How I Built This with Guy Raz - Snap: Evan Spiegel

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

What started as a design project for Stanford student Evan Spiegel quickly flourished into one of the most-used social media platforms in the world: Snapchat. It only took two years for Mark Zuckerberg to make a multi-billion offer for the company. But Evan turned it down — convinced of Snap’s potential to disrupt human communication in an even bigger way. And while Evan’s path has been anything but smooth, today Snap is valued at more than $13 billion, with ambitions beyond its hero mobile app.This episode was produced by Alex Cheng with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Katherine Sypher. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Gilly Moon.You can follow HIBT on X & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail]. Sign up for Guy’s free newsletter at guyraz.com or on Substack.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better your home might be worth more than you think find out how much at arbb.ca slash host you are contacted by facebook and you and bobby go meet with mark Zuckerberg what do you remember about that meeting um we were pretty nervous he was telling us about working on a new poke app, which ultimately ended up being a copycat of Snapchat at the time. Did he say, do you guys want to collaborate at that time?

I don't remember the exact substance of the conversation. You don't remember? Of course you remember. You were 22. Must have been incredible to be asked to come in because it's a validation of what you guys were building. That's not how it felt at the time. It felt like, oh, no, there's a really big company that everyone's been warning us about, you know, and it said they're working on something similar. We knew that a copycat product was coming. You know, and then I think that Christmas it did. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Evan Spiegel turned disappearing photo messages into Snap,

one of the biggest social media platforms on Earth. Here's the story of Snap, once known as Snapchat, that you might have. have heard. Evan Spiegel and two friends from Stanford built a social media app in 2011, and just two years later, Mark Zuckerberg offers them $3 billion. Now, this story is true. This really did happen. And if you think about it, it was kind of nuts for Evan to turn down that offer. I mean, there's a pretty large graveyard of one's high-flying tech companies that soon withered out and died. But Evan had a lot of conviction. in his product. And the data was there to back that up. Within a year of launching, Snapchat had close to 5 million daily users. Today, that number is over 450 million daily users. And what is it about Snapchat that makes it so compelling? Well, as a parent who tries to ban all social media apps for my kids' phones, the one argument I couldn't win was over Snapchat. Middle and high school kids use Snapchat in the same way adults use text messaging. In other words, Snap has figured out how to

build a moat around a major way teenagers communicate. Now, Evan's rocket chip trajectory was not as smooth and seamless as it sounds. For starters, he was just 21 when Snap launched. He was, as he admits, really bad at being a CEO in the early days. He didn't know how to run a business and the learning curve was really steep. And during the first few years, he was a first few years. And during the first few years of Snap's rise, a legal battle with one of the co-founders cast a shadow over the company. Today, Snap is still one of the biggest players in social media. And despite a somewhat lackluster performance on Wall Street, the company still has a market cap hovering between $13 and $15 billion. Lately, the companies decided to roll the dice on another hero product, spectacles,

augmented reality glasses that will bring much of the Snapchat experience right in the into your field of vision. It's a pretty risky bet given the performance of wearables so far, but a little more on that later. For now, what you need to know is that Evan grew up in the Palisades neighborhood in Los Angeles, an area, of course, devastated by the recent fires. Both of his parents were lawyers by training, but his mom eventually gave up law to take care of the kids. And watching his dad work really, really long hours, Evan says he knew pretty early on what he didn't want to be. One thing I knew for sure was that I did not want to be a lawyer.

My dad was always called away from family trips. He would get phone calls that would basically say, hey, you've got to cancel your trip or you can't go to this thing with Evan or whatever it was. So I remember thinking growing up, like, I want to be the guy on the phone calling my dad, telling him that he can't take our family on vacation. So I know you went to Stanford,

and I mean, this is like 2008. I mean, you're coming into, obviously, this financial crisis, but it's like the beginning of, you know, Web 2.0, right? You know, I think a couple of years before you, Kevin Sistram and Mike Krieger graduated and they would go on, of course, to found Instagram. We'll talk about that in a bit. But there was probably, like, already on campus just conversations around all these amazing things that people were doing, recent graduates were doing. Do you remember having those conversations and thinking, like, this is really cool, what's going on? At that time, it was still really early. when I go to campus now, it feels like almost everybody has a startup.

Yeah. Almost everybody's creating a company. But that's not what it felt like at the time. I mean, to your point, it was sort of in the, you know, around the time of the financial crisis, a lot of folks were still, you know, studying econ. That was a really popular major at the time. So it was sort of in that transitional phase between a lot of folks being really focused on econ to more computer science and things like that.

So I read a story about this experience. had. You took this class at the business school, and Scott Cook of Intuit, founder of Intuit, came to the class. And I don't know if that was a turning point for you, but what was what happened, you know, when you saw him and met him? Because I think it did, it was kind of a turning point for you as a student. Yeah, taking that class, it's called entrepreneurship and venture capital. It's taught by Peter Wendell and Eric Schmidt. It's still taught today. I'd try to guess lecture once a year. And that class was an absolute game changer for me. And, you know, Scott Cook was one of the guest lectures and gave the whole case study on Intuit. And during the

case study, I guess I asked a couple of questions in the class about how they were capitalizing the business at the time or something like that. So we'd had an opportunity to engage a little bit. And after class, I talked to him and basically begged him for a job. And so he gave me an internship at Intuit that really sort of changed my trajectory because on a very small team of people, we were, you know, I think it was three or four of us. We made web apps at the time, actually for, you know, touchpad phones, not touch screens or anything like that. But I learned that with a really small team, you could build software and deploy it all around the world. And so it sort of demystified a lot of the process of building stuff. So after doing that, I mean, did that then kind of set in motion wheels in your head like, wait,

I could do something cool. There's something cool to be done. Yeah. I think, you know, beyond that, it just showed that it wasn't that hard, that with a couple friends that we could make something too without, you know, the infrastructure of a huge company. And things like, you know, the cloud were getting built out at the time. So all this stuff that had been so hard before needing to rack your own servers, invest all this capital, have a huge team. That wasn't required to create software experiences anymore. Got it. All right. So while you were at Stanford, you had a friend named Bobby Murphy, who I guess he lived across the hall from you. And later, would actually become one of your co-founders at Snap, and we'll talk about that. But before that,

you guys, you and Bobby started another company. It was completely different. It's called Future Freshman. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Like, what was the business? Well, we had both experienced the college process that was super complicated. And one of the really challenging parts is all the different requirements of all of these different colleges when you're trying to apply. So it's a massive organizational project that could be better handled by software. And so we started trying to build really a beautiful software that could do that well. So you would just check all the box for all the schools you wanted to apply to. We would go out and gather all the requirements, the essay questions, everything, put it all in one place.

So it made it really, really easy for you to fill out the application and do that kind of thing. And you guys didn't need a whole lot of funding for this, it sounds like, or any. No, we didn't take any funding at that time. We were just trying to build a website and trying to build like a user interface. Yeah, exactly. Were your coding skills good enough to make something nice, like look good? I thought it was really cool. I mean, I did most of the design, and Bobby did most of the coding.

And, you know, I think that the software was great. The big problem was that nobody used it. How did you try to get people to use it? Well, at that time, both of our siblings were applying to college, so we tried to get them on it to start giving us feedback, and, you know, we would tell schools that it was available. But that was a big lesson for us, because our competitor at the time, they were called Naviance.

they were getting distribution through all the college counselors. So if you were in school, your college counselor would tell you and your parents, hey, use Naviance to apply to college. And so they had a massive distribution advantage. And how long did you guys kind of work on this before you came to the conclusion that you just were not going to be able to compete in that space? I think about 18 months total. We invested a lot of time into it.

And that was a really painful decision to shut it down. But I think ultimately we just realized we didn't have the distribution. And ultimately, we were solving a problem where even if we were really successful, our customers would essentially leave us every year. So we'd have to go get more customers the next year. And so it was just a really, really tough business, I think, to get off the ground. It's like diapers. You just got to get new customers in every year, as Mark Lorry said on the show many years ago. All right.

So this takes us roughly to the spring of 2011. You are, I think, a junior at Stanford. And was it sort of like, okay, you know, let's kind of spitball other ideas, come up with something else? Yeah, exactly. We had a couple other ideas that we were playing around with and working on at the time, including just really easy ways to connect with friends and share files and this sort of thing. But it wasn't until we started working on Piccaboo that I think we found something that we were really excited about. Tell me about the idea for Picaboo. How did that come about?

Well, I had come back from studying abroad in Cape Town. I was living in a dorm back on campus, hang out with a friend of mine. And he was like, man, it'd be really cool to be able to send disappearing photos. We were like, oh, that's a super interesting idea. So we started prototyping what that could look like and came up with the name Picaboo. And ultimately, I presented it to my design class. And I think the first piece of feedback we got was basically, you know, that's not going to work because you can always take a screenshot. And that piece of feedback was really, really helpful because I think early on there were some other

competitors in the space. They were all very focused on, like, security. But what we found was that what people loved using was just sending pictures back and forth really, really quickly. MMS was really slow. I mean, I think it took more than a minute to send a photo via text message at the time. And so our friends just started using it to send photos all day. All right. So Pekaboo, right, like Pekaboo, but it's spelled like PICC, Picaboo's this idea. And the idea is send, you can send a photo that will be ephemeral. It'll just, you could just quickly see it. It'll disappear in 10 seconds. mentioned this earlier, but 2011, I mean, a year earlier, Kevin Sistram and Mike Krieger, who were on the show, nine years ago, also Stanford graduates. They launched Instagram. So I have to imagine

that they were sort of like kind of legendary status or because once they launched Instagram, it really blew up. And what do you remember about hearing about those guys or talking about those guys or was it inspiring to you and to your friends in some way? Just because the parallels are so, They're so clear, you know, it's like two friends at Stanford a couple years before you with the photo app, right? And then that just becomes huge. You know, at the time, I think we were, we just really felt that like social media was taking itself too seriously. So Instagram and Facebook at the time, the whole focus was, you know, on posting the prettiest possible pictures and getting lots of likes and comments. And there was like a real focus on, you know, how many friends do you have? How

How popular are you? And of course, also a lot of concerns about like the permanence of images. I mean, at the time, there were all these stories of people getting job offers rescinded because somebody found their Facebook profile. So I think there was for us just a real need for something different, something that you could actually use to talk with your friends and have fun. Because Instagram and Facebook at that time were much more focused on this very public and permanent sort of status-based social media. Tell me, from the time of the idea to the time where you kind of like, like launch a version of Piccaboo.

I think it's just a couple of months. It's just like four or five months, right? I think something like that, yeah. How did you guys build it? Because he built it obviously as an app. Kind of take me into doing that. Did it require any money? Could you just do it on your own at Stanford?

Yeah, it didn't require any money. We could just do it. I just sketched out on one piece of paper, the screens, you know, the different flows. And one of the things we learned from future freshmen is not to build something huge and complex. It was to build something as simple as possible and get people's feedback as quickly as possible. And so we really just started with a couple key screens, you know, add a friend with their username, tap to send them a snap. But there were a couple principles that we really anchored to, like opening up to the camera, for example. So you never missed a moment. You could just open up to the

camera and snap really quickly. And so when you had this prototype, did it look good? Did it look anything like what it would eventually look like? We thought it looked good. I mean, I think today we might say that there was room for improvement. But at the time, you know, it was fun and playful and colorful and different. And I think that was really the whole point. And you designed it initially for the iPhone to work on the iPhone? Yeah, it was iPhone only to start. All right.

So when you have this app ready to launch it, was it just to test with friends that you knew? Or was it like a public launch where anybody could use it? We put it on the app store so anyone could use it. But obviously nobody knew about it except our friends. So in the early days, it was just our friends, you know, my sister, my cousin, folks just trying it and playing around with it with their friends. And what was the feedback like? I mean, what were people saying to you about it? Just that it was really fun.

I think, you know, I think it really lowered the bar to, you know, in terms of what a picture was. It wasn't about saving a perfect moment. It was about communicating. And people love that. So they started asking us for all these communication features, right? Like, hey, can I add a caption? Can I add a drawing? All the, you know, in the beginning, there weren't all these communication.

tools that we have today. Got it. Okay. So I want to raise something that is a little bit sensitive, and I know there are things that you can and maybe cannot talk about because there was litigation. So I'm going to try and fill in some gaps because it's important that we at least acknowledge it. But maybe you were working on Picaboo with two of your classmates at Stanford. It was Bobby Murphy, who we've talked about. He'd worked with you before on future freshmen. But then there was another classmate in the picture, a guy called Reggie Brown. And he would later file a lawsuit and say he was also involved in building Piccaboo. And from what I understand, you guys had a falling out. But tell me a little bit about maybe what happened or what you wished you would have done differently or maybe the communication wasn't clear about the roles that people were playing and who was doing what. Yeah, I definitely really appreciate his contributions. I mean, he came up with the idea of sending disappearing photos and share that with me. But I think one of the challenging thing. You know, Bobby and I had had this history of working together. And we, so we had, you know, a really strong working relationship. And I think those expectations were

really clear. So I think, like, to your point, you know, and for founders thinking about creating their own businesses, being really clear about those expectations up front, you know, including getting a piece of paper that really outlines those responsibilities, I think is really important. But it's not something you're thinking about when you're just playing around and trying to create something with your friends. Yeah. So, all right, from what I understand, And initially the app really took off among high school students in the Palisades and Malibu area. So I'm assuming that that was like something that maybe you were able to do. You were able to bring it to students there and encourage them to use it.

Well, we definitely shared it with our friends. And a lot of that growth happened informally. I mean, some of the things we tried, you know, like buying Facebook ads and stuff like that didn't work because people didn't understand the service until someone explained it to them until a friend used it with them. And it's only works if you've got a friend to use it with. So I think just the fundamental nature of the service is ultimately what drove its growth because the virality was inbuilt. Yeah, and it was different than social media virality because social media virality is very network-based, right? You would want to have the largest graph possible.

But the reason why Snapchat was able to grow is because you really wanted to use it with your, you know, one or two or three best friends. And so the growth trajectory was different than traditional social media, but, you know, it's still required. a friend to use it. In order to use it, somebody else has to have it. So then you get the next user and then the next user. And so it sort of self-perpetuates. I think that's one of the fun things about Snapchat. It's not a single-player experience. You've got to do it together with a friend. And some of the changes we made, especially calling it Snapchat, talking about the importance of visual messaging rather than focusing on disappearing photos, that's when people really, you know, started to understand, hey, this is for communicating. And you had to call a Snapchat because

there was another company called Picaboo, right? Yeah, exactly. We got a cease and desist from a Picaboo company, and maybe one of the best things that ever happened to us. And it happened early enough where your brand wasn't known, so it didn't matter. Yeah, exactly. So to get to January 2012, where you have 30,000 users, you could do that with almost no money. Yeah, this was one of the huge benefits of cloud infrastructure, as we could pay for what we used. But, you know, the server bills started getting more and more expensive. You know, my grandparents had left me $10,000. Bobby had some money from one of his prior jobs.

And so he chipped that in. My dad, I think, put in maybe $5,000 or $10,000. But he wasn't quite keen to put in any more to help people send photos back and forth. So we had to pretty quickly start looking for fundraising because the server bills got to be about $10,000 a month. When you talked about this idea, you know, to your dad or your mom or did anybody, was anybody skeptical? like, why would somebody want to do that? Or this just seems like it's going to be used by weirdos to send like naked pictures. I mean, aside from the media, which we'll get to in a minute, but just people you knew, did anybody ever express skepticism about this? Yeah, teachers, friends, of course. You know, but I think that, you know, that feedback was helpful and that skepticism actually helped fuel the growth of the product, right? They're like, wait a minute, I don't understand this, but so many people are using this or, wow, my friends are using it. I got to check it out and see what this is.

is all about. All right. So let's talk about fundraising. You are a senior, I think, at Stanford, and you're on campus. So I imagine it's not impossible to make connections between professors and other people on campus to sources of fundraising. I mean, just to kind of reveal what happens in March of 2012, you get almost half a million dollars in seed funding from Lightspeed, which probably one of their greatest, among their greatest investments ever. But tell me about getting that money because we'll and I should remind people listening the stories we don't hear about are all the times that light speed and Sequoia and benchmark and others made $500,000 in seed funding and it went nowhere. They lost it. We only hear about the times when it worked. So there's a lot of

money that they put out there that goes nowhere. But how did you make the case? Was it hard? Was it easy to get the money? We had a lot of unsuccessful meetings with venture capitalists. I think The places where we got more traction and saw success was anyone whose teens were using the product or they had friends who were using the product. And so, you know, ultimately, Barry, who was a partner at Lightspeed, you know, told another one of his partners, hey, my daughter is using Instagram, angry birds and Snapchat. You know, that's what she's doing all day long. We know about Angry Birds and Instagram. What's this Snapchat thing? Let's go find these guys. So they went to look for you. They went to look for us. Yeah. I got a Facebook message from Jeremy Liu at Lightspeed.

Yep. And we'd begin all sorts of messages from folks that seemed kind of spammy or suspicious. But Jeremy's Facebook profile, he had a photo of himself in Obama in the profile picture. So we were like, oh, he must be legit. We'll respond. And we ended up meeting up with Jeremy. And I think the thing that really helped them understand the business is we just shared the data. We just shared the retention data and the usage of Snapchat. So we had a lot of data that showed that once people started talking with their friends on Snapchat, they kept doing it. And ultimately, I think that's what gave them the conviction to invest. When they put half a million dollars into SNAP, what was the valuation?

$4.25 million. That's a good investment. I think so. Actually, my favorite part of that story is a school nearby invested $15,000 and ended up making, I think they ended up building a new gymnasium or something. It's pretty cool. A school nearby. Yeah, school, I guess, affiliated with one of the light speed folks. I think they were on the board or on the finance committee or something.

They were like, we should put. Oh, they invested in that seed round. Yeah, they invested $15,000 in the. dollars in the seed round and ultimately. How much money do you think they made out of that? Tens of millions of dollars, potentially. Enough for a new gym, I think. Yeah.

Did you, I mean, so up until that point, you didn't need a whole lot of money, right? But now with $500,000, I'm assuming, like, you've got to build an infrastructure. Like, how did you first deploy the money? Like, did you start to make hires? Because you're still a senior in college at that point, right? Yeah, the first thing we did was hire, friends of ours. Daniel, I was really fortunate enough to me. Daniel my freshman year during a product design seminar. And one of his friends, actually, I didn't know

they were friends of the time, but I was visiting a friend of mine in her dorm. And she was like, hey, you should meet this guy, David, across the hall. He's a really cool guy, super smart. So I just went and knocked on his door, introduced myself. Turned out he and Daniel were best friends. So David and Daniel joined the team. And I think there were about five of us there. It was me and Bobby and Dina and David and Daniel. And who's Dina? She's also a Stanford student. Yeah, we'd been friends in school. She'd helped with future friends. freshman and, you know. Was that investment from light speed?

Was that what prompted you to drop out? Yeah, that that and just that it was becoming impossible to do both at the same time. I mean, I felt just a huge sense of responsibility. I mean, we thought $485,000 was like infinity money. And, you know, we had a huge obligation to our investors. So, I mean, I can remember I was in a CNC machining class in the back of the class, refreshing my Wells Fargo account. And as soon as I saw the $485,000, I went up to the professor and I was like,

I'm just so sorry. Like, I can't continue. When we come back in just a moment, Evan realizes that he should have looked at the terms of that light speed deal a little more closely. And then later, Snapchat goes head to head with one of the biggest social media companies in the world. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This.

I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2012, and Evan has just dropped out of Stanford to, focus on his photo messaging app, Snapchat. He's recruited a group of friends to the company, and they've all moved down to L.A. to work out of his dad's dining room. We had the dining room because he has an old Mustang that he kept in the garage, like a 60s Mustang. So we were not allowed to use the garage.

That was for the car, and we were in the dining room. And he probably liked having you at home. I mean, I would love to have my kids at home after they finish college. I think in hindsight, yeah, when we finally moved out, he was like, oh, actually, that was really awesome. But, you know, we were working like 24-7. At some point, there were seven or eight of us there, so it was a lot. Tell me about your life on a day-to-day basis. You'd wake up and you would just work all day until late at night and then go to sleep? Yeah, basically that, seven days a week. Yeah. And what were you doing? What do you remember about 2012? Like, were you on the phones,

were you in meetings? Were you working on the user experience? What were the things you specifically were doing? There were a couple of big things happening at the time. One is we started working on the Android application. So Daniel and David were spending a lot of time doing that. The other thing that we were doing was really starting to work on video, because at the time it was only photos. And we had invented this really cool idea that, you know, back in the day, you had to toggle between photo and video on your smartphone. So you'd open the camera app and then if you wanted to make a video, I'd just press the video button. It would flip into video mode. There was a lot of friction. So we had invented this idea that you could just tap to take a photo or hold the button and

start recording a video. And that at the time, based on the way the camera worked, was actually quite difficult to engineer. And then, you know, a lot of time hiring, you know, one of the challenges we were up against around that time, maybe a little bit later, we had decided to stay in L.A. But up until then, we were in L.A., which doesn't have the same sort of tech ecosystem or tech talent that San Francisco or the Bay Area has. So hiring was very time-consuming, especially for tech talent and really trying to convince people to come move to L.A. to work on Snapchat. And then And fundraising, of course, at that time was also a pretty big project. And then I was answering all the support email as well at the time.

Evan, the first time I think I heard about Snapchat was when I used to read the New York Times regularly. And, you know, it was if you're in the New York Times, right, it was such a big deal. And I think in May of that year of 2012, they ran a story about Snapchat. And the story implied that, you know, hey, this could be used like for, sexual content or nudity. And that became kind of like a narrative for a while, like, oh, here's this sexting app and stuff. Tell me a little bit about, and I've read your responses to that at the time. And I could sense in your responses, just irritation with this. Tell me about how you felt about that narrative, because it was out there. It was real.

People were saying this is what it's going to be used for. Yeah, I think it was frustrating just because it felt like people didn't understand what was really happening with Snapchat. And, you know, we would try to share the data and show that people were sending 50, 100 snaps back and forth all day long communicating. And so, you know, we felt that kind of pigeonholing us into that wasn't a fair reflection of what was happening. So, all right, there's this narrative. Obviously, you're annoyed by it. And look, people, I'm sure we're using it to send nude photos. There's nothing you can do to prevent that. It's like you can have a car company and somebody can speed. You can't prevent that. But was there anything you could do to discourage that in any way? Or was it just sort of something that might happen? And

it wasn't really anything that you cared about. I think what was really important is just continuing to talk about the service as a way to visually communicate and obviously to, you know, discourage folks from doing things that were inappropriate or illegal. We invest a huge amount of money trying to stop, you know, illegal behavior or misuse of our platform and our service. So I think there's a lot that we do do and that we can do to help keep our platform safe. All right, 2012, this is like your first kind of full year, the year you've dropped out, you've get your first seed money. And probably by this point, you have a lot of people approaching you to invest.

Is that happening throughout the year? Are you getting messages? Are you getting investors approaching you? Yeah, we definitely got more inbound interest in the company for sure. But we realized very quickly that we had a problem because in our initial convertible note that had been issued from light speed, we had agreed to. right of first refusal. So as we were getting offers from other VCs, we were so excited, we took them to light speed and said, hey, check this out. You know, we got this offer to invest, really high valuation.

And they said, well, you know, you do know about this right of first refusal thing. And we were like, uh, sorry, what? Um, what did that, what did that mean? Yeah, the, the right of first refusal allowed light speed to buy up to 50% of the next round. And because of the way that a convertible note works, that meant that they would control that series of stock. So they would control the series A of stock. And that meant that other investors weren't interested in leading the series A because the minute that they decided to invest, they wouldn't control the series anyways. Did you know that when you signed that when you got that seed money? Was that clear to you? Yeah, we read the terms. But at the time, that was our impression that, you know, they were just standard terms. And we were so excited that

someone was willing to invest in the in the business that that that wasn't as important to us. But I think one of my big takeaways and one of the things I always share with entrepreneurs is just that, you know, There's no such thing as standard terms. And to be really careful, you know, as you're evaluating the terms of these investments. It's so true. I have seen throughout my life and career contract, like, this is just boilerplate. And you're like, well, I don't like the boilerplate. So, all right.

So, I mean, I'm sure you're very grateful to Lightspeed. And I think they subsequently did make more investments. But initially, you were hamstrung because the next round, they had the right to lead it, which meant that it could discourage other investors from being involved because if they couldn't lead it, they might not want to be involved. Yeah, and ultimately, by discouraging other investors, that meant that the market for our stock, the valuation, right, could have come way down. Because there was no competition.

Exactly. So, I mean, how did you get around that? Well, one of the interesting things about that point in time is that convertible notes were very new. So what we discovered was that the language in the convertible note actually allowed us to convert that note into any. type of stock. It hadn't, it didn't specify the type of stock that we were required to convert the node into. And that gave us a lot of flexibility to think about, do we just want to convert

this node into a different series of stock and ultimately then create a new series that another investor can come into? So it helped us reach a positive and constructive solution with Lightspeed who, you know, understood, okay, we'll find a solution here. We understand this, this right of first refusal. It might not be the best thing for the business. You know, early VC, early venture capitalists are actually quite open to having more founder-friendly terms early on, right? Because the amount of capital is much lower. And, you know, the idea is either, you know, you make something really, really successful or, you know, it goes to zero. So the, but we've always shared with, you know, our friends who are starting businesses, you know, you can, you have three

things you can optimize for when you're raising money. You can optimize for the people you're working with, like the venture capitalists. You can optimize for the terms. You can optimize for the the valuation, but pick two. And we, you know, with other investors, picked really the terms and the investors. And so that, ultimately, I think, served us well over time. All right, 2012. By the end of that year, I think it's in December or maybe, maybe in the fall that year, you are contacted by Facebook and you are, you and Bobby go meet with Mark Zuckerberg. Was that the first time you had met him? Yeah, it was.

Tell me what you can tell me about that meeting. I must have been kind of amazing. I mean, you know, this is now after I think the social network had already come out. He was already kind of legendary. What do you remember about that meeting? Well, I mean, obviously it was really cool to meet such a, you know, accomplished entrepreneur. We were pretty nervous. He was telling us about working on a new poke app, which ultimately ended up being a copycat of Snapchat at the time.

So that was our big takeaway. It was like, yikes. He's building something that's really similar to what we're doing. But he was clearly interested in seeing if you guys want to work together, right? I think so, yeah. I mean, you know, he's had a great track record of identifying companies pretty early on and finding ways to work with them. Did he say, do you guys want to collaborate?

Do you guys want, I mean, we're open to bringing this, you know, into our fold at that time? I don't remember the exact substance of the conversation. You don't remember. Of course you remember. And it was that you were 22. It must have been incredible to be asked to come in because it's a validation of what you guys were building. Yeah, it didn't really. That's not how it felt at the time. It felt like, oh, no, there's a really big company that everyone's been warning us about who's now really interested in what we're doing. And it said they're working on something similar. So you left that meeting nervous.

Yeah, we were, we knew that, you know, a copycat product was coming. You know, and then I think that Christmas it did. Yeah, December of 2012. I mean, you're just, you know, full year into this thing. And Facebook, the biggest social media company at that point, launches essentially a clone, a Snapchat. Were you worried? We were really worried. But I now talk about it as the best Christmas gift of all time because that Christmas morning we woke up

and everyone had been getting their new iPhones. And remember at the time, the new iPhone had a front-facing camera, which was a really big deal because people could take selfies. And so people were getting their new iPhones with front-facing cameras and they were downloading Snapchat. And Snapchat was at the top of the app store. And so that for us was just a huge sigh of relief. How many people said to you in 2012, Facebook is just going to crush you?

Because I think it would have been not an unreasonable thing to think. I mean, it was a giant. And they're launching a clone. They had an order of magnitude more users that they could just basically just send this out to everybody. How many people said that to you or implied that? That was probably the most common piece of feedback we got from potential investors. I think that was, you know, if you remember back then there was sort of this idea that, like, if you have a really, really big social network, there are these network effects and no one can compete with a business that has network effects.

And at the time, people had not yet understood that, like, if you have a big network, but you're only talking to three or five or seven people in that network, that actually the size of the network doesn't matter that much. What matters is that those people, you know, that you talk to all the time are a part of it. And so that's how Snapchat was able to grow. It wasn't focused on being the biggest network. You didn't have to have the most number of friends. But, you know, your number one best friend or your partner, in my case, my wife, is the person you talk to, you know, half the time or all the time. And so if just that person is part of the network, then the network's really, really valuable to you. And so I think back then, though, people didn't understand that, you know, you could grow another message.

service, they just thought that the person with the largest social network would always win. When investors were asking you like, well, but what's the advantage you have? Everybody's, I mean, 2012, 2013, everybody was on Facebook, right? Who is the person who's using Snapchat versus the person who might use, you know, poke or whatever Facebook might offer in the future? What would you say? I think the advantage was just that our vision was very different. We talked about this a little bit before, but this notion that social media was really for posting pretty and perfect. photos and trying to, you know, collect the greatest number of friends possible to, you know, basically participate in this huge popularity contest. And that Snapchat was actually focused on your real friends, your close friends, your family, and communicating the full range of human emotion with them as a messaging service, not as a social media broadcast service.

So when people would describe it then and now as a social media platform, do you like recoil at that idea? Would you push back and say, that's not really what we are? We've always pushed back against that. But I think, you know, some of our services like stories, for example, which we really viewed as like one to many communication with your close friends and family. I think that, you know, people's adoption of stories and then ultimately subsequent platforms also integrating stories as well led to that feeling that like, hey, Snapchat's like social media, even though on stories there are no public likes and no comments and the stories disappear after 24 hours. Evan, I'm curious about by the end of 2012, right, do you remember how many people you had? Was it more than a dozen working with you? Maybe about seven, seven, eight.

Okay, so still a small team. Yeah, something like that. Tell me a little bit about how you structured it because when I was like 22, 23, I went to go become a foreign correspondent around that time. And I had a couple people working for me, and it was hard. I did not know how to do that. I didn't know to lead a team. I'm not to manage people. I didn't know. I felt like I was a kid, you know, and I'm curious how you felt, because you were the CEO, right? And Bobby was, what, the CTO? Yeah, he's the CTO. How did you manage that? How did you even know what to do? How to be a boss? Well, I think the best part of not knowing anything is that you get to ask all sorts of questions and just approach every situation as an opportunity to learn and never be embarrassed about.

I'm not knowing. I never had to be the smartest person in the room. No one ever expected me to be experienced because I hadn't ever run a company before. And I think that was just a massive, massive advantage to just be able to ask questions, ask why, you know, the technology industry is just an incredibly generous industry when it comes to people helping each other out. Yeah, who helped you? I mean, who are some of the mentors who just, just to understand how to deal with equity or deal with investors or just deal with things like the beginning that are very complex, even for a really intelligent 22-year-old. Who helped you kind of navigate that? One of my really fond memories was when, so Eric Schmidt, I got to know through that class,

entrepreneurship and venture capital. And he was the seat, I think the chairman of Google at the time. I think so. Yeah, I think so. And so he would say, you know, hey, I'm coming to L.A. I'll come by. you and Bobby just make a list of all the questions you have and I'll help you answer them. And at the time, our questions were like, do we need a CFO? Like, you know, this kind of thing. And for Eric to just sit down and let us ask all of our questions and say, like, no, you don't need a CFO. You're not making any money. That was just really helpful to have that sort of unbelievable expert advice.

I wonder about just personally, right? You're working all day, all night, seven days a week, non-spect, stop, right? And there are still stressors. You know, this other co-founder Reggie sues the company. And then you've got this legal dispute. It was settled. And he was given a payment, a payout. But did that create stress for you and Bobby knowing that, look, this is hovering over us? This is a real thing. Was it distracting in any way? It wasn't so much like the stress of the legal process. It was sad because this had been one of my best friends in college. So I think that. That, like, personally, that part of it was terrible.

You didn't reconcile, you and Reggie. Personally, we haven't talked in a long time. All right. You guys raise a series A, $13 million, so led by benchmark. So clearly, you were able to work something out with light speed because the round was led by a different firm. And that's serious. I mean, that's a, you've got a lot of runway there. And then a couple months later, several months later, it's a series.

It's a series B, 80 million, right? And now you've got a lot of wind in your sales. In 2013, I mean, that year you had three rounds, an A, B, and C round, where you raised really a substantial amount of money. So my impression is that your feeling was, let's bring in a bunch of money and really try and grow big fast. I mean, I can't imagine how just chaotically nonstop 2013 would be, because it's just You've got to grow.

You've got to hire people, you know, build a headquarters. But what did you start to think this thing could be? At that point, we were really just trying to keep up with the growth of the service overall. We had some ideas about how to evolve it, things like stories, for example, and we were playing around with some added value features at the time. Ultimately, now we have a service called Snapchat Plus. But, you know, a lot of the folks at that time was really on building out the team. and then ultimately making the decision to really commit to building out the company in Los Angeles, which up until then was kind of up in the air. And the business model was going to be still primarily advertising?

It wasn't clear at the time what the business model was going to be. And one of the things I learned from Stanford and being up in the Bay Area, which was different than how I learned about business growing up, was the real focus on getting to scale and investing to get to scale rather than focusing on profitability early on. and that the more that you can grow and expand your total opportunity over time, ultimately the business can generate a ton of profit and whatnot down the road, but that that would not be the right thing to focus on early. And so the idea is if you can grow something that's really big, that's valuable to people that you can figure out how to monetize it later. By the way, do you think that model is still viable today,

like in terms of starting a business thing? We'll figure out the business model later. Let's just get the users. I think it depends. I think that that strategy is most effective. when it comes to new platforms. So if you look at like the advent of desktop internet, that was really the strategy very early on

for players like an Amazon, for example, where they were like, we're just gonna invest to grow, we'll worry about profitability. I think the same was true about the mobile platform development, right, where same thing, like, you know, let's just try and build really popular scale services and then focus on profitability. So in those moments of big technological change

and disruption and new platforms, I definitely think that's the right approach. But it's risky. Right. I mean, and there are lots of examples of brands and businesses that did get a lot of users and then just didn't work or couldn't monetize it. But, I mean, the idea here was let's just get people in the door and probably, you know, we could advertise, we could have a subscription. We could try different things. But once we've got the users who love this product, we can sell them something. We can make this sustainable. Yeah. And I think to be clear, that areas where that typically doesn't work is when the company is not a tech company. So I think like tech has some very interesting economies. of scale in the sense that like we design the app once and we build the app once and it scales to now, you know, more than 850 million people around the world. I think you run into challenges with that sort of grow big first and then monetize model when you don't have those same economies of scale. All right.

This has been widely reported. The Wall Street Journal did a big piece on this in 2013 and I want to dig into a little bit because it's really extraordinary. But that year, apparently, it may have happened in your first meeting with Mark Zuckerberg. It was reported that you were offered a billion dollars to sell the company and then apparently $3 billion in cash, a cash offer, all cash offer to acquire Snapchat. I mean, you were like 23 being offered $3 billion. Instagram, and we had Kevin and Mike on the show, as I say, nine years ago. And, you know, subsequently, I think they've expressed some regret about what happened and having sold it. But they sold it for a billion dollars a year in, you know.

you're like a year and a half in. This would have been a massive, massive win. I mean, a huge exit. All your investors would have done great. You would have done great. Your partners, tell me about rejecting that offer. Well, I think, as you mentioned, we did have the benefit of learning from Instagram. And it was very clear that Instagram had sold way too early.

And mobile, you know, at that point in time, mobile as a platform was still nascent. I mean, it was only just growing. If you remember, there were a lot of questions at the time, Like, will Facebook be able to monetize on mobile? Will anyone use Facebook on mobile? So it was very, very, very early on. And I think ultimately, Bobby and I just loved what we were doing. We loved working together.

And we saw a huge opportunity for the business. And ultimately, we were able to convince our investors that we saw a way bigger opportunity out in the future. And so ultimately, it just made more sense to stay independent. And I think, you know, I think there was also just a feeling that the companies were very different. I mean, they have different priorities. We were offering very different products. And I think Instagram really fit in to the Facebook model of social media. But Snapchat was really designed to be, you know, an antidote to that, the opposite of that.

I wonder, though. I mean, was it a hard decision to make? I mean, you know, we had Andrew Mason on the show a while back. You famously found a Groupon. And famously, they were offered up to like $6 billion for an acquisition from bidders like Google and Yahoo, which, of course, they turned down, which proved to be a mistake, right? I mean, the value of the company is pennies in the dollar today. Was there any, I don't know, any just sleepless nights over like, maybe we should just do this. Maybe this is just the best thing to do now.

I think one of the things that our investors have done very wisely is in one of those early financing rounds, Bobby and I were both able to cash out like $10 million each. So we were set for life. Yeah. At 22, having $10 million with compound interest. Yeah, exactly. I mean, 4 or 5 percent return every year, you're good to go. So we, I don't think, felt that pressure of, you know, is this it? Are we not, you know, if this goes to zero, what's going to happen?

We were able to really swing for the fences and try to build something really big. In that same article in the journal in 2013, there's somebody quoted in there with some skepticism about the decision that you took. And this person said, look at the fate vine has suffered. You know, vine was huge. And, again, proved wrong. But at the time, like, there was no part of you. at all that looked at things like Vine and just thought, what if that happens? Well, one of the things that helped give us confidence is we had a roadmap, right?

So I think one of the big questions in technology always, and especially when it comes to these acquisitions, is, is this a feature or a platform? And it's very important to know, you know, if you're building a feature or a platform. And so for us, maybe in the early days of Snapchat of photo messaging, that was maybe more of a feature. But by the time, we'd added things like stories and, you know, we would go on to add, you know, all of our augmented reality lenses, of course, memories, our map later on, all these different pieces of our service that have really diversified it and made Snapchat much more of a platform.

We had a bunch of that vision, so we knew that we were going to be able to continue innovating. We knew that we weren't just going to be standing still. I mean, one thing for sure in the technology industry is if you're just standing still, it's really easy for competitors to catch up, especially if they're a lot bigger. But we really believed in our ability to keep innovating. When you turn down that reported second offer from Facebook, I mean, business is business. This is what our show is about. And business is like war.

You know, I'm not casting any moral judgment. I think a good business leader has to think about, you know, has to plan to win, right? And so a company like Facebook, Zuckerberg, has to think, how are we going to outcompete these guys? Which eventually they would start to, you know, do things with Instagram, right? like Instagram stories and other things that they would put out there. Did you anticipate that that would happen? We thought that that would happen. Yeah, I think the one thing that we didn't anticipate was that Instagram would actually

perfectly copy stories like carbon copy it because in the past they had sort of tried different rifts on our products. Like they would take the core idea but then try to make it better and ultimately that wouldn't work. And so I think that like to have that sort of confidence to just say like, hey, we're going to take what we see working and put it in our service, that, you know, that was impressive and not something we'd seen from, from Facebook before. I think I know the answer to this question, but do you consider yourself to be a competitive person? I don't, actually. You don't? No, and I think,

in fact, like, I think zero-sum thinking or that sort of competitive thinking is very dangerous. And so what we try to do is run our business differently, which is to create new things, to create new open space, not to think of, you know, the world or our community as something to divide up or fight over. So when, you know, Instagram does something like that, did you take it personally? Did you think, like, screw those guys. They're a bunch of assholes. No, we admired the audacity. Really? You didn't, you didn't take it personally at all. You weren't angry in any way. You were just like, whatever. It wasn't a whatever. It was like, hey, we got to take this very seriously. And, and, but I think at the same time, a real respect that Kevin, you know, had just come out and said, hey, this thing

works really well and we're going to do the exact same thing. When we come back in just a moment, Snapchat drops the chat and tries to make the leap from your phone to your face. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2016 and Snapchat is still growing fast with another round of fundraising valuing the company at $16 billion. And despite copycatting by Instagram and other competitors, Evan is locked in on an even bigger, longer-term vision for his company. You guys rebranded to Snap.

You're more or Snapchat in 2016. And I guess that was you started to talk about Snap as a camera company. Tell me about that. One of the things that we really wanted to make clear was that we weren't a single product company, that we had aspirations beyond that. And we'd been working on wearables for a long time, you know, initially starting with the idea of like, let's get the camera out of people's pockets and basing out into the world with our camera glasses called spectacles. I think the first version we launched back in 2016. Of course, initially it was used for recording moments with Snapchat. it became, you know, primarily used for communication, which was a huge change in the way that cameras are used.

And I think in the future, and even today with, you know, the fifth generation of spectacles, cameras are really used to overlay computing on our environment and to better integrate computing with our day-to-day lives. I want to ask you about something that's more personal to me about SNAP. And it's as a parent, right, and you're a parent. And I've got two teenagers and they use it. And it's the only social media app we allow because essentially their argument was we won't be able to communicate with our friends because they all have it. So we relented. But I remember around this time, around 2016, this is not one when they got on Snap, but around the time you guys changed to Snap, there was a TED talk. And I was at that TED conference. And it was a talk about how young people get hooked on social media. And I say this as somebody who is really, I have to take all the social media off my phone every couple of weeks. just does not use it. But something that you guys really innovated was this snap streak, where every time you snap, you get a streak and kids were incentivized not to break the streak. And I wonder, from a business perspective, it's brilliant. And I love free markets. I believe in

free markets. I don't believe in blaming businesses for the way people use the products. But, I mean, it is a way to get kids hooked on it. And I wonder how you respond to that, that kind of kind of sentiment or push back. Yeah, well, I think it's really important to look at the way that streaks work. And with the Snapchat streak, it doesn't change every time you send a snap. It just increments every day that you send a snap back and forth with a friend. And so what it does is celebrate that every day you've been in touch with that person. You've checked in.

You've checked in. You've seen what they're doing. And, you know, I'm sure, have seen the research that shows the importance of just staying in touch, even in light ways with your close friends and your family. And I think, you know, just in the way that we often set reminders for, ourselves to do something that's important. I think streaks are an important reminder for folks to just stay in touch with the people that they really care about just once a day. It's interesting because philosophically, I just maybe it's just because I'm older, I just fundamentally disagree with that. I don't think people need to be in touch about every detail of their lives all the time.

Like I have cousins and relatives. I love them, but like I don't need to tell them about everything that I'm doing all the time. We can talk every few months and it's okay every few weeks. And so I wonder, like, I mean, you can talk to any parent of a teenager and they will say it becomes increasingly hard to pull your kid away from Snap or, you know, TikTok. And I wonder whether you can, you can see that argument and say, I hear you on that. I definitely hear you on that, but I also just recognize that these services work really differently. And that's one of the reasons why in our house, too, we're really supportive of Snapchat and less supportive of other services, because we want our 14-year-old to engage with his friends, to talk to his friends.

And oftentimes when I'm working late, I'll get a snap for my wife with our kids saying good night. And we get to send those snaps back and forth. And that's something that really adds a lot of value to my life. So I think what's really important is that beyond, you know, just talking about screen time, we really talk about the way that we're using our screens and what we're using them for, you know, to go a layer deeper and to really figure out, you know, how we can use technology to support things that really matter, like relationships and friendships. You know, for us as parents, we just talk about the importance of everything in moderation and having a healthy relationship with technology.

You took the company public in 2017 at a $24 billion valuation, and the stock price is going to go up and down and up and down. I think at one point it was like, you know, $80, over $8 a share, you know, something like that or $75 a share. Now it's about, as we speak, about 1060 share market caps 17 billion. Very impressive, but lower than the IPO. And that's just the reality of it. How do you view that? I mean, most of your quarters, you're not profitable because it's all public. But at the same time, you clearly believe in this business, the future of this business. You've got hundreds of millions of users. So it's a robust business. But how do you kind of manage this business? You've got hundreds of millions of users. So it's a robust business. But how do you kind of manage this? how it's seen by outsiders and investors now it's valued. Well, what's really important for us is just clearly articulating our vision for the business and, you know, our just consistent desire to invest in the long term, going after really, really big opportunities. And consistency in doing that is key.

So as we look at the long-term future of augmented reality, for example, and, you know, our desire to build a new computing platform that better meets people's needs by actually being integrated in the world around them, that's a really big and expensive bet. And the only way we're going to be able to make progress towards that is if we really invest consistently. And so we've really prioritized going after that long-term opportunity compared to short-term profitability. And it doesn't mean, you know, we're generating free cash flow. We, you know, Q4, we generated positive net income. So it's not like we disregard our finances. We've actually run a very conservative balance sheet with billions of dollars of capital so that we can consistently invest over the

But I think what's most important with investors in the broader public is to be clear about those expectations, to be clear that we are going to invest in the long term, that we're not going to optimize for, you know, the quarter to quarter share price. And we're just going to make consistent progress towards our long term vision. You know, many years ago, I interviewed Ken Chennault, the former head of American Express. And he said, you know, when I ran American Express, I always thought, we need to become the business that's going to put us out of business. And look, the reality is in 10, 20, years, maybe five, people may not be sending text messages. People may not be communicating that way. We don't know. And I say this because, as you know, some members of your team came up here to San Francisco to show me this new product that you guys are working on, which is the latest generation of your spectacles, which are these augmented reality glasses. I tried them super cool. You can do some fun things. And I know you guys have invested a lot of money in this. I mean, there's a lot of technology packed in those glasses. Is that the future of the business? Is that

where you see snap-headed? I think that's critical to our long-term future. I mean, ultimately, if you look at all the products we've built, we've tried to make technology work better for people. So much of technology in the past, right, has forced people to change their natural human behavior to fit how technology, you know, expects them to behave. That certainly could be said of social media, right, where instead of having ephemeral conversations in chronological order, social media has, you know, everything permanent and in reverse chronological order. And it feels, inhuman. I don't think we should settle for the way that computers work today for, you know, staying hunched over these small screens as the best way to get the value out of computing. I think

computers can do so much more, can be so much more. And ultimately, you know, we were talking a little bit about, you know, wanting to make sure young people in particular have a balanced relationship with technology. But what would it look like to build a computer that you really wanted your kids to use, you know, frequently? Because it's the best way to learn. The best way to play together with their friends is something they could actually use outdoors. These are all the sorts of things that glasses, I think, can really provide people over the longer term. But, you know, people have been talking about this for a long time going back to Google Glass. And, you know, meta has released something, which is not augmented reality.

It's essentially, you know, a very high-quality camera and speakers and AI and you're, you know, on these glasses. But we've thought for a long time that this is going to be how people will use it. Like they'll wear the glasses, they'll be able to see augmented reality. but so far, we as humans haven't adopted this technology at scale yet. So tell me why you're bullish about it. I think because it allows for a computing experience that can be shared together with people, which is really different than the way that we use computers today. Right now, you know, sometimes computing can feel isolating,

even if you're text messaging a friend, it's something that you're doing alone. I think what's so powerful with glasses is if you can put on glasses together with your friends and share experiences is a really powerful benefit of this technology. Of course, having it actually grounded in the real world rather than being a screen that separates you from the real world, I think is a tremendous benefit as well. And then, as you probably experience, the idea that you can just use your hands and your voice and engage with computers in a much more natural way, I think is going to be really helpful to people as well and make computers much easier to use. I want to ask you about your place in the sort of the social media ecosystem, even though I know kind of recoil when you hear that with Snap, but it is considered that for better or worse, right? And if you looked at the inauguration, you saw, you know, Mark Zuckerberg was there, Sundar Pachai was there, obviously Elon Musk was there, the TikTok CEO was there. So like Twitter, meta, Google, TikTok, they're all represented there.

What about Snap? I mean, do you feel like, you know, is it important for your business that you are engaged at that level? You know, look, we have a different set of challenges. We're a really small company compared to those companies. How many employees? About 3,000? Approaching 5,000 now. But, you know, I think one of the reasons why those large companies are engaging so closely with the government is because they've been accused of monopolistic practices.

I mean, they represent. Two of them represent the vast majority of the online advertising business. And so that is a critical issue when it comes to continuing to grow their businesses or trying to acquire new companies or thinking about, you know, their avenues for growth in the future. You know, they are the advertising market. And so I think it makes sense that they're dedicating a lot of their time and focus to engaging with the government. What do you think about, you know, what seems to be, I mean, traditionally kind of tech,

the tech sector is in California. It's been left to center. maybe a slightly libertarian, but kind of left of center. And that sort of the momentum seems to have shifted towards more right of center. Obviously, Elon Musk is super influential, right? He has a massive role in kind of reshaping government right now. Is that something that you think is an interesting trend or a positive trend? Or do you have any feeling or view on it?

I think what you've seen from technology companies in the past is that they've generally tried to align themselves with, you know, whatever administration, is currently serving the country at the time and try to be helpful. I mean, I think it makes sense. If you're an American company, you know, you want our government or president to be successful. And I think that's an important part of businesses' strategies here in the United States. So I wouldn't look at it as a new thing. I would look at it as kind of a constant if we look, you know, over American history and certainly business history. Do you for your, not just for the business, but just for you, Evan Spiegel, as a person,

Do you think it's better, like obviously, you know, Mark Zuckerberg was a contributor to Democrats for a long time, then stopped contributing to politics. And now he's, I think his views on politics have changed. Do you think it's better for you, Evan Spiegel, to be engaged to be a contributor or better for you to be apolitical as much as you can? Well, I think it's super important to be an engaged citizen. You know, what you're talking about is sort of engaging at the highest levels of government. But I think civic engagement at all levels of government, especially local governments. government is really, really valuable and important. And personally, I'm a registered independent, which is, I believe, actually, the largest party in America. I don't do political giving,

although I did give to Michael Tubbs, who lived across the hall for me in college. Stockton, Mayor, former Stockton area. Yeah, Mayor of Stockton. And great guy. But no, I think for me, personally, you know, we just try to engage where we think we can add value. And I don't think that has to be at the federal level. I think there's a lot of opportunity, even just locally, to help the community. Evan, you're so young, but very experienced, and you have your whole life ahead of you. I mean, if you're like Brian Johnson, you can live until 200 years old. Realistically, I mean, do you think that Snapchat is the end of the story for you?

Snap is the end? Is that this is going to be the thing that you're going to do for the rest of your life? Or is there a world where one day you could imagine trying something else? I'm not sure. I think there's a lot more to do here at Snap, and, you know, there's a lot more work to fulfill our vision for augmented reality and for glasses. We've been working on that for a decade, but it's going to take quite a lot longer. I mean, if you look at how much computers evolved from the 80s to today, I mean, there's a lot of work to do to fulfill that vision. But, you know,

over the longer term, I'm definitely going to look for more ways to give back. I mean, I think that's, that is really the perk of building our business and learning a bunch as a leader as being able to give back. I mean, that's kind of the whole point, I guess. So that's what hopefully I can do more of when you think about what happened you know because if you if you were to just be if you were like to land from mars and an alien was here and i said oh i'm going to tell you a story about this guy evan spiegel he's 20 years old he comes up with this idea with the friend and then within a year they get a billion dollar offer and then and then two years later three billion and they raised all this money it just it would sound like this very simple of course we've talked for a while now so it's not but it would sound like a very simple like, oh, he just went from success to success. It was easy for him because he was smart. He went to Stanford and he got the money. And obviously, it's much more complicated than that.

But when you reflect on where you are now at 34 and what you've achieved, how much of it do you attribute to your intelligence and the work you put in and how much do you think it has to do with getting lucky? I think all of it's an extraordinary blessing. Actually, the first time I was ever invited to give a speech, that's how I started the speech. I said, I've been unbelievably lucky. Life isn't fair. And it's been extraordinary to have these gifts of, you know, growing up in the Palisades, being able to attend a great school, having the opportunity of the safety net to go pursue a business.

I mean, but I think beyond luck, there are so many generations of my family that did so much work to enable me to do this. You know, my father, his father. I mean, my grandfather's dad was one of, you know, seven orphans spread all throughout the country after their parents died. You know, 12 years old, he was working in the copper mines. You know, so I just think about all the work that generations of my family have put in to give me this opportunity. So one of the most important things is waking up every day, just realizing that it's all luck. All luck. It's all hard work, too, but it's luck.

That's Evan Spiegel, co-founder and CEO of Snap. By the way, Evan also happens to be a Francophile. He loves France so much. He even became a dual U.S. French citizen back in 2018. The French government waives its residency requirements for certain people who it believes will contribute to French culture or the economy. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show.

And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the show, world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter at guyraz.com or on Substack. This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Rumtin Arablui. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Catherine Seifer. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Gilly Moon. Our production staff also includes Chris Messini, J.C. Howard, Casey Herman, Iman, Ma'Anne, Sam Paulson, Carrie Thompson, Neva Grant, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to how I built this.