#22 How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso, or four energy drinks, before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th.
Evan decided to study product design, to learn how to look at the things he used in his daily life and see how he could make them better and cooler. David Kelly, the head of Stanford's Fame Design School, took Evan on as his advisee. One thing was clear, as he frequently put it, I'm not going to work for someone else. And this gave him freedom from the heavy grind of Stanford. Nobody would ever see his resume or grades, so he took classes for what he actually wanted to learn.
So that's from one of the first chapters of the book that I want to talk to you a little bit about today. And it's called How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars, The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher. So this book might be a little different than the ones I've done in the past. I guess the podcast will be a little different, I should say.
I'm going to go in chronological order, but when I went back and started preparing for this podcast, what I realized is a lot of my highlights, a lot of my notes, they're very short. They're like just one paragraph I wanted to pull out and bring to your attention, stuff like that. There's some areas where we'll get a little longer. I particularly find the strategic battle between Evan and Mark Zuckerberg interesting, so I'll go into a little more detail on that. But I do think it is still going to be worth your time to listen, because there are some interesting ideas here. I just obviously, as I've said in the past, like I'm not trying to make a cohesive story. I'm just trying to share ideas and interesting things from the book, and hopefully get you excited to read it yourself. So let's just going to jump right in.
And Evan's got a lot of interesting ideas that I really resonate with me. So I just want to get right to them.
So the background of this little note I left for myself is there's more value in being original. And it talks about one of Evan's first startups that he created was this thing called Future Freshman, which was basically a platform for people applying to colleges to obtain information about the schools they wanted to go to. And it didn't work out, but he realized something that he used for Snapchat. So it says, Future Freshman found itself battling for Mindshare and Dollars with well-established companies that had deep pockets and large sales teams. And there were signs all too close to home that the product wasn't connecting with its intended users. Both of my siblings were applying to college at the time and neither of them used it, Evan later said. So that was a sign that, so this is a dark quote from him continuing. So that was a sign that that was probably not the right way to go. Eventually, they pulled the plug on Future Freshman. While the outcome was disappointing, Evan learned a valuable lesson. In order to avoid getting destroyed by better funded competition, his next idea had to be more original. So it's kind of echoing something I've talked about a few times on the podcast, which is this idea of the Blue Ocean Strategy, that you can wind up making a lot more money while simultaneously having less competition with more original ideas. So moving ahead a little bit in the book, as you can probably imagine from the title, How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars, that obviously was turning down the acquisition offer from Facebook a few years ago. And as such, throughout the book, there's a lot of Evan's insights as to why Facebook actually created the environment for Snapchat to grow. And so I have left several notes for myself, just little different little insights Evan has about Facebook. And so this is when they're kicking the idea about a disappearing photo app. They had an idea, possibly a big one. More than one member of the frat lived in fear that photographs of their debauchery would come back to haunt them once it came time to get serious and have a career. What if people could send each other wild pictures of themselves partying without worrying about future consequences?