CEO Diaries: The Brutal Mistake That Almost Crippled Snapchat!

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
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?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:22)
I think it's everything. I think it's everything. And these were really, really just wonderful people. I mean, still, you know, 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, you know, original engineers were musicians as well. And it was really interesting this moment, you know, 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 much of the magic actually is when those disciplines combine or crossover, or people who really love and appreciate both.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:14)
Especially for a company that's aspiring to be creative.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:17)
Absolutely.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:18)
And everything that it's doing. On this point of hiring, did you make any hiring mistakes in those early days?

**SPEAKER_3** (2:24)
Oh, absolutely.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:25)
And what were those mistakes? Not necessarily people, but the frameworks were off, or the way that you've hired these people, or what caused the mistakes?

**SPEAKER_3** (2:34)
I think occasionally in the early days, we almost overindexed 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 like, how can we hire people who can actually help us scale here and build something really big? And I think that 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 were was almost more people who had very specific domain expertise. So there were people who would come into our 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? How can I change and grow and adapt to the way that you're thinking about it to help you grow faster? So I think now one of the things we're always looking for in the interview process is adaptability. 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.