HIGHLIGHTS: Evan Spiegel - CEO of Snap

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:01)
Hi, everybody. Tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday for the long version. Tune in on Wednesdays. Hi, everybody. I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Bank Fund. And today, I'm really thrilled. I'm here with Evan Spiegel, the co-founder and CEO of Snap, the company behind the very popular Snapchat. Now, it's used by nearly a billion people every day.
He was 22 years old, turned down a $3 billion offer from Mark Zuckerberg, and has continued to build the company, which, by the way, in Norway, of all places, was one of your first really, really big markets. So, fantastic to have you here.

**Evan Spiegel** (0:38)
Thanks so much, Nikolai. It's great to be on the show. And yeah, we now reach more than 3 million Norwegians. So, very proud to serve the Norwegian people.

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:46)
Now, it started as an idea that most people were thought was like totally ridiculous, a photo that disappears just after you look at it. So, where the heck did that idea come from?

**Evan Spiegel** (0:58)
Well, Bobby and I had grown up with social media. And on social media, everything was saved forever. It was public. It was like a big competition to see how many friends you had or likes you could get on your photos. And so, it meant that people were only posting pretty and perfect moments, not the full set of emotions or full set of experiences they had that were really important to relationships. So, I think the most important thing Snapchat did was create a new way of communicating with visual messaging. That was really the foundation of the service. Now, today, it's diversified across a map that lets you see what your friends are up to, or augmented reality lenses, of course, content with stories and spotlight. But the core of the service is really visual messaging between friends and family.

**Nicolai Tangen** (1:39)
So where do you go? You're like 22 years old, no money, no app, no nothing. I mean, how do you start?

**Evan Spiegel** (1:46)
Well, I was in school at the time, and Bobby and I actually lived across the hall from each other. And so, we started working on some projects together, one of which was called Future Freshmen, which was a service designed to help people get into college. That was a total failure. Only my mom signed up for our service, despite both of our siblings applying for college at the time. So we got some strong customer feedback in the early days. We ended up shutting down Future Freshmen, trying a few other things, and ultimately creating Pickaboo, as Snapchat was called at the time, which I presented to my class in junior year.

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:20)
You had a pretty healthy offer to sell the company early on. Now in Europe, we typically take the money and run. You thought differently. How come?

**Evan Spiegel** (2:32)
Well, we really loved what we were doing. We saw a huge long-term opportunity. Now the service reaches nearly a billion people around the world. Back then, it was still very small.
We believed that we had a vision that was unique and different than traditional social media that was much more focused on close friends and family, on messaging and self-expression. And so we decided to pursue our own vision. And I think the thing that really helped us make the decision was just how much we love what we do.

**Nicolai Tangen** (3:02)
Now, you've been at the forefront of a lot of innovations, right? Disappearing messages, stories, augmented reality, filters and so on.
How do you build a company that comes up with these kind of ideas?

**Evan Spiegel** (3:15)
Well, I think what's so important is to continue to create a culture where great ideas can come from anywhere, where people put good ideas in, you know, before hierarchy. One of the challenges with companies as they grow is they become much larger organizations. People become more fixated on promotions or making more money rather than taking risks. And so one of the things that we've done is kept a very, very small design team. It's about nine people. It's a totally flat structure, so there's no fancy titles or anything like that. And the entire idea is to iterate really quickly to try new things. We look at hundreds of ideas on a weekly basis.
And every now and then we have a good idea. But I think the most important thing is to create a culture that rewards creativity and risk taking rather than a culture that rewards promotion, for example.

**Nicolai Tangen** (4:04)
Now the biggest bet now for you seems to be the augmented reality glasses. And I believe you are on Generation 5 Do you think the world is ready for this now?