Snap CEO: Building Snapchat, AR Glasses and the Future of Communication

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:01)
Hi everybody, I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Revenue 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. Fantastic to have you here.

**Evan Spiegel** (0:30)
Thanks so much, Nicolai. It's great to be on the show. We now reach more than 3 million Norwegians, so very proud to serve the Norwegian people.

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:48)
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** (0:59)
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, but 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** (1:40)
So where did you go? You're like 22 years old, no money, no app, no nothing. I mean, how do you start?

**Evan Spiegel** (1:47)
Well, I was in school at the time, and Bobby and I actually lived across the hall from each other. So we started working on some projects together, one of which was called Future Freshman, 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 Freshman, trying a few other things, and ultimately creating Picaboo, as Snapchat was called at the time, which I presented to my class in junior year.

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:21)
When did you understand that you were onto something big?

**Evan Spiegel** (2:26)
Oh, gosh. I mean, it probably wasn't until about a year after we launched the service, when there were enough folks using it and continuing to use it in a way that we thought maybe we could build a business. But I think the most important thing for us is that we loved using it together with our friends. And so that really gave us the conviction to stick with it, continue evolving Snapchat, because we were having so much fun using Snapchat to message with our friends.

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:52)
Now, in the beginning, people kind of thought it was a bit secretive, right?
Stuff is disappearing, there is no record of anything. So how did you think about the kind of reputation side of it?

**Evan Spiegel** (3:03)
You're right. Back then, people didn't really think about or prioritize privacy the way they do now. I mean, if you remember at the time, everyone was talking about the world being open and connected, and everyone was going to share everything permanently. And I don't think people had yet realized the downside of saving everything forever or allowing companies to access and store such large amounts of data. And so it was unusual for Snapchat, I guess now 15 years ago, to say privacy is really important to us.
And we think that privacy is actually the foundation of self-expression, right? Unless you feel like you can express yourself with your friends and family without fear of that being recorded and broadcast publicly, it's very hard to feel comfortable expressing yourself. So I think we were early to explain the connection between privacy and self-expression, which I think now is obviously very well understood and widely accepted.

**Nicolai Tangen** (3:54)
You had a pretty healthy offer to sell the company early on. Now in Europe, we typically take the money and run, you know? You thought differently. How come?

**Evan Spiegel** (4:06)
Well, we really loved what we were doing. We saw a huge long-term opportunity. I mean, now the service reaches nearly a billion people around the world. Back then, it was still very small. And so 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.