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David Senra: Evan Spiegel, Snap

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Evan Spiegel is the co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat. At Stanford, he enrolled in the product design program. In 2011, in a class project, he and two classmates — Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy — sketched out the idea for an app where photos disappeared. The insight was counterintuitive: in an era when everyone was obsessed with permanence and curation online, ephemerality might be the point. They built it. Spiegel dropped out before graduation to run it full time. What followed was one of the most turbulent ascents in Silicon Valley history. Facebook tried to buy Snapchat in 2013 for $3 billion in cash. Spiegel, 23 years old, said no. The decision was mocked at the time and later vindicated. Snap went public in March 2017 at a $24 billion valuation, making Spiegel — still in his mid-twenties — one of the youngest self-made billionaires in history. Spiegel has always argued that Snap is a camera company — that the camera is the starting point for how the next generation communicates, not a feature, but the interface itself. Snapchat pioneered Stories, a format that Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube all copied within years. It pioneered augment

David Senra: Super excited to talk to you. We've been talking a bunch before we started recording. I did a podcast on you almost 10 years ago. It's episode, I think, 22 of Founders, based on this book on how to turn down a billion dollars. The thing that stuck out to me the most, when I read that book, because a lot of that story takes place when you're still in college, and you're talking about two of your entrepreneur heroes. And Steve Jobs makes sense, my entrepreneur hero, too. But you mentioned this guy named Edwin Land. And I'm reading this, and I'm like, "How the f*** does a…

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