Evan Spiegel
Co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat, which he started in 2011 while studying product design at Stanford.
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Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 22 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Distribution, not product-market fit, is the hard part of consumer technology, and almost nobody spends enough time on it.
And I think people don't spend nearly enough time thinking about, you know, distribution and figuring out distribution. And that seems to me uh to be a huge differentiator.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
The value of a social network is in connecting you to the handful of people you care most about, not in how many people it connects.
what really mattered was connecting you to the right people. And so, if you could just connect someone not to all their friends, but to their best friend, to their partner, to their spouse, the people that they cared most about in the world, that that that's where the majority of the value is in the network.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
The next generation of great consumer companies will be born on new form factors like glasses, the way the last one was born on mobile.
as we look forward to, you know, sort of these next generation form factors, things like glasses, there's going to be a whole new set of opportunities and a whole new surface for people to build generational consumer companies.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
Show 19 more
Software is not a moat, and the AI industry is only now discovering what Snap learned fifteen years ago.
15 years ago we essentially learned that software is not a moat, right? Which is something that everyone is discovering today with AI, right?
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
A platform of creators and developers is a durable moat, because an ecosystem, unlike a feature, cannot be cloned.
the more that we could build a platform uh around our business, the more that we could build an ecosystem with creators and developers, the harder it would be for folks uh to to just copy that.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
Network effects are not a sufficient moat, because software features get copied however many patents you hold.
network effects are certainly an important piece of the puzzle for sure, um but I don't think they're enough when it comes to these sorts of software uh you know, software cloning.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
Computers and phones isolate people from one another, and the point of the next computer is to reverse that.
one of the things that I noticed about computers and I think today with mobile phones, uh is that in many ways they isolate us from one another, right? They actually take us out of our social interactions.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
The time is right for a new kind of computer, because people are already frustrated with what phones cost them.
I think the time is right for a new a new type of computer. I think people are frustrated um, you know, with the cost of using phones and computers today.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
Getting phone notifications on your face is not a valuable proposition, so heads-up display glasses will not become a widespread behaviour.
I don't think receiving phone notifications on your face is like, you know, a a valuable, you know, proposition for most folks.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
Large, structured organizations become risk-averse because everyone inside them is optimizing for the next promotion.
as soon as you have an organization that's very large and very structured like that, uh people become very focused on getting a promotion, right? Getting, you know, into the next step of the hierarchy. And that means that all of a sudden, uh they become a lot more risk-averse.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
A company needs both a flat inventive team and a large operational one, and the leader's real job is the relationship between them.
the companies that are very successful actually have both types of organizations inside their company. And that the leaders of the organization are the ones who are responsible for creating a healthy, functioning relationship between the two types of organizations.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
If you want to have a good idea you have to have lots of ideas, so the velocity of design work matters more than any one idea.
the velocity of work uh, you know, is really important because our favorite saying is, you know, if you want to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
You have to talk to customers and share your ideas as early and as often as possible, even though you need not take their advice.
I would say uh, you have to talk to customers. You have to share your idea. You should share your ideas quickly as possible, as frequently as possible. Uh, it doesn't mean you need to take people's advice or feedback, but it's really important, I think, to listen.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
Listening to customers is invaluable, but you should not build the thing they asked you for.
All of those insights that we you know, received just from listening to folks made a huge difference in the product design process, but we didn't build exactly what they asked for. We we empathized and then you know, came up with something new.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
Designers, not product managers, should own product direction, and a company can go a long way with designers doing the PM work themselves.
in the early days, my view was not that we don't need PMs. My view was that designers should do that work.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
Design should be an intentional bottleneck every shipped thing has to pass through, because that is what makes a product cohere.
for us design actually has always operated as like a bottleneck at the company, which is incredibly important, right? It's intentional that things need to be approved by design to ship.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
Staying close to your customer and your product is the most important thing any leader can do, in any company, not only a consumer one.
staying close to your customer, staying close to the product and the way that it's serving your customer is the fundamentally most important thing you could possibly do.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
Range, not a distinctive style, is what separates a designer from an artist, so a portfolio where everything looks alike is a bad sign.
Design is really about, you know, empathizing with your customer, empathizing with your audience, your viewer, whoever it is, and then building something that will really resonates with them. And And that means you need to have a an extraordinary amount of range.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
Preciousness about ideas is what holds designers back; if you are producing a thousand ideas it does not matter that most of them are bad.
when you're creating a thousand new ideas, who cares if most of them are not great ideas? That's totally fine, right? What we want to get rid of is that sense of, you know, preciousness that people have around ideas
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
Listing out your jobs to be done is how a company brings order to AI, because it shows exactly where an agent belongs and what it should improve.
by listing out all these jobs to be done, you know, really for the for the community journey and for advertisers as well, it became very clear where we could use agents, where we needed to be very focused in terms of building cross-functional teams around those jobs supported by AI tools.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
Humanity matters more than technology, because it is humanity that dictates whether and how a technology gets adopted.
humanity is far more important, uh you know, than than the technological developments largely because humanity dictates how technology is adopted
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
There is going to be a huge amount of societal pushback against AI, because technology leaders wrongly assume people adopt whatever ships.
I think technology leaders think that folks will just blindly adopt uh new technology as it comes out and I think we're going to enter a period of time where there's going to be a huge amount of societal pushback on a lot of the changes that are coming uh with AI.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
Beliefs others hold too
Listening to customers is invaluable, but you should not build the thing they asked you for. 2 hold this
All of those insights that we you know, received just from listening to folks made a huge difference in the product design process, but we didn't build exactly what they asked for. We we empathized and then you know, came up with something new.
How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) Said 26 Apr 2026
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