智能手机之后是什么：Snap 的 Evan Spiegel 对谈

This is pretty funny, playing chess in the pub.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Good to see you.

Good to see you. Thanks.

Give me the Snap 2026 update: product, business. What do you spend your days thinking about?

1. Snap Reaches Its Crucible Moment

We've described it as the crucible moment. Actually, we described it as that towards the end of 2025, and it is just proving to be true in a major way for a couple of reasons. One, we're about to reach 1 billion monthly active users, which is a big deal for us. We're really excited about the progress in the core Snapchat business. We're also on the verge of net income profitability, which is really exciting for us, especially as we invest really meaningfully in hardware and our Specs glasses effort.

That maybe brings me to the last point, which is that Specs are coming to consumers for the first time later this year. After 12 years of investment in glasses, in the next generation of computing, and in trying to make computing more human, it's actually coming. It's a pretty extreme time at Snap. Then, we're doing all of that while transforming the business with AI. It's a pretty full-on moment.

Why have Specs been hard to get right? The vision you guys have had for a while, I think it has generally existed for a while. There were precursors like Google Glass. Actually, was it a precursor, or did you guys have Specs before that?

We've been working on Specs probably since 2014. I think Glass came out in 2013, I want to say.

Anyway, similar times. You guys have been working on Specs since very early on. Describe some of the technical challenges, because it seems technically challenging. There's a lot of miniaturization challenges, but maybe give us an overview of why Specs are hard to make work.

2. Specs Bring Computing Into The World

The technical challenges are extraordinary. I think the promise of Specs is that you take the capability that people have experienced and pass through VR, but put it into a see-through glasses form factor. That's the space that's unoccupied today. You basically have very low-capability smart glasses or AI glasses, which are like AirPods with a camera, and then you have very high-capability virtual reality devices like the Vision Pro.

I think the sweet spot for Specs coming later this year is the wearability of normal glasses, but the capability of a true spatial computer, something like a Vision Pro. The idea, and I think the promise of glasses, or at least what I love about glasses, is that they actually bring computing into the world. I think this is something that computing has suffered from for a very long time: by its nature, it has been isolating.

When I was growing up, I loved computers. I built my own computer, but to use a computer you had to be in the computer lab at lunch when all your friends were on the schoolyard. I think phones have continued that trend of pulling people into the screen rather than bringing people into the world, helping people share experiences together with their friends. The promise of see-through glasses is that you and I can sit across from each other, play a game of chess, design something, build something, and watch something together. That's totally unlike any computing experience that exists today.

What do you think that computing mix looks like in, say, 10 or 15 years' time? There's going to be some amount of glasses. Will smartwatches still have a place, or will the glasses do that? Maybe it's useful for the wrist measurements. Do you also have an Amazon Alexa-style AI speaker, and how many with you, if so? But I'm just curious, as you think about moving—you're describing moving beyond the smartphone—what do you think that new equilibrium looks like?

I don't necessarily think we're going to move beyond the smartphone. I think the smartphone is actually going to play the most important role of legacy—

Move beyond solely a smartphone.

If you look at the capability of glasses, at least when it comes to Specs, what I actually would estimate is that a lot of the large-screen use cases are the first to move. If you think about what's so interesting about Specs, you can have a huge TV with you almost anywhere, a giant screen with you almost anywhere. Why would you pay thousands of dollars to put 2 or 3 TVs in your home when you can have any size screen through lightweight glasses? I think the same goes for a desktop display or a laptop. I think that's really valuable when you're traveling, of course. It's super frustrating for me to work on a tiny laptop.

Battle station.

Yeah, exactly. Especially when someone's looking over your shoulder. I think it's really hard to get things done on the road.

One of the earliest things that glasses take over is, say, working ergonomically on a flight, where you're not hunched over your laptop, hunchback style. But what else moves, and what other devices do you think are in the mix?

When you think about use cases moving, I do think the screen-based use cases are probably the best example of that. What I'm more interested in, though, and where we're investing most of our time, is on the net-new experiences that didn't exist before.

I think that actually is what made the phone so meaningful. The desktop is still the best for word processing. It's still the best for information retrieval and getting things done. The phone is amazing for mobile communication. Where glasses are really going to be extraordinary are experiences. I think that's a really big deal. It's a big deal in terms of the way that people also want to engage with the world now. Young people in general, it's not a secret, folks want experiences. They want to do things together. They want to see the world in a new way. That's actually what glasses provide.

To me, what's so exciting is not necessarily replacing the television on your wall. It's playing laser tag with my kids outside in the glasses, putting dinosaurs in the backyard, and building Lego with them together. I think those are the sorts of experiences that show people that computers can actually bring folks together in the real world, rather than have us all staring down at a little screen.

Yes. Maybe also usefully AGI-proof, where the future is that you are at Coachella with your Snap Spectacles. Meanwhile, Claude is off working on your desktop and doing the actual work.

This is hilarious. Developers have already built ways to just monitor what your agents are doing through Specs, and you can check in and go on with your day. I think it's commonplace here in San Francisco. People will just carry their laptop around. They're at the bar, they'll quickly open it up, check on the progress, and then move on.

It's like the joke that the more senior people are in the organization, the smaller the screen. The developer has 2 parallel monitors. Meanwhile, the boss is "sent from my iPhone." It's that, but for everyone: everyone will be able to just monitor the agent's progress from the Specs.

I do think that's one of the really cool ways that computers are changing. I do think the paradigm that we all have to operate our computers all day long is going away, and I think that's hugely positive.

Yeah. What has been hard in the development of Specs—battery, screens, motion sickness? There's all these things people talk about in the context of AR and VR. I'm curious, as you're at the coalface, what has been a challenge to crack, or where does some of the Snap IP come in, in terms of defensibility you guys have built?

I'd almost want to say everything is hard about fitting a computer into a pair of glasses, but I can talk through the different pieces of our platform and how we've thought about it. One of the things that makes Specs so unique is that we actually own every single piece of the stack.

Everything from the developer tools called Lens Studio to the rendering engine called Lens Core, which we've now honed over a decade on mobile phones, especially low-end mobile phones, which is important when you're trying to manage power and thermal on a small device like that, but also our own operating system, as well as our own optical engine.

The waveguide, which is the piece of glass there in front of your eye, and the projector itself, some other fancy stuff that we haven't announced yet, but all of these pieces really work together to be able to fit a full-fledged immersive computing experience into a pair of glasses.

All of those things are very hard. Building a ground-up operating system on Linux was really difficult to do, but it's way more performant than trying to repurpose Android. We learned that.

You don't use Android—you build your own OS for it.

Yeah, Android is way too bloated to work effectively on a pair of glasses. I think that's why you see the most recent Google experiment, Project Aura, has a huge compute pack. We just don't think it's realistic for people to carry around a compute pack to use glasses.

The latest coding models are very good at working with Linux. They have a lot of training data for that. Have you found Claude Code or Codex useful for developing in this environment, which is pretty different from what people envisage as the standard Claude Code project?

3. AI Rewrites Software Development

Claude is transforming software development, full stop, at Snap in every part of our organization.

Can you describe a little more what that looks like?

Yeah.

I think it's extraordinary. Now, more than two-thirds of new code is written by AI at Snap. That's happened really quickly. I think the rate at which these models are getting better is just extraordinary.

I think for us, we're really excited because we're so fortunate to be in a software business that has network effects, thank God. We've got a service that connects people to one another, but fundamentally, at its core, it's a software business. The way that we write software and run our business is changing so dramatically. At the same time, I think we're insulated from some of the effects of other software businesses that I think are being cannibalized very quickly by AI.

You have been much more of a believer in the AR form factor than almost anyone I know for a very long time. What gave you the conviction that this is the right form factor?

So much of what we do—actually, everything we do—starts with humanity. Computing needs to be in the service of humanity. Ultimately, humans are the ones that decide how technology is adopted. I think too often in the technology industry, we're focused on technology first rather than people first. I think that's a huge mistake.

I think when you start with people first, glasses become so obvious. They're already worn by billions of people. They sit right in front of your eyes in terms of being able to deliver a computing experience. You can operate them hands-free.

As humans, it's a big deal. We do a lot with our hands. Having computing in a pair of glasses, I think, is a better fit for our day-to-day lives. Then, of course, having them at eye level and ear level gives glasses a really good understanding of the world around you, which is so important if you want to make computing more human.

If you want to have computers understand the world and people, which we think is so key for getting the benefits of computing, but again, also for bringing people together.

Is it fundamentally a heads-down versus heads-up thing? You think the heads-down smartphone way of being is fundamentally a bit antisocial, and heads-up is a more engaged, connected way of being?

I think that's one part of it. But I also think if you want to build a computer or design a computer that actually understands the world around you, fundamentally, it has to be out of your pocket. Ideally, because most of our human sensors for understanding the world are on our head, I think that, to me, is a really good fit for our glasses technology, in terms of the way that we can architect a computer that actually brings people together and fits better into their lives.

I feel like one thing that sometimes happens in the early stages of a new tech paradigm is that there's a lot of heterogeneity, and people think there'll be a lot of specialization, and then it all collapses. In the very early days of smartphones, like, go back to '05, '06, it's like, “Oh, you'll have the BlackBerry with the keyboard for people doing a lot of emailing.” You remember the Nokia N-Gage? That was like almost a PlayStation Portable-type gaming platform.

There was this view that you should have all these different types of smartphones. Then everything collapsed into just the single iPhone/Android form factor, and there's just going to be a big touchscreen, and that's it. That's the only modality. Do you think something similar happens with Specs, where right now there is full VR, as you say, there's smart glasses, the very lightweight version, and then there's your Specs, which are kind of between those two?

Do you think full VR, like Apple Vision Pro, has a place in 5 or 10 years, or do you think everything just collapses into this form factor?

VR may have a specialized role for more immersive training environments or things like that.

Surgeons and flight simulators and stuff.

Yeah. But even then, I think folks really are going to want to be able to wear glasses and work together. You're going to want to be able to see your copilot when you're in your virtual cockpit. I think glasses are a better fit.

Again, most things that humans do—because at the end of the day, we're a very social species. That's one of the things that makes humanity so special. I think the idea that we're going to use technology that fully shuts us off from the world, or results in us looking at the world through a screen, I just don't think that's realistic.

Yes. Apple does have, with Vision Pro, the look-through feature. But yeah, fundamentally, you're a little blocked off physically.

Yeah. That's pass-through VR, where they re-project the world on a screen. But I can't imagine a huge swath of humanity wanting to interact with the world through—

Pass-through VR.

A screen. I don't think that's a fit for who we are as a species.

What do you think the ramp-up of Specs looks like? When should I expect to be seeing a lot of them out in the street?

Certainly, later this year we'll make them available. I think the early audience will be early adopters, folks who are really passionate about technology. I don't think folks remember the Macintosh. In 2026 dollars, a Macintosh was $8,000.

It was really expensive.

And I remember vividly my godfather, bringing—

You're talking about the 1984 Macintosh.

Yeah, yeah. I remember my godfather, when I was young, bringing us our first Macintosh. He was so passionate about computing and the possibility for computing that it really changed my life. I remember playing around with Kid Pix.

When I think of early adopters, I think of my godfather. I think of folks who really want to experience what's next in computing. I think that's who Specs are going to appeal to initially. They certainly won't be $8,000. I think that's a little pricey, but I do think that it's really important to engage that group of folks, especially as you look at how technology diffuses through society.

I think the folks who are most passionate about this technology are also the ones who are going to become evangelists, who are going to show their family and friends, who are going to build new Lenses. We already have so many developers building Lenses for Specs, creating new experiences. Almost every day, there's a new Lens that's published.

As I think about the smart glasses success that has existed so far, a lot of it is the GoPro competitor in a way. Where it's like—even when I played with smart glasses, and I had a super early version of the prior Specs, which was many years ago at this stage—it's fun if you're skiing or doing some cool hands-free activity.

Is that an interesting market? You could say, “Oh, it's a niche, but actually lots of people like doing these activities and sharing them.” It pairs nicely with the main part of your business. I'm curious, is that like a random niche for you or a big deal, the kind of GoPro substitute?

The problem for us is that it violates one of our fundamental principles for making new products. Look, we learned that the hard way because we built camera glasses more than a decade ago, I guess. We learned it the hard way. We also saw a lot of opportunities. We thought it was really cool to get the camera out of your pocket. Put the camera at a place where you can record hands-free if you're kayaking or something. Gosh, wouldn't that be cool to have a point-of-view video?

The problem is it's not 10 times better than the next-best alternative, which is the phone. The rule for us in product design, or when we're investing in a new product, investing in a new idea, is if it's not 10 times better than the next-best alternative, then there is no point in investing in it.

I think one of the other problems that we see is, as a result, the market size is also quite small, and the willingness to pay is very low.

If you look at camera glasses today, they're in the low hundreds of dollars—maybe $150, $200 to buy camera glasses. I think what's fascinating is if you play that forward, the problem with camera glasses, if you're really successful, is that you really won't have been able to build a platform because they don't have an operating system. They don't understand the world. They don't run applications.

Therefore, you're going to get undercut on price very quickly. The prize at the end of that rainbow, I think, is very small, and the customer benefit is also negligible when you can just pull out your phone when you're kayaking and make a great video, or, if you're really hardcore, put the GoPro on your head. I think we just didn't see a path to that being a 10 times better product.

Okay. It's not the right market. Then the way I think about new platforms is oftentimes customers buy them for a killer app, and then that gets an install base, and then they discover there's lots of other things that they'll use them for.

You remember the initial adoption of personal computers and just early PCs. A business might say, “Okay, I want a computer that can run a spreadsheet, and I'm buying this spreadsheet box, and it's a screen, and it's a computer and a keyboard and everything for running spreadsheets.” You realize it can do other things, like, “Oh, yeah. Okay, cool.” Later on, you start doing other things with it, but it really started as the thing running the spreadsheet.

Do you think there's a similar adoption pattern for Specs where people buy it because you can get a full-size screen anywhere, and then they realize there's games on it, and then they realize there's other things they can do, or do you think people will be adopting it for a broad variety of use cases?

In today's day and age, I think the killer-app concept is a little bit of a mirage, frankly, and so instead, I think—

You're telling me all my ideas are wrong.

Terrible instinct for developing Specs. This is good. I'm learning a lot.

No, I understand why people see it that way. I just think that today, especially with how easy it is to develop software, what's actually more important is to develop a platform where people can go after lots of different use cases that are highly relevant and highly valuable to them.

I think you're already seeing that today in enterprise software, for example. We have a calendar app called Saturn, which is really cool. It's actually built around your friends and your family, built for mobile. The team was using an enterprise service for bug reports, and this thing probably cost like $100,000 a year. Today, they built a replacement for it in a day, saved $100,000, but more importantly, they were like, “This is a way better tool for us. It's built bespoke for me. Yeah, I love this tool.”

Where I think we're at in 2026, which is fundamentally really different, is that there's literally going to be bespoke software for people that they're going to be able to imagine, build, and create really quickly, that they can get an enormous amount of value from. This idea of one-size-fits-all software, I don't think, is as relevant in this new world.

Your vision for Specs is that you have a new platform, and you usher in the era of custom software, where you think up what you want your Specs to do, and they can do it.

With Lens Studio, Lens Studio is becoming more and more agentic. I don't want to ruin all the surprises that we have coming later this year, but I think what's so exciting about the promise of this platform is that anyone could build almost anything and see it in the real world, incredibly quickly.

That's a big change from the way that a gaming console works, where you really need that killer piece of software. I think what's so interesting about the future, and I think what's so different about Specs, is that people are going to build software that's best for them, and maybe they'll share it with friends or the world. But because building software is so easy now, it's a fundamental paradigm shift.

Have you vibe-coded any in Lens Studio, any of your own? Can you share what you've done, or some of that stuff, or what people at Snap have done?

Almost daily, people are playing around and building new things in Specs, building incredible new tools. It can be everything as silly as a little airplane game, where you drag your hand around and fly an airplane through the clouds. Or some folks are also—I mentioned that use case of seeing what your agents are up to and being able to work together with them. That was also built with agents.

I think the entire engineering paradigm, the way that software is built now, enables a totally different way of thinking about Specs and about our platform, and frankly, overcomes the biggest hurdle that we were facing, which was the App Store lock-in and moat. That's always been the biggest question people have asked about a new computing platform. How are you going to overcome the 1 million apps or 2 million apps on the App Store that are locked into the Apple ecosystem?

Today it's so easy to write software. I'm sure you've seen my favorite graph has been the iOS app submission graph, which is like bumbling along flat, and now it's just exploding into the right.

The internal charts, as you can imagine, at Stripe are similar to that, where the rate of new business creation is just massively spiking.

It's unbelievable. That to me is super exciting. I think that unlocks a whole new way of thinking about Specs and our operating system, Lens Studio, et cetera.

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4. Snap Builds Its Core Business

I want to talk about your core business a bit. Who do you compete with? Is it that you narrowly compete with other mobile-first social apps, or is it that you're competing with other entertainment forms? Netflix is actually a competitor because it's also a thing that you could do with your time. I'm just curious how you think about the set of competitors that you have.

I think our competitors are primarily messaging services. The core of the service is messaging. When we launched Snapchat, it had no social features beyond messaging. That's always driven the growth of the service. I think then, secondarily, the camera as well. If there's a moment happening in front of you, which camera do you choose to use? Do you capture with the Snap camera or your lock-screen camera?

I think that's another thing that we think a lot about. I don't think people realize the scale of the number of selfies, for example. It was so funny. I think Apple announced last year, “There's been 500 billion selfies captured on iPhone this year,” or something like that. I sent a message to our team. I was like, “That seems like so small.” How weird is that? Sure enough, they came back, and they're like, “Oh, well, over a trillion selfies have been captured on Snapchat.”

I think when you look at the same period—

That's so many.

It's so many. We lowballed what we announced publicly. I think what's funny about—

Sorry, that's 1,000 per MAU.

Per—

Lifetime. If there's been a trillion selfies lifetime.

Over a year.

Yeah.

A one-year period, with almost a billion monthly active users.

That's a lot. I think that's a lot.

Yeah.

But I think people don't realize the scale and the engagement in the Snapchat camera.

So, a messaging service is the competitor, and then how does the business work? I actually don't know that much about how the business works. You're approaching a billion MAUs, and monetization is mostly advertising for them? Or how do your different revenue streams break down?

We've got two major revenue streams. One is advertising; the other is direct revenue. The direct revenue business is relatively new for us, I think over the last 2 or 3 years. We just announced we hit 25 million Snapchat+ subscribers, over a billion run rate on the direct revenue business. That's been growing really nicely for us.

Then advertising, of course, whether that's on the map—we've got a product called Promoted Places and actually really powerful closed-loop measurement around that. A lot of folks care right now about driving people into their retail locations, and Promoted Places plays a huge role in doing that.

There's been a general trend, I think, of businesses directly monetizing, like having their equivalent of direct revenue be more relevant with AI because the inference costs are real. Maybe the prior generation of companies were very heavily ad-dominant. Whereas if you look at ChatGPT or Claude or something like that, they have to have the various tiers of subscriptions, $20 a month and $200 a month, because you can just use a small amount of compute or a lot of compute.

Do you see similarly direct revenue becoming a bigger deal for Snap in the future? Because you're just going to have more computationally expensive products? If you're using a lot of computationally expensive Lens Studio stuff, you can potentially burn a lot of compute as a user of Snap.

Yeah. That's one consideration for us. Of course, we have a Lens+ tier of our subscription service, which gives you access to more of our AI tools and editing tools. I don't think people realize that the Snapchat camera is one of the largest image and video generation platforms in the world, just given the frequency of engagement. One of the ways we do monetize that is with the Lens+ product.

But I think for us, if I look at our subscription business, it actually just really aligns with our company's ethos and also our core skill set. If you think about what Snapchat has been good at over the past decade, it's been making products that people really love.

We would always get emails from customers asking for new features, different features, more bespoke features, like app themes, for example. We never had the resources to work on it. We were like, “Oh gosh, we can't build something for a tiny subset of our community,” even though they're so passionate about the product and about what we're creating.

I think what's been so fun about Snapchat+ is that we've been able to dedicate the resources to build this long list of features that our most passionate Snapchatters really want and are willing to pay for. It really aligns with what we love to do, and I think what we do best, which is making cool new products with our community and what they want, which are more bespoke features from us.

Sorry, is there a difference between what your paid customers tend to want versus what your free customers tend to want?

Not necessarily, but I think the most passionate Snapchatters always have requests for how we can make the product better.

We can’t always resource all those requests. But now with Snapchat+, we have an avenue where folks who are really passionate about the service want a new feature, let us know, and we can build that for our subscribers. I think that’s been really exciting.

Do people have good ideas generally?

People have great ideas—an endless number of great ideas.

How do you expose yourself to product ideas from the community?

My email is evan@snap.com, so I get my fair share of—

Especially if you say it on podcasts.

Yeah, yeah, of great customer emails. But online, in comments, every time I post a video, I’m getting comments from people telling me what we should do differently. I think that’s one of the great things about engaging with our community.

5. Close Friends Beat Big Networks

People think of social networks and messaging apps as network-effects businesses, where the bigger they are, the better they work as products and businesses because your friends are there. They are almost the textbook example used in business school discussions of network effects. That is somewhat true, but there’s also an element where you have anti-network effects and diseconomies of scale as a social network. One is that as you get more popular, there are more fraud and spam problems and things like that. But there’s also a question of what the “identity” of the social network is.

Maybe teens using a product don’t necessarily want their aunts and uncles on it because the vibe is all wrong. Or maybe Silicon Valley insiders prefer Quora. You remember Quora was around when we were first starting out, and it was originally a very Silicon Valley insider product. Now it’s a much broader product. As I think about Snap, one of the things you’ve done well is that you’ve kept it cool and avoided the “ick” of it feeling like it’s too big, which, again, is something social networks sometimes run into. Maybe you can comment on that phenomenon and how you think about the risk in general.

It’s fascinating because you’ve tapped into two of the most important ideas in social, or at least two of the most important findings that we’ve had. The first one, which is maybe the most important, was that when we were starting Snapchat, you’re right: the belief was that the bigger the network was, the more valuable it was, and folks had a whole model for how they thought about that.

What Snapchat proved was that it’s not about the size of your network or the number of people you can contact on your network. It’s about who you actually talk to. That tends to be a much smaller group than the total size of the potential network, or even your total number of friends. In fact, most of your conversations, I would guess, on a daily basis are with your wife, maybe some of your close friends, maybe some of your closest coworkers. But it’s actually a very small group of people that you talk to the most.

That broke the model of social media, which was that the more friends you have, the more engaged you are, and the more value there is. We actually said, “That doesn’t sound right.” I think people spend most of their time talking to the folks who are most important to them. If we design a service that’s all about talking to the people who are most important to you—your close friends—and we design a service that’s really, really great at that—

You may not send Snaps all day to your 400th friend, but certainly for me, I love seeing what our two-year-old is up to throughout the day. My wife sends me little Snaps, and it makes my day. It’s the best part of my day, seeing what he’s doing and what he’s up to. We’ve really built a service that’s great for your close friends. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you need the largest possible network. You just need the most important people in it.

I think that was one of the reasons why Snapchat was able to grow. When we were first getting started, we just heard from everyone, “You’re never going to be able to compete with Meta. There’s no way, because they’ve got a bigger network.” Then I think the second lesson is a follow-on from that, because the other thing that we found is that as Facebook grew and Instagram grew, there was so much pressure to add more friends.

If you remember back in the day, their entire business was based on the News Feed. In order to have content in the News Feed, you needed to have friends. In order to have more content, you needed to add more and more and more friends to have a News Feed that had more posts and, therefore, more advertising opportunities. That created a really precarious problem. I think what folks found is that after they added a certain number of friends, they got to a place where they actually didn’t know who they were friends with on Facebook. They didn’t know who was going to see their content.

There’s a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back type phenomenon where then it inhibits posting, which is very dangerous.

People felt really uncomfortable posting. That then accelerated, I think, this need to bring in public content, no longer friend content. Very, very quickly, the social network morphed into something that was much more about posts from BuzzFeed or something like that, or other news providers, than it was content about your friends. I think that’s been another one of our key learnings over time.

One of the reasons why Snapchat is a much more private service is that you can’t be embarrassed by your aunt on Snapchat because there are no public comments on your Story. You can share with your friends and feel comfortable doing that without the risk of being embarrassed. Because the service is oriented around close friends, we don’t have many of those same challenges with a public News Feed.

Your view is that if you think of a payoff curve for how good the product is relative to the number of friends you have on it, the textbook view is that it just goes up monotonically. Whereas you’re saying it starts off at zero because the product is no use if no one’s on it. Then you’re saying it goes up pretty quickly to 10 or 20 people, but maybe hits a plateau and starts decreasing. I don’t know—what are the numbers here?

Potentially even less.

Yeah. When does it start—when does a social network start having anti-utility from the incremental user?

I think we have to be careful to differentiate a social network from a messaging service. At its core, because Snapchat is a messaging service, you can get the vast majority of the value even by having one friend, two friends, or three friends. Those are the folks you talk to the most, and that connection is really, really important to you. As I mentioned, one of the big challenges of social networks was that in order to have enough content to drive enough engagement to grow the advertising business, there was a need to add more and more and more friends.

Because the News Feed was really reliant on new content, I think one of the things that we did very early on—and we could argue about how well we executed on this—was identify that we needed to open up to non-friend content: publisher content and content from creators, very early on. Rather than driving people to add friends, they could watch content from publishers when they ran out of content from their close friends.

We moderated that content. We were one of the first companies to actually rank that content with AI, with our service called Discover. The fundamental thesis was, “Let’s not force people to add friends so they can watch more content. Let’s just show them content from publishers or from creators.”

Oh, that’s very interesting. So your view is that the mistake would be that one should add more people. You should get more connections on LinkedIn so that there is content in your feed, and your view is that you should separate out the people you want to interact with and having stuff to do in the app. Those are actually pretty separate concerns, and it’s very dangerous to mix them.

I think back in 2016 or 2017, we said the most important thing you need to do is separate social from media. The biggest mistake was combining them, and it creates a lot of perverse incentives. Instead, just add the friends who are important to you, who are close to you. Use a service for messaging. Share with them if you want to, with Stories or things like that. Then, if you want to watch more content, great—we’ve got this whole world of content available to you from publishers and creators, et cetera.

Yeah, that’s very interesting. Okay, the other thing that, from a product point of view, I really associate with Snapchat is obviously persistence, or lack thereof. The ephemeral nature and the norms around this have shifted a lot, even over the course of my lifetime. I remember when I started using the internet, the norm—I don’t know if you remember this—was that you did not use your real name on the internet. The internet’s a scary place, and it would be dangerous for you to have your real name out there.

Then we got okay with that. Then there was the era where everything got posted in perpetuity through social networks and everything else. Then we realized, “Huh, maybe everything being posted in perpetuity is not a great idea.” I feel like people are still trying to figure this stuff out.

I’m curious, again, what you think the long-term equilibrium is. Do you want a central store of all the photos you’ve ever taken in your camera roll? Do you want everything to be ephemeral? If things are ephemeral, maybe you really wish you’d kept that birthday Snap from a while ago.

What is the long-term equilibrium here? Just online, in terms of how people reason about data? Do we need more fine-grained control between a one-off disappearing message and something kept forever? Maybe we need new product inventions.

6. Ephemeral Communication Feels Human

I think my general thesis would be that it will probably mirror the way that we've been living for thousands of years, which is that the vast majority of life is ephemeral. Then you save the things that are important. You don't write down every thought you have. You certainly don't record every conversation you have, although we're recording this one. I think for me, that's likely how things will evolve over time with technology.

Certainly, what we've seen with Snapchat is that when we said, "Hey, it doesn't make sense that everyone's recording everything forever in terms of our conversations," that has an impact on the way people express themselves and share with one another. That sounded crazy at the time because literally everything was saved forever. We were talking about things like the importance of privacy and the relationship between privacy and self-expression back in 2012. People were like, "What are you talking about?" This was at a time when everyone was saying, "We're going to be... Everything's going to be open and connected. We're going to share everything about ourselves with everybody."

That's just not how humans have lived for thousands and thousands of years. I think what's very likely looking forward is what's already happened, which is that the vast majority of communication products you use now have retention settings that delete your conversations unless you want to save them. I think that's true for Snapchat in terms of making Snaps as well. You may just want to send something that's silly to your friend, but if it's an important memory or if it's our two-year-old running around doing something cute, I'll just save it. I think people are going to interact with technology the same way they interact with the world, which is: save the things that are important and discard the rest.

Yes, yes. Interesting. Where do messaging apps go?

To me, the big question that we need to solve is: what is the best way to communicate on Spectacles? I think that's what's really interesting to me right now. What's fascinating is that the social network of the future is actually hanging out together in person and using Spectacles together. That's what excites me about the future of digital communication. I think messaging is fine, but it's hard to compete with actually being together with your friends and your family. If we can build technology that makes that fun, that gets you all the benefits of technology, but with your friends and family, I think that's a huge positive.

7. Kids Need Balanced Technology

You don't let your kids use screens. What age do you think you'll start?

Our 15-year-old is fully on the screen train. That ship sailed a long time ago, probably during COVID for sure. The baby, our two-year-old, for example, we let him watch YouTube when he's getting his hair cut. He's big into construction. He likes to watch—

Your two-year-old—

It's awesome. By the way, it's awesome at every age, but to see it through a two-year-old's eyes is so fun. It's mind-blowing. He's big into his construction videos. Then the six- and seven-year-olds will watch a movie from time to time or something like that. Actually, the TBPN guys gave me the ModRetro Game Boy remake thing, and so—

I'll check that out.

Yeah, they got those—

Pokémon Yellow.

It's awesome. Yeah, they got those for Christmas. They play those a little bit.

What I'm getting at is there's this big society-wide debate right now as to what you do with kids and teens, and the general view is that adults can do what they want when it comes to phones and social media. What do you think is the right policy position there?

I think the real danger is blanket policy when everybody is different. Kids are different developmentally. Each of our kids is different in where they are developmentally, what they're passionate about, and their interests. No matter what, parents need to work to cultivate a healthy balance with their kids and do what's appropriate for each of their individual kids at different times.

Flynn, our 15-year-old, was going back and forth between his dad's house and our house a lot when he was younger, so he needed a phone earlier. It was otherwise impossible to coordinate. That was something that was important. That was a decision that my wife and I made to give him a phone earlier than maybe we would have otherwise. I think it was earlier than I got a phone when I was growing up because it was important for where he was at.

I think, being a parent, we know our kids best, I would argue. It's really important to think about what's developmentally appropriate for kids—your own kids. Generally speaking, though, what concerns me the most is the massive swings in public sentiment. If you remember, during the pandemic, it was like, "Technology is saving us all. Use screens all day long, all the time." Now we're in a moment where people are worried about screens and saying, "Don't use them at all."

I think the healthy response to really anything in life is to achieve a balance. Our 15-year-old loves art. He's amazingly talented. He likes hanging out with his friends. Then, of course, he wants to unwind and watch something on Netflix or chat with his friends on Snapchat. No problem. I think it's all about that healthy balance.

I think for me, what I'm really watching with a lot of concern is that in this moment of such dramatic change with artificial intelligence, young people need to be learning how to use these tools. It is absolutely imperative that young people learn how to adopt these tools. By the way, it's so inspiring for young people to take an idea in their head and see it made real so quickly. All of these advancements are happening at a time when people are incredibly skeptical about technology, are concerned about technology, and are concerned about AI. I think the industry has a lot of work to do to build trust and make sure that young people are adopting these tools, which are just so vitally important to their future.

Relatedly, Australia just blanket-banned under-16s from the top 10, or some number like that, social media apps. What have you seen post-ban in the behavior of kids across Australia, as opposed to just a lot of zeros in the logs?

Yeah. I think there are a lot of challenges with the way that the ban was implemented. As you mentioned, it only applies to a small number of apps. If you're a young person and you want to continue to use services like Snapchat, you can just use a clone service that isn't under the ban. It doesn't fall under—

Have a bunch of direct clones popped up, basically?

I haven't followed the exact number of clones, but there are plenty of alternatives. There are millions of apps in the App Store. I think applying the ban to only a very small number of services and not implementing it at the operating-system level creates a lot of challenges. You can use facial age scans, and you can also use government IDs themselves. But a lot of young people don't have government IDs.

I think there are some real challenges in implementing a ban like this at the app level. What parents need to know, and what's so important for parents to know, is that they can already configure this on their teen's phone using the operating system. Apple has a ton of great settings. We use them at home for our 15-year-old, where we can decide exactly what apps he can use and how long he can use them. All of these settings are available to parents at the operating-system level, which is a much more resilient way to implement this sort of policy.

I think a lot of the noise in the ecosystem today and a lot of the concern obfuscate the fact that these tools are already available for parents. They've been available for a very long time. I wish the government would spend more time teaching parents, or at least telling parents, that these tools are available because the app-level implementation with a handful of apps just doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Yeah, I agree. The list of named apps feels like quite a clumsy implementation where, as you say, there are lots of apps in the App Store, especially messaging apps and stuff. There's various substitutability between things. It seems like it'll obviously lead to people going to other apps. It's not clear what you've accomplished.

As you think about teen usage in general, there are lots of debates in lots of countries about teen mental health. I'm never quite sure how to pick through the data, where a lot of it is reliant on self-reported mental health data, which is just a hard index to use because you get changes in reporting standards and everything like that. But at the same time, you can imagine maybe bad engagement wells in which to draw people, and you can conceive of a bad product direction to go in.

I'm curious how you think of this. Do you think teens are figuring out a lot, and they have complex lives with lots going on, and it's easy to pick on social media apps or messaging apps as a scapegoat? Or do you think, "Look, there's a right way or a wrong way to design these products, and we spend a lot of time thinking about, 'No, that actually wouldn't be a great product affordance to have because it would lead to some bad outcomes'"? Do you think there is stuff to do at the app level, or do you think it's just a convenient scapegoat?

I think, first and foremost, we have an enormous responsibility to make a product that we think can have a positive impact on the world.

I think what's really interesting—you mentioned social media more broadly, and there are a lot of studies that look at social media broadly. It includes Snapchat together with Instagram or TikTok or whatever. There are a small number of independent studies that we have not funded or otherwise been involved with that have tried to understand the actual impacts of different apps and differentiate between different apps.

I think what's so fascinating is that now there have been maybe 3 or more of them: 1 out of Australia, I think 1 out of the Netherlands or something, and 1 in the US, showing that Snapchat actually has a positive impact on people's well-being and relationships. That's different from TikTok or Instagram, which are actually negatively associated with people's well-being.

I think because Snapchat is built around communication with your friends and family, and because relationships are the number 1 predictor of positive mental health outcomes and of your ability to recover from a negative depressive event, it doesn't surprise me that Snapchat's orientation around your real friends and connecting with your real friends has positive outcomes when it's studied by researchers.

I think 1 of the challenges for us, obviously, is to make sure that people understand Snapchat's role and don't just lump us in with social media, because people use Snapchat very differently and primarily as a communications service. We really want to have a positive impact in the world; that's really important to us. We are proud of the fact that independent research continues to show that concerns about overuse of technology are warranted. That's why I think that healthy balance is so important. There were plenty of studies back in the day with television. If you watch too much television, that's associated with negative health outcomes. I think too much of a good thing can be—

Do you think there's a loneliness-connectedness spectrum with apps? You're saying if you go too far into the loneliness direction, where you're going through the endless feed and you're in hour 4, that's maybe not a great place to end up, whereas what you guys are trying to encourage is more in the connectedness direction. You think that will lead to pretty good outcomes for teens or anyone else?

Just in terms of what we've seen with the independent research, I think the reason that Snapchat shows up as being associated with positive well-being and positive relationships is because it's connecting friends. It's doing so in an environment where people feel like they can express themselves, be their true selves, send a silly photo, not feel the pressure to look perfect on social media, not save something forever, and not receive public likes and comments and that kind of thing.

I do think that's a difference with Snapchat. I think it's so important for us to just continue to make clear that we built our service differently. In fact, a lot of what inspired Snapchat in the early days was that we didn't like Facebook. We didn't like social media. We didn't like that you had this huge public friends list and all this pressure around posting things that would be cool and popular or pretty or whatever. We grew up with social media, and we built something different in many ways in response to having something fun that we could use with our friends.

Do you think there's an issue? Because as you think then about the content side of the business, there's a criticism that if you start down a rabbit hole, you get pulled further down the rabbit hole. If you start interested in sovereign citizen conspiracy theories, you'll get pulled further into that. If you start with anorexia content, you'll get pulled further into that. Is that something you think about, that you have to balance people not getting pulled too far into rabbit holes on the content side?

What I think is so fascinating about what you said is that people have focused far too much on the algorithms and not enough on the content itself. I think part of the reason why folks focus on the algorithm is because they're wary of tripping the First Amendment protections around what content you can display on your service. But since we launched Discover, since we ever offered a content product on Snapchat, we have moderated that content.

Now, in the early days, it was really hard because human beings had to moderate all the content before the days of artificial intelligence. We only had a very small number of publishers. That actually impacted our ability to grow because we didn't have a huge corpus of content. But now, today, we continue to moderate the content—all the content that is appearing publicly on Snapchat. I think that really needs to continue to be the focus for delivering a safe and responsible content experience.

But don't people focus on the algorithm because, for an individual user, the algorithm is the content? There'll be several orders of magnitude difference in the views between an uninteresting piece of content and a really interesting piece of content, and so my lived experience of any of these apps is that the algorithm defines my personal TV channel.

But I think in the example that you use, the rabbit hole of anorexic content, my view would be that anorexic content, or content promoting anorexia, runs afoul of our guidelines and therefore should not appear on our platform.

You want to stop it at the moderation level?

At the content level. I think that's really where the conversation needs to be. Again, it's hard in the United States of America because that's a First Amendment issue. That's much harder to regulate.

Interesting. Is there anything interesting to say on moderation? I presume that's just been a multidecade journey of getting that right.

What I would say is that it's important. I think the content experience that our community has is really important, and that we've always had fair, consistent content guidelines that we share with everybody so that they understand the rules of the road. Our concept has been that there should be rules of the road. I think 5 or 10 years ago, that was different. I think now more people are appreciating that there should be more guidelines around the types of content displayed on services online.

People talk a lot about distribution dynamics in this space. The fact that you guys, now that you're soon passing 1 billion MAUs, have a lot of advantages where you can promote the Discover content in the existing app that first became popular with messaging, but your competitors can also do that with your functionality, where you invent functionality and they can distribute it to their user bases. I'm just curious how that—you're on both sides of that. You have your own distribution, but you also compete with others who have even more distribution. How is the distribution battle playing out at the moment?

8. Distribution Becomes More Valuable

Perhaps the most important thing in all of this is that distribution is getting more and more and more important in this day and age. I think as it becomes easier to build companies, to build software, and to innovate using AI tools, there is a real premium on distribution. I think people are going to reallocate more resources away from things like software engineering, for example, to distribution in order to grow faster.

I think distribution is at a real premium. It's hard as a brand today to get visibility and traction. Places like Snapchat, I think, are a really important part of growing any business. That's only becoming more valuable at this moment in time.

You end up having distribution defensibility, especially as other things get easier?

I think it's just critically important. I think even for us, as we think about the future of our business, we've always had a ton of great ideas—many more great ideas than resources to actually execute on those ideas. Every time we've kicked around, "Oh, we've got an idea for a new app," it's like, "Oh gosh, I don't think we can spare 15 people to spin up a new app. No way."

Now, with half a person's time, half a team member's time, we can build a totally new service and distribute it through Snapchat. That, I think, for us, as we think about the future of the business, being able to build out a multi-app strategy or more services—that distribution, coupled with these advancements in artificial intelligence, is a really big deal for us.

We talked earlier about Snap managing to remain cool, which is hard for a messaging app or a social network. How do you run product? What's the day-to-day? Are you having designers come present stuff? Are you coming up with the ideas? Are people pitching ideas to you? What's the review process? Are you reviewing working features? Are you reviewing wireframes? I would just love to hear what the creative process looks like at Snap.

9. Snap Builds Through Creative Dialogue

First of all, it's cool to be uncool. We're never trying to focus on cool. We're trying to focus on making things that are useful, that our community will really get value from. I think that's so important. The North Star is durable value.

I love design. That's really my happy place. I spend a couple of hours a week with our design team, and all we do is look at stuff. It can be in really any form: it can be a sketch, it can be something on the whiteboard, it can be a fully functioning prototype, it can be on a slide, or whatever. But the important thing is just that we're looking at a huge volume of ideas.

I think on a weekly basis, we're probably looking at hundreds of ideas: ways to evolve the service or new products.

These are at the concept level? These are sketches?

A lot of them are drawings, yeah, or prototypes or whatever. Now, increasingly, our designers are shipping code, which is really wild.

Post-AI, you're seeing many more working demos just because it's easy to make them?

Yeah. Or more importantly, designers are like, “You know what? I've been so frustrated about this feature. It's been in the backlog forever. I'm really passionate about it. Here's my PR.” I think that's pretty awesome.

Then how do you down-select between them? People probably come pitch you tons of good ideas in a week—more than you have the bandwidth to implement. Also, I presume you're limited a little bit by users' familiarity with functionality. Even if you could build it all, you can't just throw all this functionality into the app because it'll overwhelm users. You have 2 limiting factors: can you build good versions of all this stuff, and what rate can users absorb?

Sometimes a great idea is actually, “We should get rid of this thing,” which is also a really important part of the creative process.

What does the selection process look like?

It involves a lot of debate, which I think is really fun. Our meetings—everyone's laughing the whole time. I think that's one of the most important things: the creative process has to be fun. Otherwise, what are we doing, anyways?

I think we try to debate and explore ideas and build on each other's ideas. There's no filter process. If you've got something you want to bring to a design meeting, have at it, and we'll talk about it and play around with it. Sometimes we're also like, “Oh, that's interesting, but maybe another time.” It comes up another 2 years later or 3 years later, and we're like, “Oh man, you remember that thing we were kicking around? Maybe we should build on that now.” I think it's really just an iterative process of exploring new ideas.

Brian Armstrong talked here about how, when the USDC idea was pitched to him, he was like, “I'm not sure. Sounds kind of silly. But sure, if you guys want to do it, then go for it.” Obviously, that's become one of the biggest things out of Coinbase. Do you have a similar story where there was an idea that you initially weren't so hot on, but ended up being—

Oh gosh, there's so many. Streaks are one. I did not like the idea of Streaks. I did not want to do it. I actually fought very hard to kill Streaks over the years. We've always been anti-metric at Snap. “No metrics. No, thank you.”

Sorry. Metrics or gamification? You mean user-facing?

Just metrics. There's almost no metrics in Snapchat. It's hard to find.

Internally or externally?

User-facing metrics. Like most social services, how many friends do you have? How many followers do you have? How many likes do you have? Comments? Everything has a—

You don't want their experience to be one of numbers?

Like, look at a bunch of numbers. We want to get out of the way and help you communicate with your friends. I've been, over the years, just trying to get rid of Streaks.

What really changed for me was learning how much people love Streaks as an opportunity to connect with one another. Over time, I would just hear these stories. People would send emails to evan@snap.com, like, “You wouldn't believe it. I moved halfway across the world, I was separated from my best friend, I got a divorce, I got a new job, and every single day I stayed in touch with my best friend.” That changed my life and was so powerful for me. I was like, “Wow!” Sometimes, just having an invitation to communicate or an invitation to connect is so important. I think over time, I've come around to really seeing the value there.

Streaks is the digital equivalent of getting out of the house. It's important to get out of the house.

Sometimes you got to get out of the house.

You got to do that online as well. That's interesting. When we talk about the product design process, are designers in the driver's seat? Is it similar—I don't know if you've compared notes with Brian at Airbnb, where they have a very design-forward culture. Is that how the culture at Snap is?

I'd say the culture at Snap is a thoughtfully managed dialogue between design, engineering, and product management, as well as data science—you name it. For us, the business was always built initially on the dialogue between myself and Bobby. He had more of an engineering background, and I had more of a design background. But he really loved design, and I actually loved engineering. We were able to really debate things and see things from different angles. That was always, I think, something that really helped the business grow.

We tried to model that as a team, where it's not necessarily design-led, product-led, or engineering-led. It's a healthy dialogue and relationship between all of these really important functions in our business.

When you talk about data science, one thing I'm reminded of is that often in social networks, because of the network effects, you get these very strong country network effects. Orkut, Google's social network, was one that no one really used for a long time except all of Brazil, who were really into it. You get these funny regional effects. Are there any countries that are just disproportionately, wildly into Snap?

Norway was the first place that Snapchat got traction. We had no traction anywhere—

Not the US?

Not the US. We had no traction anywhere except Norway. In fact, in the very early days—

I did not know this.

Oh, it was a blast. In the early days—I think this was after we had gotten venture funding, or maybe after we'd gotten our first round. We raised $400,000 or something like that. We were really growing in Norway. Big-time growing in Norway.

Like a Canadian girlfriend: “My app is big in Norway, trust me.”

We literally got on an airplane and flew to Norway. We were famous. It was unbelievable. We were in a 7-Eleven, and people were like, “What? You guys work at Snapchat? That's crazy.” I remember just being like, “Oh gosh, I hope this happens in more places.” It was an amazing feeling.

How did it happen?

I think one of our hypotheses is that Norway had both very high-end devices and great internet connectivity that was affordable for the population. If you think about Snapchat back in the day, you really needed an iPhone to be able to use the service. It was iPhone-only in a lot of cases in the early days. It required very, very heavy network use because you're sending photos and videos all the time, which was really unusual back in 2012 or whatever it was.

The kindling was dry enough for the Snap fire to—

To really take hold, yeah. Then over time, obviously, it grew in the US. But the US didn't necessarily have the same network capability or even iPhone distribution at that time.

Yes. That's so interesting. How about today? Are there any countries that are fun to start out in?

Norway is still—

Still?

Still a Snapchat leader.

That effect just pushes through 15 years in?

It's unbelievable, yeah.

That's really wild.

The other thing that's interesting about Norway—and I think this is true about Snapchat in general—is that it's a culture that really prioritizes close family and friend relationships. That's something that's really important to them.

My Norway impression was that the infrastructure is so good. It's like this country is so rich. I think they build infrastructure beyond what's sensible. You'd be driving to a village that has a population of 200 people, and you'll pass through 7 kilometers of underground tunnels to get there, and anything else would be a ferry.

The person pouring you a Guinness has a graduate degree.

Exactly.

It's great.

It's a funny country. How has your leadership style changed over the years at Snap?

In so many profound ways. I think everything about leadership is about people. I love our people. But I didn't start learning how to lead people—I started building products.

I think the transition from trying to make stuff that people really love to trying to lead in a way that can inspire people is really hard to do. What we're doing is competing against the largest companies in the world in the messaging space, building hardware—again, competing with the largest companies in the world—and working on foundational models.

When I look at our video models and everything, we're doing that. We're trying to do some of the hardest things in the world. That requires inspiring people to take on enormous challenges, recruiting some of the best folks in the world to work together with us, and then building a culture where those people can do the absolute best work of their lives.

That's different in many ways from just trying to build a product that people love.

But it's the same in that it requires a lot of empathy and understanding people and understanding that people are very different. Understanding how to bring out the best in each of them. That's one of the challenges I love most about the job today.

In the context of building hardware, one thing I hear from people who do it is that it's harder in the US because of the supply chain dynamics. In particular, if you're making stuff in Shenzhen, there's a company just down the road that can give you the V1 overnight. Then you say, "Oh, we want to change this component," and they'll swap out the production line of the components, again, overnight. Have you found that supply chain speed dynamic in the US a factor where, in particular, as we talk about re-onshoring so much manufacturing, the limiting factor with US production is often how fast you can iterate, essentially?

I think people are always stunned to hear we build some of the most important components for Specs in the US and in the UK. We've really thought about building some of the most IP-sensitive components, some of the most sophisticated components in the US and the UK, where we can sit them directly next to R&D and engineering so that we can have those really, really fast cycle times and iterations.

In-house or in the US at contract manufacturers?

In-house. That's really allowed us to lead on the display technology. Even if you look at Specs today, the resolution, the performance of our waveguides far exceeds our competitors. Again, we have a lot of foundational IP and patents in this area. That is one thing I love about hardware. It's way easier to protect our innovations and our ideas compared to software, especially today in the age of AI.

I think that is a huge factor these days as well, for sure. Should we try playing a game?

You want to play some darts? Let's do it.

Oh yeah. I want to try darts. That is perfect for here.

We're going to have to get up and move around.

Yeah, we have a dartboard, but we can—

Is Satya really number one on the darts?

Yes. Now we haven't played it with everyone. If you want to have a go at Satya's record, you can—

We can practice first with Specs.

Exactly, yeah.

Here we go. The darts should be right here. Just pick them up.

Oh, there we go. This is really funny. Right next to the actual dart. I got 28. That was a buzzer-beater.

Oh, wow! Player 2 wins. Oh my God! Nice. 51. Do you want to play chess?

Yeah, sure. Let's play.

Do you see the chessboard?

Yeah, I do. This is the chessboard. That's awesome.

There you go. This is pretty funny playing chess in the pub.

Check.

Oh.

I'm not going to lie. You're in a lot of trouble.

Oh, no. Oh, wow! Nice.

This is awesome. Thank you.

It was fun.

See you soon.

See you soon.