The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - CEO Diaries: The Brutal Mistake That Almost Crippled Snapchat!

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

In this episode of CEO Diaries, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel reveals the biggest hiring mistakes that nearly cost him everything. Overvaluing experience, ignoring culture, and avoiding tough feedback can quietly kill a company, and this brutally honest insight will change how you build teams forever. Visit - ⁠⁠www.linkedin.com/DOAC⁠⁠ Listen to the full episode here - Spotify - https://g2ul0.app.link/GSm1crv4TTb Apple - https://g2ul0.app.link/6VjMycy4TTb Watch the Episodes On YouTube - ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Today's moment episode features Evan Spiegel, the CEO and co-founder of Snapchat. And he has a tremendous emphasis on hiring people and culture, which is one of the most important things in business. The reality of running a small business is that switching off is never really an option. Even when you try, the ideas, the excitement and all the responsibility is always there.

And because you're always switched on, it's only fair that your hiring partner should be too. LinkedIn Jobs, who are the sponsor of this moments episode, has been that hiring partner for me and for years. Because it's always working away in the background. My team can post our jobs for free, share them with our networks, and reach top talent all in the same place. So let's get into today's conversation.

Let's go back to those early days. You're in that office. When you think about the people in that photo that were part of the First Order 20, how important in hindsight is hiring? I think it's everything. I think it's everything. And these were really, really just wonderful people.

I mean, still, in many cases, close friends. And I think, interesting, there was a moment I realized David, Daniel, Bobby, and a couple other of our original engineers, all of them original engineers, were musicians as well. And it was really interesting this moment, because the early folks who were working on the engineering side of Snap were unbelievably creative

and unbelievably talented. And it was an interesting like aha moment, because I think oftentimes people think of the disciplines as separate, like, oh, there's designers, and then over there, there's engineers. And I think so people think of the disciplines as separate, like, oh, there's designers and then over there there's engineers. And I think so much of the magic actually is when those disciplines combine or cross over or people who really love and appreciate both. Especially for a company that's aspiring to be creative in everything that it's doing.

On this point of hiring, did you make any hiring mistakes in those early days? Oh, absolutely. What were those mistakes? Not necessarily people, but the frameworks were off or the way that you hire these people. What caused the mistakes? I think occasionally in the early days, we almost over-indexed on the wrong types of experience, if that makes sense. So one of the things we really wanted to do was bring in people who were very, very experienced leaders

who had run much bigger teams. That was like, if we want to build a big company, we got to find people who have run big companies and big teams. And so one of the early engineering leaders who joined our team, I think he was coming from working on a team of 300 or something like that at Amazon, was coming to like a team of eight at Snapchat.

But we were really thinking ahead about how can we hire people who can actually help us scale here and build something really big. And I think that sort of focus on leadership experience and experience leading at scale was really valuable. I think what was oftentimes a bit less valuable in those early days was almost more people who had very specific domain expertise. So there were people who would come for an interview or something like that and be like, well, I think what you guys should do is add likes because every other platform has likes.

So if you just add likes, then people will use your service more. And not really coming with the same open-mindedness and curiosity about, well, why is Snapchat doing it differently? Why don't you have likes and comments? How are you thinking about the service differently? And how can I change and grow and adapt to the way that you're thinking about it

to help you grow faster? And so I think now one of the things we're always looking for in the interview process is adaptability, right? It's amazing to have prior experience, but the question is how do you apply that prior experience to a new context and change and adapt the way that you see things, change your perspective to be able to meet the needs of our business, which is different than other businesses.

What are the other factors? If you were to make a perfect Snapchat employee now, what would their personality be, their psychology, their attributes? We have three values and three leadership behaviors. Three values are kind, smart and creative. That's been the those have been the values since the very beginning, really, because Bobby and I were just having a conversation like, what kind of people do we want to work with? Kind, smart, creative, like great.

But since then, and we can spend some more time talking about this, I think what was really fascinating over time was to learn, and by the way, 10 years ago, people were not talking about kindness at work. I mean, people would be like, sorry, what? You know, no, kind, smart, creative, like, why kindness? What we found was that the relationship between kindness and creativity is really, really important.

Because unless people feel comfortable coming up with crazy ideas, unless they feel comfortable that if they say, you know, they have some new idea and it actually isn't that great, that they're not gonna be laughed at, that they'll be supported, right? Unless you have that sort of supportive culture,

it's very hard to be creative. And so we learned over time that actually, wow, kindness is kind of the essential ingredient if you want to have a creative culture. But anyways, kind, smart, creative, smart, pretty self-explanatory. And then when it comes to leadership behaviors, there's three leadership behaviors or attributes

we look for. I just want to pause on that point of kind. Do you make a distinction between someone being nice and being kind? Because in your environment, you also mentioned that you do these critique sessions and you're giving people critical feedback. And if a culture gets a little bit too kind, then isn't that going to inhibit innovation and feedback? We always differentiate between kind and nice. There's a couple examples that I think help

with that. So like, for one, I think it's really kind to tell somebody that they have something stuck in their teeth. You have something stuck in your teeth, you wanna know about it, right? It might make you feel awkward. Certainly as the person pointing it out, it's a little awkward, right? If you just wanna be nice,

you pretend nothing's going on and you just say, oh, you know, nice to meet you, whatever. But if you're really being kind and you wanna help that person, you say, you know, you've got something stuck in your teeth. You gotta take care of that. And I think that helps distinguish between niceties and being kind and really wanting to help somebody.

I think another great example is if somebody is really struggling at work or they're struggling to grow or they're struggling to perform their duties at SNAP, the nice thing to do is maybe just make them feel good about it. Oh, don't worry. I'm sure it'll be OK. The kind thing to do is really help them succeed. Say, hey, this isn't working because you're doing X, Y, and Z. Here are some things to do to think about that differently, provide that really direct feedback.

That allows people to grow. And that's the kind thing to do, rather than just making them feel good about not meeting expectations. Leadership values, you said there's three. Leadership values, okay, there's three of them. The first one is T-shaped leadership. So we talk a lot about T-shaped leadership. What we mean by that is that you have a real depth of experience,

a depth of expertise in a given area, and then a real breadth of understanding of the business overall, and an ability to connect with lots of different types of people who think different ways. Because you need to an ability to connect with lots of different types of people who think different ways. Because you need to be able to connect your expertise to all the different areas of our business to really drive impact as a leader. I mean, I think that's one of like almost the hallmarks

of running a business today, is it's basically impossible to do anything interesting without a team, right? The way that the world works today is very complicated and it's really important that you have folks who have deep expertise, but then they have to apply it to all these other cross-functional areas. So they have to have a familiarity with it and an ability

to relate to people with different viewpoints or other areas of expertise. And as we proceed with these leadership principles, are you saying that in order to become a leader at Snapchat, you need these three things? Or are you saying everybody at Snapchat needs these three things? We think everyone is a leader. So we do apply it broadly. But of course, you know, I think it's really important as we're thinking about hiring or bringing in a new leader that this is something that we talk to folks about.

So if someone's not quite T-shaped, if they're a little bit I-shaped, is there something they can do to become a bit more T-shaped? Yeah, that's almost maybe the easier one, right? If you can build on a real depth of expertise by going engaging with folks maybe outside of your comfort zone or in different parts of the business and build that curiosity and understanding, that helps develop, I think, that breadth of understanding.

I think what's harder is if you're a generalist and you don't have that deep skillset or that deep area of expertise, it's really, really hard to bring enough value to the team, right? And I think that's where people get frustrated with like the idea of middle management, right? Where it's like, oh, this is just a person

who knows a little about a lot, but can't really help me solve this problem because they don't really know the details. They don't really understand how to help me grow as an individual or solve this tough technical problem. And so I think that's why that area of expertise is so important because it's so hard to inspire people that you're working with if you don't know a lot about the area that you're working in.

And do you need to be a T-shaped leader at Snapchat now? And when there was 10 of you in the bedroom or in your dad's house, has it always been important or is that a function of being bigger? That's a great question. I wish we had been more thoughtful about the leadership values and characteristics we were looking for back then. I think when you're working on a team of 10 or a team of 20,

you're not thinking as much about what leadership characteristics are really important to us. It's more about like, how do we survive tomorrow? But I think over time, as we learned what leaders were really successful at Snap, we were able to look at those attributes and say, OK, these are the leaders who really succeed here and drive a lot of value for our business. Before we move on to the second two,

if this Evan could have gone back to the Evan that was running a team of 10, and he could have pulled him aside and said, listen, here's some advice that you're going to need to know about leadership in building this team, the most critical advice I could give you at this time, and this is for all the entrepreneurs out there that are building, they're laying the foundations of a potentially very big company right now, what would you have whispered in his ear? I would have said, everything's going to be okay. Really?

Everything's going to be OK. Everything's going to be OK. I think sometimes people are too focused on making the right decision and not as focused on fixing it if they're wrong. And I think what I would have put more emphasis on is just how quickly are you changing your mind when you receive new information? How quickly are you changing your mind when you receive new information? How quickly are you fixing a problem or a mistake if you didn't make the right decision

in the first place? And that's the feedback loop that is so mission critical to building a business in the early days. It has very little to do. Obviously, there's existential decisions, and those can create some big problems for your business, but most decisions are not existential decisions. And the more important thing is to make a decision and then if you're wrong, fix it.

And I think it's the, when you're wrong, fixing it part that deserves most of the attention and also how you can identify who your great leaders are, who really talented folks on the team are, because they're very quick to point out, I don't think we did that right. I think we should take this path, you know, this other path that, you know,

we maybe hadn't considered the first time. And I think it takes courage to say that in an organization rather than just say, oh, we're doing a great job. And when you're back there and you've made a mistake, there's something you've done wrong, in hindsight, did you know in your chat? Because one of the things that I think of when I was a first time founder building a

student notice board was I would get feedback and the feedback would be saying, you're wrong about this, you need to change. And I think sometimes there was a part of me that knew, but I was like too scared to act upon it. So I kind of like gaslit myself to just keep going. And I think a lot of founders do that. I know this because they come to me in my portfolio and they say, oh Steve, there's this guy we've hired

and he's been there now for a year and he's just not cutting it. I'm like, why the fuck are you telling me? And they're procrastinating, avoiding the conversation, but clearly they know, clearly they know it's not right. It's funny you say that because anytime someone comes to ask me about like that type of people advice like, what do you think we should do? Do you think that I'm like, it sounds like you've already made up your mind.

So yeah, I think it is really important to act on that feedback, not be afraid to change direction quickly if you realize that you made a mistake. But as you point out, it's hard to do. And sometimes it is worth seeing if your bet plays out. You don't want to thrash the team and change your mind all the time. So sometimes, it is sometimes worth seeing things through a little bit before you change.

Is there anything else you would have said to that younger Evan in your dad's house advice? At that point before we had scaled to a lot of thousands of people, I think we could have been much more clear on the culture, the kind, smart, creative piece, and really embedded that in the team prior to scaling. One of the biggest challenges that we confronted was, as we went from 20 people to 2,000 people, we basically imported all of these different cultures from all sorts of

different companies. We imported an Amazon contingent, who they really love their six-page documents. We imported a Google contingent, and they're very focused on consensus-based decision making. We imported a contingent from Meta as well. And I think we were too slow to be really clear about what our values were and what that looked like in practice, what those behaviors looked like. And I think if we had earlier and faster, so when we're evaluating performance, we look at our values, kind, smart, creative, we have specific behaviors attached to that that are

actually research-backed and whatever. We did a whole study to understand which of those behaviors are really tied to performance and those values. But that gives people a really clear framework for the expectations for how to behave at Snap and our unique culture. And there was a moment in time where I felt like we were losing control of our culture. And I wasn't happy with our company and the team. I remember I was complaining to a friend of mine, this is probably like your story of

folks coming to you and saying, oh, it's not working. I was complaining to a friend of mine and I was just like, man, I just don't like it. I don't like my job. I don't like what our company has become. She just looks at me and she's like, then fix it. Great point. I think that it had changed and grown so quickly that it was really hard to stay true to our values.

But I think I really took that advice to heart and just started trying to fix it with our team, getting really clear about the values, getting really clear about the behaviors, holding a higher bar and saying, hey, if you're not into the kind, smart, creative thing, that's OK. There are other companies with different cultures.

But that really matters to us here. I hope you found today's conversation helpful and insightful. If you're ready to join two and a half million other small businesses already using LinkedIn for hiring, head over to LinkedIn.com slash DOAC now. That's LinkedIn.com slash DOAC to find your next exceptional hire.