Evan Spiegel & The Anti-Social Network

**Jason Allan Scott** (0:04)
Welcome back to The Jason Allan Scott Show. Today, we're going to be talking about Evan Spiegel and The Anti-Social Network. So here's my question for you. What of the most valuable thing you could build wasn't designed to be addictive, but designed to disappear? Evan Spiegel once said, Social media businesses represent an aggressive expansion of capitalism into our personal relationships. We are asked to perform for our friends, to create things they like, to work on a personal brand. But humanity cannot be true or false. We are full of contradictions and we change. That is the joy of human life. We are not brands. Over the past weeks, we have looked at Phil Knight's religion of belief, and Walt Disney's obsession with control. In today's episode, we are looking at something every founder eventually confronts. The choice between becoming what the world expects, or building something the world doesn't yet understand. Today I am pulling from a book called How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars, The Snapchat Story, by Billy Gallagher. A book that reveals not the sanitized tech success story, but the philosophical rebellion of a 23 year old who looked at Facebook's empire and said, this is broken and we can do better. I'm Jason Allan Scott. This is The Jason Allan Scott Show.
A show hosted by me to look at entrepreneurship, not through a business lens, but through a philosophical one. To understand that entrepreneurship might be the philosophy we all need, the philosophy that helps us make the best of our lives, the short time we have here on this third rock from the sun. And we look at this philosophy through the lenses of those that came before us, the founders who have quite literally shaped the world. Because Charlie Munger said it best, the greatest lessons are hidden in three dollar books. So that's my job, to bring you the stories hidden in three dollar books in the hopes that they bring you three billion value of knowledge, of expertise, of lessons and stories so that you can replicate or completely avoid the mistakes that others have made. So that you can stand on the shoulders of giants or completely escape the rat race and do something completely different. Today's story is a story of a college student who built an app his classmates called The Dumbest Thing Ever, a founder who turned down a three billion dollar acquisition offer from Mark Zuckerberg at the ripe old age of 23 A CEO who hired a philosopher before hiring a sales team whose ideas mattered more than revenue. And yet somehow, against every valley norm, against Zuckerberg's cloning attempts, against the narrative that disappearing photos are just for sexting, it became Snapchat. Because sometimes the only thing more dangerous than building what users ask for is forgetting why they're asking in the first place. And sometimes the only thing more powerful, the network effect, is understanding that networks, or should I say, is understanding what networks are destroying. This is what happens, this is what, this whole story, is about what happens when you refuse to conform, when you fight the status quo from the inside out. Act 1, The Origins of Rebellion. The student who refused to optimize for resumes. Stanford, early 2010 Evan Spiegel is a product design student, but he's not like the others grinding for Goldman Sachs interviews or Google internships. He's taken on as an advisee by David Kelly. David Kelly, if you don't know, is the head of Stanford's famed design school, the D school, as they call it. The one thing that becomes immediately clear in Evan's mind is I'm not going to work for somebody else. This is if you know me, you know my story and if you've been following this podcast or any of the podcasts I've done since 2015, you'll know my mantra that has driven me is to never be a boss and never have a boss. That's it. That's the mantra. I might change directions, I might change ideas, but I never give up on that belief. And Evan wasn't any different. He just said, I'm never going to work for somebody else. And I want you to understand what this realization unlocks. It gives him freedom, freedom from the heavy grind of Stanford. Nobody will ever see his resume or grades. So he takes classes for what he actually wants to learn, not what looks good on a CV, not what's markable or marketable by the market, but more what he's curious about. And this specific knowledge, this is specific knowledge in its purest form. And don't forget, specific knowledge cannot be taught. It can only be learned through experience or apprenticeship. Evan is never optimizing for the job market. He's always optimizing for understanding how to look at the things he uses every day and make them just a bit better, just a bit cooler. And that distinction, better and cooler, matters. Most people optimize for one or the other. Utility or Aesthetics, Function or Form. Evan wanted both, and he was willing to ignore grades, ignore recruiters, ignore the entire Stanford machinery to figure this out. His first startup was called Future Freshman, a platform for college applicants to get information about schools. And surprise, surprise, it failed. But the failure, the failure taught him something crucial. Future Freshman found itself battling well-funded competitors with deep pockets and large sales teams. There were signs, too close to home, that the product wasn't connecting. Evan later said about this, that both of my siblings were applying to college at the time, and neither of them used it. So that was a sign that this was probably not the right way to go. And eventually Evan pulled the plug. The lesson? In Evan's own words, in order to avoid getting destroyed by better funded competition, my next idea had to be more original. And this echoes something we've talked about before, the Blue Ocean Strategy. You could make more money while having less competition with more original ideas. Not better executing of existing ideas, but completely original ideas. Ideas that don't have to have a category or yet to have a category. Ideas that sound crazy until they become obvious. The idea that made everyone uncomfortable. It was late 2011, Evan and his fraternity brothers sitting around talking shit. More than one member of the frat lives in fear that photographs of their debauchery will come back to haunt them when it's time to get serious and have a career and be important people. Reggie Brown, one of Evan's friends, has an idea. What if people could send each other wild pictures of themselves partying without worrying about future consequences? Evan listens intently. He nods along. Then he starts talking in fast, clipped sentences. How weird is that? How weird is that that whoever started the internet and Facebook just decided that everything, everything, everything, everywhere should just stick around forever? Think about that. Someone made a decision early in the internet's design, that persistence was the default. That everything you post, everything you share, everything you should say or have said should be permanent, indexed, searchable forever.