🇺🇸Evan
Spiegel

Evan Spiegel was raised in Pacific Palisades, an affluent neighborhood in Los Angeles where both his parents were attorneys and the expectations for achievement were high and clearly understood. He attended Crossroads, one of the most selective private schools in California, where he was known for a restless, design-oriented intelligence — he was the kind of student who would redesign the school's website without being asked, then do a better version of that, too. His father had connections in the technology industry and took the young Evan to demonstrations of new products. By sixteen, Spiegel had decided he was going to Stanford, and by seventeen he had been admitted. He enrolled in Stanford's product design program in 2009.

The idea that became Snapchat came from a conversation in the spring of 2011. Spiegel was in a class project meeting with his fraternity brother Reggie Brown when Brown suggested that disappearing photos — images that vanished after being viewed — would be useful for sending things you would not want permanently recorded. Spiegel immediately recognized the opportunity. He brought in a mutual friend, Bobby Murphy, to write the code, and the three of them launched an app called Picaboo in July 2011. It was renamed Snapchat in September of the same year after Brown was pushed out of the company — a dispute that would result in years of litigation and ultimately a settlement. Spiegel left Stanford a semester before graduating to run the company full-time. He was twenty-one.

Snapchat grew with a speed that surprised almost everyone who watched it, including many people who initially dismissed it as trivial. The application's core insight was that most real human communication is ephemeral — people say things, and then those things are gone, and that is not a flaw in communication but one of its essential features. Social media up to that point had been built on the opposite premise: everything was archived, searchable, permanent. Snapchat gave users something different, and particularly among teenagers, the adoption was immediate and passionate. By 2013, the app was processing more than 350 million snaps per day. Facebook, recognizing an existential threat to its position with younger users, offered $3 billion to acquire Snapchat. Spiegel turned it down. He was twenty-three.

The refusal of Facebook's offer was one of the most scrutinized decisions in recent technology history. At the time, many observers thought it was reckless — Facebook had just made a similar offer to Instagram, which Kevin Systrom had accepted, and the outcome had been good for everyone involved. Spiegel's position was that Snapchat was worth far more than $3 billion, and that he had no interest in running a product that Facebook would absorb and then compete with on its own terms. He has said since that he thought Snapchat could become a generation-defining company, and that selling it to Facebook at that stage would have meant it never would.

Snap Inc. went public in March 2017 at a valuation of $25 billion, making it the largest American technology IPO since Facebook. Spiegel rang the opening bell in New York wearing a hoodie. He was twenty-six. The IPO also made him, on paper, one of the youngest billionaires in the world. Snap's stock performance since has been volatile — the company has gone through periods of user stagnation, costly restructuring, and intense competition from Instagram's Stories feature, which was widely understood to be a direct copy of Snapchat's core product. But Spiegel has continued to push the company into augmented reality, building what he describes as a camera company rather than a social media company. Snap's AR lenses, Spectacles hardware, and developer platform represent bets that computing will increasingly happen through the camera, overlaying digital information on the physical world. Whether those bets pay off at the scale Spiegel envisions remains one of the more interesting open questions in technology.