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disease. You

2:15

are contacted by Facebook

2:17

and you and Bobby go

2:20

meet with Mark Zuckerberg. What

2:22

do you remember about that meeting? We

2:25

were pretty nervous. He was telling us

2:27

about working on a new poke app,

2:29

which ultimately ended up being a copycat

2:31

of Snapchat at the time. Did he

2:33

say, do you guys want to

2:35

collaborate at that time? I

2:37

don't remember the exact substance of the conversation. You

2:39

don't remember? Of course you remember. You were 22.

2:42

It must have been incredible to be asked

2:44

to come eat him because it's a validation of

2:46

what you guys were building. That's not how

2:48

it felt at the time. It felt like, oh

2:50

no, there's a really big company that everyone's

2:52

been warning us about, you know, and has said

2:54

they're working on something similar. We

2:56

knew that a copycat product was coming, you

2:58

know, and then I think that Christmas it

3:00

did. Welcome

3:10

to How I Built This,

3:12

a show about innovators, entrepreneurs,

3:14

idealists, and the stories behind

3:16

the movements they built. I'm

3:20

Guy Ross, and on the show

3:22

today, how Evan Spiegel turned disappearing

3:24

photo messages into Snap, one

3:26

of the biggest social media platforms

3:28

on Earth. Here's

3:42

the story of Snap, once known as

3:44

Snapchat, that you might have

3:46

heard. Evan Spiegel and two

3:48

friends from Stanford built a social

3:50

media app in 2011. And

3:53

just two years later, Mark

3:55

Zuckerberg offers them $3

3:57

billion. Now, this

3:59

story is true. This really did happen. And

4:01

if you think about it, it was kind

4:03

of nuts for Evan to turn down that

4:05

offer. I mean, there's

4:08

a pretty large graveyard of once

4:10

high -flying tech companies that soon

4:12

withered out and died. But

4:14

Evan had a lot of conviction

4:16

in his product, and the data was

4:18

there to back that up. Within

4:20

a year of launching, Snapchat

4:22

had close to 5 million daily

4:24

users. Today, that

4:26

number is over 450

4:29

million daily users. And

4:31

what is it about Snapchat that

4:33

makes it so compelling? Well, as

4:35

a parent who tries to ban

4:37

all social media apps from my

4:39

kids' phones, the one argument I

4:41

couldn't win was over Snapchat. Middle

4:43

and high school kids use

4:45

Snapchat in the same way adults

4:47

use text messaging. In other

4:50

words, Snap has figured out how

4:52

to build a moat around a major

4:54

way teenagers communicate. Now,

4:56

Evan's rocket chip trajectory was not

4:58

as smooth and seamless as it

5:00

sounds. For starters, he was

5:02

just 21 when Snap launched. He

5:04

was, as he admits, really bad

5:06

at being a CEO in the early

5:08

days. He didn't know how to run

5:10

a business, and the learning curve was

5:12

really steep. And during the first

5:15

few years of Snap's rise, a legal

5:17

battle with one of the co -founders cast

5:19

a shadow over the company. Today,

5:21

Snap is still one of the biggest

5:23

players in social media. And

5:25

despite a somewhat lackluster performance on

5:27

Wall Street, the company still

5:29

has a market cap hovering between

5:31

$13 and $15 billion. Lately,

5:35

the companies decided to roll the

5:37

dice on another hero product,

5:39

Spectacles, augmented reality glasses that will

5:41

bring much of the Snapchat

5:43

experience right into your field of

5:45

vision. It's a pretty risky

5:47

bet given the performance of wearables so

5:49

far, but a little more on that

5:51

later. For now, what you

5:53

need to know is that Evan grew

5:55

up in the Palisades neighborhood in Los

5:57

Angeles, an area, of course, devastated by

5:59

the recent fires. Both of

6:01

his parents were lawyers by training, but his

6:04

mom eventually gave up law to take

6:06

care of the kids. And

6:08

watching his dad work really, really

6:10

long hours, Evan says

6:12

he knew pretty early on what

6:14

he didn't want to be. One

6:17

thing I knew for sure was that I did not want to be

6:19

a lawyer. My

6:21

dad was always called away from family trips. He

6:23

would get phone calls that would basically say,

6:25

hey, you got to cancel your trip where you

6:27

can't go to this thing with Evan or

6:29

whatever it was. So I remember thinking growing up,

6:31

I want to be the guy on the

6:33

phone calling my dad and telling him that he

6:35

can't take our family on vacation. So

6:38

I know you went to

6:40

Stanford. I mean, this is like

6:43

2008. coming into, obviously,

6:45

this financial crisis, but it's like

6:47

the beginning of Web 2 .0,

6:49

right? I think a couple of years

6:52

before you, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger graduated, and they

6:54

would go on, of course, to found Instagram. We'll

6:56

talk about that in a bit. But

6:58

there was probably already on campus

7:00

just conversations around all these

7:02

amazing things that people were doing,

7:04

recent graduates were doing. Do

7:06

you remember having those conversations and thinking

7:08

like, this is really cool. What's going

7:10

on? At that time, it was still

7:12

really early. I mean, when I go to campus now,

7:14

it feels like almost everybody has a startup. Yeah,

7:16

almost everybody's creating a company, but that's not what it

7:18

felt like at the time. I mean, to your

7:21

point, it was sort of in the, you know, around

7:23

the time of the financial crisis, a

7:25

lot of folks were still, you know,

7:27

studying econ. That was a really popular

7:29

major at the time. So it's sort

7:31

of in that transitional phase between a

7:33

lot of folks being really focused on

7:35

on econ to more computer science and

7:37

things like that. So,

7:39

I read a story about this

7:42

experience you had. You took this

7:44

class at the business school and

7:46

Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, came

7:48

to the class. I don't know if that

7:50

was a turning point for you, but what happened

7:52

when you saw him and met him? Because

7:55

I think it was kind of a

7:57

turning point for you as a student. Yeah,

7:59

taking that class. It's called Entrepreneurship and Venture

8:02

Capital. It's taught by Peter Wendell and

8:04

Eric Schmidt. It's still taught today. I

8:06

tried a guest lecture once a year.

8:09

that class was an absolute game changer

8:11

for me. And, you know, Scott Cook

8:13

was one of the guest lecturers and

8:15

gave the whole case study on into

8:17

it. And during the case study, I guess

8:19

I asked a couple of questions in the

8:21

in the class about how they were capitalizing

8:23

the business at the time or something like

8:25

that. So we'd had an opportunity to engage

8:27

a little bit. And after class, I talked

8:30

to him and basically begged him for a

8:32

job. And so he gave me an internship

8:34

at Intuit that really sort of changed my

8:36

trajectory because on a very small team of

8:38

people, we were, you know, I think it

8:40

was three or four of us, we made

8:42

web apps at the time, actually for, you

8:44

know, touchpad phones, not touchscreens or anything like

8:46

that. But I learned that with a really

8:48

small team, you could build software and deploy

8:50

it all around the world. And so it

8:52

sort of demystified a lot of the process

8:54

of building stuff. So after

8:56

doing that, I mean, Did that then kind

8:58

of sit in motion wheels in your

9:00

head like, wait, I could do something cool.

9:02

There's something cool to be done. Yeah,

9:05

I think, you know, beyond that, it just

9:07

showed that it wasn't that hard that

9:09

with a couple friends that we could make

9:11

something to without, you know, the infrastructure

9:13

of a huge company and things like, you

9:15

know, the cloud were getting built out

9:18

at the time. So all this stuff that

9:20

had been so hard before needing to

9:22

rack your own servers, invest all this capital,

9:24

have a huge team that wasn't required

9:26

to create software experiences anymore. Got

9:28

it. All right. So while you were

9:30

at Stanford, you had a friend.

9:32

named Bobby Murphy, who I guess

9:34

he lived across the hall from you. And

9:36

later he would actually become one of your co

9:38

-founders at Snapple. We'll talk about that. But before

9:40

that, you guys, you and Bobby started another

9:42

company. It was completely different. It's called Future Freshman.

9:45

Can you tell me a little bit about

9:47

that? Like what was the business? Well,

9:49

we had both experienced the college process that

9:51

was super complicated. And one of the

9:53

really challenging parts is all the different requirements

9:56

of all of these different colleges when

9:58

you're trying to apply. So it's a massive

10:00

organizational project that could be better handled by

10:02

software. And so we started trying to build

10:04

really beautiful software that could do that well.

10:06

So you would just. Check all the box for

10:08

all the schools you wanted to apply to.

10:10

We would go out and gather all the

10:12

requirements, the essay questions, everything, put it all

10:14

in one place. So it made it really,

10:16

really easy for you to fill out the

10:18

application and do that kind of thing. And

10:20

you guys didn't need a whole lot of funding

10:22

for this, it sounds like, or any. No,

10:24

we didn't take any funding at that time.

10:26

We were just trying to... Just building a

10:28

website and trying to build like a user interface.

10:31

Yeah, exactly. Were your coding skills good enough to

10:33

make something nice like look good? I thought

10:35

it was really cool. I mean, I did most

10:37

of the design and Bobby did most of

10:39

the coding. And, you know, I think that the

10:41

software was great. The big problem was that

10:43

nobody used it. How did you try to get

10:45

people to use it? Well at that time

10:47

both of our siblings were applying to college so

10:49

we tried to get them on it to

10:52

start giving us feedback and you know we would

10:54

tell schools that it was available but that

10:56

was a big lesson for us because our competitor

10:58

at the time they were called Naviance. They

11:00

were getting distribution through all the college counselors

11:02

so if you were in school your college

11:04

counselor would tell you and your parents hey

11:06

use Naviance to apply to college and so

11:08

they had a massive distribution advantage. And how

11:11

long did you guys kind of work on

11:13

this before you came to the conclusion that

11:15

you just were not going to be able to compete in

11:17

that space. Think about 18 months

11:19

total. We invested a lot

11:21

of time into it. And that was

11:23

a really painful decision to shut it

11:25

down. But I think ultimately we just

11:27

realized we didn't have the distribution. And

11:30

ultimately we were solving a problem where

11:32

even if we were really successful, our customers

11:34

would essentially leave us every year. So

11:36

we'd have to go get more customers the

11:38

next year. And so it was just

11:40

a really, really tough business, I think, to

11:42

get off the ground. It's like diapers. You

11:45

just got to get new customers

11:47

in every year as Mark Lowry said

11:49

on the show many years ago

11:51

All right, so this takes us to

11:53

roughly to the spring of

11:55

2011 you are I think

11:57

a junior at Stanford and

11:59

Was it sort of like okay,

12:01

you know, let's kind of spitball other

12:03

ideas come up with something else Yeah,

12:05

exactly. We had a couple other ideas

12:07

that we were playing around with and

12:09

working on at the

12:11

time, including just really easy ways to connect

12:14

with friends and share files and this sort

12:16

of thing. But it wasn't until we started

12:18

working on Pickaboo that I think we found

12:20

something that we were really excited about. Tell

12:22

me about the idea for Pickaboo. How did

12:24

that come about? Well, I had come

12:26

back from studying abroad in Cape Town. I was living

12:28

in a dorm back on campus, hanging out with

12:30

a friend of mine. And he

12:32

was like, man, it'd be really cool to

12:34

be able to send disappearing photos. We were

12:36

like, oh, that's a super interesting idea. So

12:38

we started prototyping like what that could look

12:40

like and came up with the name Pickaboo.

12:43

And ultimately, I presented it to my design

12:45

class. And I think the first piece of

12:47

feedback we got was basically, you know, That's

12:49

not going to work because you can always

12:51

take a screenshot. And that piece

12:53

of feedback was really, really helpful because

12:55

I think early on there were some other

12:57

competitors in the space. They were all very

12:59

focused on like security. But what we found

13:01

was that what people loved using was just

13:03

sending pictures back and forth really, really quickly. MMS

13:06

was really slow. mean, I think it took more

13:08

than a minute to send a photo via text

13:10

message at the time. And so our friends just

13:12

started using it to send photos all day. Alright,

13:15

so peek -a -boo, right, like peek -a -boo, but it's

13:17

spelled like pick -p -i -c, peek -a -boo is this idea.

13:20

And the idea is, send, you can send

13:22

a photo that will be ephemeral. It'll just, you

13:24

could just quickly see and it'll disappear in 10 seconds.

13:27

I mentioned this earlier, but 2011, I

13:29

mean, a year earlier, Kevin Cisterham

13:31

and Mike Krieger, who were on the show nine

13:33

years, eight or nine years ago, also

13:35

stand for graduates. They launched

13:38

Instagram. So, I have

13:40

to imagine that they were sort of

13:42

like kind of legendary status or because

13:44

once they launched Instagram, it really blew

13:46

up. And what do you remember about

13:48

hearing about those guys or talking about

13:50

those guys or was it inspiring to

13:52

you and to your friends in some

13:54

way? Just because the parallels are so

13:56

they're so clear, you know, it's like

13:58

two friends at Stanford a couple of

14:00

years before you with the photo app, right?

14:02

And then that just becomes huge. You

14:05

know at the time I think we were

14:07

we just really felt that like social

14:09

media was taking itself too seriously so Instagram

14:11

and Facebook at the time the whole

14:13

focus was you know on posting

14:15

the prettiest possible pictures and getting lots of

14:18

likes and comments. And there was like a

14:20

real focus on, you know, how many friends

14:22

do you have? How popular are you? And,

14:24

and of course, you know, also a lot

14:26

of concerns about like the permanence of images.

14:28

I mean, at the time there were all

14:30

these stories of people getting job offers rescinded

14:32

because somebody found their Facebook profile. So I

14:34

think there was for us just a real

14:36

need for something different, something that

14:38

you could actually use to talk with

14:40

your friends and have fun because

14:42

Instagram and Facebook at that time were

14:44

much more focused. on this very

14:46

public and permanent sort of status -based

14:49

social media. Tell me from the time

14:51

of the idea to the time

14:53

where you kind of like launch a

14:55

version of Pickaboo, I think it's just a

14:57

couple of months. It's just like four or five

14:59

months, right? I think something like that, yeah.

15:01

How did you guys build it? Because he built

15:03

it as obviously as an app. Kind

15:06

of take me into

15:08

doing that. Did it require any money or could

15:10

you just do it on your own at

15:12

Stanford? Yeah, it didn't require any money. We

15:14

could just do it. I just sketched out on

15:16

one piece of paper, the screens, you

15:19

know, the different flows. And one of

15:21

the things we learned from Future Freshman is

15:23

not to build something huge and complex.

15:25

It was to build something as simple as

15:27

possible and get people's feedback as quickly

15:29

as possible. And so we really just started

15:31

with a couple key screens, you know,

15:33

add a friend with their username, tap to

15:36

send them a snap. But there were

15:38

a couple principles that we really anchored to,

15:40

like opening up to the camera, for

15:42

example. missed a moment. You could just open up

15:44

to the camera and snap really quickly. And

15:46

so when you had this prototype, did it

15:48

look good? Did it look anything like what

15:50

it would eventually look like? We thought it

15:52

looked good. I mean, I think today we

15:54

might say that there was room for improvement.

15:57

But at the time, you know, it was

15:59

fun and playful and colorful and different. And I

16:01

think that was really the whole point. And

16:03

you designed it initially for the iPhone to

16:05

work on the iPhone? Yeah, it was iPhone

16:07

only to start. All right,

16:09

so when you have this app ready

16:11

to launch it, was it just to

16:13

test with friends that you knew or

16:15

was it like a public launch where

16:17

anybody could use it? We put

16:19

it on the app store so anyone could

16:21

use it, but obviously nobody knew about it

16:24

except our friends. So in the early days,

16:26

it was just our friends, you know, my

16:28

sister, my cousin, folks just trying it and

16:30

playing around with it with their friends. And

16:32

what was the feedback like? I mean, what

16:34

were people saying to you about it? Just

16:36

that it was really fun. I think it

16:38

really lowered the bar in terms of what

16:40

a picture was. It wasn't about saving a

16:42

perfect moment. It was about communicating. And people

16:44

love that. So they started asking us for

16:46

all these communication features. Like, hey, can I

16:48

add a caption? Can I add a drawing? In

16:51

the beginning, there weren't all these communication tools

16:53

that we have today. Got it. Okay,

16:55

so I want to raise something that

16:57

is a little bit sensitive and I know

16:59

there are things that you can and maybe

17:01

cannot talk about because there was litigation. So

17:04

I'm going to try and fill in some

17:06

gaps because it's important that we at least

17:08

acknowledge it. But

17:10

maybe you were working on Pickaboo with two

17:12

of your classmates at Stanford. It was

17:14

Bobby Murphy who we've talked about. He'd

17:16

worked with you before on Future Freshman.

17:19

But then there was another classmate in the

17:22

picture, a guy called Reggie Brown, and

17:24

he would later file a lawsuit and say

17:26

he was also involved in building Pickaboo. And

17:28

from what I understand, you guys had a

17:30

falling out. But tell me a little

17:32

bit about maybe what happened or what you

17:34

wished you would have done differently, or

17:36

maybe the communication wasn't clear about the roles

17:38

that people were playing and who was

17:40

doing what. Yeah, I

17:43

definitely really appreciate his

17:45

contributions. came up with the

17:47

idea of sending disappearing photos and share that with me.

17:49

But I think one of the challenging things, you know,

17:51

Bobby and I had had this history of working together.

17:53

And we, so we had, you know, a really strong

17:55

working relationship. And I think those expectations were really clear.

17:57

So I think like to your point, you know, and

17:59

for founders thinking about creating their own businesses,

18:01

being really clear about those expectations upfront,

18:03

you know, including getting a piece of

18:06

paper that really outlines those responsibilities, I

18:08

think is really important. But it's not

18:10

something you're thinking about when you're just

18:12

playing around and trying to create something

18:14

with your friends. Yeah. So,

18:16

alright, from what I understand, like,

18:18

initially the app really took off among

18:20

high school students in the Palisades

18:22

and Malibu area. So I'm assuming that

18:24

that was like something that maybe

18:26

you were able to do. You were

18:29

able to bring it to students there and

18:31

encourage them to use it. Well, we

18:33

definitely shared it with our friends and a lot

18:35

of that growth happened informally. I mean, some of

18:37

the things we tried, you know, like buying Facebook

18:39

ads and stuff like that didn't work because people

18:41

didn't understand the service until someone explained it to

18:43

them, until a friend used it with them. You

18:46

know, it's only works if you've got

18:48

a friend to use it with. So

18:50

I think just the fundamental nature of

18:52

the service is ultimately what drove its

18:54

growth because the virality was inbuilt. Yeah,

18:57

and it was different than social media virality

18:59

because social media virality is very network based,

19:01

right? You would want to have the largest

19:03

graph possible. But the reason why Snapchat was

19:05

able to grow is because you really

19:07

wanted to use it with your, you know,

19:09

one or two or three best friends. And

19:11

so the growth trajectory was different than traditional

19:14

social media. But, you know, it's still required

19:16

a friend to use it. In order to

19:18

use it, somebody else has to have it.

19:20

So then you get this next user and

19:22

then the next user. And so it's sort

19:24

of self perpetuates. I think that's one

19:26

of the fun things about Snapchat. It's

19:28

not a single player experience. You've got

19:30

to do it together with a friend.

19:32

And some of the changes we made,

19:34

especially calling it Snapchat, talking about the

19:36

importance of visual messaging rather than focusing

19:38

on disappearing photos, that's when people really

19:40

started to understand, hey, this is for

19:42

communicating. And you had to call it

19:44

Snapchat because there was another company called Pickaboo,

19:47

right? Yeah, exactly. We got a

19:49

cease and desist from a pick -a -boo company and

19:51

maybe one of the best things that ever

19:53

happened to us. And it happened early enough where

19:55

your brand wasn't known, so it didn't matter.

19:57

Yeah, exactly. So to get

19:59

to January 2012. where

20:01

you have 30 ,000 users,

20:04

you could do that with almost no

20:06

money. Yeah, this was one of the

20:08

huge benefits of cloud infrastructure as we

20:10

could pay for what we used. But

20:12

the server bills started getting more and

20:14

more expensive. My grandparents had left me

20:16

$10 ,000. Bobby had some money from

20:19

one of his. Prior jobs, and so

20:21

he'd ship that in. My

20:23

dad, I think, put in maybe five or

20:25

$10 ,000, but he wasn't quite keen to

20:27

put in any more to help people

20:29

send photos back and forth. So we had

20:31

to pretty quickly start looking for fundraising,

20:33

because the server bills got to be

20:35

about $10 ,000 a month. When you

20:37

talked about this idea, you know,

20:39

to your dad or your mom,

20:41

or was anybody skeptical? Like, why

20:45

would somebody want to do that? This

20:47

just seems like it's going to be used

20:49

by weirdos to send naked pictures. Aside

20:52

from the media, which we'll get to in a minute,

20:54

but just people you knew, did anybody

20:56

ever express skepticism about

20:58

this? Yeah, teachers, friends, of

21:00

course. But I think that feedback

21:03

was helpful, and that skepticism actually helped fuel the growth

21:05

of the product. They're like, wait a minute, I

21:07

don't understand this, but so many people are using this,

21:09

or wow, my friends are using it. I got

21:11

to check it out and see what this is all

21:13

about. All right, so let's

21:15

talk about fundraising. You are...

21:17

I think, at Stanford and

21:20

you're on campus. So

21:22

I imagine it's not impossible

21:24

to make connections between professors

21:26

and other people on campus

21:28

to sources of fundraising. I

21:31

mean, just to kind of reveal

21:33

what happens in March of 2012, you

21:35

get almost half a million dollars

21:37

in seed funding from Lightspeed, which probably

21:39

among their greatest investments ever. But

21:42

tell me about getting that money because And

21:45

I should remind people listening, the stories

21:47

we don't hear about are all the times

21:49

that light speed and Sequoia and Benchmark

21:51

and others made $500 ,000 in seed funding

21:53

and it went nowhere. They lost it. We

21:55

only hear about the times when it worked. So there's

21:57

a lot of money that they put out there that

21:59

goes nowhere. But how did you make

22:02

the case? Was it hard? Was it

22:04

easy to get the money? We

22:06

had a lot of unsuccessful meetings with

22:08

venture capitalists. I think the places

22:10

where we got more traction and saw

22:12

success was anyone whose teams were

22:14

using the product or they had friends

22:17

who were using the product. And

22:19

so ultimately, Barry, who was a

22:21

partner at Lightspeed, told another one of his

22:23

partners, hey, my daughter is using Instagram, Angry

22:25

Birds and Snapchat. That's what she's doing all

22:27

day long. We know about Angry Birds and

22:29

Instagram. What's the Snapchat thing? Let's go find

22:31

these guys. So they went to look for

22:33

you. They went to look for us. Yeah,

22:36

I got a Facebook message from Jeremy Liu at

22:38

Lightspeed. And we'd be getting all sorts of

22:40

messages from folks that seemed kind of spammy

22:42

or suspicious. But Jeremy's Facebook profile, he had

22:44

a photo of himself and Obama in the

22:46

profile picture. So we were like, oh, he

22:48

must be legit. We'll respond. And we ended

22:50

up meeting up with Jeremy. And I think

22:52

the thing that really helped him understand the

22:55

business is we just shared the data. We

22:57

just shared the retention data and the usage

22:59

of Snapchat. So we had a lot of

23:01

data that showed that once people started talking

23:03

with their friends on Snapchat, they kept doing

23:05

it. And ultimately, I think that's what

23:07

gave them the conviction to invest. When they

23:09

put half a million dollars into Snap,

23:11

what was the valuation? 4

23:14

.25 million. That's a

23:16

good investment. I think so. Actually, my favorite

23:18

part of that story is a school nearby

23:20

invested $15 ,000 and ended up making, I think

23:22

they ended up building a new gymnasium or

23:24

something. It's pretty cool. A school nearby. Yeah,

23:26

school, I guess, affiliated with one of the

23:28

light speed folks. I think they were on

23:30

the board or on the finance committee or

23:32

something. were like, we should Oh, they invested

23:34

in that seed round. Yeah, they invested $15

23:37

,000 in the seed round and ultimately... How

23:39

much money do you think they made out

23:41

of that? Tens of millions of

23:43

dollars, potentially. Enough for a new gym,

23:45

I think. Yeah. Up

23:48

until that point, you didn't need a

23:50

whole lot of money, right? But now

23:52

with $500 ,000, I'm

23:54

assuming you've got to build an

23:56

infrastructure. How did you first deploy

23:59

the money? Did you start to make hires? Because

24:01

you're still a senior in college at that

24:03

point, right? Yeah, the first thing we

24:05

did was hire friends of ours, Daniel. I was

24:07

really fortunate enough to meet Daniel my freshman

24:09

year during a product design seminar. And one of

24:11

his friends, actually, I didn't know they were

24:13

friends at the time, but I was visiting a

24:15

friend of mine in her dorm and she

24:17

was like, hey, you should meet this guy, David,

24:19

across the hall. He's a really cool guy,

24:21

super smart. So I just went and knocked on

24:23

his door, introduced myself, turned out he and

24:26

Daniel were best friends. So David and Daniel joined

24:28

the team. And I think there were about

24:30

five of us there. It was me and Bobby

24:32

and Dina and David and Daniel. And who's Dina?

24:34

She's also a Stanford student. Yeah, we'd

24:36

been friends in school. She'd helped with Future

24:38

Freshman and, you know. Was that

24:40

investment from Lightspeed? Was that what prompted

24:42

you to drop out? Yeah,

24:45

that and just that it was becoming impossible

24:47

to do both at the same time. I

24:49

mean, I felt just a huge sense of

24:51

responsibility. I mean, we thought $485 ,000 was like

24:53

infinity money. And, you know, we had a

24:55

huge obligation to our investors. So, I mean,

24:57

I can remember I was in a CNC

25:00

machining class in the back of the class

25:02

refreshing my Wells Fargo account. And as soon

25:04

as I saw the $485 ,000, I went

25:06

up to the professor and I was like, I'm

25:08

just so sorry, like I can't continue.

25:13

But when we come back in just a moment,

25:16

Evan realizes that he should have looked

25:18

at the terms of that lightspeed deal

25:20

a little more closely. And

25:22

then later, Snapchat goes head -to -head

25:24

with one of the biggest social

25:26

media companies in the world. Stay

25:28

with us, I'm Guy Reyes, and you're listening

25:30

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configured with the proper settings. Hey,

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welcome back to How I Built This.

28:52

I'm Guy Reyes. So it's 2012

28:54

and Evan has just dropped out

28:56

of Stanford to focus on his

28:58

photo messaging app, Snapchat. He's

29:00

recruited a group of friends to the

29:02

company and they've all moved down to

29:04

LA to work out of his dad's

29:06

dining room. We had the dining

29:08

room because he has an old Mustang that

29:10

he kept in the garage, like a 60s Mustang.

29:12

So we were not allowed to use the

29:14

garage. That was for the car, and we were

29:16

in the dining room. And he probably liked

29:18

having you at home. I mean, I would love

29:20

to have my kids at home after they finished college. I

29:23

think in hindsight, yeah, when we finally moved out, he

29:25

was like, oh, actually, that was really awesome. But, you

29:27

know, we were working like 24 -7. At some point, there

29:29

were seven or eight of us there, so it was

29:31

a lot. Tell me about your

29:33

life on a day -to -day basis.

29:36

You'd wake up and you would just

29:38

work all day until late at night and

29:40

then go to sleep? Yeah, basically

29:42

that. Seven days a week. Yeah. And

29:45

what were you doing? What do you

29:47

remember about 2012? Were you on the

29:49

phones? Were you in meetings? Were

29:52

you working on the user

29:54

experience? What were the things you

29:56

specifically were doing? There are

29:58

a couple of big things happening at the time. One is we started working

30:00

on the Android application. So Daniel and David were

30:02

spending a lot of time doing that. The

30:04

other thing that we were doing was really starting

30:06

to work on video, because at the time it

30:08

was only photos. And we had invented this really

30:10

cool idea that, you know, back in the day

30:13

you had to toggle between photo and video on

30:15

your smartphone. So you'd open the camera app, and

30:17

then if you wanted to make a video, I'd

30:19

just press the video button, it would flip

30:21

into video mode. There was a lot of

30:23

friction. So we had invented this idea that you

30:25

could just tap to take a photo or

30:27

hold the button and start recording a video. And

30:29

that at the time, based on the way

30:31

the camera worked, was actually quite difficult to engineer.

30:33

And then, you know, a lot of time

30:35

hiring. You know, one of the challenges we were

30:37

up against around that time, maybe a little

30:39

bit later, we had decided to stay in LA.

30:41

But up until then, we were in LA,

30:43

which doesn't have the same sort of tech ecosystem

30:45

or tech talent that San Francisco or the

30:47

Bay Area has. So hiring was very time consuming,

30:49

especially for tech talent and really trying

30:51

to convince people to come move to

30:53

LA to work on Snapchat. And then

30:55

fundraising, of course, at that time was

30:58

also a pretty big project. And then

31:00

I was answering all the support email

31:02

as well at the time. Evan,

31:05

the first time I think I heard

31:07

about Snapchat was when I used to read

31:09

the New York Times regularly. And,

31:11

you know, it was, if you're

31:13

in the New York Times, right, was such a big deal. And

31:16

I think in May of that

31:18

year of 2012, they ran a story

31:20

about Snapchat. And the story implied

31:22

that, you know, hey, this could be

31:24

used like for sexual content or

31:26

nudity. And that became kind of like

31:28

a narrative for a while. Like,

31:30

oh, here's this sexting app and stuff.

31:32

Tell me a little bit about

31:34

And I've read your responses to that

31:36

at the time, and I could

31:38

sense in your responses just irritation with

31:40

this. Tell me about how you

31:42

felt about that narrative, because it was out there,

31:44

it was real. People were saying this is what it's going

31:46

to be used for. Yeah, I

31:48

think it was frustrating just because it felt

31:50

like people didn't understand what was really happening

31:52

with Snapchat. And, you know, we would try

31:54

to share the data and show that people

31:56

were sending 50, 100 snaps back and forth

31:58

all day long communicating. And so,

32:00

you know, we felt that kind of pigeonholing

32:02

us into that wasn't a fair reflection of

32:04

what was happening. So, all right,

32:06

there's this narrative. Obviously, you're annoyed by

32:08

it. And look. People, I'm sure we're

32:11

using it to send nude photos. There's

32:13

nothing you can do to prevent that.

32:15

It's like you can have a car

32:17

company and somebody can speed. You can't

32:19

prevent that. But was there anything you

32:21

could do to discourage that in any

32:23

way? Or was it just sort of

32:25

something that might happen and it wasn't

32:27

really anything that you cared about? I

32:30

think what's really important is just continuing to

32:32

talk about the service as a way

32:34

to visually communicate and obviously to, you know,

32:36

discourage folks from doing things that were

32:38

inappropriate or illegal. We invest a huge amount

32:40

of money trying to stop, you know,

32:42

illegal behavior or misuse of our platform and

32:44

our service. So I think there's a

32:46

lot that we do do and that we

32:48

can do to help keep our platform

32:50

safe. All right. 2012, this is

32:52

like your first kind of full year. The

32:55

year you dropped out, you've got your

32:57

first seed money. And

32:59

probably by this point, you have a

33:01

lot of people approaching you to

33:03

invest. Is that happening throughout the year?

33:05

Are you getting messages? Are you getting investors

33:07

approaching you? Yeah, we definitely got

33:09

more inbound interest in the

33:11

company, for sure. we

33:14

realized very quickly that we had a problem

33:16

because in our initial convertible note that had been

33:18

issued from light speed, we had agreed to

33:20

a right of first refusal. So as we were

33:22

getting offers from other VCs, we were so

33:24

excited, we took them to light speed and said,

33:26

hey, check this out. You know, we got

33:28

this offer to invest really high valuation. And they

33:31

said, well, you know, you do know about

33:33

this right of first refusal thing. And we were

33:35

like, sorry, what? What

33:37

did that, what did that mean? Yeah,

33:39

the writer -first refusal allowed Lightspeed to buy

33:41

up to 50 % of the next

33:43

round. And because the way that

33:45

a convertible note works, that meant that

33:47

they would control that series of stock. So

33:49

they would control the series A of

33:51

stock. And that meant that other investors weren't

33:53

interested in leading the series A because

33:55

the minute that they decided to invest, they

33:57

wouldn't control the series anyways. Did you

33:59

know that when you signed that, when you got that

34:01

seed money? Was that clear to you? Yeah,

34:04

we read the terms. But at the time,

34:06

that was our impression that they were

34:08

just standard terms. And we were so excited

34:10

that someone was willing to invest in

34:12

the business that that wasn't as important to

34:14

us. But I think one of my

34:16

big takeaways and one the things I always

34:18

share with entrepreneurs is just that there's

34:20

no such thing as standard terms. And to

34:22

be really careful as you're evaluating the

34:24

terms of these investments. It's so true. I

34:26

have seen throughout my life and career

34:29

contract, this is just boilerplate. And you're like,

34:31

well, I don't like the boilerplate. I

34:34

mean, I'm sure you're very grateful

34:37

to Lightspeed. I think they subsequently did

34:39

make more investments, but initially you

34:41

were hamstrung because the next round they

34:43

had the right to lead it,

34:45

which meant that it could discourage other

34:47

investors from being involved because if

34:50

they couldn't lead it, they might not

34:52

want to be involved. Yeah,

34:54

and ultimately, by discouraging other investors,

34:56

that meant that the market for

34:58

our stock, the valuation, could have

35:00

come way down. Because there was

35:03

no competition. Exactly. I mean,

35:05

how did you get around that? One

35:08

of the interesting things about that point

35:10

in time is that convertible notes were very

35:12

new. So what we discovered was that

35:14

the language in the convertible note actually allowed

35:16

us to convert that note into any

35:18

type of stock. It didn't specify the type

35:21

of stock that we were required to

35:23

convert the note into. And that gave us

35:25

a lot of flexibility to think about,

35:27

do we just want to convert this note

35:29

into a different series of stock and

35:31

ultimately then create a new series that another

35:33

investor can come into. It

35:35

helped us reach a positive and

35:37

constructive solution with Lightspeed who, you know, understood,

35:39

okay, we'll find a solution here. We understand

35:42

this, this right -of -first refusal might not be

35:44

the best thing for the business. You

35:46

know, early

35:48

VCs, early venture

35:50

capitalists are actually quite open

35:52

to having more founder -friendly terms

35:55

early on, right? Because the amount

35:57

of capital is much lower

35:59

and, you know, the idea is either,

36:01

you know, you make something really, really successful,

36:03

or it goes to zero. But

36:05

we've always shared with our friends

36:07

who are starting businesses, you

36:09

have three things you can optimize for when

36:12

you're raising money. You can optimize for the

36:14

people you're working with, like the venture capitalists,

36:16

you can optimize for the terms, you can

36:18

optimize for the valuation, but pick two. And

36:21

we, with other investors, picked

36:23

really the terms and the investors.

36:25

And so that ultimately, I

36:27

think, served us well over time.

36:32

2012 by the end of that

36:34

year, I think it's in December

36:36

or maybe maybe in the fall

36:38

of that year You are contacted

36:40

by Facebook and

36:42

you are and you and Bobby

36:44

Go meet with Mark Zuckerberg. Was that the first

36:47

time you had met him? Yeah,

36:49

it was tell me what

36:51

you can tell me about that meeting I must

36:53

have been kind of amazing. I mean, you know, this

36:55

is now after I think the social network

36:57

had already come out He was already kind

36:59

of legendary What do you remember about

37:01

that meeting? Well, I mean,

37:03

it obviously was really cool to meet

37:05

such a, you know, accomplished entrepreneur. We

37:07

were pretty nervous. He was telling us

37:09

about working on a new poke app,

37:11

which ultimately ended up being a copycat

37:13

of Snapchat at the time. So that

37:15

was our big takeaway. It was like

37:17

yikes. He's building something that's really similar

37:19

to what we're doing. But he was

37:21

clearly interested in seeing if you guys

37:23

want to work together, right? I

37:26

think so, yeah. I mean, he's

37:28

had a great track record of

37:30

identifying companies pretty early on and

37:32

finding ways to work with them.

37:34

Did he say, do you

37:36

guys want to collaborate? I mean,

37:38

we're open to bringing this into

37:40

our fold at that time. I

37:43

don't remember the exact substance it. You don't

37:46

remember? Of course you remember. You

37:48

were 22. It must have been incredible to

37:50

be asked to come meet him because it's a

37:52

validation of what you guys were building. Yeah,

37:55

it didn't really, that's not how it felt at

37:57

the time. It felt like, oh no, there's a

37:59

really big company that everyone's been warning us about

38:01

who's now really interested in what we're doing.

38:03

And it's said they're working on something similar. So

38:05

you left that meeting nervous. Yeah, we

38:08

knew that a copycat product was coming,

38:10

and then I think that Christmas

38:12

it did. Yeah, December of 2012. I

38:14

mean, you're just full year into

38:16

this thing. And Facebook, the

38:18

biggest social media company at

38:21

that point, launches essentially a

38:23

clone, a Snapchat. Were you worried? We

38:26

were really worried. But I now talk

38:28

about it as the best Christmas gift

38:30

of all time because that Christmas morning

38:32

we woke up and everyone had been

38:34

getting their new iPhones. And remember at

38:36

the time, the new iPhone had a

38:38

front -facing camera, which was a really big

38:40

deal because people could take selfies. And

38:42

so people were getting their new iPhones

38:44

with front -facing cameras and they were

38:46

downloading Snapchat. And Snapchat was at the

38:48

top of the app store. And so

38:50

that for us was just a huge

38:52

sigh of relief. How many people said

38:54

to you in 2012, Facebook

38:56

is just going to crush you? Because

38:58

I think it would have been not

39:00

an unreasonable thing to think. I

39:02

mean, it was a giant and they're

39:04

launching a clone. They had an order of

39:07

magnitude more users that they could just

39:09

basically just send this out to everybody. How

39:11

many people said that to you or implied

39:13

that? That was probably the most common piece of

39:15

feedback we got from potential investors. I think

39:17

that was. You know if you remember back then

39:19

there was sort of this idea that like

39:22

if you have a really really big social network

39:24

there are these network effects and no one

39:26

can compete with the business that has network effects.

39:28

And at the time people had not yet

39:30

understood that like if you have a big

39:32

network but you're only talking to three or

39:34

five or seven. people in that network, that

39:36

actually the size of the network doesn't matter

39:38

that much. What matters is that those people

39:40

that you talk to all the time are

39:42

a part of it. And so that's how

39:44

Snapchat was able to grow. It wasn't focused

39:46

on being the biggest network. You didn't have

39:49

to have the most number of friends, but

39:51

your number one best friend or your partner,

39:53

in my case, my wife, is the person

39:55

you talk to. you know, half

39:57

the time or all the time. And so

39:59

if just that person is part of the

40:01

network, then the network's really, really

40:03

valuable to you. And so I think

40:05

back then though, people didn't understand

40:07

that, you know, you could grow another

40:09

messaging service. They just thought that

40:11

the person with the largest social network

40:13

would always win. When investors were

40:15

asking you like, well, but what's the

40:18

advantage you have? Everybody's, I mean,

40:20

2012, 2013, everybody was on Facebook, right?

40:22

Who is the person who's using Snapchat? versus

40:24

the person who might use, you know,

40:27

poke or whatever Facebook might offer in the

40:29

future. What would you say? I

40:31

think the advantage was just that our

40:33

vision was very different. We talked

40:35

about this a little bit before, but

40:37

this notion that social media was

40:39

really for posting pretty imperfect photos and

40:42

trying to collect the greatest number

40:44

of friends possible to basically participate in

40:46

this huge... popularity contest, and that

40:48

Snapchat was actually focused on your real

40:50

friends, your close friends, your family,

40:52

and communicating the full range of human

40:54

emotion with them as a messaging

40:56

service, not as a social media broadcast

40:59

service. So when people would describe

41:01

it then and now as a social media platform,

41:03

do you like recoil at that idea? Would

41:05

you push back and say, that's not really

41:07

what we are? We've

41:09

always pushed back against that, but I

41:11

think, you know, some of our

41:13

services like stories, for example, which

41:16

we really viewed as like one

41:18

to many communication with your close friends

41:20

and family. I think that, you

41:22

know, people's adoption of stories and then

41:24

ultimately subsequent platforms also integrating stories as

41:26

well led to that feeling that like,

41:28

hey, Snapchat's like social media, even

41:30

though on stories, there are no public

41:32

likes and no comments and the stories

41:35

disappear after 24 hours. I

41:37

mean, I'm curious about By

41:39

the end of 2012, right? Do you remember

41:41

how many people you had? Was it more

41:43

than a dozen working with you? Maybe

41:45

about seven, seven, eight.

41:47

Okay, so still a small team. Yeah,

41:49

something like that. Tell me a

41:52

little bit about how you structured it

41:54

because when I was like 22,

41:56

23, I went to go become

41:58

a foreign correspondent around that time. And

42:00

I had a couple of people working for

42:02

me and it was hard. I did not

42:04

know how to do that. I didn't know

42:06

how lead a team and not to manage

42:08

people. I didn't know I felt like I

42:10

was a kid, you know, and I'm curious

42:12

how you felt because you were the CEO,

42:15

right? And Bobby was what, the CTO? Yeah,

42:17

he's the CTO. How did you manage

42:19

that? How did you even know what to do?

42:21

How to be a boss? Well,

42:23

I think the best part of not

42:25

knowing anything is that you get to

42:27

ask all sorts of questions and just

42:29

approach every situation as an opportunity to

42:32

learn and never be embarrassed about not

42:34

knowing. I never had to be

42:36

the smartest person in the room. No

42:38

one ever expected me to be experienced

42:40

because I hadn't ever run a company

42:42

before. And I think that was just

42:44

a massive, massive advantage to just be

42:46

able to ask questions, ask why, you

42:49

know, the technology industry is just an incredibly

42:51

generous industry when it comes to people helping

42:53

each other out. Yeah, who who

42:55

helped you? I mean, who are some

42:57

of the mentors who just just to

42:59

understand how to, you know, deal with

43:01

equity or deal with investors or just

43:03

deal with things like the beginning that

43:05

are Very complex, even for a really

43:07

intelligent 22 year old. Who helped

43:09

you kind of navigate that? One

43:12

of my really fond memories was when, so Eric

43:14

Schmidt, I got to know through that class

43:16

entrepreneurship and venture capital. And he was the seat,

43:18

I think the chairman of Google at the

43:20

time. I think so, yeah, I think so. And

43:22

so he would say, you know, hey, I'm

43:24

coming to LA, I'll come by. you

43:26

and Bobby just make a list of all the questions

43:28

you have and I'll help you answer them. And,

43:31

you know, at the time our questions were like, do

43:33

we need a CFO? Like, you know,

43:35

this kind of thing. And for Eric to just

43:37

sit down and let us ask all of

43:39

our questions and say like, no, you don't

43:41

need a CFO. You're not making any

43:43

money. That was just really helpful to

43:45

have that sort of unbelievable expert advice.

43:48

I wonder about

43:50

just personally, right? You're

43:52

working all day, all night. seven

43:55

days a week, non -stop, right?

43:57

And there are still stressors. You

43:59

know, this other co -founder Reggie sues the

44:01

company and then you've got this

44:03

legal dispute. It was settled and

44:05

he was given a payment, a

44:08

payout. But did that create

44:10

stress for you and Bobby knowing

44:12

that, look, this is hovering over

44:14

us. This is a real thing. Was

44:17

it distracting in any way? It

44:20

wasn't so much like the stress of the legal

44:22

process. It was sad because this this had

44:24

been one of my best friends in college So

44:26

I think that like personally that part of

44:28

it was terrible. You didn't reconcile

44:30

you and Reggie Personally,

44:33

we haven't talked in yeah a long

44:35

time All right,

44:37

you guys raise a series a

44:39

13 million dollars so led by Benchmark

44:41

So clearly you were able to

44:43

work something out with lightspeed because the

44:45

round was led by a different

44:47

firm And that's serious.

44:50

I mean, that's a, you've got a

44:52

lot of runway there. And then

44:54

a couple months later, several months later, it's

44:56

series B, 80 million, right?

44:58

And now you've got a

45:00

lot of wind in your sales.

45:02

In 2013, I mean that year,

45:05

you had three rounds, an

45:07

A, B and C round, where you

45:09

raised a really a substantial amount

45:11

of money. So my impression is that

45:13

your feeling was, let's bring in

45:15

a bunch of money and really

45:17

try and grow. big, fast. mean,

45:19

I imagine how just chaotically nonstop

45:22

2013 would be, because it's just,

45:24

you've got to grow, you've got

45:26

to hire people, you

45:28

know, build headquarters or, but

45:30

what did you start to

45:32

think this thing could be?

45:35

At that point, we were really just trying to

45:37

keep up with the growth of the service overall. We

45:40

had some ideas about how to evolve

45:42

it, things like stories, for example. And we

45:44

were playing around with some added value

45:46

features at the time. Ultimately, now we have

45:49

a service called Snapchat Plus. But a

45:51

lot of the folks at that time was

45:53

really on building out the team and

45:55

then ultimately making the decision to really commit

45:57

to building out the company in Los

45:59

Angeles, which up until then was kind of up in the

46:01

air. And the business model was

46:03

going to be still primarily advertising.

46:06

It wasn't clear at the time what the

46:08

business model was going to be. And

46:10

one of the things I learned from Stanford

46:12

and being up in the Bay Area,

46:14

which was different than how I learned about

46:16

business growing up, was the real focus

46:18

on getting to scale and investing to get

46:20

to scale rather than focusing on profitability

46:22

early on. And that the more that you

46:24

can grow and expand your total opportunity

46:26

over time, ultimately the business can generate. a

46:28

ton of profit and whatnot down the

46:30

road, but that that would not be the

46:32

right thing to focus on early. And

46:34

so the idea is if you can grow

46:36

something that's really big, that's valuable to people,

46:38

that you can figure out how to monetize

46:40

it later. By the way, do you think

46:42

that model is still viable today? Like

46:45

in terms of starting a business thing, we'll figure

46:47

out the business model later. Let's just get the

46:49

users. I think it depends. I think

46:51

that that strategy is most effective when it

46:53

comes to new platforms. So if you look

46:55

at like the advent of desktop internet, that

46:57

was really the strategy very early on for

46:59

players like an Amazon, for example, right, where

47:02

they were like, we're just going to invest

47:04

to grow, we'll worry about profitability. I

47:06

think the same was true about the

47:08

mobile platform development, right, where same thing,

47:10

like, you know, let's, let's just try

47:12

and build really popular scale services and

47:14

then focus on profitability. So in those

47:17

moments of big technological change and disruption

47:19

and new platforms, I definitely think

47:21

that's the right approach. But it's

47:23

risky, right? I mean, and there are lots

47:25

of examples of brands and businesses that did

47:27

get a lot of users and then just

47:29

didn't work or couldn't monetize it. But I

47:31

mean, the idea here was let's just get

47:33

people in the door and probably, you know,

47:35

we could advertise, we could have a subscription,

47:37

we could try different things. But once we've

47:40

got the users who love this product, we

47:42

can sell them something. We can make this

47:44

sustainable. Yeah. And I think to

47:46

be clear, the areas where that typically doesn't work

47:48

is when the company is not a tech company.

47:51

So I think tech has some very interesting economies

47:53

of scale in the sense that we design

47:55

the app once and we build the app once,

47:57

and it scales to now more than 850

47:59

million people around the I think

48:01

you run into challenges with that sort of

48:03

grow big first and then monetize model when

48:05

you don't have those same economies of scale. All

48:08

right. This has been

48:10

widely reported. The Wall Street Journal did

48:12

a big piece on this in 2013, and

48:14

I want to dig into it a

48:16

little bit because it's really extraordinary, but That

48:19

year, apparently, it may

48:21

have happened in your first meeting with Mark Zuckerberg, it

48:24

was reported that you were offered

48:26

a billion dollars to sell

48:28

the company, and then, apparently, three

48:30

billion dollars in cash, a

48:32

cash offer, all cash offer, to

48:34

acquire Snapchat. I

48:36

mean, you were, like, 23, being

48:39

offered three billion dollars.

48:41

Instagram, and we had Kevin and Mike

48:44

on the show as they say, nine years ago, and You

48:46

know, subsequently, I think they've expressed some

48:48

regret about what happened and having sold it,

48:50

but they sold it for a billion

48:52

dollars a year at in, you know, you're

48:54

like a year and a half in.

48:57

There's been a massive, massive win. I mean,

48:59

a huge exit. All your investors would

49:01

have done great. You would have done great.

49:03

Your partners, tell me about

49:05

rejecting that offer. Well, I

49:07

think as you mentioned, we did have the

49:10

benefit of learning from Instagram. And it was

49:12

very clear that Instagram had sold way too

49:14

early. And mobile, you know, at

49:16

that point in time, mobile as a platform

49:18

was still nascent. I mean, it was only

49:20

just growing. If you remember, there were a

49:22

lot of questions at the time, like, will

49:24

Facebook be able to monetize on mobile? Will

49:26

anyone use Facebook on mobile? So it was

49:28

very, very, very early on. And I think

49:31

ultimately, Bobby and I just loved

49:33

what we were doing. We loved working together and

49:35

we saw a huge opportunity for the

49:37

business. And ultimately, we were able to

49:39

convince our investors that we saw a

49:41

way bigger opportunity out in the future.

49:43

And so ultimately, it just made more

49:45

sense to stay independent. And I think

49:47

there was also just a feeling that

49:49

the companies were very different. I mean,

49:51

they have different priorities. We were offering

49:54

very different products. And I think Instagram

49:56

really fit into the Facebook model of

49:58

social media. But Snapchat was really designed

50:00

to be an antidote to that, the

50:02

opposite of that. I wonder

50:04

though, I mean, was it a hard

50:06

decision to make? I mean, you know,

50:08

we had Andrew Mason on the show

50:10

a while back. He famously founded Groupon

50:13

and famously they were offered up to

50:15

like six billion dollars for an acquisition

50:17

from bidders like Google and Yahoo, which

50:19

of course they turned down, which proved to be

50:21

a mistake, right? I mean, the value of the

50:24

company is pennies in the dollar today. Was

50:26

there any, I don't know,

50:28

any just sleepless nights over like maybe

50:30

we should just do this maybe this is

50:32

just the best thing to do now I

50:34

Think one of the things that our investors

50:36

have done very wisely is in one of

50:39

those early financing rounds Bobby and I were

50:41

both able to cash out like ten million

50:43

dollars each So we were set for life.

50:45

Yeah at 22 having ten million with compound

50:47

interest Yeah, exactly. I mean four or five

50:49

percent return every year. You're good to go

50:51

So we, I don't think, felt that pressure

50:53

of, you know, or is this it? Are

50:55

we not, you know, if this goes to

50:58

zero, what's going to happen? We were able

51:00

to really swing for the fences and try

51:02

to build something really big. In

51:04

that same article in the journal

51:06

in 2013, there's somebody quoted in there

51:08

with some skepticism about the decision

51:10

that you took. And

51:12

this person said, look at the fate Vine

51:14

has suffered. You know, Vine was huge. And

51:17

again, proved wrong. But

51:19

at the time, there was

51:21

no part of you at all that

51:23

looked at things like Vine and just thought,

51:25

what if that happens? Well,

51:28

one of the things that helped give us

51:30

confidence is we had a roadmap, right? So

51:32

I think one of the big questions in

51:34

technology always, and especially when it comes to

51:36

these acquisitions is, Is this a feature or

51:38

a platform? And it's very important to know,

51:41

you know, if you're building a feature or

51:43

a platform. And so for us, maybe in

51:45

the early days of Snapchat of photo messaging,

51:47

that was maybe more of a feature. But

51:49

by the time we'd added things like stories

51:51

and, you know, we would go on to

51:53

add, you know, all of our augmented reality

51:55

lenses, of course, memories, our map later on,

51:57

all these different pieces of our service that

51:59

have really diversified it and made Snapchat much

52:02

more of a platform. We had. a

52:04

bunch of that vision. So we knew that we were

52:06

going to be able to continue innovating. We knew that we

52:08

weren't just going to be standing still. I mean, one

52:10

thing for sure in the technology industry is if you're just

52:12

standing still, it's really easy for

52:14

competitors to catch up, especially if they're a

52:16

lot bigger. But we really believed in our

52:18

ability to keep innovating. When

52:20

you turned down that reported second

52:22

offer from Facebook, I

52:24

mean, business is business. This is what our show

52:27

is about. And business is like war. Casting

52:30

any moral judgment. I think a

52:32

good business leader has to think

52:34

about you know has to plan

52:36

to win right and so a

52:38

company like like Facebook Zuckerberg has

52:40

to think how are we going

52:42

to outcompete these guys which? Eventually

52:45

they would start to you know do

52:47

things with Instagram right like Instagram stories and

52:49

other things That they would put out

52:51

there. Did you anticipate that that would happen?

52:53

We thought that that would happen. Yeah,

52:55

I think the one thing that we didn't

52:57

anticipate was that Instagram would actually perfectly

53:00

copy stories like carbon copy it because in

53:02

the past they had sort of tried

53:04

different rifts on our products like they would

53:06

take the core idea but then try

53:08

to make it better and ultimately that wouldn't

53:10

work. And so I think that like

53:12

to have that sort of confidence to just

53:14

say like, hey, we're going to take

53:17

what we see working and put in our

53:19

service that that you know, that was

53:21

impressive and not something we'd seen from from

53:23

Facebook before. I think I know the

53:25

answer is question. But do you consider yourself

53:27

to be a competitive person? I

53:29

don't, actually. You don't? No. And I

53:32

think, in fact, like, I think zero -sum

53:34

thinking or that sort of competitive thinking is

53:36

very dangerous. And so what we try

53:38

to do is run our business differently, which

53:40

is to create new things, to create

53:42

new open space, not to think of, you

53:44

know, the world or our community as

53:46

something to divide up or fight over. So

53:49

when, you know, Instagram does

53:51

something like that, did you

53:53

take it personally? Did you

53:55

think, like, screw those

53:58

guys? They're a bunch of assholes. No,

54:00

we admired the audacity. Really? You didn't

54:02

take it personally at all? You weren't

54:04

angry in any way? You were just

54:06

like, whatever. It wasn't a whatever.

54:08

It was like, hey, we got to take this

54:10

very seriously. But I think at the same time,

54:12

a real respect that Kevin had just come out

54:14

and said, hey, this thing works really

54:16

well, and we're going to do the exact same

54:18

thing. When

54:21

we come back in just a

54:23

moment, Snapchat drops the chat and tries

54:26

to make the leap from your

54:28

phone to your face. Stay with

54:30

us. I'm Guy Raaz, and you're listening to

54:32

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on LinkedIn ads. Hey,

56:43

welcome back to How I

56:45

Built This. I'm Guy Reyes. So

56:47

it's 2016 and Snapchat is

56:49

still growing fast with another round

56:51

of fundraising valuing the company

56:54

at $16 billion. And

56:56

despite copycatting by Instagram and

56:58

other competitors, Evan is locked in

57:00

on an even bigger, longer -term

57:02

vision for his company. You

57:05

guys rebranded to Snap. You're

57:08

no longer Snapchat in 2016. And

57:10

I guess that was You start to

57:12

talk about Snap as a camera company.

57:15

Tell me about that. One of the

57:17

things that we really wanted to

57:19

make clear was that we weren't a

57:22

single product company, that we had

57:24

aspirations beyond that. And we've been working

57:26

on wearables for a long time,

57:28

you know, initially starting with the idea

57:30

of like, let's get the camera

57:32

out of people's pockets and facing out

57:34

into the world with our camera

57:37

glasses called Spectacles. I think the first

57:39

version we launched back in 2016,

57:41

of course, initially was used

57:43

for recording moments with Snapchat, it became

57:45

primarily used for communication, which was a

57:47

huge change in the way that cameras

57:49

are used. And I think in the

57:51

future, and even today with the fifth

57:53

generation of spectacles, cameras are really used

57:55

to overlay computing on our environment and

57:57

to better integrate computing with our day -to

57:59

-day lives. I want

58:01

to ask you about something that's

58:03

more personal to me about Snap. And

58:06

it's as a parent, right? And a

58:08

parent. And I've got two teenagers and they

58:10

use it. And it's the only social

58:12

media app we allow because essentially their argument

58:15

was we won't be able to communicate

58:17

with our friends because they all have it.

58:19

So we relented. But I remember

58:21

around this time, around 2016, there's no

58:23

one when they got on Snap, but around

58:25

the time you guys changed to Snap, there

58:28

was a TED talk and I was

58:30

at that TED conference and it was

58:32

a talk about how young people get

58:34

hooked on social media. And

58:36

I say this as somebody who is

58:38

really, I have to take all the

58:40

social media off my phone every couple

58:42

of weeks just to not use it.

58:44

But something that you guys really innovated

58:46

was this snap streak where every time

58:49

you snap, you get a streak and

58:51

kids were incentivized not to break the

58:53

streak. And I wonder from

58:55

a business perspective, it's brilliant. And

58:57

I love free markets. I believe

58:59

in free markets. I don't believe in

59:01

blaming businesses for the way people

59:03

use the products. But I mean, it

59:05

is a way to get kids

59:08

hooked on it. And I wonder how

59:10

you respond to that, that kind

59:12

of sentiment or pushback. Yeah.

59:14

Well, I think it's really important to look

59:16

at the way that streaks work. And with a

59:18

Snapchat streak, it doesn't change every time you

59:20

send a snap. It just increments every day that

59:22

you send a snap back and forth with

59:24

a friend. And so what it does is celebrate

59:26

that every day you've been in touch with

59:29

that person, you've checked in, you've seen what they're

59:31

doing. And you know, you've, I'm sure, have

59:33

seen the research that shows the importance of just

59:35

staying in touch, even in light ways. with

59:37

your close friends and your family. And I think,

59:39

you know, just in the way that we

59:41

often set reminders for ourselves to do something that's

59:43

important, I think streaks are an important reminder

59:45

for folks to just stay in touch with the

59:48

people that they really care about just once

59:50

a day. It's interesting because philosophically, I just, maybe

59:52

it's just because I'm older, I just fundamentally

59:54

disagree with that. I don't think people need to

59:56

be in touch about every detail of their

59:58

lives all the time. Like I have cousins and

1:00:00

relatives, I love them, but like... I don't

1:00:02

need to tell them about everything that I'm doing

1:00:04

all the time. We can talk every few

1:00:07

months, and it's okay for every few weeks. And

1:00:09

so I wonder, like, I mean,

1:00:11

you can talk to any parent of a teenager, and they

1:00:13

will say, it becomes increasingly

1:00:15

hard to pull your kid

1:00:17

away from Snap or, you

1:00:20

know, TikTok. And I wonder

1:00:22

whether you can see that argument and

1:00:24

say, I hear you on that. I

1:00:26

definitely hear you on that, but I also

1:00:28

just recognize that these services work really differently. And

1:00:30

that's one of the reasons why in our

1:00:32

house too, we're really supportive of Snapchat and less

1:00:34

supportive of other services because we want our

1:00:36

14 year old to engage with his friends, to

1:00:38

talk to his friends. And oftentimes when I'm

1:00:40

working late, I'll get a snap from my wife

1:00:42

with our kids saying good night. And, you

1:00:44

know, we get to send those snaps back and

1:00:46

forth. And that's something that. really adds a

1:00:48

lot of value to my life. So I think

1:00:50

what's really important is that beyond just talking

1:00:53

about screen time, we really talk about the way

1:00:55

that we're using our screens and what we're

1:00:57

using them for. To go a

1:00:59

layer deeper and to really figure out

1:01:01

how we can use technology to support

1:01:03

things that really matter, like relationships and

1:01:05

friendships. For us as parents,

1:01:07

we just talk about the importance of

1:01:09

everything in moderation and having a healthy

1:01:11

relationship with technology. You

1:01:13

took the company public in 2017.

1:01:17

at a $24 billion valuation and the

1:01:19

stock price is going to go up

1:01:21

and down and up and down. I

1:01:23

think at one point it was like

1:01:25

$80 over $8 a share or something

1:01:27

like that or $75 a share. Now

1:01:30

it's about, as we speak, about $10

1:01:32

.60 a share, market cap

1:01:34

$17 billion. Very impressive, but

1:01:37

lower than the IPO and that's

1:01:39

just the reality of it. How

1:01:41

do you view that? I mean,

1:01:43

most of your quarters you're not

1:01:45

profitable. because it's all public. But

1:01:48

at the same time, you clearly

1:01:50

believe in this business, the future

1:01:52

of this business. You've got hundreds

1:01:54

of millions of users, so it's

1:01:56

a robust business. But how do

1:01:58

you kind of manage how it's

1:02:00

seen by outsiders and investors? Now

1:02:02

it's valued. Well,

1:02:04

what's really important for us is

1:02:06

just clearly articulating our vision for

1:02:09

the business and, you know, our

1:02:11

just consistent desire to invest in

1:02:13

the long term, going after really,

1:02:15

really big opportunities. And

1:02:17

consistency in doing that is key. So

1:02:19

as we look at the long term

1:02:21

future of augmented reality, for example, and,

1:02:23

you know, our desire to build a

1:02:25

new computing platform that better meets people's

1:02:27

needs by actually being integrated in the

1:02:29

world. around them, that's a really

1:02:31

big and expensive bet. And the only

1:02:33

way we're going to be able to make

1:02:35

progress towards that is if we really

1:02:37

invest consistently. And so we've really prioritized going

1:02:40

after that long -term opportunity. compared to short

1:02:42

-term profitability. And it doesn't mean, you know,

1:02:44

we're generating free cash flow. We, you

1:02:46

know, Q4, we generated positive net income. So

1:02:48

it's not like we disregard our finances.

1:02:50

We've actually run a very conservative balance sheet

1:02:52

with billions of dollars of capital so

1:02:54

that we can consistently invest over the long

1:02:56

term. But I think what's most important

1:02:58

with investors in the broader public is to

1:03:00

be clear about those expectations, to be

1:03:03

clear that we are going to invest in

1:03:05

the long term, that we're not going

1:03:07

to optimize for, you know, the quarter to

1:03:09

quarter share price, and we're just going

1:03:11

to make consistent progress towards our long -term

1:03:13

vision. You know, many years

1:03:15

ago, I interviewed Ken Chinalt, the former

1:03:17

head of American Express, and he said,

1:03:19

you know, when I ran American Express,

1:03:21

I always thought, we need to become

1:03:23

the business that's going to put us

1:03:25

out of business. And look, the reality

1:03:27

is in 10, 20 years, maybe five,

1:03:29

people may not be sending text messages.

1:03:31

People may not be communicating that way.

1:03:33

We don't know. And I say this

1:03:35

because as you know, some members of

1:03:37

your team came up here to San

1:03:39

Francisco to show me this new product

1:03:41

that you guys are working on, which

1:03:43

is the latest generation of your spectacles,

1:03:45

which are these augmented reality glasses. I

1:03:47

tried them super cool. You can do

1:03:49

some fun things. And I know you

1:03:51

guys have invested a lot of money in this. I mean,

1:03:53

there's a lot of technology packed in those glasses. Is

1:03:56

that the future of the business? Is that

1:03:58

where you see Snap headed? I think

1:04:00

that's critical to our long -term future.

1:04:02

I mean, ultimately, if you look

1:04:05

at all the products we've built, we've

1:04:07

tried to make technology work better

1:04:09

for people. So much of technology in

1:04:11

the past has forced people to

1:04:13

change their natural human behavior to fit

1:04:15

how technology expects them to behave.

1:04:17

That certainly could be said of social

1:04:19

media, where instead of having ephemeral

1:04:21

conversations and chronological order, social media has

1:04:23

everything permanent and in reverse chronological

1:04:25

order, and it feels inhuman. I think

1:04:27

we should settle for the way

1:04:29

that computers... work today for, you know,

1:04:31

staying hunched over these small screens

1:04:33

as the best way to get the

1:04:35

value out of computing. I think

1:04:37

computers can do so much more can

1:04:39

be so much more. And ultimately, you

1:04:42

know, we were talking a little bit about, you

1:04:44

know, wanting to make sure young people in particular have

1:04:46

a balanced relationship with technology. But what would it

1:04:48

look like to build a computer that you really wanted

1:04:50

your kids to use, you know, frequently, because it's

1:04:52

the best way to learn the best way to play

1:04:54

together with their friends is something they could actually

1:04:56

use outdoors. These are all the sorts

1:04:58

of things that glasses, I think, can really

1:05:00

provide people over the longer term. But people

1:05:02

have been talking about this for a long

1:05:04

time, going back to Google Glass. And

1:05:07

Meta has released something which is

1:05:09

not augmented reality. It's essentially a

1:05:11

very high -quality camera and speakers

1:05:13

and AI on these glasses. But

1:05:15

we've thought for a long time

1:05:17

that this is going to be

1:05:19

how people will use it. Like,

1:05:21

they'll wear the glasses. They'll be

1:05:23

able to see augmented reality. So

1:05:26

far, we as humans

1:05:28

haven't adopted this technology at

1:05:30

scale yet. So,

1:05:32

tell me why you're bullish about it.

1:05:35

I think because it allows for a

1:05:37

computing experience that can be shared together

1:05:39

with people, which is really different than

1:05:41

the way that we use computers today.

1:05:43

Right now, sometimes computing can feel isolating,

1:05:45

even if you're text messaging a friend,

1:05:47

it's something that you're doing. alone.

1:05:49

I think what's so powerful with glasses

1:05:51

is if you can put on glasses together

1:05:53

with your friends and share experiences is

1:05:56

a really powerful benefit of this technology. Of

1:05:58

course, having it actually grounded in real

1:06:00

world rather than being a screen that separates

1:06:02

you from the real world, I think

1:06:04

is a tremendous benefit as well. And then

1:06:06

as you probably experience, the idea that

1:06:08

you can just use your hands and your

1:06:10

voice and engage with computers in a

1:06:12

much more natural way, I think is going

1:06:14

to be really helpful to people as

1:06:16

well and make computers easier. much

1:06:18

easier to use. I

1:06:20

want to ask you about your place

1:06:22

in the sort of the social media ecosystem,

1:06:25

even though I know kind of Greek

1:06:27

oil when you hear that with Snap, but

1:06:29

it is considered that for better or

1:06:31

worse, right? And if you looked at the

1:06:33

inauguration, you saw, you know, Mark

1:06:35

Zuckerberg was there, Sundar Pachai was

1:06:37

there. Obviously, Elon Musk was there. The

1:06:40

TikTok CEO was there. So

1:06:42

like Twitter, Meta, Google,

1:06:44

TikTok, they're all represented

1:06:47

there. What about

1:06:49

Snap? I mean, do you

1:06:51

feel like, you know, is it

1:06:53

important for your business that

1:06:55

you are engaged at that level?

1:06:57

You know, look, we have a different

1:07:00

set of challenges. We're a really small

1:07:02

company compared to those companies. Right. How

1:07:04

many employees? About 3 ,000? Approaching

1:07:06

5 ,000 now, but I think one

1:07:08

of the reasons why those large

1:07:10

companies are engaging so closely with the

1:07:12

government is because they've been accused

1:07:14

of monopolistic practices. I mean, two of

1:07:16

them represent the vast majority of

1:07:18

the online advertising business. And so that

1:07:20

is a critical issue when it

1:07:22

comes to continuing to grow their businesses

1:07:24

or trying to acquire new companies

1:07:26

or thinking about their avenues for growth

1:07:29

in the future. They are

1:07:31

the advertising market. And so I think it

1:07:33

makes sense that they're dedicating a lot

1:07:35

of their time and focus to engaging with

1:07:37

the government. What do you

1:07:39

think about, you know, what seems

1:07:41

to be, I mean, traditionally kind of

1:07:43

tech, the tech sector, it's in

1:07:45

California. It's been left a center.

1:07:47

Let me a slightly libertarian, but

1:07:49

kind of left of center. And that

1:07:51

sort of the momentum seems to

1:07:53

have shifted towards more right of center.

1:07:55

Obviously, Elon Musk is super influential,

1:07:58

right? He has a massive role in

1:08:00

kind of reshaping government right now.

1:08:02

Is that something that you think is

1:08:04

an interesting trend or a positive

1:08:06

trend? Or do you have any feeling

1:08:08

or view on it? I

1:08:10

think what you've seen from technology companies

1:08:12

in the past is that they've generally

1:08:14

tried to align themselves with whatever administration

1:08:16

is currently serving the country at the

1:08:18

time and try to be helpful. mean,

1:08:20

I think it makes sense if you're

1:08:22

an American company, you want our government

1:08:24

or president to be successful. And I

1:08:26

think that's an important part of business's

1:08:28

strategies here in the United States. So

1:08:30

I wouldn't look at it as a

1:08:32

new thing. I would look at it

1:08:34

as kind of a constant if we

1:08:36

look over American history and certainly business

1:08:38

history. Do you for your,

1:08:41

not just for the business, but just

1:08:43

for you, Evan Spiegel, as a person, do

1:08:46

you think it's better? Like, obviously,

1:08:48

you know, Mark Zuckerberg was a contributor

1:08:50

to Democrats for a long time and stopped

1:08:52

contributing to politics. And now he's, I

1:08:55

think his views on politics have changed.

1:08:57

Do you think it's better for you,

1:08:59

Evan Spiegel, to be engaged, to be

1:09:01

a contributor, or better for you to

1:09:03

be apolitical as much as you can?

1:09:06

Well, I think it's super important to

1:09:08

be an engaged citizen. You know, what

1:09:10

you're talking about is sort of engaging

1:09:12

at the highest levels of government, but

1:09:14

I think civic engagement at all levels

1:09:16

of government, especially local government, is really,

1:09:18

really valuable and important. And personally, I'm

1:09:20

a registered independent, which is, I believe,

1:09:22

actually the largest party in America. I

1:09:25

don't do. political giving, although I did

1:09:27

give to Michael Tubbs, who lived across

1:09:29

the hall from me in college. Stockton

1:09:31

Mayor, former Stockton Mayor. Yeah. Mayor of

1:09:33

Stockton and great guy. But no, I

1:09:35

think for me personally, you

1:09:37

know, we just try to engage where we think we can

1:09:40

add value. And I don't think that has to be at

1:09:42

the federal level. I think there's a lot of opportunity, even

1:09:44

just locally, to help the community. Evan.

1:09:46

You're so young, but very experienced and

1:09:48

you have a whole life ahead of you.

1:09:50

I mean, I mean, if you're, if

1:09:52

you're like Brian Johnson, you could live until

1:09:54

200 years old. Realistically,

1:09:56

I mean, do you think that Snapchat is the

1:09:58

end of the story for you? Snap is the

1:10:00

end. Is that this is going to be the

1:10:02

thing that you're going to do for the rest

1:10:05

of your life? Or is there a world where

1:10:07

one day you could imagine trying something else? I'm

1:10:09

not sure. I think there's a lot

1:10:11

more to do here at Snap and, you

1:10:13

know, there's a lot. more work to

1:10:15

fulfill our vision for augmented reality and for

1:10:17

glasses. You know, we've been working on

1:10:19

that for a decade, but it's going to take quite

1:10:21

a lot longer. I mean, if you look at

1:10:23

how much computers evolved from the 80s to today, I

1:10:26

mean, there's a lot of work to do to

1:10:28

fulfill that vision. But, you know, over the longer term,

1:10:30

I'm definitely going to look for more ways to

1:10:32

give back. I mean, I think that's, that is really

1:10:34

the perk of building our business and learning a

1:10:36

bunch as a leader is being able to give back.

1:10:38

I mean, that's kind of the whole point, I

1:10:40

guess. So that's what hopefully I can do more of.

1:10:43

When you think about what happened, you know

1:10:45

because if you if you were to just be

1:10:47

if you were like to land from Mars

1:10:49

and an alien was here I said I'm

1:10:52

gonna tell you a story about this guy

1:10:54

Evan Spiegel He's 20 years old He comes up

1:10:56

with this idea with the friend and then

1:10:58

within a year They get a billion dollar

1:11:00

offer and then and then two years later

1:11:02

three billion and they raise all this money It

1:11:04

just it sat it would sound like this

1:11:06

very simple of course We've talked for a

1:11:08

while now, so it's not, but it would

1:11:10

sound like a very simple like, oh, he just

1:11:12

went from success to success. It was easy

1:11:14

for him because he was smart and he

1:11:16

went to Stanford and he got the money. And

1:11:19

obviously it's much more complicated than

1:11:21

that. But when you reflect on where

1:11:23

you are now at 34 and

1:11:26

what's what you've achieved, how

1:11:28

much of it do you attribute to to

1:11:30

your intelligence and the work you put in

1:11:32

and how much do you think it has

1:11:34

to do with getting lucky? I

1:11:36

think all of it's an extraordinary blessing.

1:11:40

Actually, the first time I was ever invited to

1:11:42

give a speech, that's how I started the speech.

1:11:44

I said, I've been unbelievably lucky. Life isn't fair. And

1:11:47

it's been extraordinary to have these gifts

1:11:49

of, you know, growing up in the Palisades,

1:11:51

being able to attend a great school,

1:11:53

having the opportunity, the safety net to go

1:11:55

pursue a business. I mean, but I

1:11:57

think beyond luck, there are

1:11:59

so many generations of my family

1:12:01

that did so much work to enable

1:12:04

me to do this. My father,

1:12:06

his father, my grandfather's dad was one

1:12:08

of the seven orphans spread all

1:12:10

throughout the country after their parents died.

1:12:12

At 12 years old, he was

1:12:14

working in the copper mines. So

1:12:17

I just think about all the work

1:12:19

that generations of my family have put

1:12:21

in to give me this opportunity. So one

1:12:23

of the most important things is waking

1:12:25

up every day, just realizing that it's

1:12:27

all luck. All luck. It's all

1:12:29

hard work too, but it's luck. That's

1:12:34

Evan Spiegel, co -founder and

1:12:36

CEO of Snap. By

1:12:39

the way, Evan also happens to

1:12:41

be a Franco file. He loves

1:12:43

France so much, he even became

1:12:45

a dual US French citizen back

1:12:47

in 2018. The French

1:12:49

government waves its residency requirements for

1:12:51

certain people who it believes

1:12:53

will contribute to French culture or

1:12:56

the economy. Hey, thanks

1:12:58

so much for listening to the show this

1:13:00

week. Please make sure to click the follow button

1:13:02

on your podcast apps so you never miss

1:13:04

a new episode of the show. And if you're

1:13:06

interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some

1:13:08

of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please

1:13:10

sign up for my newsletter at

1:13:12

GuyRoz.com or on Substack. This

1:13:14

episode was produced by Alex Chung

1:13:16

with music composed by Ramteen Ereblewe.

1:13:18

It was edited by John Isabella

1:13:20

with research help from Catherine Seifer. Our

1:13:23

engineers were Patrick Murray and Gilly Moon.

1:13:26

Our production staff also includes

1:13:28

Chris Messini, J .C. Howard, K

1:13:30

.C. Herman, Iman Mahani, Sam

1:13:32

Paulson, Kerry Thompson, Neva Grant,

1:13:34

and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy

1:13:36

Roz, and you've been listening to How I

1:13:38

Built This. If

1:13:52

you like how I built this,

1:13:54

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1:14:03

listen add on Amazon Music. Before

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you go, tell us about

1:14:07

yourself by filling out a short

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survey at Wondery.com slash survey. Shopify's

1:14:12

point of sale system helps you

1:14:14

sell at every stage of your

1:14:17

business. Need a fast and secure

1:14:19

way to take payments in person.

1:14:21

We've got you covered. How about

1:14:24

card readers you can rely on

1:14:26

anywhere you sell? Thanks, have a

1:14:28

good one. Yep, that too. Want

1:14:31

one place to manage all your

1:14:33

online and in-person sales? That's kind

1:14:35

of our thing. Wherever you sell,

1:14:38

businesses that grow, grow with Shopify,

1:14:40

grow with Shopify. listen.