Evan Spiegel, Snapchat: Building a Multi-Billion Dollar Company

Super excited to talk to you. We've been talking a bunch before we started recording. I did a podcast on you almost 10 years ago. It's episode—I think—22 of Founders, based on How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story. The thing that stuck out to me the most when I read that book, because a lot of that story takes place when you're still in college, is that you were talking about 2 of your entrepreneur heroes. Steve Jobs makes sense—he's my entrepreneur hero, too. But you mentioned this guy named Edwin Land, and I'm reading this, and I'm like, “How the f*** does a 21-year-old kid even know who Edwin Land is?” I've done 10 podcasts on him and read every single biography. Tell me how you discovered Edwin Land and what you admired about him.

Yeah. I think he's so central to the history of photography. As we've set out to try to reinvent the camera and how people express themselves with the camera, we studied a lot about the evolution of the camera over time. One of the funny stories that we found is that the first selfie ever was taken by a guy named Robert Cornelius, and my co-founder, Bobby Murphy, is Robert Cornelius Murphy. So, just by unpacking the history of photography, we found a lot of interesting similarities and parallels, and we've learned a ton from founders like Edwin Land, who transformed photography by focusing on building amazing products and thinking about how to make sure those products fit into people's lives and uplifted humanity.

If you look at instant photography and the role it played in people's lives, Edwin thought of the camera as something that was incredibly personal, right? As we've looked at the trajectory of technology over the long arc of time, technology gets more and more personal. As technology gets more deeply interwoven into our lives, the founders who are thinking about making technology more personal and how the things they're inventing fit into and support humanity have a real advantage.

But how does a 21-year-old kid decide—you even said it in the book—“I want to build a company at the intersection of technology and liberal arts”? What was happening that made you interested in doing that?

Part of it was my background growing up. I went to school in Santa Monica, here, at a school called Crossroads. The full name for Crossroads is actually Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences, so it really is the intersection of science and art. A lot of what the school is focused on is developing empathy and building empathy. They have this thing called Council, for example, where you sit with about 12 other students, speak from the heart, and take turns expressing yourself.

The school is really oriented around how you build strong relationships and build empathy with other people. So, literally, I grew up at a school that was so focused on the intersection of art and science, but then also wrapped all of it in a commitment to humanity, to understanding one another, to building relationships, and to giving back. The school is very anchored in community service. Three of our kids go there now, which is fun. Some of the teachers are still there.

I think a lot of it came from my upbringing and that being a real focus. Then, as I got a bit older and got into things like graphic design and built my own computer, I was always working at that intersection of art and technology.

Yeah. I think the perception of you is that you're this cool designer, but you actually self-described as a nerd growing up.

My wife and I always joke, “It's cool to be uncool.” I definitely don't think of myself as cool. My background really was in a computer lab, and that's one of the things that also inspired a lot of the work that we do.

As I reflect on growing up, one of my frustrations or disappointments with the way that computers have been built over time is that they actually pulled us away from one another. During lunch, rather than being in the recess yard running around with my friends, I was so inspired by what computers could do and so obsessed with computers that I was in the computer lab all day long.

Computers, whether it was the mainframe or the desktop, have pulled us away from one another and away from society, brought us indoors, and brought us into this very single-player experience. A lot of what I've thought about and what has inspired me is how we take all these extraordinary benefits that computing brings to the world but actually use them to support our connections with one another and our connections to the world.

Can we build a computer that brings us outside, that we use together with friends? One of the side effects of my love of technology growing up was that it pulled me away from more social relationships, or from just running around and playing on the schoolyard.

So, wait, you had that philosophy even back then, when you were in your 20s?

Yeah. That's a lot of what inspired how we thought about the evolution of Snapchat. Even basic things like opening into the camera: It opens into your experience of the world, right? Not a feed of content from other people, not a messaging feed alerting you to what other people are sending you. It literally opens into your experience.

From the very beginning, we've thought about how we ground your experience of computing in what is right in front of you in the present moment and inspire you to create from that.

Why do you think the way computing worked before would just isolate you? Essentially, you're staring at a screen and getting materials pushed to you.

I think the early versions of computers, given their physical and technological constraints, were isolating. Whether it was a mainframe—you had to go to a building to use the computer, right?

Yeah.

Or, if it was a desktop, you had to keep it plugged into the wall. I think those physical constraints pulled you out of whatever environment you wanted to be in. The laptop and mobile phones are representative of this continuum of computing getting more personal. But I think today people feel like... I think they're spending seven or eight hours on average staring at screens, they feel like screens are pulling them out of the moment or away from friends. Or when they're at the dinner table, they're looking at a phone instead of connecting with one another. And so, to me, there's this big question of how do we get all these amazing benefits of computing, but in a way that actually connect us with one another, connect us to the outdoors, connect us to the world? And that's so much of what we're working on.

If you were an alien and you came to Earth…

I remember walking to pick up my daughter from school. You could either sit in the car line, right, or you could get out and pick them up. This was many years ago. I thought, “I'm going to walk,” and I passed by 30 cars. Every single person in the line waiting to pick up their kid was staring at their phone.

That's an addiction. That is a crazy thing. I was walking on the beach here the other day, and this lady almost ran into me. This is a beautiful freaking beach, and she almost ran into me because she was looking at her phone. I was like, “There's mountains and the Pacific Ocean here. What are you doing?” That's a crazy thing to do.

Is there anything else from Edwin Land that inspired you or that you think you used either in the beginning of Snap or now?

Before we jump into Edwin, 2 things you said—

Yeah.

—just really inspired me. The first was school drop-off. Our kids insist that I walk them in every day. So, I'm used to doing the long walk in—

Yeah.

—while everyone's in the carpool line. But I think, to your point, what's fun about that is you get to connect with everyone and say hi to other parents and teachers—

Yeah.

—and, as I mentioned, some of the teachers actually taught me when I was there.

Yeah.

But the second thing you said, which is so funny, is that my daydreaming right now, especially as we think about glasses and the future of computing, is really: What if aliens are watching Earth right now, and they're terrified that smartphones have taken over humanity? That we're spending all day long caring for these things, plugging them in, tending to them, and orienting our lives around these little screens?

What would aliens do? Part of my imagination has been: What if aliens are sending Specs—these glasses—to save people from lives that have become so oriented around screens? It's funny you mention that. I love thinking about the alien perspective of humanity right now.

For Edwin Land, there are a couple of other things that really stood out to me. One, he was a statesman, right? Behind the scenes, people really relied on his advice, and he gave it freely. He was a big supporter of the U.S. government and was very thoughtful behind the scenes in providing advice to the U.S. government, including technological advice.

I like that he had a commitment beyond just his customers and creativity and those sorts of things. He really wanted to participate in building a better world and took that seriously. If you look at a lot of the investments he made around his laboratories and innovation, he was famous—and back then this was quite unique—for uplifting women in those research roles.

I think he was a real champion of talent. He saw talent very clearly. At a time when people weren't as focused on that or investing as much in it, he was really focused on uplifting the best possible talent, regardless of people's backgrounds.

I was just on stage at an event with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. When I looked over to my right, I noticed that on the sleeve of Eric's jacket it said, "We win when our customers win." Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast, and the way that Ramp helps their customers win is by helping you save time, save money, and grow revenue. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%. The median company running on Ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So, when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only all-in-one platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top CEOs and founders that I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp, and you should too. Go to ramp.com today to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com.

We're both in LA. We both avoid San Francisco. We were talking about the people I admire the most, like Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was trying to create technology that enhanced humanity. Some of these weirdos in San Francisco are creating technology to eliminate humanity. Why is it so important for you to build technology that actually enhances humanity?

Well, I think fundamentally my source of inspiration is humanity. I'm inspired by other people. I'm inspired by the extraordinary world that humans have created. I'm inspired by the relationships between people and my relationships with other people. So much of what motivates and animates what I like to do is about making people's lives better and solving their problems.

We all get to choose what we do when we get up in the morning. That's what I like to do and what I want to contribute to the world. The challenging thing, I think, is that sometimes when you're working on new technology, it's so exciting and inspiring that you can lose focus on its impact on people.

I think we try to start with people and really listen to people and what they respond to, and how they're feeling about the products they're using. That was the core inspiration of Stories, right? People were saying, "Why is my social media feed in reverse chronological order? Why is it permanent? Why am I feeling judged all the time by how many likes or comments I have?"

That made us realize that the way people have told stories forever is in chronological order. They're not permanently saved forever and publicly judged and liked and that sort of thing. So, it was very easy for us to develop a product where all the images and videos were in chronological order. They were deleted after 24 hours. You could start your day fresh the next day.

They didn't have these likes and comments, which opened up this whole new world of self-expression, right? Because instead of just trying to post what would look pretty, popular, or perfect, people were sharing this whole range of human emotion. So much of what we do and what we're inspired by is the way people feel, what they share with us, and really this desire to help people build stronger relationships with one another.

I read this book about you, the one I did the episode on 8 years ago. I think it's *How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars* or something. There's a quote from you in the book where you're like, "Whoever invented the internet, why did they decide to make everything permanent?"

It's completely opposite. This conversation we're recording happens to be recorded, but the conversation we just had earlier wasn't recorded. It was just a moment in time. We'll have memories of it and different interpretations of it, but then we just move on to the next.

I think that's a really good example of the way technology ends up shaping human behavior. If we're not thoughtful enough about the technology we're building, it can have unintended consequences.

In this case, one of the reasons why everything was saved forever is because disk-based hard drives were expensive to write over. It was actually more expensive to go back and write over something to delete it than it was to just leave it there and write over it again sometime in the future when you wanted to save something new.

No one was thinking about how to erase things because it was much easier to leave them there and maybe write over them when you had something new to save. A lot of the early work we did with Snapchat was asking how we could be certain that everything was deleted and how we could make sure that everything was being written over, because that wasn't a consideration for a really long time.

So, in a very Edwin Landian way, you seem to observe what everybody's doing, and you have this natural inclination to go your own path. But you had it at the very beginning. How old were you when you started Picaboo, which turns into Snapchat?

I was probably 20.

Where did this desire to do something different come from?

My dad was always pushing me to get a job when I was younger. If I was ever around the house, he'd be like, "What are you doing here? Get a job," right?

So, I interned at Red Bull, for example. I interned at Abraxis BioScience. This was back in the day when we were racking GPUs to do early-stage drug discovery. That was my first experience with GPUs when I was in high school.

Then I had a couple of other really cool internships, but my first more serious job was working at Intuit on this service called TextWeb, which was basically designed to help people with touch-tone mobile phones build little micro-websites and access them, primarily in India at the time.

I had learned all these really interesting things about business during these internships, but fundamentally, I didn't really want to have a boss. I didn't see how possible it was to build something amazing until TextWeb. I think there were 3 of us on the team. I did the least on the team. But the 3 or 4 of us on the team were actually able to build and launch a service in India.

I was like, "Wow, it's actually a lot easier than I thought to build things and to create things that can reach millions of people." That really inspired me. Simultaneously, I had lived across the hall from Bobby, who I ended up starting Picaboo and Snapchat with. He had a job at the time too, and we both just loved building things.

So, we started working on this thing called Future Freshman, which was designed to help people get into college. It was a total failure, but we loved working together.

This is the important part. Can you say why it failed? I think you took an idea from there for your next business.

Yeah. I mean, there were a number of reasons why it failed. First of all, we really focused on building the perfect product for way too long before we got feedback. We worked for 18 months to build this perfect, full-featured product, which was in direct contravention to how I was always taught to build things: build a prototype, build an MVP, get it in front of people, and learn as quickly as possible.

We had spent all this time building this perfect piece of software, and we hadn't thought enough about distribution. While we'd built this great piece of software, our competitor at the time, called Naviance, which I think still today is probably the leader in this college application software world, had secured distribution through all the different college counselors.

What piece of software are you going to choose to help your kid get into college: the one recommended by the college counselors or the one from 2 kids at Stanford? I think it's a pretty easy choice. So, we saw very early that we had no distribution advantage.

Even if we loved our software, we saw that people weren't going to use it because we didn't really have a scalable way to get it in people's hands. Around that time, when we saw the emergence of the App Store on the iPhone, it was very clear that that was a distribution channel that we could really use and benefit from.

But we also needed to build things that we could build quickly, things that we were really going to use together with our friends, so that we could be the first early customers. Ultimately, Picaboo and Snapchat represented that.

Yeah, because in the book you talked about it: "We built a product; no one used it."

It's tough when no one uses it.

Yeah.

Except my mom.

Move on to the next thing. So, Picaboo, which obviously turned into Snapchat: was there anything in between those two?

There were a couple of other failed experiments, I would say, in between those. We were playing around with ideas for more private groups and social sharing and things like that, but nothing that really pushed through.

But it seemed like it was a direct counter to the existing social networks at the time.

Yeah. The problem that we were experiencing was that the way that everyone was socializing at the time on Facebook—and I think Instagram was just getting started at the time—but the way that everyone was socializing on Facebook was like a giant popularity contest, so it wasn't fun.

Everyone was competing for how many friends they had and how many likes they had. Everything was about pretty photos. In college, we wanted to have fun with our friends.

But the alternatives at the time, with text messaging, for example, were so clunky. People forget that sending an image via text message back then took 1 minute, 2 minutes to send an MMS. It was crazy.

Part of the core invention of Snapchat was actually just making it really fast to send images, which made a huge difference in people's ability to use images to communicate.

Because back then, images were for documenting things. They were for saving memories forever, right? And the reason why photography has exploded—and I think there are more selfies taken on Snapchat than on iPhone in total, which is a crazy stat—is because people are using images to communicate.

And so, in inventing Snapchat in response to this documentary culture around photography and this feeling of public pressure about the way that people were expressing themselves and communicating online, Snapchat, especially because the camera was on the smartphone, really transformed the way that people communicate by allowing them to communicate with images.

So, did you think you were building a messaging app or a social network?

I mean, it's a messaging service.

But even back then?

Yeah.

You thought about it as a messaging app.

Yeah. I mean, it only had messaging for the longest time, until we introduced Stories. It was only a messaging service.

Stories has got to be one of the best inventions ever in terms of the apps that we use. I mean, now, obviously, it's on every single app. You were the first one to come up with that. I think there's Stories on LinkedIn and Pinterest or some shit now. They're just in places they shouldn't be—they're there.

Going back to the early days of the smartphone, if you remember, Apple was really talking about, “Hey, when you're going to watch video on your iPhone, you're going to turn the phone sideways and watch horizontal video.” In the first several years of Snapchat, almost all video online was horizontal video in the feed.

And so, when we came out with vertical video, we said, “No, we think everyone's going to watch video the same way they hold their phone all day long—vertically.”

Where people were like, “What?”

Mm-hmm. We spent a ton of money back then, without AI, just helping advertisers recut their video to make it vertical. We had to convince them by showing them that the completion rate was 9 times higher when they used vertical video instead of these little postage-stamp-sized horizontal videos.

But for us, it was just obvious, right? People were going to want to watch video the same way they hold their phone. They don't want to turn their phone to watch video.

But do you see what I keep trying to get to? This is not normal, though. You're very comfortable. I'm trying to figure out—because the whole point of me having these conversations, this entire show, is just: Who am I intensely interested in talking to? There's something interesting I still don't understand. Where the hell did this confidence in your own judgment and disregard for the need to conform come from? Because it's obviously still there today.

Let me give you some background. I remember the first version of Spectacles—the ones you bought in a vending machine. I bought them. I wanted them so badly, and you were out of stock. I bought the ugly f***ing blue color. I did not want bright blue f***ing glasses. I'm a grown-ass man. But I was like, “This is so weird. This is so interesting.” You were 10 years ahead of everybody else. Where the hell does that come from?

I'm not sure exactly. I think a lot of this stuff just really appears obvious to me and to us, right? It was obvious to me that, if you looked at the evolution of computing, holding this tiny little screen in your hands was not the future of computers. It makes absolutely no sense, especially for humans that want to live and work hands-free, right? They want to be able to see one another and interact with the world.

And so, I think things like that just seem so obvious. We're fortunate to be able to invest consistently behind that vision, because I think the hard part is not necessarily seeing what the future could look like. A lot of people have different visions for the future. I think the thing that's been maybe different about Snap or Snapchat is our determination and consistency in pursuing that vision.

I mean, with Stories, the first 6 months of Stories, no one used it. I remember sitting in a board meeting, and we were like, “We think Stories is going to be a big thing. We think this is the future of how people are going to want to share on internet services, on Snapchat.” And the board was like, “Well, no one's using it.”

And we're like, “Okay, but it's new, so it's going to take time. Let's give people time to discover it, to learn about the feature, et cetera.” And then, maybe by the next board meeting or the one after that, it was growing super rapidly.

So, I think the hard part is not necessarily having the vision for the future, and oftentimes it just seems very obvious. The hard part is delivering it, right? Getting there.

Were you disagreeable when you were a kid?

I think so, probably.

If I asked the people you work with, “Is Evan disagreeable?” would they say yes?

Strong opinions, loosely held. No, I think I've always felt comfortable seeing something differently or advocating for something different.

Would people that work with you describe you as uncompromising?

I think so, yeah.

Okay. There's a Steve Jobs element.

Yeah, but at the same time, we've tried to build a really different culture. You've mentioned the Walter Isaacson book. That book broke my heart, right? Because I think that book essentially called Steve a bad father, which I thought was not only unfair, but it also sort of made the case that Steve believed you could only achieve these sorts of things if you were uncompromising, but uncompromising with a taste of being mean, essentially.

Mm-hmm.

And for me, watching Steve and seeing how people spoke about him, there are plenty of stories of folks who felt really close to Steve and felt really inspired by Steve, and also stories of people who felt like Steve was mean, right?

My big question to our team was: Could we achieve something really extraordinary? Could we build a culture that was incredibly creative but, at the same time, was kind? So, with our 3 values, it's kind, smart, creative. And kind is the first one for a reason.

What we really wanted to do was create a culture that's uncompromising but, at the same time, very kind and supportive, because we think that is the best and most fertile ground for creativity. If people feel afraid, it's very, very hard to be creative. Fear is almost the opposite of creativity.

Did you ever read Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar, his autobiography called Creativity, Inc.?

No, I always wanted to. I haven't.

Okay. That's another book. I just gave you one book; I'll give you another one. Ed's actually doing the show, and I can't wait to talk to him.

Cool. Yeah.

Because he worked for Steve Jobs—or worked with Steve Jobs—longer, more consecutive years than anybody else. I think they worked together for 24 years.

I would just buy the book today and skip to the end. There's a 20-page afterword called “The Steve We Knew,” and his whole point, after the Isaacson book came out, was, “That's not the Steve I knew.”

His point was that earlier in his career, there were a lot of these stories. Yes, he was like that, but he learned and evolved in how to be a better leader. So, in that 20-page afterword—

Mm.

Ed is telling the story of how—

Mm.

—he evolved over time. F***ing 45-year-old Steve Jobs, of course, is not going to be the same as 21-year-old Steve Jobs. So, I think that's a very important point to make.

How do you reconcile that, though? Because there's a lot of people that are famous for this, like Elon. I just heard somebody telling me a story—Michael Moritz from Sequoia said the same thing. Camaraderie is dangerous, and kindness is dangerous for your teammates because you can't deliver honest feedback and tell them if their work isn't up to par or whatever. How do you balance that? Be kind but also honest if the quality of the work isn't there?

Well, I think there's a big difference between kind and nice.

Okay. Explain.

Huge difference. When you're being kind, it means you really want the best for somebody, right? And sometimes that means a tough conversation. Sometimes this means saying, “We're just not there yet on this project we're working on,” or, “Hey, the way that you delivered that really isn't working,” or whatever it is.

Nice is about making people feel good, right? Kind is about wanting the best for them. And so, I think for us, our culture is oriented around kindness, which is a much deeper expression of care for somebody else and involves tough conversations.

One of the great things about having a best friend or a partner is that they're honest with you about your shortcomings and help you evolve and make you better, and that comes from a place of love, right?

And so, I think kindness, in many ways, is essential because it allows people to hear that feedback. One of the big problems, I think, in a more hostile work environment is that people are more resistant to feedback because they don't hear it coming from that positive place of wanting you to grow and develop.

And I think that expression of kindness for us is one of the things that helps people grow fast, right? Ultimately, at a company like Snap, our goal is just to help people grow as fast as humanly possible, so that we can meet the needs of our customers and evolve our business, et cetera.

Who plays that role for you? Who tells you the truth?

My wife is brutally honest in a very loving way. In a very loving way. And it's super important.

I grew up with—and one of the things I love about being in LA is that a lot of my high school buddies are here, right? I have friends who I've grown up with who've always been real with me, and that's a huge benefit of being here in LA.

When I get to hang out with my friends and talk to them about what I'm going through or what's going on, I can count on them to be honest.

I think of what Charlie Munger said. He says, “Anybody engaged in complex work”—this is a paraphrase of his quote—“anybody engaged in complex work, it’s very useful to find somebody to help organize your thoughts with.” And I think he was really referencing the role he played with Buffett, where Buffett was the main guy and obviously was 100 times richer than Charlie, but Buffett knew that Munger was special, and he let Munger shape his mind.

Do you have anybody like that? High school friends are different. They’re more like peers, or people who have an understanding. You have a very unique lived experience for somebody who’s still in their mid-30s.

Yeah. I think Bobby Murphy, who is my co-founder, has really been that for me. I think we approach the world differently and see the world differently, so I think that’s really valuable. But I would say I rely on our leadership team and, broadly, our company to help me do that.

That’s the fun part about innovating: it’s a dialogue, right? It’s not like issuing commands, like, “Let’s go build this.” It’s like having a real, intense debate and dialogue about what’s best for our customer, what we should do, and what we should prioritize.

So, for me, it would be a real shame if I only got that from—maybe if it was Charlie Munger, I’d feel differently. But for me, what’s so important is to make sure I’m getting that sort of feedback and having that kind of dialogue with lots of members of our team, or mentors as well. That’s hugely valuable.

What does the leadership team look like?

On the Snapchat side, it’s roughly 10 or so people. It’s funny—even in the architecture of our building, we have a circle table for a reason. I really like everyone to sit around a circle and have a dialogue where we’re all talking from an equal position around that table.

It’s that sort of mentality where everyone is expected to contribute. Everyone has an equal seat around the table, and you get that sort of really helpful dialogue.

Are these people who started at Snap and got through the ranks? Are they former founders? The reason I ask you is because one of the most interesting, or surprising, ideas I’ve had so far, having these conversations—the other podcast, the “Founders” podcast that I’m doing—is that there’s not one right way to do things.

I talked to Tobi Lütke, the founder of Shopify, and that conversation blew my mind, the way this guy thinks. He was going through a very difficult time, and he didn’t know what to do. He actually tells a story on the podcast, I think, where he went to the Slack channel that they had for former founders, and he was just like, “I need your help.”

He essentially built, very much like Rockefeller did, a team around him that was just founders. Is that what yours looks like? Is it people that you poach from other companies? What does this look like?

I would say it’s an incredibly diverse set of backgrounds. Some folks are from other companies. Some folks have spent their entire career at Snap, more or less. Some folks around the table are founders who joined Snap.

So, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all model.

I think we’re really fortunate to draw from lots of different backgrounds.

Is there a lot of turnover?

I would say at points in Snap’s history, there has been a lot of turnover. Not currently—knock on wood. But the business changed so quickly, right? There were periods of time when we went from having 100 people to over 1,000 people in 18 months.

We were slow to build what we needed to support that scale of a team. Back then, there weren’t the AI tools that are available today that make a lot of those things easier to operate at that scale and that quickly.

But there are periods when the company has just changed a lot, and it’s required a different skill set. During those periods of intense change, we have seen turnover—sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional—because folks may be misaligned with where we’re trying to take the company.

The reason I asked is because I think conversations like these, like the other “Founders” podcast that I’m doing, are important for entrepreneurs to realize that there’s not one right way to do things.

Tobi told me, “There are probably 100 right answers here. You’ve got to do the one that’s best for you.” So, I’m just curious: do you have a philosophy on turning over the top people on the team?

If you look at Larry Ellison and read biographies of him, he thought the fact that he kept the core product team at Oracle together for multiple decades was a huge advantage. The person he mentors—if you ask Elon who he admires, he says Larry Ellison. He’s like, “I want fresh blood,” I think is the term, over and over again. Do you have an opinion here?

I think it’s different in different parts of the organization. If you look at the core product and design team, that’s a very small team. I think it’s currently 9 people. It usually fluctuates between 8 and 12 people at any given time.

Many of the folks on that team have been at the company for an incredibly long period of time, and they usually join out of school—right out of college. We’ve had some interns, but no one joined right out of high school.

We spend a huge amount of time investing in their growth and building things together, and so I think it’s really important to have that longevity because those are folks who really understand how we build products at Snap. That’s something that I think really has to be learned. I haven’t found anyone who’s just been able to enter Snap and immediately understand it.

Certainly, folks can contribute right away, but it takes time to learn what makes Snap.

Say more about that. That’s interesting. Why does it take so long?

Because ultimately, I think the way that we build products at Snapchat is just fundamentally different than anywhere else in the world. I’ve yet to see someone come into Snapchat with all the skills and all the understanding necessary to really deliver value in that role.

The closest we come are probably folks out of art school, because they’re used to such a rapid iteration process and are used to making things in extremely high volume. They’re a good fit for the design culture at Snap, which is really about very rapid idea generation and creation.

Every week, I’m with our design team for several hours, and we’re just looking at new work—new work every week, hundreds of ideas, hundreds of concepts, iteration, et cetera. We’re really working through a critique process together as a group.

I think the art school folks adapt the easiest to that culture because they’re used to such a rapid velocity of work. But at the same time, we’re really trying to overlay that deep empathy for people—that deep connection with how our community feels and what they’re looking for.

We’re also trying to cultivate a very positive and fun environment around that. We’re laughing half the time in these design meetings and playing around with ideas. I think creativity can really thrive in that environment of levity and fun.

That combination, and that velocity of creativity and product development, is something that people typically have to adapt to when they come to Snapchat.

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If I was to sit in on one of these design meetings—you said there are 9 to 12 people, and you—what would I see?

You would just be looking at a ton of work. We would be talking through a huge volume of ideas across the service, or maybe even ideas for new services, and that sort of thing, for a couple of hours.

These last a couple of hours?

Yeah.

You’re going over—when you say “volume,” like hundreds of ideas?

Yeah, easily.

In a few hours?

Yeah.

And are you leading this discussion?

Yeah, but we’re all contributing and batting stuff around. Laughing and iterating.

Why is the volume part so important?

Because the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. It is critical. The most toxic thing you can have is people attached to an idea instead of constantly thinking about it.

Ideas are free, right? There should be a zillion of them. If we can create that culture where there’s just an endless flow of ideas, you’re very lucky. You’re much more likely to get lucky by finding good ones.

So, how many of these do users of Snap ever see?

A tiny, tiny fraction.

I mean, less than 1%, probably. Maybe 1%.

And what's the process? How soon from when an idea comes up in the meeting to you liking it to it getting in front of one of your users?

Well, now that's happening incredibly quickly, because designers can ship code with all these new AI tools. So the whole world of design is changing, I think, very rapidly. Now many of our designers are empowered. If they've got something and we think it's cool, let's get it in the app and test it immediately. So I think design to code is happening way faster than ever before.

There's an intense design culture at Snap. There always has been.

Do you describe yourself as a designer?

Yeah, I think. I mean, that's my background.

Yeah. And that's what you described when you started, right? And so, talk a little bit about what you think AI will do to a company like yours, where it seems to be a design-first culture.

I think AI is probably the best thing that's ever happened to Snapchat, which is great. I think the reason why is because we've always had a ton of ideas and a deep connection with our community and our customers. But we've always had very limited resources, and we're up against monopolistic companies. And so we've essentially been engaged in trench warfare with monopolies for 15 years, right?

I think what's so funny is you look at the last 15 years, we learned very, very early on that there's no moat in software, which was an incredibly powerful lesson, right? All of our ideas, the things that we invent, people just try to copy right away, and it's easy to do that with software. But what's fascinating about the world today is that it has never been easier, right? Almost instantly, you can copy nearly any piece of software.

And so, because we learned that lesson very early on, we've evolved our business to really focus on the things that are hard to copy, right? A network-effects business of people communicating with one another. These platforms, like our Augmented Reality platform or our content ecosystem, are not just pieces of software that you can easily copy, but ecosystems of people communicating with one another, creators making content that people are watching, or people building Augmented Reality experiences. All of those sorts of things are very hard to copy.

So over the last 15 years, we've really honed our business perspective for this moment, right? Because we saw how easy it was to copy software. So in terms of our business and the way it meets our customers, I think we are well-positioned for the huge transformation that's happening.

At the same time, our core business is software development. So we're able to get a lot of the benefits of the extraordinary transformation in software development without the same risk to our core business, because we build network effects over time and thought about how to position ourselves for this moment.

AI is changing every single team at Snap. It's changing the way that everything gets done at Snap. And because our core business is software development, in the last 3 months, there's been a profound change. But to imagine 18 months from now, the way that Snap operates will be completely different from the way it operated last year.

There are so many founders, and almost none of them are saying this on the record, but they tell me, “I should not be running my company anymore. I'm trying to figure out how to build AI to run my company.” They are trying to literally replace themselves. They're like, “It's just going to be so much better than I am at doing this. It should be doing this. I should not be doing this.”

I think that's certainly true in terms of the operational lift, but at the same time, right, the vision, creativity, and connection to your customer have never been more important. And so I think, if anything, it's going to enable founders to run teams that are much more operationally effective and require less of their time to operate the business, and instead, hopefully, pivot more time toward that sort of creativity and ideation and meeting customers where they're at.

What's one of the most surprising ways that AI has changed how Snap operates internally?

I don't necessarily think this is a surprise, per se. But I do think—and I feel like this is old news because everyone in the world has been saying it—the change in how software is written since the beginning of this year is profound.

Our core business is writing software. And now that these models are good enough to write more and more complex pieces of software on their own, the job of a software engineer at Snap is profoundly and forever changed, right? And I think the more that we can embrace that, make that easier, and teach people how to do that really effectively, it's just transformational for our core business.

Because, as I mentioned, we have been up against companies who don't have new ideas but have infinite resources, right? And we've got lots of new ideas, but very limited resources. And that's been a real challenge. And so it's been hard to see a path forward for Snap up against these giants without AI tools.

And now with AI tools, you're like, “Wow, we could basically have an infinite number of engineering resources?” That's a pretty profound change for Snap. I guess I would say the rate at which that has happened has surprised me.

You said something very interesting. You said you realized a long time ago that software has no moat. The experience that taught you that lesson—was it Stories?

No, the first big wake-up call was when Facebook, at the time, carbon-copied Snapchat to make Poke. Do you remember this?

Yes.

And Mark Zuckerberg recorded himself saying the word “Poke” as the notification sound. He was so excited about this. And we were like, “Wow. Okay, this is a really good lesson for us.” It ended up being super helpful to Snapchat.

In the book, you call it “the greatest Christmas present—

Ever.

—you ever received.”

The nervousness going into that holiday period, right? I mean, they literally put “Download Poke” at the top of every single Facebook app, right? And it was just a clone of Snapchat. And then on Christmas Day, seeing Snapchat at number 1 in the App Store in that context was huge, huge for us.

But that was the first time we realized, okay, we're going to have to be really smart about how we build this business and invest in the things that are hard to copy.

Do you remember how old you were when this was happening?

When would that have been? That would've been 2012, 2013, so 22, probably. Yeah. Super young.

Super young to take on—That had to be terrifying.

I mean, to be living in my dad's house with 3 of my buddies from college, and this huge company set their sights on us—I mean, it was definitely a formative experience, I would say.

So then, realizing software has no moat—is that direct insight what leads to the bizarre decision, which I think is correct in hindsight, for what people consider a social network app or a messaging app to get into hardware and make glasses? Those 2 things are related?

Absolutely. And I think that, even before that, there was a real focus on messaging. So the other key foundational insight of Snapchat that really changed the company was that, at that time, if you recall, people were very focused on a very simplistic model of network effects. Their very simplistic model was basically, the more nodes you have in the network, the more valuable the network is, right?

And what we realized was that wasn't really true if you weren't using those network connections. So actually, what reflects the value of the network is: Are the people that you actually talk to and communicate with, especially the ones you communicate with more frequently, a part of your network? And if they are, then you can accrue the vast majority of the value in that network very, very quickly, without having the same scale or the same size, right?

So what Snapchat showed was that if you just have 1 good friend on Snapchat, they might represent half of your communication, right? Because they're super important in your life. So you don't need 500 friends on Snapchat. You just need your best friend on Snapchat. And that's what helped the service really grow and take on these much larger competitors.

What really prompted the work on glasses in the beginning was the feeling that we were always competing with that lock-screen camera button, right? And so—

What do you mean? Do you know, on the iPhone, there's a lock-screen camera button?

Yeah. Snapchat opens to the camera. Right?

Yeah.

And we always want you to choose to open Snapchat to share a moment with your friends and your family. And you're making a choice between having to unlock your iPhone, go and open Snapchat, and take a Snap, or just using that lock-screen camera button. And that lock-screen camera button is on your phone, and it's in your pocket.

And so when we were trying to reinvent the camera and change how people were using their camera to help them communicate, one of our fundamental questions was: How do we get the camera out of your pocket, off your phone, to make it easier for you to share and express yourself, or communicate your point of view, or communicate what you're doing?

That was really the prompt that led us to explore glasses. Because back in the day, we just made camera glasses. But I think, as part of that journey and as part of starting to work on camera glasses, not only did we realize, first of all, that the market for camera glasses is very small, right? Ultimately, your phone is very good for taking photos.

Even if you're on a jet ski or even if you're rock climbing, people still use their phone to take a photo. So that meant that we had to push way harder and faster toward our full vision for glasses.

When did you learn the market was small? Because you couldn't even keep these things in stock.

I told you I had the big, ugly blue color.

Yeah.

It was a fine color, but you know what I mean.

Yeah, but I think we were shipping hundreds of thousands of units. And I think 100,000 units in hardware is kind of the first threshold of, “Okay, you’ve got a product people are interested in and want to buy.” But even at a couple hundred thousand units, I just didn’t see a path to it being hundreds of millions of units.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, the bar that we set for any product we develop is that it has to be 10 times better than the next-best alternative. And when we looked at how people were using Spectacles at the time, it just wasn’t 10 times better than pulling your phone out of your pocket. Maybe in some use cases it was, if you really wanted to be hands-free or that kind of thing, but it just wasn’t 10 times better than the amazing camera you had on your phone.

And so we really then set out to push as fast as we could toward our true vision for computing.

That was how many years ago, when you started this?

That would’ve been 2016 or 2017, when we were really pressing into the more advanced parts of augmented-reality glasses. And I think, if you look at the step-by-step approach we took, the first generation had 1 camera. The second generation had 2 cameras with depth. The generation after that added a display. The generation after that added an operating system and developer platform.

What’s the generation I used yesterday? That came out in 2024. That’s generation 4 or 5?

4 or 5, yeah.

Okay.

And that was the first time we really offered a developer platform, so that folks could start building and creating all these experiences.

Okay, so can you explain your evolution of glasses? You said basically you don’t think of it as glasses. It’s just another form of computing?

So, to go all the way back, the initial thesis was, let’s get the camera out of your pocket. But at the same time, on the phone, we were so constrained in what we could build. You have this tiny little screen. We’re watching augmented reality just take off on the phone. Hundreds of millions of people every day are using these augmented-reality experiences on this tiny little screen.

Let’s pause real quick there, because this is another, I think, example of what I was trying to figure out about you earlier, and I kind of went crazy.

We still haven’t figured it out.

I know. Well, it might take a few more conversations. You’re talking about all these people using augmented reality. You’re talking about the filters you added, or the lenses and stuff, to Snapchat.

Yeah.

Did you get that idea from another company? Where did that come from? Were you the first one to do it?

We bought a startup called Looksery that was working on those lenses, and then Bobby really pushed the vision of turning that into a platform. Once we turned it into a platform and built these developer tools called Lens Studio so that anyone could build lenses, it just took off.

That’s what got me using Snapchat, because I was a little older than the typical people using it. But did this launch after Stories?

That must have launched after Stories, yeah.

So, how many years into Snap do you think that you added this other feature?

Probably 3 or 4 years, something.

Okay, that’s actually—

5 years.

—way sooner than I thought. Because you’ve been working on Snapchat for how long? 15?

About 15 years, yeah.

Okay.

15 years.

Okay, so go back to what you were saying. Then you found hundreds of thousands or millions of people now using AR?

Hundreds of millions of people—

Hundreds of millions, okay.

—are now using AR every day.

But back then, they’re engaging with AR through this feature, but this is before you did the glasses.

Yeah, sort of concurrent with—

Okay.

—the glasses, and maybe concurrent with the second generation, I want to say, by the time we really had an augmented-reality platform.

The original thesis behind creating lenses was just that a lot of people thought it was weird to take a selfie, right? Tons of folks were taking selfies to express themselves, but a lot of people were like, “Why would I just take a selfie?”

Especially if you’re ugly.

Yeah.

I don’t want to be reminded what I look like. You could put some dog ears on me.

Yeah, yeah. You know, or vomit a rainbow, right? So people had a reason to—

I always covered people in flowers.

Yeah, that’s fun.

That’s fun. On the glasses, especially.

So I think lenses really gave people a reason to express themselves and to share with their friends. But then, after we built out the Lens Studio developer tools and this kind of thing, the platform just exploded.

Now people have made millions of lenses—all sorts of different ways for people to express themselves, not only with selfies, but also lenses that change the world, as you experienced. And we just found that people were incredibly constrained by this tiny little smartphone screen and needing to use their thumbs to interact with augmented reality.

It was so clear that we needed to embed it in the world for it to be successful, and we were going to need to create the device to do that, because no device even came close to the vision that we had. So we’ve really just pushed over the last decade to make that vision possible, and then later this year, we’re launching the first consumer version, which will be a big step for us.

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You used the word “vision” when we were talking before we started recording. I think this is interesting. You literally see it—see what you want. You said you have a problem designing a product if you can’t see it in your mind. Can you explain more about that?

Yeah. I think, in general, with my life thus far, with the things that we build, I see them very, very clearly even before we’ve built them. I kind of know what I want. I know how I want it to work. And I also know that if I can’t see it, then we’re off track.

So I think really trying to stay true to that feeling, that vision, and that focus is just so important. And that doesn’t mean not being open to other people’s ideas, other people’s creativity, et cetera. But I think I just very, very vividly can see what we’re trying to create.

I’m going to explain or describe an experience that I read about. You tell me if it’s similar to the one that you experienced, when that legendary meeting happened—when Edwin Land was 70 and Steve Jobs was 25. They were in a conference room, sitting across a table from one another, and they talked about how they didn’t really consider themselves inventors.

It’s kind of funny, because Edwin Land had the third-most patents in human history. They said they discovered products by literally looking at an empty table and seeing the final form of what they were doing. Then they reverse-engineered from that, and essentially brought their entire organization along to invent the technology and the product.

Is that a similar experience to what you’re having?

I really, really like that, because I think what they’re describing is technology in service of a product vision. Instead of chasing a technology, you’re being crystal clear about what you’re trying to create and then organizing everyone to invent everything needed to create that product.

So, yes, I guess.

Is that not what you’ve been doing the last decade with the glasses? Because you made a choice. Other people are partnering with existing companies, like Luxottica, which I think is a very fascinating story. I told you before, I did this crazy episode of the Founders podcast—I think it’s Episode 394—on Leonardo Del Vecchio, which was just one of the most fascinating stories. He was an orphan, and he built, to this day, one of the most powerful and dominant companies in his industry.

But you chose not to do that.

There are a lot of reasons why I don’t think that’s right.

Let’s go into them. We don’t have an end here. As much as you can share that. But I’m very interested—

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

—in your philosophy behind the decisions you’re making. That’s what I’m trying to get to.

I think there are a number of challenges. Obviously, I think it’s much more harmful for Luxottica than it is for Meta. I think Meta needed to partner with Luxottica because the Meta brand, I think, is not something that people want to put anywhere near their face.

So I think that Meta really needed it. I think what’s challenging for Luxottica is that they took the most iconic, crazy high-margin product and destroyed the margin, and then associated it with Meta. So I think we’ll see if that pans out over a longer period of time, and if that was the right brand choice for them.

But I can definitely see why Meta needs to camouflage its brand—which I think a lot of people don't resonate with and don't like—with the Ray-Ban brand. But I think people are misreading the dynamic of what's happening when you have Meta Ray-Bans on the shelf next to a regular pair of Ray-Bans, and they're both about the same price, right?

And I love to just walk into a Sunglass Hut or whatever and talk to them: “Hey, what's going on? What's selling? What's not?” It's like, “Well, you can get the Meta Ray-Bans that have a camera for about the same price as the regular Ray-Bans. Why don't you try it out for your upcoming vacation?”

I think that's a smart strategy if you want to move a lot of volume, but I don't know if that builds a durable business over time. And the reason why I don't know if that builds a durable business over time is, if I look at successful hardware companies over a long period of time, we can look at Apple or talk about Tesla, for example.

Early adopter is the wrong term, but they really try to start with premium or even luxury positioning around a very passionate early-adopter group that believes in their vision, right? Think about the Tesla Roadster, right? Or the early iMac or the early iPhone.

They build a brand by starting with those early enthusiasts who believe in the electrification of the world, the transformation of the power grid, and how we're going to move things around. Or, in the case of Apple, a revolution in the personal computer—that everyone's been doing phones wrong, and that having this personal computer in your pocket would be really transformational.

And they really activate that passionate group of enthusiasts. Then, over time, they work with that really passionate group of enthusiasts to grow into the mass market while preserving their premium positioning, which means high gross margins.

Then they take those high gross margins and reinvest in R&D, which widens their lead. And that is the story, I think, of successful hardware companies. I think it's very, very hard to start with a super-broad-based, low-margin consumer product and try to work your way into premium positioning.

So, I think if you look at Spectacles and what we've tried to do—even your early experiences with the brand—we're innovative and different, and oriented around a group of enthusiasts and early adopters who want to see the world differently and participate in the cutting edge of technology.

And I think if we're able to build the brand that way and build our own brand around that, that will allow us to sustain our margins over time, which will allow us to reinvest, which ultimately will give us a big competitive advantage.

I want to go back to wanting to control most of the process of actually building your own hardware. You said something—even the marketing, though. I've got to give you credit for the marketing you guys were doing back in the day for the first Spectacles.

Mm-hmm.

There wasn't a store you could just walk into. It's not the experience you just described. You would airdrop these vending machines. Then I remember there was a website, and I'm not a fucking power user of Snapchat. I was just like, “I want these glasses.”

Yeah.

I would be refreshing the website to figure out, “Oh, okay, here's a new drop,” and you'd have a countdown: “It's dropping.” You wouldn't say where it was. I'm in Miami at the time, and it's like, “All right, it's dropping in Venice.” I'm like, “Oh, goddamn it.”

Then the way I got them was, you did a drop in New York, and a friend of mine—I called him, and he went and stood in line and got them for me. It was a really unique and fun experience.

I was just talking to Brian Armstrong, the founder of Coinbase, about this. He was like, “Everybody has shareholder letters. Everybody has to write a shareholder letter. Everybody has to do these analyst calls.” He's trying to find a way to make them fun and kind of internet-native, and there are forms of marketing. They're not just analysts who are reading these things.

If you think about them and think about doing creative marketing, you could just drastically increase the number of people who are getting information about your company. Why is it so important to you, though, to control so much of the hardware that you're making?

Control of the hardware is necessary to deliver an extraordinary customer experience in this space, and the intersection between the hardware and the software to deliver that customer experience is essential.

So, as we look at how other people are approaching this space, trying to cobble together components from a ton of different manufacturers and get them all to work really well in a super-small, lightweight form factor that's incredibly performant is just really, really hard to do.

For us, if we want to really deliver this cutting-edge computing experience, doing that requires us to have a very high degree of control over the areas where we can really differentiate.

For example, the display components are an area where we really differentiate. We have an incredibly performant waveguide, where the glass is part of the lens—the lens of the glasses, basically. And we've developed our own projector that's incredibly small and beams light into this waveguide.

That's a big strategic advantage for us because the display components draw a lot of power, right? They're really important in terms of having that immersion and being able to have a very wide field of view.

When you're using the glasses, you can interact with the world. And, of course, the resolution and the sharpness are the things that really, really matter.

For us, in order to push those boundaries, there's no one who comes close to our ability to deliver on that display experience. By doing it ourselves, I think we've created a competitive advantage that will show up in the product that consumers will experience.

Say more about that line where you said it's important to control the parts that you can differentiate on.

Essentially, you're going to burn yourself out if you try to control everything.

Mm-hmm.

Right? So, it's really important to identify very early on where the strategic points are where you can create a totally unique customer experience by really investing and doing things differently.

For us, we've really thoughtfully picked out where we can play and do something that's really hard, and do it differently, in a way that creates a sustained competitive advantage because it delivers such an awesome customer experience.

The display components are one. I can talk about that because it's public, but later this year, people will see a lot of these areas where we've invested and fundamentally invented new ways of doing things that I think consumers are going to love.

Another thing that Edwin Land—again, people should study Edwin Land. They should study all of history's greatest entrepreneurs, because you realize they come up with ideas, too.

We were talking earlier about how he realized that if he didn't have control, because he wanted to be an inventor, not an entrepreneur, he had to learn to be an entrepreneur just so he could actually make money on his inventions. Therefore, he only wanted to make money so he could invent more things. He was not after just having piles of money.

Anytime he tried to outsource, first, he let other companies get in between him and the end consumer, which he fixed when he did Polaroid and the cameras. But when it came to manufacturing, he owned it. The factories were in Massachusetts, for God's sake.

He was manufacturing high-end technology in America, and his whole point was that he didn't want to be a manufacturer, but he needed to control those things not only to get the cost down but also to be able to influence the end unit of the product.

Yeah, people, I think, would be stunned to learn that we manufacture core components in the US and the UK in our own facilities, which allows us to do this really advanced R&D that pushes the boundaries of what's possible with these components.

Yeah, it's the same exact idea. So, how are you going to distribute them?

I can't share all of our secrets.

That's fine.

But we can regroup after the launch and deep dive into all of it.

Okay, but I have a sense that you want to control that, too.

I think it's important in terms of the customer experience.

What a surprise.

All right. You described this—you wrote about this, I think, in your annual letter recently—and I forgot the term. You're basically positioning Snap not as a little brother, but you described it as essentially having the scale of some of these big players without having the trillion-dollar market cap, right?

And I think at least once in this conversation, you described that you've been engaged in trench warfare. Why do you call it trench warfare, and tell us some stories about this?

Yeah. I mean, I think the term I used in my letter was the middle child, right?

That's what it is.

Because we're so much bigger than smaller competitors like Reddit or Pinterest or something like that, right? But we don't have the—

Did you just call Reddit small?

We're almost a billion folks using our service. If you look at our daily active users, it's about half a billion folks.

So, there's half a billion people using Snap every day?

About half a billion every day, yeah.

And a billion overall?

Almost a billion globally.

How many other services are that size?

Maybe 10, maybe.

Okay.

7 to 10, depending on whether you include China.

No, we don't. America, baby.

All right, so wait. You're not the—I keep saying little brother. You're the middle child. Say more about that.

We're the middle child. I think what's interesting about that is—and it's funny, we've got 4 kids at home, right?—part of it was based on my own experience with our kids, where a lot of attention is paid to the eldest child, right?

And they've gotten so much bigger, and they've grown up—our 15-year-old.

And then the baby is growing so fast; it’s so exciting. Somewhere in the middle—and hopefully this isn’t the case in our house—there’s this period where you’re changing and evolving, and people don’t know what you’re becoming, right? Maybe in the case of Snap, people are trying to understand: What is this glasses thing they’ve been doing for 12 years that they’re about to launch to the world? What is the role?

Snapchat’s core business is evolving. We’re growing this huge direct-revenue business that’s growing really, really rapidly, and we’re diversifying our advertising business with small and medium customers. So, we’re in this period of very intense change, I think, for Snapchat. As I mentioned, we’re not as big as the giants, and we’re not as small as our smaller competitors.

So, it’s that really interesting moment that I think middle children also maybe experience, where there’s all this change happening and you’re sort of stuck in the middle.

Is this a stressful time for you?

It’s so funny. My wife loves the Oura Ring. She’s obsessed. She markets this thing to everybody, right? She wants to compare scores and all this. So, she finally, years and years later, was like, “I’m going to try the Oura Ring.”

She was shocked to learn that there’s sort of a relaxed and stressed state, and I’m just in the relaxed state all day long. So, I wore it for a week, and it basically said, “I sleep 7 or 8 hours. I’m in the relaxed state all the time.” She was like, “How?” I was like, “What?”

So, I think I really love periods of intense change. I’m inspired by it. I enjoy it. While, yeah, it is stressful to some degree, I think the question is: How do you turn that stress into opportunity, into growth, into change?

But I think what’s really important is for our entire team and our organization to know what a high-stakes moment this is for our business, right? At this moment in time, what will we become? We are in a transitional moment, and that’s super, super exciting. It means every second, every minute counts.

I would say it’s more exciting than stressful, but it’s a really cool moment for our company.

When you write something like that, obviously, is it more aimed at the broader investor community, or is it aimed at internal consumption?

I always wrote them internally, but then they kept leaking—

Yeah.

—and people liked them. So, then I was like, “You know what? We’ll just publish it publicly going forward.”

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I had this great conversation with Michael Dell, who’s just awesome. He’s a great human being. I absolutely love that I get to spend time with him. I can’t believe it. He has that thing where he thinks it’s important—even if you don’t have a crisis—to induce one, to create one.

Yeah.

He’s reimagined his company. I mean, have you spent any time with him?

I have, yeah.

Okay, yeah. So, if I was you, I’d be picking his brain. I’m friends with his son, Zach, and everybody has access to the Bloomberg Terminal—

Mm-hmm.

—and Zach’s like, “I got the Dell terminal.” It’s just like, I could type in any question and get some crazy response from this—essentially, he’s been a world-class entrepreneur for 4 decades. So, “I have an issue with supply chain.” Well, guess what? Dell’s seen everything about supply chains and can be very helpful.

But his whole point was, he knew that his company was at an inflection point a few years ago, and he stood up and gave this, I guess, this talk. I think it was a talk, and he might have written it down, but it was just like: There’s a company out there that is going to be faster than us, have better products, have cheap products, and essentially, they’re going to come for us. He’s like, “That company’s us.”

“We are going to reinvent. We’re going to figure out what our weakness is. Instead of waiting around to be somebody else’s meal, we’re going to figure out how to reinvent our company.” On the podcast—the episode we did together—he was just like, “If you don’t have a crisis, you need to invent one.”

I would say yes, with the caveat that I don’t want our team to always feel like they’re in crisis mode. I think I always try to be really cognizant of where the team is at, when we should sprint and run hard, and when we actually need to take a step back and adjust.

So, I think staying in touch, especially at our size—right? We’re like 5,000-ish people—you can really stay in touch with the feeling of the organization and know when to really, really push, and when it’s better to create a little more space for ideation or experimentation.

So, 5,000 people serving a billion users. You mentioned you have a bunch of different revenue lines, or ones that are growing. Tell me about the ones that are new.

One of the new ones is our subscription business, which is growing really, really rapidly, called Snapchat+. And I think it’s a really good fit for Snap’s culture. We adopted the advertising model very early on. I think it’s well understood. It’s a huge opportunity, and we have a ton of engagement on Snapchat.

Advertising is a big opportunity for us and allows us to offer our product for free, which is great. But I think the heart of Snapchat and our company is about building stuff that people love and that they want. We were getting so many requests for all sorts of new and different features from the most passionate members of our community.

We could never really find time to resource and invest in them because we were focused on things that everyone would use, not just the most passionate Snapchatters. So, we decided to build Snapchat+, which essentially gives you access to new, fun features on Snapchat. We listened to our community and the things that they want, and we’ll test stuff and release new things for Snapchat+.

For 4 bucks a month, you can join Snapchat+ and get access to all of these new features. That’s now grown to 25 million subscribers, which is ESPN's scale of subscribers, and I think in the last quarter it was growing 60% year over year at a billion—

Don’t make me do public math. Is that a billion-dollar run rate?

We’re doing a billion-dollar run rate, growing 60% year over year.

That’s incredible.

And it’s a really good fit for what we’re great at, which is making new stuff that people love and want to pay for. So, I think culturally, it’s been a great fit for our company.

It kind of ties to what we were talking about in your design meetings earlier, where it’s just like we’re looking at hundreds of—how often are you doing these design meetings, by the way?

Once a week.

Okay. So, every week you’re going through hundreds of new ideas.

Yeah.

Some of which wind up as features for Snapchat+.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Okay. So, that’s perfectly in time. What did you say earlier about what else you’re going to do with that? Do you think you’re going to add to that or do something in the future, if you want to talk about it?

For the subscription business? I mean, we’ve got a zillion ideas in the backlog, so we’re just going to keep shipping new additions and features.

Do you think you’ll eventually increase the price?

Maybe, but I think it’s so—

Or different tiers?

—early right now.

Yeah, we have done tiering. So, one of the things that has been really popular—we released something called Lens+. I think Snapchat, the camera itself, is probably the most used generative-AI camera service in terms of image and video generation, this kind of thing, just because of how many people are using our camera every day.

So, we released a bunch of these generative-AI lenses, and we give a number of uses for free. But then, if folks want to upgrade to Lens+ because they’re loving it and using them all the time, they can do that, and that’s grown nicely for us too.

So, Lens+ is at a slightly higher price tier. And then we have the Platinum plan, or whatever, where you can get rid of ads and unlock more features, and that kind of thing.

What did you change about the advertising business? You said something about how you basically adopted what was there and available and maybe known at the beginning. How has that changed over time?

There have been a couple of huge shifts for us in the past couple of years. The core of our advertising business from the early days really grew around a small number— in the hundreds—of large customers in the United States, really built around a brand business. And it grew very, very quickly throughout the history of the company.

But our advertising mix almost looked like the inverse of a Google or a Meta. Google or Meta get the vast majority of their revenue from small and medium-sized customers, and a small amount of their revenue comes from large customers, especially here in the U.S.

We had the inverse. We had most of our revenue coming from this small group of large customers, and then a very small amount of money coming from small and medium customers. Part of that was because, at the time, many years ago, we didn’t have a really robust lower-funnel advertising business, where people can optimize against events that happen in their app or people making purchases on their website.

And we hadn't really built out a lot of those capabilities, and small and medium customers really care about that. They want to see their return on ad spend right away. So, despite having this enormous scale and all this engagement, the ad offering, especially in the lower funnel, was immature.

So, over the past couple of years, we've built out that entire lower-funnel advertising offering so we can really drive performance for customers, especially small and medium customers. And we've been rapidly growing that small- and medium-customer segment. So, we're doing this really difficult transformation to make our sort of inverted, mostly-large-U.S.-customer advertising business, which was oriented around upper-funnel and brand goals, into one focused mostly on small and medium customers advertising against lower-funnel goals.

That's just been a transformation of every part of our advertising business: the way that we go to market on the sales side, and the engineering and product work that's happening.

Yeah, I'd be curious what that looks like. Because if you're doing the inverse, you have these giant brand deals. I'd have to imagine these giant brands spend a ton of money, right? I'd have to imagine then you have to employ a ton of salespeople, right, in a way that Google and Facebook do not.

Yeah, that's certainly one part of it, for sure.

So, they'd be more profitable, too, because they have a self-service product.

Yeah. And I think large customers rightly want a lot of bespoke service as well. So, our engineering team was spending a huge amount of time building bespoke solutions for really large customers who want to measure things in a specific way, or want a really unique integration or unique offering.

And now our engineering team is spending a huge amount of time serving lower-funnel customers at scale, right? So, rather than doing—

Building a product they need to adapt to.

Yeah, we're building a product that small and medium customers can really easily sign up for and use.

Are you getting rid of the bespoke?

We're doing a lot less bespoke, but we also find that these large customers want to drive lower-funnel outcomes, too. So, a lot of it is teaching our sales folks, who were used to living in this more brand- and upper-funnel-oriented world, to sell into lower-funnel objectives for large customers.

There's actually a weird idea that just came to mind because I just did this episode called “How SpaceX Works.” There's this guy named Max Olson. He still needs permission to publish a book, but essentially, he's like, “Hey, I want to tell this story of the history of SpaceX as it happened, and I'm going to use their internal memos to do so.”

So, he's got access to the first 10 years. I hope SpaceX allows him. I've seen the advance copy that you can't sell yet. It's called SpaceX Foundation. So, he's like, “Well, in the meantime, I'm going to write an essay that tells the story of why this is important.” And so, I read the essay 3 times. This is fucking crazy, so I just did an episode of Founders on it.

And one of the most interesting things I never thought of is that, essentially, the aerospace industry was entirely bespoke. Everything was custom to the customer. And it's just like, well, if you do that, you can't scale.

Gwynne Shotwell was a huge driver behind this. It's like, “We're going to build a basic, good-enough launch system that you adapt to.” And then it took a while to educate them to adapt to it, but once they're adapted, now they're doing—I think most launch providers would do 2 to 4 launches per year, and they do 1 every 2 days.

They did more payload last year than every single other launch provider in China, Russia, America, everywhere else combined. And that one idea is: We can't do bespoke. We have to get this uniform if we're going to scale this, and we can't get to our goals if we don't scale it.

And to take it a step further, they didn't have to deal with all the political pressure that NASA is under to put a certain factory here or a plant in this state. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

I think, just out of the gate, they were able to deliver rockets at 1/10 the cost of NASA or something like that.

Did you intentionally invert it, where you were like, “Google and Facebook are doing it this way, so we're going to try a different way,” and then realized, “Oh, we need to change”? Back then, did you make that decision consciously?

We saw that if we really wanted to grow the ads business to be double-digit billions over time, we needed to have a lower-funnel business with a diversified set of small and medium customers.

But did you hope that wasn't true at the time, at the very beginning?

No. I just think we grew really fast on large-customer brand advertising. They can move dollars very, very rapidly, right? That's one of the benefits. If you're working with a large customer, they can move millions of dollars very quickly. If you have a couple hundred of those customers, you can build a very large advertising business very quickly.

The question is, how do you build a diversified, very, very big one over time?

Okay, so you can get big, but you can't get huge without it. Oh, okay. And you needed to get big. That was almost like stage 1. You had to do it that way.

And I'd say almost all of these platforms' stage 1 looks like that.

Okay.

Right? I mean, even Facebook in the early days—it was display advertising, right? And then over time, they built out way more advanced systems, optimizing against lower-funnel goals.

I'd argue a Reddit or a Pinterest today—I mean, to some degree, Pinterest is building out lower-funnel objectives and this kind of thing—but a lot of it is still large-customer, upper-funnel dollars. So, I'd say almost all ad platforms start with that because you can grow very quickly, and then you use that to invest in building out much more sophisticated systems.

Yeah, and at the beginning, you said you really thought you were building a messaging app, not a social network. You studied the way messaging apps in other countries monetized. I feel like you have a lot of soul, and so you would prefer—I don't know if you could say this—but you would prefer almost if you had an all-subscription business because the incentives are more aligned.

I really love the subscription business. I wish we had done it earlier. I love it. I love the direct connection to our customers. I love that it's directly related to the value that we provide them.

And I think it's been really exciting to see that, unlike some of these other internet services, people are getting a ton of value from Snapchat. So much so, they're willing to pay for it, right? And I think it's also a sign to me that we're building something that's valuable.

I spend a lot of time with the Spotify team—Daniel, Gustav, and Alex, the top 3 people there. And they just have this soul in the game, and they're really trying to build an app. Their whole thing is: When you're done using Spotify, do you feel good?

Mm.

And I'm like, well, I spent an hour listening to music. I feel great. I spent an hour listening to the Founders podcast or any other podcast, and I feel great. Now, they have audiobooks. Do you feel great?

They obviously have somewhat of an ad business, but I think they told me they're the second-most paid subscribers in the world, behind Netflix. And they did that in a relatively short amount of time.

I'm friends with Jimmy Iovine—he was on the show—and he told me some outlandish shit. He's just like, “When Apple bought us, Spotify only had 3 million paid subscribers. I wanted to take a run at them.” And now they're at 250 million.

Wow.

But there is something about it: If you do have this soul, if you are trying to put something good into the world, and it's not just trying to maximize usage on an app that's not good for you, it's just more aligned.

I didn't ask you that before, but I just got the sense that's how you were. Do you have any idea of the size you think it could get to? How many paid subscribers do you have? You said 20—

25 million subs.

When did you start it?

Was it 2 or 3 years ago, something like that?

Still, it's pretty goddamn fast.

Let's see. I'm excited. It's obviously grown quite rapidly, and I think it'd be a big revenue driver for us.

All right, let's go back to the more difficult times in Snapchat's history. I want to know more about this trench warfare. That's a great line that you had.

I think, given that we're up against such large monopolistic competitors, every day is a fight. Every day is about putting 1 foot in front of the other because they just have so much scale.

And I think, for us, creativity has historically been the force multiplier that's allowed us to break through and take ground, right? But I think, as I look toward the future, what makes me so excited—and the reason why I brought that up—is that creativity combined with AI should allow us to move incredibly quickly in this environment and overcome a lot of the resource constraints that we've had historically.

And that's something that's really different about the next decade for Snap.

Do you ever foresee the hardware being a separate business?

It essentially is. So, it's a wholly owned subsidiary today. The brands themselves are adjacent to one another, but they're different brands. In many ways, it's a different customer, although not entirely different.

So, I do think that they'll grow in different ways over time.

Why did you make the decision to start a separate company outside?

The hardware business, at its core, is just so different from the internet service business that we operate with Snapchat, and it even requires a different execution style.

With hardware, you cannot make a mistake, right? The things that we are doing today will show up 2 years from now. And if we made a mistake, it's a huge problem, and it'll cost us another year or whatever to fix it.

I mean, that type of precision and operational rigor is just night and day different from Snapchat, right? Where if we break something today because we're moving quickly, it's fine.

We'll fix it this afternoon, right? And move on. Culturally, they have to be different companies and have different operating styles.

In terms of the brand and where we're trying to take the Specs brand, I think Snapchat has always tried to be fun and whimsical, to make sure that you feel comfortable expressing yourself, right? Snapchat never takes itself too seriously. And while I don't think Specs is going to take itself seriously in a way that's weird or not true to who we are, what we're trying to do is incredibly serious.

We are trying to reinvent the computer and make it more human. We think the way that people have designed computers for the last 50 years is robbing us of who we are and our humanity, and that people are going to want a new type of computer. They want a computer that allows them to use AI and access AI in different ways, that brings them closer together with their friends and the world.

That vision and mission, I think, deserves real focus and dedication. In some ways, while it shares that same root, philosophy, and idea that animates Snapchat, it's approaching it from a very different perspective.

When did you, in your mind, realize that this had to be 2 separate companies?

In a lot of ways, they've operated quite separately, right? They have the same sort of G&A support, but Snap Lab, which was the precursor to Specs Inc., has operated as a relatively independent part of Snap for a long time.

Different location? Separate, not shared office space? Explain the organization.

I'd say nearby. In some cases, it's shared office space. In some cases, definitely not, depending on what we're working on. The leadership team and all that has historically been quite separate.

Did you ever read about—I’m sure you did—but Steve Jobs was very adamant that, when he was inventing something new, it could not be in the same building. It had to be a completely different team. I don't think he separated out different entities inside of Apple, but he was like, “You can't even be in the same building.” That was really, really important.

It makes sense to me because focus is just so critical when you're trying to build something new.

And differentiation. You don't want the opinions of other people outside of the people working on it. What was Snap Lab?

Snap Lab really incubated a lot of the Spectacles and Specs work.

Why did you make the decision to start something like Snap Lab?

It was to house all the hardware development.

So it's not like Snap Lab was created and then you realized, “Hey, let's do hardware.” It was the vehicle to do hardware?

I think it was sort of concurrent. When we started working on Spectacles back in the day, that was really the genesis of Snap Lab. That's what it was called initially.

Do you still have some kind of separate R&D thing to dream up new products, or do you only focus on the app and the glasses?

One of the things we're thinking a lot about now—and this is what I mean about the force multiplication of AI and creativity—is that the core Snapchat business is really well-positioned to launch new app categories today, right? We have a massive amount of distribution. We've got tons of great ideas and brilliant creative people. And now, with AI, we actually have the resources to make that possible.

So inside of Snapchat today, and in our design team, we're thinking a lot about what types of new apps and internet services—

But a separate app from Snapchat, or an app that's—

A separate app from Snapchat. But we can use Snapchat as a launchpad for these new services because it reaches almost 1 billion people.

Do you have any other apps? I don't even know.

There's an app called Saturn, which we acquired, that's a totally new way to think of calendaring. If you look at calendars today, not only are they really entrenched in the business world, but because they are, it makes it almost impossible to easily share calendars with friends, right?

Calendars today are all oriented around email rather than your phone number and your text messages. But all of your planning and the way that you're working together with your friends is happening in your text messages and around your phone number.

The Saturn team had a lot of really great insights about what the future of a calendar should look like. That's a separate app that's now owned by Snapchat, that's integrated with Snapchat, and gets distribution through Snapchat, but is a standalone service.

Why would people use it? Give me a use case.

Because it's a calendar built for your friends. It is so difficult—I don't know if you've experienced this with your partner—but with my wife, it's so hard to get my work calendar to match with her work calendar. It's almost impossible, let alone getting that to map to our 15-year-old's calendar and everything he's got going on after school.

I think all of a sudden there's a solution that works really well for our 15-year-old, who doesn't have a corporate email but wants to share his calendar with friends, right? We can have visibility into each other's calendars, and it all works centered around your phone and your mobile number.

It actually is a social calendar rather than a work-oriented calendar, and that just makes things easier.

How much do you use email?

All the time.

I push everything to text or WhatsApp.

Really? I push everything to email.

Yeah. Well, you probably have an army.

I use email like a text message.

Okay. Oh, no.

No, there's no army. I use email like text.

How do you balance focus? Obviously, Snapchat is working—the app. Specs is working and will continue to grow. How do you balance inventing new things with focusing on what you already have? How do you think about that? Or do you just need to invent new things? Is that a compulsion for you?

It's a really great question. I see a huge amount of opportunity in the products and services that we have today, and I think we need to continue to constantly iterate and evolve them and make them better. Ultimately, that's what our customers and our community expect, right? They want us to constantly innovate for them and make their lives better. So I think we have to tirelessly do that.

At the same point, there's nothing more valuable than focus. Arguably, my primary role in our company is helping to drive focus and prioritization. So I almost don't see them necessarily as trade-offs, but as an ongoing part of running our business: making sure that we're being really clear about focusing on the areas where we see the biggest opportunity.

If somebody were to ask me, “Okay, you've read 400 biographies on history's greatest entrepreneurs. Give me a top-10 idea list,” I can do one better. I can distill everything down to 1 single word: focus.

While you were talking, I was just looking this up because I save all my notes and highlights for every single book I read. I have a personal AI that's trained only on all the transcripts for my podcast, every single highlight from every book, and every single note.

Edwin Land, one of my favorite quotes of his, says, “My whole life has just been trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had.”

I love it. That's awesome.

He was obsessed with focus. The reason I ask you this is because, have you spent any time with Tony from DoorDash?

Not a lot, no.

Okay. We just recorded this intense conversation, and I'm going to have to do it again every 6 months. The guy's got so many ideas.

I don't buy individual stocks. I don't really give a shit about anything but making podcasts and trying to maintain this intense focus. I don't think about investing, I don't think about anything else. I just do what I'm doing every day: wake up and do it 7 days a week.

But I don't know anything about the finances of DoorDash. All I can tell you is, he's, I think, 41 years old. I've never come across another person that gives me young Jeff Bezos vibes. I'm so tempted to just back up the truck and be like—

There's a vibe. I'm going to vibe-invest just because everybody's like, “Oh yeah, you got 60% of...” I think right now he has 60% market share of food delivery. You're out of your goddamn mind if you think that guy is just thinking about food delivery.

He's going to build—and he already is. I think they launched 6 new products, including their own hardware. There's something about this conversation that's reminding me of this, where he's going to be focused on what they're excellent at, but he's got grandiose ambitions.

Just like there was no way in hell Bezos was going to stick with books, CDs, and movies. It's impossible for that kind of personality type to be that way. So I was just curious if there was something in you that was basically your level of ambition.

I think ambition is the wrong word.

Okay.

I think creation and problem-solving is really what I love to do.

I think you're right. They see a series of problems, and they think they can solve them better than anybody else.

Yeah, and I think there's something so incredibly gratifying about doing that. It's awesome. To see the way it makes people's lives better, the way they respond to it—that's the best. It's awesome.

Your focus, basically, every day when you wake up, is that you're attacking what you feel is the biggest problem in Snapchat. Is that how you organize your day? How do you go about this? I heard you on another podcast say that you kind of get turned on.

You didn’t use these words, but you’re attracted to hard problems. You want difficulty. You want to spend your time solving the hardest problems.

I think it’s absolutely essential for us to go after solving hard problems, especially as we look at the long-term success of the business. I think that ultimately, that is where value is created. So I think a huge amount of what I’m thinking about is, how can we make our community, our customers’ lives better? And what are some really, really hard problems that we think we can uniquely solve?

I meant more about the existing problems and how you spend your time. How you allocate your time is a better way to put it—the existing problems in the business.

How do I allocate my time across the existing problems?

Yeah, exactly. Elon’s famous for asking, “What is the bottleneck here?” He’ll find out, in his entire empire, where the bottleneck is, then physically go there and dedicate all the resources. In that essay I told you I read about the history of SpaceX, there’s a NASA guy visiting SpaceX, and they’re like, “When there’s a problem, a flash mob appears.” So Elon has a very specific way of doing it. And I heard you on another podcast saying you’re attracted to problems, so I’m just curious. I’m not talking about problems you could solve in future product development. I’m saying, literally—

Yeah.

—you’re running a giant company. There are all kinds of things that aren’t going well.

Yeah. My Monday morning, for example, is 2 to 2½ hours in the Specs business, going through the risks and dependencies: red, orange, yellow, green. What are we doing to solve them? What progress are we making? How can I help? That’s how I start my week.

You and I were looking at this book I gave you before we started recording, and it was a photographic history. I think it’s called Fearless Genius or something, and it’s about Steve Jobs. You opened to a page, and Steve had a shit list. You said, “I have a shit list too.” It’s the 5 hardest problems he’s got to solve, and many of them don’t have solutions yet. So it’s similar to that.

Yeah, and I think what’s most important for me is creating a culture where people are raising their hands and bringing those problems early and often. That is mission-critical across the organization. We can’t solve a problem that we don’t know about. We can’t solve a problem that someone isn’t escalating quickly.

So I think it’s really beyond just making sure that we’re staying focused on the issues that we need to get resolved, launch blockers, or whatever they are. Culturally, we’ve got to make sure that this is how the team is operating all day, every day, throughout the organization.

How do you ensure that information gets to you, though?

I think one of the things that’s really great—I stole this from Walmart, which I thought was great—is that they have a Friday meeting called “In It to Win It.” They have leaders from across the company, not just super-senior leaders, but leaders from across the company around the world, all get together for about an hour. They essentially raise their hands and say, “Hey, the shopping cart ball bearing isn’t working properly. We’ve got to get this thing fixed.”

Whoever’s in charge of the shopping cart ball bearing can raise their hand and give a response, or they can say, “I’ll get back to you,” or whatever it is. But that’s multiplied across the entire company.

What they found was that their leaders would go out into stores and into the community, hear about problems, and then solve the problem just for that store. They wouldn’t solve it for the company. In It to Win It allows them to solve these problems company-wide.

We do the same thing for Spectacles and for Snapchat: bring the problems forward. You can also use the even simpler way to do it, which I love: just walk around and talk to our people. Hear about what’s going on and hear about the issues impacting them.

But I think unless you create these structures and processes in the company to actively surface problems and build that culture, it’s hard to do that. And I think it’s just so important.

So I heard you describe the design team as very flat, with no hierarchy. Is the rest of the company like that? How do you actually organize?

I’d say the rest of the company is certainly flatter than most, but the design team is actually flat. Everyone’s got the same title, that kind of thing.

But I think what’s so important for Snap is that we’re a ruthless meritocracy. In the early days—this is kind of silly now—we would just make up people’s titles, make them hilarious. You could come and join Snap and make up whatever you wanted to be called, because the whole point was, who cares about your title? If you’re focused on your title, you’re focused on the exact wrong thing.

We are going to die if we are a company that’s focused on title and hierarchy and getting ahead, rather than focusing on the customer. I think that’s a huge, huge problem.

So I’d say the company, yeah, of course we’ve got great leaders, and we invest a lot in our leaders. But one of the things that I think makes Snap so unique is that, no matter who you are or where you are in the company, you can have a huge, outsized impact.

It was fun. I got some great intern feedback. One of our interns came to me and was like, “It’s funny, I came to Snap, and it wasn’t even really clear who my manager or leader was, because everyone was so helpful. Everyone was guiding me, providing mentorship, and working together with me.”

So I think that one-team feeling is really important.

So how do you make sure that anybody in the company can make a major impact, though?

First of all, by setting that expectation. That’s what we expect at Snap. It’s not just that we try to enable it. If you see a problem, and you can fix it or solve it, we’re going to celebrate that and lift it up. We’re not going to be precious, like, “Oh, this is my thing, my territory.”

I think people respond really negatively to that in our culture. So sometimes that creates problems because the swim lanes are less clear. People are solving problems across the organization and across teams, and they’re working together.

I think just making sure that we have a culture and leaders who are rewarding that and reinforcing that behavior is so important.

Have you studied how Jensen organized his company?

Not in depth. You would be the expert, I’m sure.

Not nearly, but I did do 2 podcasts on him. There’s a great book called The NVIDIA Way that goes into this. But I haven’t found anybody else, especially at that size, that has as flat an organization as possible. I think he’s got 60 direct reports. It’s pretty wild.

He describes how people are worried about being able to manage AI that’s smarter than them, and AI agents that are smarter than them. He’s like, “I do this every day. All my 60 direct reports are smarter than me in their domain, and I’m able to manage them and orchestrate them perfectly.”

It’s just very fascinating. I’m always curious. Again, I think the companies are a reflection of the personality of the founder. The founder is the guardian of the company’s soul, and it only works if it is built around who you are and the philosophy that you have.

Yeah, and I think, generally speaking, I would expect the world to move toward flatter structures and much larger spans of control, because the communication and organization tax today is night and day compared with what it was 20 or 30 years ago.

So I think companies are still thinking in this sort of industrial mentality, where communication was very high-friction. That doesn’t make a lot of sense in terms of the way that companies are organized and operate today.

I would imagine that more people will move to much, much wider spans of control and much flatter organizations, and I think that’ll be helpful.

I’m not really interested in people’s first company. I’m interested in their last company. Do you feel like this is your life’s work, your last company?

I think Spectacles is probably my last company, I would guess. I always said I would never do it again, and now I find myself doing it again with Spectacles. I hope that, in the not-too-distant future, I can also think about more ways to give back to society.

Our family does a lot. We have a family fund, and we’ve got the Snap Foundation. We are constantly thinking about how to support Los Angeles, and hopefully, in the future, more broadly.

I love charity, but the best way to be charitable is to build a company and a product to make somebody else’s life better.

I think that’s one way to contribute, for sure. But I think there are lots of ways to contribute to making the world better.

The biggest problem that I see today is people spending 7 or 8 hours a day on their computer and spending their life operating a computer. I think that is a disaster for our society, and I think we have to change that. If we don’t, we’re headed in a really bad direction.

So I think Spectacles, if we can attack that problem and even shift 2 hours of the 8 hours a day you’re spending hunched over like this to looking out at the world, going for a walk, spending time with your friends, and playing together with them, that’s massive for the world.

I really want to land the solution to that problem, for sure. But I think there are a lot of problems out there, and over a longer period of time, I want to think about more ways that I can make an impact.

You just reminded me: I want to go back to this interesting decision for you to go in on AR at a time when almost everybody was thinking that VR was the path. I’ve heard you say some funny things about that, so don’t let me forget that.

But I guess the line of questioning I’m on right now is really—what I’m trying to get to is, you’re famous for turning down billions and billions of dollars really fast to sell the company. I think the book that I read on you 8 years ago was called How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars, or something like that. They made reference to it. I’m trying to get to what is motivating you?

I study entrepreneurship. Obviously, my entire life is founders. During the day, I make Founders podcast. At night, I hang out with founders. This is my whole life. I think the common misconception is that entrepreneurs are driven by money, and I would argue they’re driven by control. If you’re talented and you want to build a product that makes somebody else’s life better, and you maintain control, you wind up with money anyway. But their primary motivation is not money.

Clearly, your primary motivation was not money. I think there’s a line in the book that said you would never work for anybody else. Take us through the decision of just, “I don’t give a shit about your billions of dollars. I want to do this.”

Well, I think I would never underestimate the fact that our investors were smart. They allowed Bobby Murphy and me to both sell $10 million of stock very early on. Obviously, that would’ve been worth maybe a lot more by now, but very early on, that meant that we were able to support a family, buy a house, whatever it was, right? So I think very early on, money was no longer a consideration.

But $10 million is not $1 billion.

But $10 million is more than enough money to live a really great, comfortable life.

Yeah, yeah. But do you see what I mean here? It’s still an unusual decision on your part, especially when you were—how old were you the first time you turned down a multibillion-dollar acquisition offer?

Probably 20—I don’t know. Early 20s.

Okay, don’t downplay it. See, we’ve gone over a series of unusual decisions that you keep making, so explain to me why. I wouldn’t do it either. I’d hope I wouldn’t do it, because I guess the work I’m trying to do on Founders podcast, to the degree that there is any influence that the podcast has on future generations of entrepreneurs, is that right now, the entrepreneurship ecosystem celebrates because the incentive structure is f***ed up. They celebrate “start, scale, sell.”

Hmm.

You started, you scaled, you didn’t sell. Of the 400 biographies, there’s not a single biography that I’ve read where a guy started a company, 2 years later sold it for billions of dollars, and spent the rest of his life as an investor. I’m sorry—I almost threw up in my mouth at the thought of this. They don’t write books about that.

Why did you take yourself out of the game? The whole point—like, Elon’s the richest person on the planet. You think he’d ever do that? No. He puts his chips back in there. He wants to build shit.

Yeah.

This is one of the things I admire about you. So how the hell do you make that decision at 22, 23, 24?

Well, I think we loved what we were doing. Bobby and I just loved working together. We loved making stuff. We saw a huge opportunity for the service. Fundamentally, the service was so different from what else was out there, and it was very clear that we would’ve had to compromise on our vision and values if we sold the company.

I mean, you think about it: almost every choice was the opposite of what was happening at the time, right? It was permanent, public social media on a feed; we were doing private messaging, private ephemeral messaging. No public likes and comments, opening into the camera, not a feed. Investing in things like augmented reality when everyone was investing in virtual reality, thinking that people were actually going to wear a TV on their face—it was insane.

And I think it makes no sense. We looked at that and we were like, “Wow, if that’s the direction people want to go, that’s scary for the world.” Now, it’s great in many ways that all of these services have adopted our inventions. When we talked in 2012 and 2013 about the importance of privacy, people looked at us like we were insane. Literally, they were like, “What are you talking about, privacy?” Like, “What?”

Remember Mark Zuckerberg being like, “The world’s going to be open and connected. Everyone’s going to share everything”? What? It was just so wrong in terms of the direction of the world and what people actually wanted.

You could imagine a world without Snapchat, without these inventions, and I think the world would be a worse place. It’s so interesting right now: there’s a lot of concern about social media and the way that it makes people feel, right? What’s fascinating is that when Snapchat is studied separately from social media, there’s study after study—independent studies—that show Snapchat makes a positive impact on people’s friendships and their well-being that is fundamentally different from social media.

Because in those same studies, it shows that Instagram, TikTok, whatever, make people feel bad, right? What I find so interesting is that Snapchat itself represents something different—a connection to your friends and family that actually makes your life better.

Even though it’s challenging to continue operating a business and compete with these folks who have a very different worldview and a very different direction for how they want the world to move, I worry about a world without Snapchat. I worry about a world that doesn’t try to fight for this different set of values and this different way of thinking about things.

One of the benefits of reading a biography is that you see the evolution of an idea over time. Your decision not to sell as a young man in his early 20s—you might have had a faint idea that, first of all, you love being an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs need businesses. What is an entrepreneur who sold his business? It’s nothing. You’re just sitting on the sidelines doing nothing.

So you shouldn’t ever sell your best idea. That’s what I said back in 2018 when I made the first podcast about you. I think you even said this: “I don’t think I’m going to come up with a better idea than this. So I’m going to now dedicate my life to working on my second-best idea?” How the hell does that make sense? For money that I’m going to get anyway in the future, and most of which I won’t even spend in my lifetime?

But you had that kernel of the idea, and now you just said this great articulation of that. It’s just like that idea almost grew and solidified over time. Then there are things in the future that had to happen that you didn’t know were going to happen, and you realized that was the right choice.

Social media gets a really bad rap. It has terrible PR. All the polling is just people—even though they’re addicted to these things, they seem to not make their lives better. But if you separate that out and you’ve built something where people are actually happy and feel good about using the product, that’s worth more than money.

100%. Yeah, and you get to have an impact at the scale of 1 billion people around the world who use our service to talk with their friends and family and build stronger relationships. That’s inspiring to me.

There were 2 conversations I had on this podcast that surprised me. The first one was with Daniel Ek of Spotify, and the next one was Tobi Lütke of Shopify. I get those confused all the time.

Daniel said something interesting: at the beginning, he was even willing to—he thought Spotify needed to exist in the world. He didn’t want to sell it, but if he thought selling it would increase the likelihood that it continued on in this world, then he was willing to do so. That shocked me.

Then Tobi Lütke said something that was fascinating. He thought that if it were not for this new invention of AI in its current format, he wouldn’t be the best CEO of Shopify, so he’d find somebody else to do that. In both cases, they wanted what was best for the company.

I think for me, I see Snapchat as the best possible vehicle to reinvent the computer. If you think about Snapchat, we have this core, cash-flowing, profitable business in Snapchat that we’re able to use to reinvest in what has been a very long-term, speculative project to reinvent the computer.

Snapchat has really been, in addition to changing the world in its own way, a real vehicle for enabling this evolution of computing. So I think for me, that’s one of the real benefits of running and controlling Snapchat today: we’ve been able to very consistently invest in advanced technology and R&D over an incredibly long period of time to build a real competitive advantage, but also to build a world-class product that we wouldn’t have been able to do without Snapchat.

Oh, I never even thought about it like that. So you view Snapchat as a means to reinvent computing?

It’s an incredibly important part of it, because without a hugely profitable, cash-flowing—I mean, Snapchat’s almost a $7 billion revenue business, right? Almost in the Fortune 500. People make fun of us for not being profitable enough. We’re taking a lot of that core cash flow from Snapchat and using it to reinvest in winning this future of computing.

What’s very unique about Snapchat is that we’ve been able to do that now. We’ve invested in glasses for 12 years. We’ve been able to very consistently invest in a way that no VC would ever, in a million years, support.

Would there ever have been a world where you only built software? There’s too much of this art and design background with you. I’m sitting here as you’re talking and describing this to me, and I didn’t even think about your business in those terms, which is why it’s valuable to sit down and have conversations like this. It’s just this guy’s 2 heroes built the best hardware of all time in both of their industries.

Yeah. I think ultimately—

And Jobs is famous for saying, “If you want to build great software, you have to control the hardware.”

100%. Yeah, I think ultimately, if you think about the customer experience you’re trying to create or what you’re trying to create in the world, you realize that hardware is a necessity in realizing that vision, essentially.

So the answer is no. There is no world in which Evan only builds software.

Think about how early we started doing it. This was back in 2014. We started investing in hardware.

Yeah, I think you’re really misunderstood. I did an entire podcast about you, I’ve listened to all your interviews, and I’m still learning things right now from talking to you.

No, it’s fun, right?

Yeah. No, it’s definitely a lot of fun, but we need to do a better job of telling the story, man.

Well, I think the best way to tell the story is through the product, right? I think that’s what’s so exciting about this year, and why I articulate it as a crucible moment, because we are inflecting and transforming Snapchat at the same time that we’re launching a whole new product category that we’ve invented. So this will be a seminal year for our company.

So what does your schedule look like during a year like this? I’ve heard—

It’s insane.

Okay, so—

It’s completely insane.

Tell us more.

Untenable. No, this is a 7-day-a-week job.

How do you balance that, though? You have young kids at home, and I heard that in very intense times, you were talking about sometimes having to get up before they were awake, and going home every day after they were asleep.

There are a lot of days like that right now. I’m definitely back in that mode. I always try to keep Sunday protected. We go to church as a family, we go to brunch, and then I spend the afternoon with our kids, and that’s super important to me. But other than that, it’s full-on.

So early mornings, late nights all the time.

Yep.

And your biggest issue is that you’re inventing new hardware. I don’t want to diminish Snapchat, but it sounds like it’s at scale, it’s profitable, and you’re adding a lot of product features.

With Snapchat, we do need to reaccelerate the advertising business, but I think, given the transformation we’ve undertaken over the last 3 years of the advertising platform, that is coming, right? We’re seeing the growth in the small and medium customers. We’re diversifying the advertising business. We’ve built this direct-revenue business.

So I look at Snapchat, and I see a path to a lot more revenue over the coming years. I think that certainly has been a huge focus over the last several years. Then I think the core Spectacles business—this year will mark the real beginning of the next chapter of that story, as we transition from being a developer platform to a consumer product, which is a really challenging thing to do.

All right. So you have an insane schedule. I have a feeling, based on—you have this simmering intensity about you—are these actually your favorite times to be running the company?

Absolutely. Yeah.

Why?

Because every decision, the way you spend every minute, really matters. I think that’s exciting, because we’re at a real inflection point in the company. If you think about the last 12 years of my life that I’ve invested in creating this new vision for what a computer can be, in some number of days we’re about to share that with the world, and that’s incredibly, incredibly exciting.

How do you handle the stress, though?

I’m huge on meditation. Kriya meditation changed my life.

What’s it called?

It’s called Kriya.

Okay.

Unbelievable. Meditation was never a fit for me. They’d say, “Try TM. Learn your mantra.” It just never clicked. Kriya is incredibly energizing. It involves breathwork, and to me, it’s like—wow. It’s super powerful.

Is this a daily practice?

When I can, yeah. I try to exercise every morning and do Kriya as much as I can, a couple of days a week. Obviously, playing with our kids and hanging out with my wife—that’s the stress-management regimen.

Yeah. I feel like all the great entrepreneurs—the best quote I’ve ever heard describing this kind of mentality was from a guy named Herb Kelleher, who was the founder of Southwest Airlines, which is the most successful airline. Think about it: he’s selling a commodity product, right? The most successful airline of all time. I think it was profitable for 40 straight years.

That’s awesome.

He was asked one time, “How do you handle the stress?” He said, “I don’t handle it. I like it.” He said, “I wouldn’t start a company in a hugely competitive environment if I wanted to take an easy path through life.”

But I think what he did there, and how he explained that, is really powerful. I think this is what a lot of founders do: they reframe it, right? If you can reframe stress as an opportunity, it’s going to be great.

I hated speaking publicly when we created our company. I didn’t like it. My innate nature—I mean, this goes back to growing up in the computer lab, right? I just did not want to do public speaking. I didn’t want to do company-wide Q&A. I was like, “If I want to communicate with the company, I’ll send an email,” kind of thing. Crazy.

One of our board members was like, “Evan, it’s your job. Too bad. Figure it out.” Literally, I was like, “Okay. I’m going to learn how to love it.” I’m going to learn how to love public speaking. I’m going to learn how to love doing a live Q&A with our team, and I do now. I love it. I love doing Q&A with our team.

I think that ability to reframe things that appear like a challenge or feel like something you’re uncomfortable with is really important.

Yeah. You’ll see this in the history of entrepreneurship. Thomas Edison, Henry Kaiser, Edwin Land—they viewed problems as just opportunities in work clothes. It’s like, this is an opportunity. We just have to get to work to actually do it.

There’s been this new thing that’s popped up where—I’m glad you actually developed a skill set to tell your own story and communicate this, because companies are trying to hire a chief storyteller. It’s like, yeah, that’s the founder. Edwin Land—again, we talked about Edwin Land and Steve Jobs a lot today. They would tell you that the person best able to do it—and it’s not even that you have to be that articulate—is the person who cares more about it than anybody else.

Yeah.

You know more about it than anybody else. Just educate us on why your product exists and what makes it special. Who else could do that but the person who was there when it was just 1 person, 2 people, and a laptop?

Yeah. I’ll never forget: when I was a lot younger, when I was starting the company, I had the opportunity to meet President Clinton, right? His advice was, “The job is explainer-in-chief. That is the job. You’ve got to go around and explain this stuff to everybody so they understand”—their role at Snap or Snap’s role in the world. I think that’s super valuable.

Well, you’re doing a good job at it. I appreciate you taking the time for this. I do want to end on one of my favorite quotes. This is from that book that I read about you almost a decade ago.

I guess I’ll give a little context here. You dropped out of Stanford with 5 or 6 classes left, but you decided to walk for an empty diploma, right? You regretted it, and then you told this beautiful story. This is a direct quote from you:

“It only recently occurred to me while preparing this how totally absurd this whole charade was. It reminded me that oftentimes we do all sorts of silly things to avoid appearing different. Conforming happens so naturally that we can forget how powerful it is. We want to be accepted by our peers. We want to be part of the group. It’s in our biology. But the things that make us human are those times we listen to the whispers of our soul and allow ourselves to be pulled in another direction.”

It’s very obvious that you listen to the whispers of your soul. I’m very glad that people like you exist. Thank you very much for taking the time to have this conversation.

Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah. Awesome, man.

Thanks.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.