Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No to $3B From Zuckerberg!

you became the world's youngest billionaire at the age of 25 you've got Mark Zuckerberg offering you $3 billion 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 that decision evan Spiegel is the co-founder behind one of the world's biggest social media platforms Snapchat he turned disappearing messages into a multi-billion dollar empire redefining how we connect online evan you don't do many podcasts do you i don't do much public speaking at all but I want 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 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 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 raised $485,000 at a $4.25 million valuation what a deal but back then there were a lot of apps that would get popular really really quickly and

then sort of fade away and a lot of people told us that we should sell it they said you're just sending photos back and forth how is this going to grow for the long term but the growth of Snapchat was atypical to say the least it was like this virus and it was reaching 75 million users on a monthly basis so I wondered if you had any advice on the fundamental principles of success how much people care about what they do and the ability to move quickly is the predictor of success and at Snapchat we

have a really small design team it's nine people who are constantly generating an incredible number of ideas and products and features because 99% of ideas are not good but 1% is i want to know what they teach at Stanford because the success rate of creating some of the world's pre-minent entrepreneurs is really really high there were a lot of very good lessons the first one is this has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the 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 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 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 that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so [Music]

much Evan when you look back over your earliest years and you you try and make sense of the dots that connected in hindsight I guess as Steve Jobs once said what are those dots there were a couple fateful choices that my parents made that I think had a huge impact one was that they never let me watch TV so they never let me watch TV it didn't uh want me to spend my time doing that but at the same time would allow me to get whatever book I wanted and that was a really uh I

think formative experience for me and and reading a book you get to use your imagination a lot you know to try to paint the characters in your own mind and that was really helpful and because I wasn't watching TV I had a lot of time on my hands and so I like to build stuff I mean when I was young I would make a little fake hotel in our living room and 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 my imagination a lot at home and my parents never made me feel bad about turning the house upside down moving chairs around to to express myself and and make stuff did you feel like you 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 think sometimes that made it harder for me to you know feel like I fit in and when did computers come into the picture for you uh I guess I I was exposed to my

first computer gosh probably kindergarten first grade maybe around that uh period of time i my godfather brought over one of the early Macintoshes to show our our family 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 the computer lab a lot my I really wanted my own computer so the big breakthrough was when my mom said you 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 build your own computer you can have it to to play with and so that was probably by sixth grade I had a teacher 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 you know putting together these pieces turning it on you know getting uh you know windows up and running um just made me realize why it's it seems so complicated on the outside when you're just looking at that tower that box 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 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 think there's something really empowering about that about that feeling what what does that feeling teach you I 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

think uh once you start realizing that things that look really complicated or confusing on the surface aren't aren't 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 experiment with something that seems impossible from the outside but really it's just not that hard and you got bullied in school right was it sixth grade that you got bullied or was it sometime thereafter yeah middle school was not the I think not the easiest easiest time for me why um

you know 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 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 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 school I think you know just led to me feeling a bit socially isolated at you 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 don't know if I was confident in myself per se but I definitely was confident in my ideas like I was willing to take a stand for ideas that I thought were different or I was willing to explore ideas that didn't seem popular at the time because I thought it was you know important i I was uh I was talking to my my dad's has been staying with us for 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 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 remember you wrote that article that was like an expose of the math program because you were you know you you basically interviewed all these teachers and kids and parents and you know uh wrote this whole expose about how the math program could

be better." And he was like you know it was sort of like maybe better left unsaid in that environment but the school to their credit supported me and like let me publish it and uh you know I think created an environment where you know kids could challenge authority which which was really uh you know something 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 they're okay with pushing against convention and you know certain moments in your life you make these

decisions which one would say are contrarian bets i can I can see them all over your story but clearly that was something innate in you from a fairly young age as you look back you don't do many podcasts do you i don't do much public speaking at all it's it's a 2025 New Year's resolution for me though so 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 that people understand our our company and what we stand for why we make the decisions

that we do and and I think part of that is you know getting to know me and Bobby and I you know started this business 13 years ago and we have made a bunch of different choices along the way but I think unless we talk about them nobody knows um and so it's it's really important for us to share you know how how we make decisions and our design philosophy and and that kind of thing it's a really interesting time I think to be a CEO generally because I think even 1015 years ago CEOs of

major companies that so many people use and love weren't doing podcasts they weren't they would maybe release press releases and their marketing team would kind of run the coms but there's been this almost big shift towards leadership transparency now where leaders are like expected to be glass boxes i think even beyond that media has really reshaped to focus on individuals right individuals are the are what people are interested in they're the ones who have distribution so I think that like the the center of gravity has shifted away from the entity like the business to focus

more on the individual characters right and storytellers so you went off to university um you went to Stanford University which is an incredible university and you went to ultimately try and pursue product design at Stanford why did you choose product design at that stage in your life what was it that was calling you about that course well what's really cool about product design is the basic concept is like you don't need to wait around and you know wait for an idea to fall out of heaven or get struck by lightning you can systematically create new

ideas by listening to people empathizing with them and then basically prototyping solutions to the problems that they share with you and then iterating on those solutions by bringing those solutions back to them and saying "What do you think does this solve your problem so for me to be able to combine um my love of making things with this process for making things that could be useful to people making new products that was really uh exciting to me and and the product design school was created by a really visionary guy named David Kelly i had the

opportunity to take a class from him and it was it was really just uh an incredible experience what is product design for someone like someone like me that has no idea what they teach in such a course is it cuz my head says like designing like physical products or a lot of the product design school at Stanford is oriented around physical products of course now you know it's so much more uh than that but when I when I was there at the time and it was under the mechanical engineering department it was very oriented around

physical products understanding materials but all part of this framework of how do we understand the problems that people are facing how do we empathize with them and then how do we design solutions that solve those problems did you learn entrepreneurship through this time as well because I think in your sophomore year you took a a class on entrepreneurship and venture capital right yeah that was that was really a gamecher so I that that uh class called entrepreneurship and venture capital and the class is a series of case studies basically led by entrepreneurs who come in

and present the story of creating their business and lessons learned and then it's an open Q&A i got to listen to their amazing stories and and ask them questions and and that was super inspiring to me do you remember anything you took away from those classes that ended up being really important for you in terms of an idea or a philosophy or anything i think the biggest thing that I took away from my time at at Stanford and from that class was the focus on going after really really big opportunities and I think one of

the things that's so different and growing up here in LA I think a lot of the the business community that I was exposed to is more focused on cash flow right like how quickly can this business turn a profit you know how can we do that really predictably how much cash are we going to generate at Stanford the business culture is entirely oriented around well how big is that opportunity like is that a huge opportunity is that opportunity big enough because if it if you're not going after something that could reach billions of people that's

not that interesting uh and that was a totally different way of thinking for me combined with the venture capital approach which is really to invest a lot of money early and scale quickly and then build out the business later uh after you've achieved scale after you've achieved mass adoption i've always wondered what they teach at Stanford especially as it relates to business because the success rate of creating some of the world's sort of pre-minent entrepreneurs is really really high so you're telling me one of the key ideas is big ambitions yeah and and I think

it makes sense because it's so hard to create a business your odds of success are so low so it's really important that you go after something really big so that if you're successful that at the end of the day there there's a huge opportunity at the 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 so you know I could open a coffee shop right and my chance of success is pretty decent but if I go

after building a new social network which is something only a psychopath would do then my odds of success are what one in a gazillion yeah i I I think what is exciting though about the technology business is the way that it scales and so I think what's different than your coffee shop example is once you build a great service once once we build Snapchat one time it can scale to 850 million people around the world right whereas you'd have to go build a new coffee shop uh you know on every on every street corner to

scale the business and so once once I think you start seeing the world in terms of the potential to scale and the potential to build you know a product or service that can reach billions of people it really changes you know the opportunities you identify or the things that you know the services that you want to build interesting so the question that most of us especially in the UK we we often don't think about building businesses that have the potential to reach huge scale um in part because we don't have as much of a robust

I think technical track record in terms of building great unicorn tech companies in Europe as you guys do over here one of the I mean I don't know if we want to go down this path and talk about entrepreneurship in Europe but I think one of the real challenges in Europe is how small the different markets are in each country and so I think what's really interesting what I when I talk to entrepreneurs in Europe oftentimes they're very focused on growing first in their country and using that market as a stepping stone but the all

the countries in Europe are quite different they're different cultures and different languages and so sometimes entrepreneurs can spend too much time trying to grow in Europe rather than what I've seen out of some companies in Australia for example they're on an island the first thing that these entrepreneurs are thinking about is like how do I go grow in the US how do I go grow in China how do I go grow in a really really big market and get to scale really quickly and then I can go reinvest and grow in Europe or grow in

other countries where it might be more difficult to to grow that is so true thinking about my investment portfolio there's about 40 different companies there and almost every single one of them without without 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 in that transition to the US they encounter tons of challenges with how expensive it is to succeed here like marketing costs here if they're in retail how difficult it is to get into Target or Walmart here also the founders end

up building their lives their families in the UK which means 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 try the US waste a ton of money get burnt run back and then I've seen that story play over and over again when you think about penetrating these international markets do you send core team members there often times what we've done with Snapchat is actually follow the growth so looking for countries where people have already started using the product already love it

are giving us a bunch of feedback and then 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 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 communication it you know Snapchat doesn't really work unless you're using it with a friend you got to use it together uh what we look for is just that momentum where friends are are using it to communicate with one another and then figure

out how to build on top of that with the content ecosystem or augmented reality and those sorts of things what was your first idea that failed oh my well there there were I mean I made an orange juicer at one point um but this but um but I think the biggest the biggest failure was future freshman Bobby and I I I was really fortunate to meet Bobby he lived across the hall from me uh at our our fraternity at at Stanford and we you know we shared this love of making stuff so we you know

we had kind of worked on a couple social ideas that were interesting but the one thing we decided to spend a lot of time on was future freshmen which was designed to help kids apply to college it was something that we'd had direct experience with so we could empathize with how difficult the process is we had siblings who were also applying to college so we spent about 18 months building like a fullfeatured website you could select the schools you wanted to go to it would aggregate all the essay questions and requirements and make it really

easy to apply um but it was very clear by the end of that 18 months or so that it was going to be really difficult for us to to win we were up against a company called Naviance which had their own software suite and they had a really good idea which is they went to all the college counselors around the US you know and high schools and things like that and said hey tell everyone to use Naviance uh make sure your students parents are using our platform and so they got a a lot of distribution

through all the different schools and so obviously you're going to use the platform that's being recommended by your college counselor not you know an app made by two kids uh out of Stanford um and so we had a real distrib contribution disadvantage and then we also realized like even if we were wildly successful and we got you know the million students you know a year who applied 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 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 something different and most importantly try to to build something that wouldn't take 18 months to build before we got great feedback so to try to build something really simple um you know that that people could could try and and that we could collect feedback on faster so two points there how do you know when to quit you've kind of assembled a couple of principles there but even it's I think it's difficult in

business because you can be getting lots of negative feedback but that doesn't necessarily mean that the idea is something that you should quit maybe it means you should pivot or iterate or just keep going but how did you know what were the stars that align that told you to quit that business i I think for us it was that we didn't love the 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 anything i mean that was really

the case with the early days of Snapchat we loved uh build you know using using the product we were using it all day with our friends so we could really we just had an attachment to it that we never you know really developed with future freshmen because we weren't applying to college so we didn't have that same I think connection with the product that we ended up developing with Snapchat and why does that end up mattering so much that like love and passion for the thing that you're building because I think that's what you know

the love and passion for what you're building and the love and passion for the people you're working with like that's what allows you to get through you know all the challenges that come when you try to to to build a business i think if you don't love what you're doing I mean I just absolutely love what I do and 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 love for what you do it's it can be

you know it can it can be hard and you the other thing you said was you felt that you should go after a business that didn't take like 18 months like two years of your time to build before you got it to market why is that for entrepreneurs that are listening that maybe have spent years perfecting something in their bedroom that hasn't gone to market yet why was that insight so important to you for your next venture i think getting that feedback from your customers as quickly and early as possible is critical even if it's

on like the back of a napkin and like "Hey here's what I'm thinking this is what it's going to look like." What do you think about that idea because it's very hard to know whether or not you have a good idea unless you can put something in front of people and have them use it i mean that's almost one of the cardinal rules of the product design program that you I guess we will willfully uh ignored which is that you should really rapidly prototype and get feedback as quickly as possible so that you know you're

on the right track i 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 learned that wasn't interesting to people they wanted to communicate with pictures they wanted to talk with pictures so when we called the app Snapchat we explained that it was 10 times faster than sending a photo via text message people were like "Oh I want that like that's something that I'll use every day." And so it was just really interesting to get the feedback really really early

on you know with the with an initial version of the app that took you know a couple months to create i think this is a really interesting point that a lot of founders don't realize that even companies like yours they start with an initial hypothesis which is nearly always wrong but kind of when you hear these stories you hear like had an idea in my basement and then pursued it and then it became a billion dollar business but there's something in the like humility and the realization that your initial idea might be wild be off

and that your job isn't to like be right it is to be successful and they're like two different things right i I totally agree and I think the the challenge someone I I think this was 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 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 that's like always the interesting challenge with a business that you have to stay true

to your vision the reason why you're building a product your philosophy but at the same time your customers are the people you serve and and ultimately how they feel about your product is is right whether or not you agree with it so how did you get past um future freshmen to your next business what was the journey from there so you'd met your co-founder at that point Bobby and how did you then move over to the idea of Snapchat i think one of the things that was really helpful is that I did a semester a

quarter abroad uh in Cape Town and I think taking a step back and being there 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 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 find something else and was that more than anything a feeling you had like a feeling of just I'm not enjoying doing

this every day opening my emails thinking about this problem yeah i think it's so important to listen to those feelings yeah yeah we were very good at not listening to them think because parents and other pressures right to continue doing something so then how did you get from there from being in Cape Town to the idea for Snapchat well I came back uh from Cape Town i moved into um a dorm at Stanford one of my buddies who had been Reggie one of my friends who had been living in our fraternity before was also in

that same dorm so we were hanging out and 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 it up there were a couple other apps that were doing some similar stuff at the time um but they were very they were much more like like security focused they weren't really focused as much on on fun you know so that's a super interesting idea and you could see really quickly that it it was simple enough that we could build

it and get feedback really quickly you know and I I think there were a couple uh important design choices uh that we made at the time one was opening to the camera um we really wanted to be the you know the the tagline is the fastest way to 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 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 there was a big toggle you had to choose between the camera and and video right so there's all this friction in 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 into capturing what's happening in front of you before the moment disappears so that I think that was a a really important um choice that we made and then of course the choice to let people choose how long they wanted to

let someone um you know see their snap but with the caveat that you could always take a screenshot um and that was probably one of the most important pieces of feedback we got in the initial 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 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 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 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 that you might be embarrassed to post to all your friends but that you want to share with your best friend or you know your family um everyone's like "This is never going to work because you can always take a screenshot this makes 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 why I think it's so important to get this feedback one of the big inventions that we made uh at that later that 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 little notification back that said "Hey you know your friend took a screenshot." And I think that was part of what made the service fun that you know you could set how long it would uh appear for your friend but if they wanted

to save it they could take a screenshot but you would know that they saved it and I think that was one of sort of the early uh feedback loops of the product that helped you know make people feel comfortable using it for picture messaging how long was that journey between you having that conversation with Reggie about wanting photos to disappear and the moment when you knew Snapchat was going to be a big deal like how how long is that gap i would say it took until maybe um certainly the following school year for me so

over that summer Bobby and I went to my dad's house worked a lot uh on the service renamed it Snapchat got a lot of feedback when we were using it with our friends everyone wanted like "Hey can I add a caption can I add you know can I draw on it?" Because in the original version it was just a photo um but because people were you know using just our friend group using it to to communicate we needed to add things like captions and and drawing so I think the Snapchat launched in the app store

about September of 2011 and it probably wasn't until late that fall maybe or even into into the following beginning of 2012 that I was I remember sitting in the back of my classroom and 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 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 change you know but by that time by you know the beginning of 2012 every time I refreshed

the snap counter page you know 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 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 the things you said there is that you were using people around you your friends to give you feedback on what features you should add next you said people wanted to write on and

they wanted to add captions as a founder that must be quite hard because you're getting lots of feedback to change lots of things all the time how do you know what to filter as good feedback that you'll implement versus a distraction or bad feedback is there a framework at all that you have you've had to deploy so I think all feedback is good feedback all feedback is valuable i think what you do with it is what matters so for example let's take the use of the the caption tool for example you know we could have

added a super clunky caption tool that took forever to use that was like you know like social media where you add the caption at the bottom of the photo and tap it and hashtag stuff the way that we decided to implement captions to make it easier for people to communicate is all you have to do is tap on the photo right after you took it so you'd snap take the photo tap the keyboard would pop up there was a little caption bar you know the caption bar uh well you 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 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 important than hearing feedback of hey I I want a way to you know add a caption or express more in the snap the way that we implemented that feedback and designed something really fast and easy to use

is why that black bar caption is you know now I think synonymous with Snapchat and and is like you know well well well known around around the world so it was a year from the idea to the day when you raised capital for the first time roughly yeah more or less and talk me through that so how much did you raise about raising the capital and what was the business like at that time in terms of users and downloads yeah I I don't remember the exact uh sort of user statistics but what was really really

helpful is that we had about a a year of data so if 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 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 were raising money one of the things that really helped us is we had a year's worth of data to basically show hey when

people start using this product to talk to their friends they keep doing it because it's really fun and it's better than text message based communication visual communication is way more fun more powerful more expressive than textbased communication and you know people use it consistently once they learn how um and that was really important to the investors who were worried is this you know just another flash in the pan type service um so so we really just led I think we had like three maybe five slides of just the data um do you remember feedback you

got from investors at that early stage i think this is important because all founders are going to get the email that tells them that they're not on to something yeah I think the biggest piece of feedback was just like hey this seems like something that these really big powerful tech companies are just going to copy and um you know it's they're really tough to compete with so you know we we're not really sure we want to invest in something that's going up against these really really big powerful tech companies i mean there's some wisdom in

that certainly a lot of foresight in that one yeah because the odds anyway of building a a social networking app are extremely low it's we were saying before we started recording that you've got to be almost like delusional to think that you can i think at that time too you know Snapchat came last after Facebook Twitter Instagram like you name it all of those services had come first and so I think the idea that like you know and that was still at the time when people believed that network effects meant that you couldn't 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 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 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 interested but Jeremy at Lightseed reached out he had his

profile picture was a photo of him with Obama uh and I 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 legit." So we met up with them and and one of his partners that uh I guess his daughter used Snapchat and loves Snapchat and so they understood the service and what it was about and how she was using with her friends and so they ended up investing $485,000 at a $4.25 million valuation what a deal in hindsight how 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 like that and the valuation was $4 million roughly 4.25 yeah in that first year up until the point that you raised that money did you ever doubt that Snapchat was going to work and I guess to understand the question a bit more you almost have to add a goal or ambition to it so I'm presuming you wanted it to be and thought it could be a company did you ever doubt that it would

be was there anything that ever happened in that first year there was one moment where we accidentally took down the Snapchat infrastructure for three days so the service stopped working entirely for three days actually it something broke and it took us three days to fix it and we were like we're we're done i mean what are we going to do you know uh the 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 use it um and

when we turned it back on people just started using it again and that gave us a lot more conviction and that you know we had a product that people really just loved using how and why was it growing was it a marketing campaign or was it organic the only thing that we ever saw work was you know friends using it with friends telling their friends about it and wanting to you know learn how to use it because communicating with photos was a new thing i mean people were hadn't been talking with pictures before and even

the way people thought about photos it was like a photo is for saving a precious moment right like that's or like a family photo like that's really how people were thinking about photos at the time you weren't able like that was just coming out of the digital camera like plug it into your computer and upload the photos era so there was this massive I think behavioral change of people realizing like wow like no a picture is worth a thousand words and now that I can take it instantly on my phone and and send it with

my friend in you know uh a couple hundred milliseconds like we can talk with pictures and instead of just use pictures to save memories i don't think we really remember that isn't that crazy that we don't remember it wasn't that long ago i know but we just don't remember like as you were saying I was like yeah you couldn't like send a photo to your friend to talk i was like I was trying to think of the app that I could have used back then to do that and there just like isn't one yeah but

now I'm dating myself you know it's terrible 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 they ultimately got that from you copied that from you i've got this photo um from the early days do you 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 actually our first office which was great it was called the Blue House in Venice 523 Oceanfront Walk and actually

you know things sort of uh had had reached a breaking point at my dad's house i think there were seven or eight of us living there you know one one night his girlfriend at the time now wife came in and one of you know one of our teammates was like sleeping on the couch with a blanket she had bought him for Christmas and she was just like I think there's like we've had enough here so we we had to get an office uh and and move out and we were going to dinner in Venice and

we walked past this old blue house and it had a four lease sign on it we were like "Wow this would be wild we could have an office on the beach on the Venice boardwalk." Um let's let's call them and we called them they wanted a crazy amount per square foot in rent we couldn't afford at the time but we ultimately waited uh a bit longer and 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 the Blue House was that

the the Venice Boardwalk is one of the most popular destination tourist destinations in the 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 icon outside and all day long people would come up and talk to us about the app or give us feedback or need help with their account and so we were just immersed in people from all over the world who were using Snapchat and wanted to come talk to us about it

ult ultimately became like a little too much but in the beginning in the beginning uh it was just so amazing to be right there on the boardwalk uh with so many people and so how many people could fit into the blue house i think you know at max capacity it was 20 something i think we were 20some people by the time we moved out maybe 30 it 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 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 millions I would have I would guess yeah and you've dropped out of university by that point obviously tell me about that decision because that's not I know the app's growing and everything but to drop out of a prestigious university can't be a super easy decision i I really felt I had no choice i didn't have enough credits to graduate i mean I you know I was doing the I was

doing the product design program the engineering program i had a lot more classes that I had to to finish and ultimately we'd raised $485,000 uh from investors and you know I was spending all day trying to pass these you know I was taking I think 20 credits at the time or something uh and trying to trying to work on our business i just couldn't do both at the same time so I was like you know hopefully one day I'll be able to go back i actually did end up going back and got my degree in

2018 which was awesome um and uh but um I just couldn't do both at the same 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 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 degree like why do I need one you know I I think colleges can can be really valuable it's not for everybody 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 kids i was thinking earlier when we were talking about college university the world was different when you went to university and college and you've got these four boys now the oldest I think is 14 years old if he wants to be like dad say he wanted to follow in your footsteps is there anything else based on how the world is currently that you'd be advising him to learn before the age of like 21 is are there

any topics or degrees that you would be pushing him towards now if he wanted to be like dad if that was his decision I think one of the most important things today is really nurturing creativity i mean I think creativity is really the the X factor certainly in the age of AI right and so I think nurturing creativity finding ways to develop those skills for example Flynn who's 14 he loves drawing he's unbelievably talented at drawing and I think sometimes he's like well I don't know if there's a career in drawing but I think sometimes

he doesn't see that drawing is just the way that he's expressing creativity drawing is the beginning of that journey of exercising those muscles in your brain that allow you to visualize something that other people don't see right and and that's 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 muscle that creativity is so important i think creativity is just becoming more and more rare ultimately because so much of our society is oriented around things we can measure creativity is so hard

to measure and so I think it can be really tough um you know to to find the the dedication to invest in developing creativity when it's uncertain what the outcome is um but that that's really what I would encourage him or so many so 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 think that we stop you know practicing that ability or you know uh or we become fearful of expressing ourselves and and 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 doctor lawyer etc versus we don't necessarily think as much about collecting useful long-term skills i'd 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 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 well it's probably makes more sense to try and get some

fundamental skills that will translate plus job titles are totally ridiculous anyways in the in the early days we would just make up anyone who joined the team we would just make up their uh their title it would have nothing to do with anything um so job titles are ridiculous when the team is small right just in general right because I think people anchor to job titles to confer confer status right and I think ultimately like amazing impact creativity great ideas come from anywhere right and the more that you focus your organization around hierarchy I think

the less you're focusing on the right things which are how are we making sure great ideas are coming from anywhere getting surfaced you know and um being built but hierarchy comes into place when things start to get big and we need to put processes and reporting lines in place how do you defend against that 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 Loonshots which I really love that actually gets at this issue directly and and basically what

the author Safi Beall found was essentially that very big companies you know once they get a lot larger they have a lot of customers to serve they need to build all this organizational infrastructure and ultimately that comes with hierarchy but the ones that continue to innovate that are very successful at innovating consistently over long periods of time also have very small very flat teams that don't have any hierarchy at all that are really really focused on innovating and on trying new things and ultimately the companies that are really successful find a way to build a

relationship between the huge organization that is supporting all these customers and needs to be operationally rigorous and metrics focused builds a relationship between them and this very small group of people who are trying crazy things and he gives a lot of examples you know one of the ways that the United States was able to win World War II they had these crazy group of scientists that were trying new things like radar and stuff like that at the time but then they were taking those ideas bringing them to the military which is a huge very structured

hierarchical organization and saying "What do you guys think about this how can you play with this what are your ideas what are your feedback take this into battle put it on an airplane see what happens." and then give that feedback back to this very you know unstructured flat small group of of uh inventors and scientists and by really focusing on the relationship between those parts of the organization ultimately companies can figure out how to build a strong relationship between the two and then innovate over time so how have you done that at Snapchat at Snapchat

we have a really small design team i think it would surprise people it's nine people really it is totally flat so there's no fancy titles everyone is a product designer um the the way that the team works is very focused around making things that's the entire job in fact your very first day when you start you we have design critiques once a week for a couple hours your very first day you have to present uh something so you have to make something and and present it and what that does that I think is really interesting

and and powerful is that ultimately of course on your first day when you have no context for what the company's working on no idea what's going on how how on earth are you supposed to come up with a great idea i mean it's almost impossible but you have to show an idea your first day and so ultimately on your very first day your worst fear has come true that like we're sitting there al together and we're looking at an idea that's like ultimately not that great i mean sometimes they're pretty good but ultimately not that

great and that I think opens the door to creativity because you've already it already happened you already failed there's 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 good but 1% is and you know we really abide by that idea of like you know or the concept that like the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas so the team is just constantly generating an incredible number of ideas and products and features and that sort of

thing and ultimately our job is to try to figure out what the great ones are and then most importantly build a strong relationship between this little team that's coming up with all this stuff all the time and our you know much bigger engineering organization our bigger product organization who also have all sorts of amazing ideas and are also innovating in their own way and build a flywheel between the two where we can ultimately you know make a lot of new products and then consistently make 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 producing no but I I do know when we need more okay okay fine okay so you've got a 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 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 do how do you get them to work together for

us the the bridge organization is probably our product organization and they really helped connect the dots between the engineering folks and the design folks and a lot of this stuff you know actually mirrors the relationship that Bobby and I had in the very early days where I was more design focused i had a bit of an engineering background and had taken some CS but I was more design focused and Bobby you know is an unbelievable uh computer scientist right he you know took math and and uh computer science at school but he also loved design

and so we had this really you know powerful relationship where you know I I could talk with him about new ideas and and design and he could talk about the engineering constraint so when you know for example when we were 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 really big deal right to to you know to help people more easily use their cameras now every camera on a smartphone is tab for a photo hold for video but the

engineering complexity that was required to enable that design was something that we really talked about and worked through because the way that the design and the animations had to work and the way that you you know held your finger really mattered with the way that ultimately we were flipping between you know the the video feed and or capturing uh a still a still image and it was that dialogue that ultimately ended up you know resulting 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 build that relationship across the organization constantly over time where you know there's there's a real dialogue and an understanding and an appreciation both for design and engineering um you know that oftentimes is facilitated by our product organization in terms of that small design team you said you have a critique session once a week what is a critique session so it's just where we look at work that's all we do uh we 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 small and new designs that have come out of the last week from that team and these can be anything really anything yeah oftentimes they're oriented around solving a problem so kind of coming back to that product design philosophy like what problem are we trying to solve how can we empathize with our you know community okay our creators are having friction you know posting to to 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 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 isolation within that team or are they working as one team they very often are getting feedback from one another oftentimes are tackling projects together and small teams you know um but all come together on a on a regular basis i love this this point you were making about the key thing that you've discovered is is that the game is more ideas not trying to find a perfect idea more ideas more feedback yeah

more ideas more feedback you increase your failure rate you get more feedback it it does kind of go contrary 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 business before because eventually you learn you learn something right you learn that you're not that good at guessing yeah and I think ultimately you have to maximize your rate of learning i mean that's that's just critical maximize your rate of learning let's go back to the um those early

days you're in that office when you think about the people in that photo that were part of the first sort of 20 how important in hindsight is hiring i think it's everything i think it's everything and these were really really just wonderful people i mean still you know uh in many cases close friends and I think interesting there was a moment I realized um David Daniel Bobby and a couple other of our original engine all of them uh you know original engineers were musicians as well and it was really interesting this moment you know because

the the early folks who were working on the engineering side of of Snap were unbelievably creative and unbelievably talented and it it was an interesting interesting like aha moment because I think often times people think of the disciplines as separate like oh there's designers and then over there there's engineers and I think so much of the magic actually is when those disciplines like combine or cross over or people who really love and appreciate both especially for a company that's aspiring to be creative absolutely in everything that it's doing um on this point of hiring did

you make any hiring mistakes in those early days oh absolutely and what were those mistakes not necessarily people but the the frameworks were were off or the way that you've hired these people or what what what caused the mistakes i think occasionally in the early days um we almost like overindexed on the wrong types of experience if that makes sense so one of the things we really wanted to do was bring in people who were very very experienced leaders who had run much bigger teams that was like if we want to build a big company

we got to find people who have run big companies and big teams and so one of the early engineering leaders who joined our team I think he 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 Snapchat but we were really thinking ahead about like how can we hire people who can actually help us scale here and and build something uh really big and I think that that sort of focus on leadership experience and experience leading

at scale was really valuable i think what was oftentimes a bit less valuable in those early days were was almost more people who had very specific domain expertise so there were people who would you know come into our come for an interview or something like that and be like well I think what you guys should do is add likes because every other platform has likes so if you just add likes then people will you know use your service more and not really coming with the same open-mindedness and curiosity about well why is Snapchat doing it

differently like why don't you have likes and comments it's like what how are you thinking about the service 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 grow faster and and so I think now one of the things we're always looking for in the interview process is adaptability right it's amazing to have prior experience but the question is how do you apply that prior experience to a new context and change and adapt the way that you see things change your

perspective um you know to be able to meet the needs of our business which is different than you know other businesses What what are the other factors if if you were to make a perfect Snapchat employee now what would their personality be their their psychology their their attributes we we have three values and three leadership behaviors three values are kind smart and creative that's been the those have been the values since the the very beginning really because Bobby and I were just having a conversation like what kind of people do we want to work with

kind smart creative like great but since then and 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 years ago people were not talking about kindness at work i mean people would be like sorry what you know no kind no kind smart creative like why kindness what we found was that with the that the relationship between kindness and creativity is really really important because unless people feel comfortable coming up with crazy ideas unless they feel comfortable that if

they say you know they have some new idea and it actually isn't that great that they're not going to be laughed at that they'll be supported right unless you have that sort of supportive culture it's very hard to be creative and so we learned over time that actually wow kindness is is kind of the essential ingredient if you want to have a creative a creative culture but anyways kind smart creative smart pretty self-explanatory um and then uh when it comes to leadership behaviors there's three leadership behaviors or attributes we look for i just want to

pause on that point of kind do you make a distinction between someone being nice and being kind because in your environment you also mentioned that you do these critique sessions and you're giving people crit critical feedback and if a culture gets a little bit too kind then isn't that going to inhibit innovation and feedback we always differentiate between kind and nice there's a couple examples that I think help with that so like for one um I think it's really kind to tell somebody that they have something stuck in their teeth you have something stuck in

your teeth you want to know about it right it might make you feel awkward certainly as the person pointing it out it's a little awkward right if you want if you just want to be nice you 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 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 know nicities and being

kind and really wanting to help help somebody i think I think another great example is if somebody's really struggling you know at work or they're struggling to grow or they're struggling with you know to to 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 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 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 feedback that allows people to grow and that's the kind thing to do rather than just making them feel good about not meeting expectations leadership values you said there's three leadership values okay there's three of them the first one is is T-shaped leadership so 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 expertise in a given area and then a real breadth of understanding of the business overall

and an ability to connect with lots of different types of people who think different ways because you need to be able to connect your expertise to all the different areas of our business to really drive impact as a leader i mean I think that's one of like almost the hallmarks of of running a business today is it's basically impossible to do anything interesting 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 they have to apply it to

all these other crossunctional areas you know so they have to have a familiarity with it and an ability to relate to people with different you know viewpoints or or other you know uh areas of expertise so and as we proceed with this these leadership principles are you saying that in order to become a leader at Snapchat you need these three things or are you saying everybody at Snapchat needs these three things we think everyone is a leader so we do apply it uh broadly but of course you know um you know I think it's really

important as we're thinking about hiring or 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 eye-shaped is there something they can do to become a bit more te T-shaped yeah that that's almost maybe the the easier one right if you can build on a if you can build on a real depth of expertise by going engaging with folks maybe outside of your comfort zone or in different parts of the business and build that curiosity and

understanding that helps develop I think that breadth of understanding i think what's harder is if you're a generalist and you don't have that deep skill set or that deep area of expertise it's really really hard to bring enough value to the team right and I think that's that's where people get frustrated with like the idea of middle management right where it's like oh this is just a person who you 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 you

know how how to help me you know grow as an individual or solve this tough technical problem and so I think that's why that area of expertise is so important because it's so hard to inspire people that you're working with if you don't know a lot about you know the the area that you're working in and do you need to be a T-shape leader at Snapchat now and when there was 10 of you in the in the bedroom or in your dad's house has it always been important or is that a function of being bigger

that's a great question i wish we had been more thoughtful about the leadership values and and characteristics we were looking for back then i think you know when you're working on a team of 10 or a team of 20 you're not thinking as much about what what leadership characteristics are really important to us it's more about like how do we survive tomorrow um you 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 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 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 and said "Listen here's some advice that you're going to need to know about leadership in building this team the most critical advice I could give you at this time and this is for all the entrepreneurs out there that are building at they're laying the

foundations of a potentially very big company right now what would you have whispered in his ear?" I would have said "Everything's going to be okay." Really everything's going to be okay um you know I I think sometimes people are too focused on making the right decision and not as focused on fixing it if they're wrong and I think what I would have put more emphasis on is just how quickly are you changing your mind when you receive new information how quickly are you fixing a problem or a mistake if you didn't make the right decision

in the first place and that's the feedback loop that is so missionritical to building a business in the early days it has very little to do obviously there's existential decisions you know and and those can you know create some big problems for your business but most decisions are not existential decisions 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 wrong fixing it part that deserves most of the attention and and also how you can identify you know who your great

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 right i think we should take this path you know this other path that you know we we maybe hadn't considered the 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 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 because because one of the things that I think of when I was a first-time founder building a student notice board was I would get feedback and the feedback would be saying you're wrong about this you need to change and I think at sometimes there was a part of me that knew but I was like too scared to act upon it so I kind of like gaslit myself to just keep going and I think a lot of founders do that i know this because they they come to me in my portfolio and they say

"Ah Steve there's this guy we've hired and he's been there now for a year and he's just not cutting it." I'm like "Why the are you telling me?" And they're they're procrastinating avoiding the conversation but clearly they know clearly they know it's not right it's funny you say that because anytime someone comes to ask me about like that type of people advice like "What do you think we should do?" You know do you think that I'm like sounds like you've already made up your mind 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 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 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 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 in your dad's house advice um at at that point before we had scaled to a lot of you know thousands of people I think we could have been much more clear on the culture the kind smart creative piece and really embedded that in the team prior to scaling because one of the biggest challenges that we confronted was you know as we went from 20 people to 2,000 people we basically imported all of these different cultures from all sorts of different companies like we imported an an Amazon contingent right we you know who They

really love their six-page documents we you know imported a a Google uh contingent right and they're very focused on consensus based decision-making we imported you know a contingent from from Meta as well and I think we were too slow to be really clear about what our values were and what that looked like in practice what those behaviors looked like and I think if we had earlier and and faster one so when when we're evaluating performance we look at our values kind smart creative we have specific behaviors attached to that that are actually researchbacked and whatever

we did a whole study to understand which of those behaviors are really tied to performance and those values but that gives people a really clear framework for the expectations for how to behave at Snap and our unique culture and there there was a moment of 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 the team i remember I was complaining to a friend of mine this is probably like your story of of folks coming to 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 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 was like "Great point." Um and and I you know I think at that it just it had 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 that advice to heart and

just started trying to fix it with our team getting really clear about the values getting really clear about the behaviors holding a higher bar and saying hey you know if you're not into the kind smart creative thing that's okay there are other companies with different cultures but 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 made like a culture bible in the early days and then like I'm thinking practically what should a founder

do then if they're at that stage when they've got a small team now to prevent what happened to you in terms of the culture becoming a little bit too pick and mix so I think it's less about the culture bible and more about how you apply whatever your values are to your hiring processes to your promotion processes to whether or not people still work at the company and so we were too slow to embed those values in our performance evaluation and so I think if we had been way faster at just saying hey these are

our values and what we stand for this is what it looks like in practice uh and if you're not living up to that this isn't the right home for you like that that would have helped shape the culture a lot faster also because immediately people see oh wow if they're serious about their values and they're asking people to leave if they won't live up to their values well then I you know I I better get on board with the values or find you 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 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 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 collection of group behaviors you know that are uh acceptable or norms in your in your company so I think instead of using this big culture word

which I was hearing a lot but not understanding how it was like tactically connecting to our business I think when we're talking with founders we should just be more specific about you know how people are living their the values of their company every day through their behaviors and that's dictated essentially by the incentives of the organization because what you said is you basically introduced incentive structures said you're going to be exited or you're going to be promoted and and getting really real about that and serious but it you know that the tough conversations come where

it's like well that person's a superstar you know but they're not really living our 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 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 think this concept that like if you're really that smart how could you possibly be a jerk to people i mean what that that I think you know really informed our

approach to to building out our team and and I think gives you that clarity in those moments where you're like "Wow but they're so smart or they're so talented." It's like yeah but if they're that smart and talented why can't they just be kind to people what was the worst advice you got in those early years we talked about some of the good advice and the good advice you'd give now but was there any like really bad advice that you got that 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 we should sell it i mean there there were a lot of there was one embarrassing moment i remember I I joined a conference call uh early with some of our lawyers and I don't think they had known I I had joined and they were 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 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 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 um you know you're competing in a really really tough industry with a lot of big players and you don't know if people are going to you know continue to love this product but I think what they missed was our vision for

the future right they only saw what was in the public we were working on all sorts of and still are working on all sorts of amazing new products that give us conviction in the future and and our ability to make products that that people really love but I think from the outside when you were looking at Snapchat you're like people are just sending photos back and forth i mean how is this ever going to be a business how is this ever gonna grow for the long term but you do end up getting an offer a

very very famous offer when you're 23 years old from Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook yeah that was a a fateful fateful day for sure how does how does that begin how does that story begin is it an email a phone call an introduction i think it was an initial email 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 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 exploring this space kind of thing what do you think and maybe you want to join uh Facebook i think they had just acquired Instagram too um probably like a year earlier or something like that and our view was that Instagram had been wildly undervalued in that um acquisition ultimately had given up like a massive massive opportunity um Instagram was sold for a billion was it a billion yeah and WhatsApp was 19 billion roughly yeah i think so you're 23 years old at that point you've got Facebook Mark Zuckerberg offering you a lot of money

i heard that it was $3 billion they offered yeah we never talked about it publicly but yeah is is that the number uh that's not technically the number but it's what's been reported publicly so we can go with that okay and but did you get an offer there were there was a real conversation about what it would look like and you know um you know to to join forces but ultimately you know when we 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 a 23-year-old if someone offers me $3 billion for an app that I've started you said you're probably still at your dad's house or in the blue office at that point yeah I think we were definitely in my dad's house you're in your dad's house and someone's offering you $3 billion for an app what wisdom do you have that enables you to turn that down 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 we were working on we

believed in the the future of it and ultimately we were able to convince our investors as well that like our opportunity was much bigger over time um and you know so I think that's you know that's what gave us I guess the confidence in in making that decision did you ever get to meet with Mark or speak to Mark about it yeah yeah yeah i've known Mark for a long time and was he he was keen to buy it um I you know I I we had we had some 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 sensitive to those conversations i don't want to like speak out of turn but um you know he's he's very strategic and very good at identifying you know at the time they had a a piece of software that was identifying sort of what are 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 interested to see how those things play out it's almost it sounds like something

you'd see in a movie where you get this call from someone like Mark Zuckerberg who's built this massive empire and you almost it feels like you get summoned I would imagine you get summoned from your dad's house to come and meet him and you went to Facebook's offices to meet him I'm guessing in person i think at one point I went up there we he came and met us at uh we met at Cheryl's condo in like Santa Monica 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 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 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 was less so like not wanting to join a big company i think fundamentally we wanted to build a business that was different i mean you go back to our first blog post and the way

that we talked about wanting to offer an alternative to social media that we felt like social media was about being pretty and perfect and we wanted a way to communicate with our friends that was fun the company ethos the values the visions were so divergent it was very hard to imagine that like we could keep doing what we love in the way that we loved doing it like as a part of that organization because they're just oriented in a very different way was there ever a day where you doubted that decision no not even a

moment not a moment no was Were all of the board supportive yeah all of our investors were supportive i They would have made a lot of money yeah but they did something very smart early on in like a prior financing round that I guess around that 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 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 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 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 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 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 responded to her this morning a friend of mine whose business was I think it was at the top of the market in 2020 was set for an IPO and her board and investors and everyone was telling her that it's going to be a billion dollar business and that she should carry on going she approached me and asked me if I would buy some shares off her i took a look at the business and I valued it at a quarter of a million sorry a quarter of a

billion so 250 million very different numbers um and her investors 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 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 basically having a story sold to me so what I ended up doing a couple of months after our conversation is I sold some shares and obviously you know what happened in 2020 with

the markets and eventually everything comes crashing down and she says I would be losing my mind now because the company's struggling and obviously the markets have changed if I hadn't have taken some off the table and she was sending a voice note four years later to say thank you for putting that seed in their head and I hear the same with you i hear that you took some money off the table it changed your decision framework um but also you just never know yeah and and I think you have to be to your point you

have to be careful about approaching these situations as like zero sum like either we're going to like go big or you know and with the risk that we'll lose it all or you know we'll we'll sell the company i think you know there are all sorts of creative solutions that allow founders to take some money off the table take care of their families and still swing for the fences and and build a big business and venture capitalists are really aligned with the swing for the fences 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 10x 100x return so I I think you know to to find a formula that works for 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 friends you said you know him uh last I last time I saw him was at the the uh Senate hearings I think what last last year those look fun should try it sometime no no no chance no chance

by 2014 when you were 24 years old 40% of US adults were using Snapchat every day and by 2015 Snapchat was reaching 75 million users on a monthly basis at that point what's life like for you as a CEO as a founder this was 2015 2014 2015 2014 2015 you became the world's youngest billionaire at the age of 25 just four years after launching Snapchat with an estimated net worth of 4 billion at the time life was pretty good i met my wife in 2014 uh which uh was a gamecher for me um and why

now she's an incredible just an incredible woman and and really gave me a huge sense of stability and a massive amount of support she has a she really cares about wellness that's something that she's really passionate about so it's like I live with a wellness coach basically every single day and you know to have that sort of stability and support system while going through you know building our business was just profoundly helpful how do you manage that though how do you manage a romantic relationship when you are piloting a rocket ship i think one of

the things that was really helpful is she's you know incredibly accomplished herself she has her own business that she is working on called Core Organics which is a an organic skincare business um so she really understands that it's hard to be an entrepreneur and was always really supportive um you know of of my work and my commitment to my work and our team and so um I think that was almost something that brought 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 relationship's been under strain because I'm working so much." And what I realize when I have those conversations with people is very often times they met their spouse when they weren't working as much they met their spouse 10 years ago 15 years 20 years ago you know when they were just getting started in their career and I think you know it can be difficult when you have a much bigger job and it's all time you know all consuming and your spouse is like "Remember when we first met and you weren't

working all that much you were spending more time with me." From the minute I met my wife we were both working flat out and so I think this expectation that you know we both work all the time to support our our business support our family do what we 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 place to make sure that you're not just both at the office the whole time one of the

things that's really been helpful that we started doing a couple years ago is just having Sunday family day always family day um and that means everyone's 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 and you know just dedicating that time to to our family is is really important what role does she play in giving you feedback oh wow um she she gives very uh very candid feedback which is a gift right it's a gift um yeah

and I think she's really passionate about areas that are different than what I'm passionate about and so you know she's able to give me feedback in in different areas 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 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 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 mom was a tax lawyer like I I grew up listening to my dad have very intense conversations on the phone all the time and so like in business mode I can be very direct um and I don't think it's 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 she she's always just encouraging me like hey you could say the same thing but in like a slightly different way and people will hear it

you know my girlfriend says that to me because I think sometimes I I fail to context switch out of work Steve to then and 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 if I was at the office but and it just and I have to say she's always right because there is a part of my tone which I think was conveying the emotion I was feeling from the thing I

was doing to her to try and con to get her to leave me alone this is something we can both work on it's crazy it's crazy that Matt is so much at home the way you say something 100% and having an empathy and a and a kindness um and you you've had four children as well which is something that I've not had so for me that's an extra responsibility on top of the rocket ship of Snapchat the relationship and now four kids as well yeah but it's the greatest in the world i mean the greatest

thing in the world to have kids really literally nothing better in the planet i mean I have not found anything close why because the love and connection that you have with your children is unlike anything else that you'll ever experience i mean it's it's profound you know how how do you both juggle the the four children the businesses the relationship well I think Miranda probably juggles it better than I do i think um and she's really committed to spending time with our children i mean that's something that's so important to her and it's important uh

to me i don't think you know I I spent a lot of time actually over the years just I found people who are extremely successful and just like asked them like hey how do you raise great kids like you've been extremely successful how'd you do it and my basic takeaway from like a hundred of these conversations was basically that parents that are actually committed that can spend that time with their kids and do it themselves engage with their kids themselves they tend to have really fruitful relationship with their kids and their kids seem to turn

out really great and I it breaks my heart that there are so many parents that can't spend that direct one-on-one time with their kids or I guess in my case one on four time uh with with their kids because that seems to be kind of the key ingredient is that connection with your parents being there yeah do you own a business or do you work in marketing if that's you listen up for a valuable opportunity from our show sponsor LinkedIn i'm an investor in about 40 odd companies and while they operate in different industries they

all face one challenge maybe the most important challenge when it comes to marketing getting their brand in front 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 us linkedin has now grown to a network of over a billion professionals including 130 million decision makers which means you can specifically target your buyers by job title seniority industry even company revenue so stop wasting your marketing budget on the wrong audience and start targeting the right crowd through LinkedIn now and

because you're part of my community LinkedIn is offering you a $100 credit for your next campaign head to linkedin.com/diary to claim yours now that's linkedin.com/diary and of course terms and conditions apply and only available on LinkedIn ads i saw your LinkedIn page i saw your bio do you know what 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 not my joke we we uh we uh have appropriated that joke from I think Cara Swisser who who originated it but

I think now that they've copied ephemeral messaging and stories everything you know a lot of the stuff we've done in augmented reality of course now they say they're working on glasses um which you know we've been working on for over a decade i think um I think I've I think I've earned that earned that title i don't know that must piss you off because that would piss me off like I can sit on a podcast and I can say now I wouldn't be bothered you know the thing is that blah blah blah blah blah but

no that would piss me off because you just told me that there's a lot of people that are going to great creative lengths to think of these ideas they're having thousands of ideas you're you're fighting to find one and then you have that moment where you present it to the world the world says "This is interesting." You you know the guy that came up with it you sit next to him one of the things that's incredibly irritating about it is they repurpose our inventions to make products that make people feel unhappy and bad about themselves

one of the things that was so fascinating just in the last year there was a study out of the Netherland 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 Tok and Snapchat and it it basically found that Snapchat there there are no negative they the study determined there were no negative health imp me mental health implications of using Snapchat but there were negative mental health implications of using Instagram and Tik Tok and in fact I think the study in the Netherlands

found Snapchat actually promotes well-being and helps uh promote your relationships as well and so I think what's really frustrating is when people think because they've copied some of our features that the products are the same or that they do the same thing when our product is designed in a way that's very different that's designed to support your relationships with your close friends and family and ultimately is something that supports your your well-being and so what we never want anyone to think is if they're using stories on Instagram that that's the same as Snapchat and you

know even though they stole the the the name of the product or the way that you know some of some of the functionality of it the way that Snapchat is designed on the whole is something that can have a really positive impact in in people's lives And that's not something that people feel when they use Instagram did you ever consider sending Mark an email or like a message or a phone call when they first started copying some of your core features like the story feature no no we we didn't do that i think you know

one of the things that I really admire about Kevin Cyrum is when they copied the the stories feature they they stopped pretending that they 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 it a little bit differently with you know with stories um you know Kevin Cistro came out and just said "Hey we 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 love it." And you know I I think that the honesty at least was admirable is there do you feel a sense of injustice when someone steals your idea like that no not at all i mean that that is sort of the the I you know I'm sure you know the saying like you know great artists uh steal i think like one of the things about our industry is that people are constantly being inspired by one another i mean in the very early days I went to visit bite dance

when they only had Totia the app Totia which was a news a newsfeed app essentially but it was backed by AI by ML and when I saw that uh that was really inspiring to me and we made a big change to our product we actually separated out all the creator and publisher content from our sto from stories from friends and we 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 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 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 inspiration from other uh companies and other businesses is is part of innovating um so so I think it is it's 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 products we ought to make things that are really difficult to copy uh

that take a long time to copy that are really hard to do because if you go after really difficult and hard things it's much harder for these large uh companies 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 it's a podcast and they're dealing with people copying their ideas and sometimes they react really badly and they take to social media and they post both and say "Look this person copied us." And they tag the brand

what advice would you give to founders that are being knocked off i I think it's really important to very very quickly evolve from being just a product or just a feature to becoming a platform or an ecosystem and so what I mean by that is if I if I compare the early days of stories where people just were posting stories uh for one another it's relatively easy to copy that feature you know it's you can code that up pretty quickly probably with AI now you can code it up very quickly when I look at what

we've done with augmented reality right we have a Lens Core which is our own rendering engine for for augmented reality that runs on the phone but also on our glasses we have a a tool called Lens Studio that's an incredibly sophisticated tool that developers can use to build these AR experiences we have a huge you know hundreds of millions of people who are using these AR experiences on the phone and we have hundreds of thousands of developers who are making all of these AR experiences when you have that sort of very complicated technology that's hard

to copy and you have an ecosystem of people that are using it both in terms of developers you know creators and also our community who love uh those AR experiences it becomes very very hard to you know copy the four million lenses that developers have created for our platform uh you know or move the the hundreds of millions of people who are enjoying augmented reality on Snapchat to a new platform and so especially in the technology business the faster you can evolve from being you know a feature or a product to a real platform I

think that's where the 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 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 terms of other people using it right almost more of like a marketplace right um it it makes it very difficult to to migrate both sides of the marketplace do you think that the technology companies that exist now those trillion dollar

ones those big social platforms are monopolies and should be broken up because there was a big call originally to break these companies up and you've been I guess you could say victim to the strength of a monopoly being able to swoop in copy replicate steal and innovation i think what matters more 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 if you remember there was a period of time when everyone thought that Microsoft was going to take over the world they

were caught up in a lot of antitrust legislation or um antitrust um sort of inquiries and and uh lawsuits and whatnot and ultimately as a result maybe of being distracted by the lawsuits but I think also just a function of how they thought about their business at the time they they missed the entire mobile cycle um you know I I think people are looking at Google right now and saying is there a similar moment happening for Google google is subject to a lot of these antitrust um inquiries is chat GBT for example coming along and

with AI you know actually going to make it a lot harder for Google's core business to to compete and so I I think given just the longevity of the regulatory and litigation cycle I mean you're talking 10 plus years it almost doesn't matter so much if the government thinks that it's a monopoly or not because there's not much it seems like that they're able to do about it so what I think matters a lot more for small technology companies is thinking about what fundamental innovations fundamental technologies can we work on can we develop that ultimately

can help us grow our business and maybe you know one day catch a catch one of these larger companies on a on a back foot want to talk about that but my last question on copying was if you were in Mark Zuckerberg's shoes would you have copied Snapchat i think given their market position it's a very effective strategy they basically have an enormous cash pile they I think they're investing $20 billion a year right now just into you know the the AR glasses stuff and some of their VR stuff ar glasses stuff is largely copying

what what we've been doing um and then outside of that they 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 so I think it's quite an effective strategy if you're at that scale generating that much cash to just you know deploy that capital across a bunch of different bets and wait and see what companies are successful and what they make and then try to throw a ton of capital uh and and hoping that those companies don't get to scale

was was there a hard day for you amongst all of this copying was there a hardist day that you can recall um there there was a lot of concern when Instagram stories first launched that Snapchat would essentially be obsolete and you know they they did a very good job talking about how many people were using you 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 realized at the time that folks were using Instagram mostly for content creators

and influencers and that sort of thing and they were mostly using Snapchat for their friends and family and so we had really focused on this friends and family use case that was not really what Instagram was going after they were much more focused uh on influencers and and I think it was really only because Snapchat had started growing with those influencers if you remember you know DJ Khaled and some of those early snaps there were influencers who were starting to join Snapchat just to use stories right to use it differently than how we had initially

designed it for friends and family and I think that's what really got Instagram's attention so it was really frustrating in those moments where people were saying well how's Snapchat going to survive because they didn't understand that stories on Instagram is for a totally different purpose than you know stories on Snapchat you must see that coming because people start leaking that there's this new feature coming i I was running a social media business at the time and there were hackers that can kind of look into code bases and see what features are about to come and

then it's leaked out to the blog so as a team you're managing the emotions of a group of people and that group of people they're all hearing that the biggest player in the game is about to launch a central feature of your proposition how is the leader do you manage the emotions of the people through that well I think that can be something that is you know energizing for a team right if you have some of the biggest companies in the world validating what you're working on that can be really energizing if you approach it

that way right so I think rather than just saying "Oh no it's you know game over but it might as well shut the thing down and give up." I think if you say "This is really evidence that we're on the right path here that we're building products that people love that they're getting the attention of some of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world." You know let's build on that let's continue to go build products that billions of people all over the world will use and I think ultimately to this point of you

know can you hire and and you know retain really talented creative people i think it's pretty cool if you're a designer at Snap that the things you're making are not just you know used by the 850 million plus people that use Snapchat but billions of people that use all sorts of other products because people get so much inspiration from our design team and what they build i 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 and this is this is something

I was only thinking about yesterday is you you at some point have to make a decision about like adult content on the on the app and Only Fans have built this massive business now and they're basically in the adult content business at some point you must have had been challenged on that by investors or by users whether you were going to allow adult content to be on the platform because that would have been presumably that would have been a growing user base interesting yeah we we proactively scan for pornography and 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 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 know when you when you think about self-expression the importance of self-expression the environment that you're in really matters right and that's why we have content guidelines because we want people to feel like they're in an environment where they can express themselves and I think some of the the conversation about different content guidelines or having

content guidelines or not having them has been really interesting because I think people are missing the broader point if 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 lot of pornography that's a really uncomfortable thing for most people right that's that's uncomfortable you 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 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 feel comfortable expressing themselves feel comfortable communicating with their friends and family having content guidelines is really helpful because it means that the content experience is one that that feels more comfortable but isn't that people would say well that censorship i'm thinking now of the video that Mark Zuckerberg released about Meta's change to their moderation systems moving to Texas realizing that I think he said that they'd overindexed with their moderators in terms of left-leaning politics so a lot of the

right-leaning content had been censored what do you make of that argument for content moderation that we don't want to censor people i think it's a misunderstanding of the the First Amendment and and how it applies if we look at our country uh the way you know at least here in the United States with the first amendment that really focuses on the way that the government interacts with content creators or content publishers and it says hey it's not okay for the government to interfere with individuals or publishers self-expression right that's not allowed but one of the

things the first amendment also does is say you know platforms or individuals can make choices about what sort of content they want to promote or want to have on their platform that's part of the first amendment you can't force the Wall Street Journal to you know put this article or that article or accept any article from any author all around the world the Wall Street Journal as a paper can decide what you know what authors you know it wants to include on on its pages and that's part of the protected first amendment expression we have

here in this country so this whole notion of of censorship doesn't apply to to companies that are private businesses that actually have a first amendment right to decide what content is on their platform and they may want to decide we're open to literally anything anything goes no problem and it seems like some platforms are making that choice but other platforms like ours say "Hey in order to have a healthy set of discourse across our platform in order to make sure people feel comfortable when they're viewing content on our platform we don't want people to come

across pornography for example or violent content or you know hateful content that that's not something that makes people feel good and we actually want to make sure that that that content isn't on our platform because it doesn't comply with our our guidelines." And that may be one of the reasons why in some of these studies it shows that people feel better when they use Snapchat because they're not encountering you know really violent uh content when when they're using Snapchat is there an issue that if you're geographically based in Los Angeles or California then your content

moderation perspective is going to be very left-leaning versus if you're based in a red state and that might not be representative of the world or do you just not care did you just think well these are these are our values as a company so I don't think so because I don't think saying you know extreme violence is not something we want on our platform i don't think that's 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 think that that's you know

political choice i think that's a values-based decision so I think unfortunately right now in our culture there's actually a real temptation to politicize things that are actually quite common sensical and so I think we have to avoid that that temptation and instead focus on you know what are the values or the business choices that people are making why do you think Meta have 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 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 of rules and regulations about you know prohibiting things like hate speech for example or or terrorist content and I think um it'll be interesting to see how they navigate that it's certainly a lot less expensive to to avoid moderating 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 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 moderated engagement can go down um certainly there are studies that show that negative content spreads much further and faster on social media for human reasons um but but I'm not sure in this particular instance how are you how are you feeling about the social media landscape it's changed so much in the last six months it's just not even six months I'd say 12 months since I think Elon bought Twitter now called X that it's almost like this domino effect has happened in terms of content moderation in terms of the types of

voices on social media in terms of this big movement around censorship and free speech there's also been this splintering of social media where lots of people are now like leaving certain platforms and going to Blue Sky and Threads and you know Rumble was the only sort of big right-leaning platform just just a couple of years ago and now I don't know it seems like it's all changing before our eyes i I don't read too much into it to be honest with you to me it feels like more of a continuation of of almost you know

at least in the case of I I think we can use Meta as the example just because they are essentially the social media uh market um and what's really interesting about their choices is what they've tended to do uh is sort of follow the political winds so when Biden was president and Mark's been very public about this they did a lot of very proactive content moderation and that was something that apparently I guess the White House at the time was asking them to do very proactively and now it seems like you know with the with

the new administration this new administration has a different approach to to content moderation and Meta is following that and so I what I've seen mostly from from Meta over time is that they're quite willing to sort of navigate the the political landscape and follow um you know really follow the the lead of of uh politicians here is that something to be admired no I think it's a it's definitely a survivalist approach for sure when you're such a large and powerful company right you know if you look at Meta they have so much litigation with the

government right now the government is scrutinizing so many different aspects of their business and so when you're at that scale and you're you know controlled by a single founder i I think it's a survivalist instinct that that you know means that depending on who is in the White House you change your policies are you optimistic about the next four years in America i'm incredibly optimistic about our country i I I love our country so much i think uh that Americans across our country uh have an incredible spirit that has allowed us to overcome extraordinary challenges

together more recently the COVID pandemic you know longer ago things like World War II uh you know where we came together not only as a country but more broadly in the world to confront uh you know the horror of uh the Axis powers i I think our country in in very critical and important moments comes together in 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 where he's going to be getting increasing pressures to join social media are you going

to let him join Instagram he's on Snapchat i I I He's on Snapchat um certainly on YouTube and Roblox which he likes a lot um so that that's sort of the current um the current situation you must have thought about this there's so much conversation at the moment around the impact that social media has on kids anxiety all of the sort of toxic things around comparison and becoming more isolated have you developed a an agreement with your your wife with your kids with your family about social media usage going forward 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 one-sizefits-all model is the right approach here i think it really depends on on where each of our kids are at at at any given point and who they are and what they want to do i think one thing I would really encourage them to be thoughtful about is their privacy especially as young people and I think there are a lot of young people at a very young age are posting a lot of

public content and I think it's very important to be thoughtful about those sorts of decisions because once you've posted something publicly you can't get that back and I think you know it's really important as we talk about technology that we focus on the healthy and constructive ways uh that you know Flynn for example at 14 can use technology like staying in touch with his friends and family i think the real watershed moment for us as a family was up until the COVID pandemic we we didn't allow Flynn to have a phone we really didn't allow

him to use a computer when the pandemic happened he had to stay in touch with his friends he had to be connected with his friends there were we knew that that was vitally important for his well-being right and and I think the challenge we have is is almost the whiplash that young people are experiencing because throughout the pandemic they were told you can only talk to your friends on the computer you can only talk to your friends on the 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 think both extremes are are are unusual and I for us as parents we we think a 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 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 with his friends when you know they're spread out all over the world uh

you know or they're after school trying to meet up like it's helpful to use technology it's helpful to message your friends and so I think we have to find this right balance of saying you know 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 with your friends or watch entertaining content or play a game to relax like that's healthy too even if Finn says "I want to watch I want TikTok Dad." That that might be a bridge too

far we say cuz Tik Tok's like I don't even use Tik Tok myself um personally because 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 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 although he hasn't really pressed pressed the issue tik Tok was going to be banned and then Trump swooped in and seemed to save the day is that

a good thing is this as a CEO of Snapchat was part of you hoping that 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 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 relationship with China is to figure out the areas where businesses are going to collaborate and do business across the United States and China and areas where they

are not so you're probably familiar many technology companies cannot operate in China 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 operate here in the United States where we have an open market a free market and I think we have to be very thoughtful at this point in time as a country because being an open market has always been a massive strategic advantage for the United States it's something that the United free trade things like that have been massively supportive of our

economic growth but we're now at a moment where I think we need to be thoughtful and say with some countries free trade in some areas makes a lot of sense so if it we're talking about kids toys or diapers or you name it right like let it rip that that's good for both countries and both countries uh I think uh can do business in those areas but when it comes to other areas like you know information services or maybe it's critical critical minerals maybe it's some types of pharmaceutical uh you know compounds or or ingredients

those are areas where the countries aren't going to be able to collaborate because ultimately they have very different goals ideologies visions for the future and and I think the issue that the business community has right now is there's not enough clarity in that regard so the more clarity the government can create and say you know the United States and China working together can say hey we agree these areas are open for business and these areas are areas where we're going to compete and we're not going to collaborate that would help the business community because I

think what's so frustrating imagine being a Chinese entrepreneur right now building this really successful company and then the US government saying hey you know given our our country and and our values and the strategic relationship we have with China this is not this isn't it's 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 that potentially an app like Snapchat the UK might decide listen we don't we 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 Snapchat be in the UK that could set a worrying precedence around the world i think there's already some early flavors of that with folks really focused on data localization and and whatnot and and that's sort of my point around I think we need to get really clear about with which countries you know are we going to have open free flow of data and and trade and and which countries are there areas where that that might not work as effectively snapchat

eventually goes public um running a public company is difficult to say the least because the share price can go up and down really irrespective of what you're doing and what you're building and it's really a reflection of the broader market people's emotions and vibes but you have to manage that as a CEO not easy I imagine you know what I a lot of people warned us about going public um and 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 of

thing um that the quarterly scrutiny would be challenging for for our business ultimately I think the transition from being a private company to a public company was was uh challenging it's it's quite different um but now I I really think the discipline and the rigor around the quarterly performance the you know need to forecast your business really effectively and then compare how you're tracking to your forecast helps the company run in a much more effective way so that sort of scrutiny I think can be really helpful you know for the leadership team and then the

broader team in terms of running the business now where it can get difficult is when it comes to long-term investment and and innovation so for example right now interest rates have gone way up um folks are uh discounting cash flows um you know at a much higher rate as a result and so there's a huge focus on profitability for uh many many businesses across all sectors what we know is true for long-term innovation is that consistency really matters you can't just flick a switch and and turn on and off innovation turn on and off um

you know investments in new uh products it's very difficult and disruptive to do that and so we've made a decision through this period of time even though we've made some really difficult and painful deci decisions to shut down some of our projects we're still investing at a higher rate uh right now through this period of time even though we know that that means that you know our share price might be lower because people are you know discounting our cash flows differently due to higher interest rates so I think you know that's when it gets challenging

the actual reality of of you know continuing to invest through you know challenging periods of time or periods where interest rates have gone way up when I think about sitting in your shoes or sitting in your seat I think about all the things you could do as a public company i think you could do anything like you could go after any game and at some point as you kind of said there 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 and so on I find the hardest thing for me is especially when you're somewhat creative etc is to pick something and to say no to everything else and I've looked at your philosophy and I know saying no and focus is so central to your to your sort of leadership style but also how you think as an entrepreneur tell me about those painful moments where you had to kill something that you didn't want to kill yeah I there there are a bunch i you know that that piece of advice was

so helpful to us especially in the early days of our business one of our first venture investors was like hey Evan you got to get really good at saying no he's like you have almost no resources I think we were a team of four people at the time um you know and you're going to get all this inbound because the company's growing people are going to want to do partnerships or do an interview or what and just if you can just get really good at saying no and stay focused on your community stay focused on

your customers like that's the that's the secret and that focus has really helped us over the years but as you point out there's there have 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 were mini games we had an amazing hundreds of people using um our our mini games and people love them it was an amazing uh platform you could play like real-time multiplayer games together inside of Snapchat and ultimately it was just clear that that was not going to be a

really really big business for us at least at that time and so we had to make the really painful decision to you know shut down uh our our mini games our mini games business so how do you think about what to go after there's all these new technologies there's these buzzwords there's AI now there's AR there's VR there's headsets there's wearables there's all these things how how do you decide what bet is your bet i think that's a really good question that is to some degree where intuition uh you know plays an important role but

it's also where feedback plays a really important role and that's why for example with our last generation of spectacles that we announced last year the fifth generation of spectacles our goal was just to get it into developers 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 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 our product the faster we

can make it better and find that product market fit that's so important and you also don't know the time horizon for when the world will sufficiently change in the direction that your your bet has been placed i think about Google Glass 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 vanish and disappear uh and then I think about when Meta bought Oculus and we thought okay no so this

is now when everyone's going to be wearing VR headsets and it's still kind of not really happened so you could make a bet you could be right but you could be 15 years off you have to be very careful in in technology I think 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 new technology came out of nowhere but no they've been working on it for what a decade i mean you know and and consistently trying to to

make progress and so I think you know as long as you find something that you really believe can can make a positive impact that people can use in a really compelling way you're right that sometimes you have to be patient but other times you can invent new things that bring that timeline in and so I think a lot of 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 about it differently or invented you know some new

uh piece of technology that could help us accelerate our vision to you know glasses that help people you know share these experiences that overlay computing on the world and that 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 video of it which seem to be again copying Snapchat Did that piss you off the only thing that frustrated me was that the Lxodica guys had actually come to us probably back in 2017 who's that lxodica Lxotica is the company that makes Ray-B bands

they had come to us in 2017 saying "Wow it's so awesome what you guys are doing with Spectacles we love it we should find a way to partner." So we talked with them of course all about everything that that we were doing and then they went radio silent and decided not to partner with us and then obviously resurfaced doing this with Meta so I think ultimately as a is something like that i think ultimately um you know you learn a lot I think growing a business and and really understanding how people do business and and

I think it shows you a lot about the 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 compelling idea they've got an amazing service that that they can compete that they can build uh really compelling businesses even though it seems impossible with such giant you know companies whether it's Luxotica which is the giant in the glasses space or or Meta um that I think Snapchat hopefully can be you know an example of a company that's been able to stay independent and compete

with these really really large businesses artificial intelligence has become I mean the most talked about technology over the last couple of years as it's in many respects thanks to Chat GPT how are you um thinking about the future of artificial intelligence in terms of how it's going to fundamentally change human connection you've got four boys you must be thinking about you know we talked about earlier the kind of jobs that are going to exist in the future there's a big narrative saying that knowledge jobs like lawyer and accountant aren't going to be the same in

fact even when you think about how your kids are going to be educated your youngest child is one years old are they going to go to a school or are they going to go to a large language model like how are you thinking about that future are you scared i I really love that you jumped to education because I think it's so profoundly powerful i mean even in my own experience my ability to learn such amazing things in such a short period of time and connect different ideas together I it's it's an incredible tool for

discovery and for 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 uh to some to some degree but as a thought partner uh you know AI is just incredibly powerful so so I do think uh especially for creative people it should be an unbelievably powerful tool to be able to iterate to get feedback to explore different ideas explore different options even when I'm writing something and I'm stuck on like yeah 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 brainstorm um you know to to find that that right word i was wondering the other day when um I was using chat GBT 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 thing's now doing it for me and writing is such a wonderful way to think and understand so therefore am I going to get worse at like understanding things because I'm now deferring the process of thinking through

something logically to this computer whereas back in the day I would have to like really think deeply about what I was trying to say myself i I don't know i I think it's going to be really important that 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 think that that is going to be important but I think the bigger question for me is whether or not AI will help people get better at asking questions because ultimately asking a great question

and having someone who can help answer it is the key to learning i mean that's I think you know perhaps the greatest uh blessing of having a a great teacher or a great mentor or a parent is that you get to ask all sorts of great questions right and and get those answers and so I I think if we're now in a you know a modality that really is all about asking the right question and doing that really repeatedly if that can train us all to ask questions more effectively uh that that would be a

very big deal interesting i've not thought about that i don't know if I'm getting 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 we often don't discover the trade-off until 15 years 20 years time when it's 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 corner or looking over the horizon now to think through the trade-off of us hurtling into something which just like social media made something

better faster cheaper easier but came with a unintended consequence i think generally speaking as we have looked historically at the evolution of technology these sorts of foundational technologies you're right that they've been disruptive uh but they ultimately have massively positive and beneficial uh effects i mean I think if you look at a foundational technology like the internet a foundational uh technology maybe like the the motor vehicle these are the you know an airplane these are the sorts of foundational technologies that I think can really change the trajectory of the world and ultimately make people's lives

better i think the key will be how do we navigate that change together and that'll be something that will be really uh really important to do thoughtfully and I I think you know in many ways the good news about this sort of technological change is it's always governed by people i mean folks I I think almost overly fixate on new technology developments and don't think enough about what is actually the human adoption curve look like how are we making this something that's easier to use easier for people to understand easier for people to integrate into

their lives into their workflows um and so I think a lot of the work for a big foundational technology like AI is going to be much more around how humans are interacting with it interpreting it understanding how it fits in their lives if you spend most days on your computer you'll probably want to hear this some recent brain imaging studies have found that handwriting fires up more parts of the brain associated with creativity and critical thinking but in digital workplaces it's easy to lose the cognitive edge of handwriting so I want to introduce you to

GoodNotes a solution that combines both i've used GoodNotes for a long long time well 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 on the iPad in front of me during every recording that I've pretty much ever done in the last couple of years it 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 talking outside of the studio I use it to mark up design concepts

in meetings whenever I'm brainstorming and to capture other insights with my team goodnotes is like my second brain it's the tool that helps me to unlock original ideas and sharper thinking and their built-in AI lets me build on those ideas too for collaborative work your team can get a business license or get it yourself it only costs £9.99 a year and they're offering our community a 30-day free trial just head to goodnotes.com/doac to get started no matter where I am in the world it seems like everyone is drinking matcha and 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 podcast called Perfect Ted because they're the brand used globally by cafes like Blank Street Coffee and Joe in the 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 cheaper in seconds using our flavored matcha powders that I have here in front of me perfect Ted Matcha is ceremonial grade and sourced from Japan it is smooth it is naturally

sweet not like those bitter grassy matches that I tried before perfect Ted and if you are one of those people that have told yourself you don't like matcha it's probably because you haven't tried our Perfect Ted Matcher and you can find Perfect Ted Matcher in the UK and Tesco Sainsbury's Holland and Barrett and in Waitros or Albertahheine if you're in the Netherlands and on Amazon in the USA or get the full range online at perfectted.com where you can get 40% off your first order with code Steven40 what season is Snapchat in in terms of its

company's life you know like you were in that startup phase you're in your dad's bedroom phase where you're scrappy and you're growing quickly then you went to the blue office you know the met met uh meteoric growth you had the IPO what season is Snapchat in as we sit here today in 2025 how would you like summarize it if you had to poetically describe the psychology of the business now i mean in some ways it feels like we're emerging from like a two-year winter into an early spring the last two years have been really challenging

we had to rebuild our entire ad platform change the way that we go to market you know really help advertisers find more success and at the same time do a lot of that for creators as well we've seen a tremendous growth in terms of you know I think last quarter the the creators posting grew something like 40% year-over-year there was a billion public posts a month on Snapchat and that's an area we've invested in a lot as well but it's been a very challenging last two years so I I would almost say maybe like very

very early spring you're starting to see uh you know some some green shoots but you know um and the frost is melting have you had any acquisition offers since that conversation with Mark Zuckerberg once upon a time do people still try and buy the company like these days no i I think given the voting structure of the company you know Bobby and I uh have voting stock and non- voting stock is what's publicly uh traded i think generally you know sometimes people will say "Hey if you guys ever you know want to retire or something

keep us in mind." But I think um you know in terms of uh you know kicking an offer over the over the sill or something that that that doesn't make a ton of sense given our company structure another thing that I admired when I was reading about the way you run Snapchat is this idea of having a council oh amazing wow okay can you tell me about this because I might want to steal i shouldn't please take it okay good council is something that I stole uh from uh the school that I I went to

growing up called Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences which is quite a unique uh school um and one of the things that they have at Crossroads is a council and you know basically starting in middle school you get together with a group of let's call it 10 or 12 classmates and you sit in a circle and there are three rules it's you know speak from the heart uh listen from the heart and be spontaneous and it's essentially uh you know turn-based storytelling where you 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 what's a rose bud and a thorn from you know the last uh the last week and it it really creates an opportunity a for people to listen to one another because you're taking turns going around the circle but b you get to know people in a very very different way and I saw how powerful it was in middle school middle school is a tough time was a tough time for me but in council I was able to connect with my classmates uh you

know in a really thoughtful and and maybe deeper way that you wouldn't just kind of around the the water cooler or 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 the big decisions we were confronting at the time was whether or not we should move the company from LA to the Bay 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 there for the for the talent and and so we just got our team together and you know that had our first council and everyone went around the circle and shared their thoughts should we stay in LA or not how did they feel about that what did they think and what was so clear coming out of that conversation we didn't even need to make a decision it was just obvious that the that we believed in LA and wanted to be in LA and the team thought it was actually something really important to our

business to our identity to actually the way that we hired talent because people had to really commit to moving to LA to be a part of the the company so that was the first time we used council at at Snap and I saw how effective it was in the workplace setting then as the business got a lot bigger and it became much more important to connect with people who were new to the company or you know worked in a different area of the company council became just a really useful tool for for doing that um

and so you know at SNAP we have council facilitators whose job it is to to run these uh councils and now many more companies are interested in doing this and we we also help help train companies or offer sessions for other companies to help um help them bring their team members together what is the essence of it it's just get the get a small team in a certain department around a table and let everybody speak from the heart listen from the heart and be spontaneous yeah and it's usually not sitting around a table it's usually

sitting on the floor in a circle um which again I think helps create that feeling you know when you're sitting in a a circle everyone is situated equally which I think is a really important thing as you mentioned companies have a lot of hierarchy i think it feels really different in a company when everyone see that seat around a circle uh and 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 weekend or actually I had an amazing time i

went out to dinner with my wife it was fabulous." And and I think people find new points of connection that they maybe wouldn't have found otherwise without it interesting as a leader how do you know in those situations whether to listen to your team or not to listen to your team because you know it sounds quite risky for a founder I'm not saying this is what you do but for a founder to run their company on consensus i.e making sure everybody agrees on something and we're actually seeing this in the post-pandemic world with this whole

like remote work debate where some companies originally were okay everybody's going to be remote and then it went back to a lot of companies are like no come back into the office and I mean if you ask a team they're probably not going to all say let's run back to the office but as a CEO you have to make a call and what is this the the remote policy with Snap at the moment we are more than four days a week in the office on average more than is that by 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 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 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 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 miracle i'm like oh my god I get to see our kids every single day i get to wake up and see our kids and I have an open door policy if I'm working from home in my home office our kids can come in anytime it was only a problem once when uh one of our boys came in fully nude with two Oreos which actually prompted me to consider going back to the office but I really I I 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 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 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 know that the adrenaline and the teamwork that happened you know during the pandemic when we were

all able to work together really effectively remotely that was only possible because we had been working together physically for such a long period of time we had all of that trust built we had all that shortorthhand built we had that you know many times you know long road 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 that the culture was starting to fray right people don't learn the culture as quickly when they're alone and and and

remote uh you know separated all all around the world and I was really worried about our ability to consistently be creative which is so important to our business if we weren't physically together so ultimately um you know and especially after that Oreo incident we thought it was pretty important to get get back to get back to the office how was that received one of the things that we tried to do that was you know helped team members is just give a pretty long runway we we made that decision pretty early on and then gave team

members quite an extended period of time i think it was like six or nine months for folks who had you know extenduating circumstances we you know would grant exceptions and over 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 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 to the office." That's not super thoughtful for

any entrepreneurs that are out there now listening to our conversation and they're at the very beginning of their journey and they are um they're thinking about so many different things so many different problems their products aren't working their customers are complaining when you think about the principles of being successful as an entrepreneur that that are transferable across all industries have you defined what those principles are in your mind to be successful in any endeavor we talked about some of them already we said about culture we said about hiring is there anything else that you've come

to learn in your wisdom that entrepreneurs like me should be thinking a lot about as fundamental principles of success to me it seems like the biggest differentiator is how much you care i mean that just seems day in and day out as I meet entrepreneurs and people working on businesses how much do you care about your business your team your customer uh and those are the entrepreneurs I think that are really 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 world it can be about something that people really want to invent it can be their love of their customers and seeing the smile on their customers faces but how much people care about what they do seems to me to be quite a large predictor if not the predictor of of success can you care too much i I don't think so sounds stressful though 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 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 really really powerful like I I wish more people talked about it that way because I think you know you just 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 ask you about is the stress of of being you and do you have techniques to manage that stress especially running a public company i just think it's psychotic well what I what I thought

was hilar So this has been one of my hilarious findings from my ring over the last couple of days trying it out i finally had enough days that it like gave me a stress score or whatever and I'm just not stressed during the day which really lines up with like how I experience work i don't find work to be very stressful i think a lot of it has become very normal because you know over the years we've grown our business and encountered all sorts of wild situations that at this point it's it's just a a

daily normal thing um do you celebrate do you get really happy when you have professional moments where I don't know you launch a new feature and it's wellreceived do you get really happy no it's something that I I need to work on especially celebrating our team as well like I you know just providing more of that really positive feedback that's not something I do um a ton especially around like outcome focused goals when I see a great idea if I see a great new idea then I get really happy and excited i love it but

you know to me uh you know some of these big corporate milestones like 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 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 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 founders recently and they were telling me

how they've over time and with maturity they almost just developed this calm within all the chaos where they're not moved up or down and and some of them make the case to me that if you are moved up by something that happens externally it's impossible therefore not to be moved down when something bad happens externally so founders develop this almost like coldness to them that would be a real problem for me because so much of creating products is about connecting with people and listening to people and being able to empathize with them so like I

absolutely under no circumstances can cut off my emotional response i think you know I pick the things or I you know the things that make me feel really happy are things like being with 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 excited about that but I I think to your point one of the things I I do regret at some point is not celebrating 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 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 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 think breaking out of that like you know what could go wrong which actually is quite helpful that paranoia is probably pretty helpful but celebrate those moments

um is is important so that's a good takeaway from from our chat was there was there 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 that i think some of the hardest days um the the painful days have been you know when we've had to make changes to our company structure things like things like layoffs i mean I I feel like just a huge sense of responsibility to our team members and so when we let them down like that uh

you know that's those days are are the worst i mean that's that's you know of course you know in many cases worse for them and I you know um but but as a leader the sense of shame I feel when we have to make a decision like that that's you know that's sucks do you ever have imposter syndrome because I think about the odds of you the odds of launching a social media communications application as we said earlier like a billion in one or something great I don't know this it's staggering and I guess it's

not a billion there's not been a billion of them but the odds are just against you so when that happens and it explodes and it becomes this major global app is there not any feelings of imposter syndrome i don't like the word imposter syndrome because it doesn't sound very nice and I I think imposter syndrome is actually a a good thing in the sense that it means that you feel like there's more to learn right and so like for me you know as I approach any situation or you know any meeting or you know 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 obviously you know this is an opportunity for me to really listen to learn to figure out how I can how I can 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 doing differently you know how could I grow and I I think sometimes when we call it imposttor syndrome like that's 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 like hey maybe this isn't totally normal to be running a big company right maybe maybe it's a good thing to stay open to to different different ideas or ways of doing things if um if Snapchat goes away today what does Evan end up doing starting a new company i would probably continue a lot of the work that we've been doing as a family to to

give back i mean I think that's been like the greatest blessing of this whole SNAP experience is being able to to give back um you know we've done a lot as a as a family 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 life is that story you wouldn't want to start another tech company never in a million years really no chance no chance why um it's it's way too hard way too hard i told you it was psychotic i

could have told you that when you started it you should have asked me whenever I meet a serial entrepreneur I'm like "What what?" 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 Instagram and my Snap this morning about how hard it is and how nobody talks about that and so when you experience the hardship as a founder you kind of look in the mirror and think it's you do you know what I mean you think "Oh this is evidence of my

inadequacy." But it really I mean why' you say that because it sounds like you have PTSD no it's more I think like the the hard kind of to your point about how do you turn stress into something positive right the hard is a good thing in the sense that like what makes it so fun but also so challenging is the rate at which you have to change and grow like that is what has been so unbelievably hard right that you know the business at four people is really different than the business at 100 people the

business when we're supporting a million people is different than the business supporting 850 million people using our service and to have to change so much 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 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 business needs six months from now which inevitably will be different than than who I am today so

do you think you could run Snap for the rest of your life i would certainly be an honor i mean I'd love that maybe you you'd leave Snap and then you'd get bored and then you'd start some some new new company who knows and we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question that has been left for you 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 had to overcome 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 myself right i've constantly had to force myself at at every stage to grow and change and be different and evolve 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 the the battle with yourself to become a better version of yourself every day that that that's

a tough one 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 it's such an important thing when there's so much counting on you being aware so I don't know how you think about self-awareness as a leader and how if there's any system you've had to cultivate that awareness that's been productive i I love that you said that i I think um it's so challenging and it becomes harder and harder I think as the business grows and you

grow as a leader a because you become busier so it's harder to tune in and really connect with people right in the way that you really need to to to understand how they really feel or what they're thinking and to create a trusted relationship so they feel like they can tell that to you as the company grows you know I think people become very focused on curating the information that you're receiving so you're constantly getting a lot of reporting that you know shows leaders and and their teams in a very positive light and so you

have to think about proactively breaking that because that will be the the default that the organization I think will do all of a sudden they will just try to make sure you're receiving information right that that shows them in a in a great light because they want to be successful it makes perfect sense but I think you have to really do a lot of work to break that and to get out deeper in the organization and just talk to people and and I think there's no substitute i wish there was but there's really no substitute

to just walking around and talking to people and I found that that's an unbelievable way in our organization to just get great information really quickly and then you see as a CEO someone's working on a presentation they're like "Oh yeah this presentation will get to you in like six weeks you know." Um but 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 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 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 people and form those trusted relationships uh being really proactive about breaking the information system that will form around you right if you're not more deliberate about going and getting other sources of information that's that's really important and then you know I think just you know that empathy and intuition really helps because sometimes people 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 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 ability to really understand how how people feel and create a space for them to actually share their perspective it just you know is so so valuable do you ever find yourself feeling a little bit impatient with your team cuz I get this a lot i'm always

trying to make things move faster and I think maybe there's a point of privilege where as the leader of an organization you know you can just break everything to make things happen but maybe the intern in the office doesn't feel like they've got that permission but urgency as a leader speed you talked about increasing the learning speed of the organization do you ever feel impatient as a leader i'm extraordinarily impatient like and I think it's in my DNA i mean like my father would not like the idea of waiting like if you want to just

like punish my father you put him in a line for anything like he will go ballist like it's just like he the thought of waiting in a line for him would just drive him crazy because he's a very impatient person i think I have some of that some of that impatience you know if I asked your team members what's Evan like as a leader what do you think they'd say oh my goodness um I don't know they might all have different perspectives because I really try to like bring out the best in our team members

by showing different parts of myself i'm not the same leader to every individual that would be terrible uh I think so much of being a leader is trying to figure out for each individual and each person what sort of communication style will bring out the best in them and their unique abilities so you know they engage the the way I engage with our CEO Derek is different than the way I engage with Betsy who's our chief brand officer is different 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 um I think I'm good at a at a couple things i think I'm quite good at um really understanding human needs and and wants and figuring out how to reflect that in our product uh I mean oftentimes it's one of the competitions I like to have with our team is you 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 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 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 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 and I think that sort of intuition of what people will respond to uh you know what makes sense to them what's 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 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 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 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 the best in people and I think you know hopefully if I've done my job really well people say like "Wow I didn't think I could do that." Or "I didn't know I could do that." Or "I didn't know that I was a really creative person but you showed me that I'm actually a really creative person that's so cool thanks." How i think oftentimes it's by giving people the courage and the space uh to be creative and also to show them the different ways that creativity applies so for example you know I think

uh a lawyer might think how could I be creative as a lawyer right but if you have a conversation with a lawyer as you know as we did early on in our business and say you know the problem today is all these privacy policies that are written they make no damn sense and I don't 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 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 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 problem differently we don't need to just have another privacy policy just like everybody else we can work really hard to put it in human terms and that would be better and so I think showing all sorts of team members across our company the way that their work can be creative in service of our

community or in service of our advertising partners that's something uh that I I I hope to 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 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 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 mean that seriously that like in almost every area of our business whether it's HR or legal or um you know finance whatever I'm certainly far from the best i mean we our our team members are extraordinarily talented at what they do 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 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 entrepreneurs do is say how can I spend more of my time doing what I'm good at you know collaborating with our team trying to create new products be creative and then you know have a team around me that's so much better at everything else that you know I couldn't possibly be be better at es especially as a being a younger CEO I think that's probably even more important than it is for for other people to be be able to have that self-awareness and humility to 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 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 interestingly it's it is the strategic advantage right to be 20 years old and to not know anything so that you can ask any question and not look like an idiot is the greatest gift in the world I mean I was almost always the youngest person in the almost always you know and that that was such a blessing

because everyone's like "Oh what what are you working on?" "Oh an app that's cool." And I'd be like "Yeah actually would you mind talking to me about like you know the best ways to prepare your company to be public?" And people are like "Sure." You know uh so I I I think you know being able to use that naive as as the fundamental advantage to be able to learn quickly is so important but have you lost that now uh hopefully never i mean that's the whole that that's like what I love to do is the

curiosity the asking questions evan what is the this is my last question what is the most important question for entrepreneurs that are listening to this conversation now based on everything that you know and have done that will help them that I didn't ask i think they should really ask themselves if they love what they're doing and if they really love what they're doing that will be the fuel that will carry them the whole way but there are so many people who are trapped building businesses or you know in jobs that don't really love what they

do who haven't found how to use their special gifts in a way that applies to the the business world and I think so much of life is trying to figure out what is that thing that I can do that I just love that brings out the best in me and my talents and I I think not giving up in pursuing that is just so important evan thank you so much thank you so much for doing this today i know you don't do a ton of podcasts 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 nerve-wracking experience i had a lot of fun and thank you for helping me with my 2025 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 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 well thank you so much and it's so wonderful to get to know you more and understand how you're thinking about all of

these things and thank you for the wisdom that all of the entrepreneurs the founders 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 that are so curious um about the ups the downs and everything in the middle of being an entrepreneur building a company like you have in a world that is changing at absolute light speed so it's a real service to all of us to get to know you to get to know the thinking of the

company um but also to be able to learn from the experience you've had and I'm really excited now to go and try these spectacles awesome let's do it we launched these conversation cards and they sold out and we launched them again and they sold out again we launched them again and they sold out again because people love playing these with colleagues at work with friends at home and also with family and we've also got a big audience that use them as journal prompts every single time a guest comes on the diary of a CEO they

leave a question for the next guest in the diary and I've sat here with some of the most incredible people in the world and they've left all of these questions in the diary and I've ranked them from one to three in terms of the depth one being a starter question and level three if you look on the back here this is a level three becomes a much deeper question that builds even more connection if you turn the cards over and you scan that QR code you can see who answered the card and watch the video

of them answering it in real time so if you would like to get your hands on some of these conversation cards go to the diary.com or look at the link in the description [Music] below heat heat n [Music]