Evan Spiegel

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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in the early days, my view was not that we don't need PMs. My view was that designers should do that work.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I don't think receiving phone notifications on your face is like, you know, a a valuable, you know, proposition for most folks.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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15 years ago we essentially learned that software is not a moat, right? Which is something that everyone is discovering today with AI, right?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I'm just rediscovering uh Pokemon, which is so fun. It's so great. And I think uh you know, there's so much art to it and personality and character and uh what an amazing brand and franchise.

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I think specs, like what the biggest problem that I see today is people spending seven or eight hours a day on their computer and spending their life operating a computer. I think that is like a disaster for our society.

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Yeah, and I think, you know, generally speaking, I would expect the world to move towards flatter structures and much larger spans of control because, like, the communication and organization tax today is, like, night and day what it was 20 or 30 years ago.

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And if you're focused on your title, you're focused on, like, the exact wrong thing, right? Like, we are going to die if, like, we are a company that's focused on title and hierarchy and, you know, getting ahead, right, rather than focusing on the customer.

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Yeah, and I think what's most important for me is creating a culture where people are raising their hand and bringing those problems early and often, right? Like, that is mission critical across the organization, right? Like, we can't solve a problem that we don't know about.

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I think it's absolutely essential for us to go after solving hard problems, especially as we look at, like, the long -term success of the, the business. I think that ultimately, like, that is where value is created.

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At the same point, there's nothing more valuable than focus. Like focus is, I mean, arguably my primary role in our company is helping to drive focus and prioritization.

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And, you know, even requires a different execution style, you know, with hardware, like you cannot make a mistake, right? Like the things that we are doing today will show up in two years from now. And if we made a mistake, it's a huge problem and it'll cost us another year or whatever to, to fix it.

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Yeah, I think ultimately if you think about the customer experience you're trying to create or what you're trying to create in the world, ultimately you realize that hardware is a necessity in realizing that vision, essentially.

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Essentially, like you're going to burn yourself out if you try to control everything, right? So it's really important to identify very early on, like where are the strategic points where you can create a totally unique customer experience by really investing in doing things differently?

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And I think it's very, very hard to start with a super broad -based, low -margin consumer product and try to work your way into premium positioning.

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And then over time, they work with that really passionate group of enthusiasts to, you know, grow into the mass market while preserving their premium positioning, which means high gross margins. Then they take those high gross margins and they reinvest in R &D, which widens their lead.

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I think Meta needed to partner with Luxottica because the Meta brand, I think, is not something that people want to put anywhere near their face.

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I really, really like that because I think what they're describing is technology in service of a product vision. So instead of chasing a technology, being crystal clear about what you're trying to create and then organizing everyone to invent everything needed to create that product.

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Because ultimately, at the end of the day, the bar that we set for any product we develop is that it has to be 10 times better than the next best alternative.

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And so it's been hard to see a path forward for Snap up against these giants without AI tools. And now with AI tools, you're like, wow, we basically have an infinite number of engineering resources.

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And now that these models are good enough to write, you know, more and more complex pieces of software on their own, like the job of a software engineer at Snap is like profoundly and forever changed.

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I think that's certainly true in terms of like the operational lift, but at the same time, right, like that, the vision and creativity and connection to your customer has never been more important.

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So the whole world of design is changing, I think, very rapidly because now, you know, many of our designers are just empowered. If they've got something, we think it's cool. Let's, you know, let's get it in the app and test it like immediately. So I think design to code is happening way faster than ever before.

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I mean that's the fun part about innovating is it's a dialogue, right? It's not like issuing commands, like let's go build this. It's like having a real intense debate and dialogue about what's best for our customer and what we should do, what we should prioritize.

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And so I think kindness in many ways is essential because it allows people to hear that feedback. So one of the big problems, I think, you know, in a more hostile work environment is people are more resistant to feedback because they don't hear it coming from that positive place of wanting you to grow and develop.

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When you're being kind, it means you really want the best for somebody, right? And sometimes that means a tough conversation.

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If people feel afraid, it's very, very hard to be creative. I mean, fear is almost like the opposite of creativity.

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And what we really wanted to do was create a culture that's uncompromising, but at the same time very kind and supportive. Because we think that that is, you know, the best sort of and most fertile ground for creativity.

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So, I think, you know, the hard part is not necessarily having the vision for the future, and oftentimes it just seems very obvious. The hard part is delivering it, right, getting there.

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Like, it was obvious to me that, you know, if you looked at the evolution of computing that, like, holding this tiny little screen in your hands was not the future of computers. Like, it makes absolutely no sense, especially for humans that want to, like, live and work hands -free, right?

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But for us, like, it was just obvious, right, that people were going to want to watch video the same way they hold their phone. They don't want to turn their phone to watch video.

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I think, first of all, we really focused on building the perfect product for way too long before we got feedback. So, you know, I think we worked for, like, 18 months to build this perfect, full -featured product, which was, like, in direct contravention to, like, how I was always taught to build things, right? Which is, like, build a prototype, build an MVP, get in front of people, learn as quickly as possible.

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They didn't have these likes and comments, which opened up this whole new world of self -expression, right, because instead of just trying to post what would look pretty or popular or perfect, people were sharing this whole range of human emotions.

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That made us realize, like, the way that people have told stories forever, right, is in chronological order. They're not, you know, permanently saved forever and publicly judged and liked and that sort of thing.

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And I think, you know, the challenging thing, I think, is, you know, sometimes when you're working on new technology, it's so exciting and inspiring that you can lose focus on its impact on people.

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I think that's a really good example of the way technology ends up shaping human behavior. So if we're not thoughtful enough about the technology we're building, it can have unintended consequences.

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And I think as we've looked at the sort of trajectory of technology, over the long arc of time, technology gets more and more and more and more personal.