done running a public company before so there I think humility is probably even more important for someone like you at that stage I'm
02:25:58
interestingly it's it is the strategic advantage right to be 20 years old and to not know anything so that you can ask
02:26:04
any question and not look like an idiot is the greatest gift in the world I mean I was almost always the youngest person
02:26:10
in the almost always, you know, and that that was such a blessing because everyone's like, "Oh, what what are you
02:26:17
working on?" "Oh, an app. That's cool." And I'd be like, "Yeah, actually, would you mind talking to me about like, you know, the best ways to prepare your
02:26:22
company to be public?" And people are like, "Sure." You know, uh, so I I I think, you know, being able to use that
02:26:29
naive as as the fundamental advantage to be able to learn quickly is so important. But have you lost that now?
02:26:35
Uh, hopefully never. I mean that's the whole that that's like what I love to do is the curiosity, the asking questions.
02:26:42
Evan, what is the this is my last question. What is the most important question for entrepreneurs that are
02:26:48
listening to this conversation now based on everything that you know and have
02:26:54
done that will help them that I didn't ask?
02:27:00
I think they should really ask themselves if they love what they're doing. And if they really love what
02:27:07
they're doing, that will be the fuel that will carry them the whole way. But there are so many people who are trapped
02:27:14
building businesses or, you know, in jobs that don't really love what they do, who haven't found how to use their
02:27:20
special gifts in a way that applies to the the business world. And I think so much of life is trying to figure out
02:27:26
what is that thing that I can do that I just love that brings out the best in me and my talents. And I I think not giving
02:27:32
up in pursuing that is just so important. Evan, thank you so much. Thank you so much for doing this today.
02:27:38
I know you don't do a ton of podcasts, so I was I was particularly honored that you'd come and sit here with me. And hopefully it wasn't it wasn't a
02:27:44
nerve-wracking experience. I had a lot of fun and thank you for helping me with my 2025
02:27:49
resolution. Going to try and make some progress here. I'm so keen. I'm so keen to know who who in your life has been
02:27:55
nudging you to get out there more because there must be someone unfortunately like everybody which is why which is why I've caved. So,
02:28:03
well, thank you so much and it's so wonderful to get to know you more and understand how you're thinking about all of these things. And thank you for the wisdom that all of the entrepreneurs,
02:28:09
the founders, the listening to this conversation have gained from you. And I do encourage you to do more of this kind of thing because there's so many of us
02:28:15
that are so curious um about the ups, the downs and everything in the middle of being an entrepreneur, building a
02:28:20
company like you have in a world that is changing at absolute light speed. So it's a real service to all of us to get
02:28:25
to know you, to get to know the thinking of the company. Um but also to be able to learn from the experience you've had.
02:28:31
And I'm really excited now to go and try these spectacles. Awesome. Let's do it. We launched these conversation cards and
02:28:36
they sold out. And we launched them again and they sold out again. We launched them again and they sold out again because people love playing these
02:28:41
with colleagues at work, with friends at home, and also with family. And we've also got a big audience that use them as
02:28:47
journal prompts. Every single time a guest comes on the diary of a CEO, they leave a question for the next guest in
02:28:53
the diary. And I've sat here with some of the most incredible people in the world. And they've left all of these questions in the diary. And I've ranked
02:29:00
them from one to three in terms of the depth. One being a starter question. And
02:29:05
level three, if you look on the back here, this is a level three, becomes a much deeper question that builds even
02:29:11
more connection. If you turn the cards over and you scan that QR code, you can
02:29:16
see who answered the card and watch the video of them answering it in real time. So, if you would like to get your hands
02:29:23
on some of these conversation cards, go to the diary.com or look at the link in the description
02:29:28
[Music] below. Heat. Heat. N. [Music]
