Evan Spiegel on Snap's Past, Present, and Future

Foreign. Hi, everyone. Really excited to have my dear friend Evan Spiegel in conversation today. Evan, thanks for doing that. I'm so excited to sit down with you, Imran.

It's so great to be together. It's making me actually nostalgic for the good old days at Snap. So thanks so much for having me and really excited to chat a little bit about our business and the world and whatever else on your mind.

Yeah, well, coming here, I was thinking that I have so many questions for you. We worked together for four years and no each other for, geez, almost over a decade now. And so I feel like I have so many questions that I never get to ask. So I have a ton of questions. So hopefully we have time to cover everything. So let's start with Snap founding. You know, you started Snap while you were at Stanford. This was your second company. How did the idea of Snapchat came about and like, what is the moment that you said, you know what I need to build a business like this?

Well, Bobby and I had a pretty unique perspective because we were the first generation to grow up with smartphones and also the first generation to grow up with social media. And so when I was in college, people were using Facebook. I think Instagram had just gotten started. But there was this real obsession with permanent social media. There was a big feed, you had a public friends list, you had all these public likes and comments. So there was a lot of pressure to look a certain way online, to try to look pretty or perfect or popular. And that was really weighing on our friends. And one of my buddies, Reggie, at the time, said, you know what, if you can make a photo disappear? We thought that was a really cool idea. And so we started prototyping an app that at the time was called Picaboo, where you could ostensibly send a photo that would disappear, but anyone could always take a screenshot. And so when I first presented Picaboo to my class, my design class at Stanford, everyone was like, this app makes no sense. You can always take a screenshot. And sure enough, as we started working on the app and evolved it over time, what became really powerful was the way we had designed it to open up into the camera and to send a photo really quickly. And so we started using it with a couple of our friends and just sending photos back and forth to talk. And so we realized that the key use case for Snapchat was visual communication. So we renamed the app Snapchat. We focused on letting people know that it was a much faster way to communicate. And that's really when we started to see growth of the service.

So what was the timeline from the incubation of the idea and coming up with the name Peekaboo to going to Snapchat, how long it took? What was the process? And did you, like how convinced you were that you were building something big?

From very early on, we had no idea that we were building something really big. We really just wanted to make something that we could use with our friends. Because Bobby and I had worked on something called Future Freshmen before, which had taken us maybe 18 months or two years, we built this really complex web app that was designed to help people apply to college, but nobody used it except my mom. God bless. Even though I had a younger sister and Bobby had a younger brother, both of whom were applying to college, and they didn't even use it. So we were like, yikes. We had invested so much time in building this really complex app that no one used. So when we were thinking about the next thing we wanted to work on, our number one goal was just to make something really simple that people hopefully would use, because I think once people start using something, they give you feedback, and you can start making it better and evolving it over time. And that's something that was really important to us. So I think from the time we started working on the service, that was probably. Oh, gosh, that was probably in the spring maybe of my junior year, and I think sort of by the fall then of my senior year, we had renamed it Snapchat and evolved some of the functionality, and we're starting to use it with our friends.

So building consumer product is so hard. There are very few people in the world build a consumer product at scale, and you are one of them. How did you acquire the first thousand? First 20,000, 50,000? Because I think the first time I met you in 2014, you had like 50 million users, right? The company is one of the fastest growing consumer companies ever. So how did you get that vitality, and what did you do? Or it just happened on its own?

Well, interestingly, we built a product that's only fun if you use it with a friend. So Snapchat really requires you to add at least one friend to be able to use it and to communicate. And one of the real obstacles we had in the beginning was that Snapchat was so new, it was a different idea, and it was strange to open up an app and open directly into a camera as a way to communicate, and so it actually really had to grow. Word of mouth. Friends just told one another about it. Started using it together. And I think one of our big advantages at the time was how slow it was to send a picture via traditional sms or it was called MMS at the time. Took about a minute to upload a photo and send it. And Bobby and I had created a way to send a photo really, really quickly and that was a advantage for us. So I think as friends started realizing, hey, I can use this to send photos really quickly back and forth with my friends. That's really how the service began to grow. We tried things like online marketing. I actually went to the Santa Monica promenade and handed out flyers and said, hey, try sending a photo using Snapchat. And we didn't get a lot of traction like that. It was really through our friends and our family that just started using it.

So I always tell people, and not to flatter you, that you are probably the best single best product person of your generation and definitely the person I've ever met. So, you know, you started ascending just Snap and a lot of people ridiculed it, you know, it's not going to work, you know, but you showed the conviction dropping off the Stanford, you know, and becoming a focus. But at that time, like you were launching product every few weeks, right, Just creating stories. I think a lot of young people don't know that you created stories. You created full screen mobile video ad unit, you created completely new kind of group chat. So talk to me about like, what inspired you to launch stories? What inspired, like where did you find the inspiration of creating so many products? I just gave three examples that nobody ever had that before, you know. But you completely changed the world by creating those products.

Yeah, well, we always get our inspiration from people. People are endlessly inspiring. They have all sorts of feedback and in fact, a lot of our products go back to sort of the core elements of human nature. So let's take stories for example. At the time, most people were broadcasting content to their friends in a reverse chronological social media feed that had public and permanent likes and comments. So there was a lot of social pressure around it. And because the feed was in reverse chronological order, you saw always the end of somebody's day or the end of somebody's birthday before the beginning as you were scrolling the feed. And that was a pretty odd experience. And so we realized that people really enjoyed telling stories, beginning, middle, end. That that's how people have been telling stories for thousands and thousands of years. And on top of that, they really wanted the opportunity to start fresh every day because there was this feeling that you went to your Social media profile and you were like, oh my gosh, I posted this photo seven years ago. This doesn't reflect who I am today. And so there was this real desire to start fresh every day. And there was a lot of social pressure in the form of these public likes and comments that meant that people only felt comfortable posting a very small percentage of their life and not all those moments in between. That, I think, are what relationships are built upon. So as we started thinking about Stories, some of the original initial ideas were about posting a status or something like that. We'd gotten all these requests from people to make a send to all button on Snapchat. People just wanted a button where they could just send snaps to all their friends. And we were really worried that if you could just send a snap to all of your friends, that people would get blasted with push notifications and get really frustrated by that experience. So we really imagined Stories as a way that you could share your day with all of your friends without bothering them by blasting them with a ton of snaps and then start fresh the next day after your story expires, after 24 hours. So that's how we thought of introducing Stories. But again, that was a product that was so new that for the first.

Nobody ever had that before you created that product. Now Stories is everywhere. But I think time has passed. I don't know how many young people know that, but Snap and Evan Spiegel created Stories.

Well, I think what's so funny, when you're making something new, those first six months, nobody used it. I remember going to the board and saying, give us some time. We really think people love it. They just have to figure out and learn how to use Stories. It took a little while for people to learn how to use Stories because they were so new at the time. But now, of course, they're quite common.

As you point out, and everybody copied it or adopted it. We'll get to it. That how you are the force behind a lot of things that we are seeing in mobile. That you created it and then other people adopted it. That's a whole new conversation. I want to cover that, but I do want to go through some of the pretty incredible innovation that you did like created lenses, right? Obviously we acquired the technology through luxury. But what made you create lenses that vomiting rainbow that got billions of billions of use. And so what made you suddenly create a lenses product or filters?

Well, we're so fortunate to have an incredible and creative team that builds all these lenses and now to have a developer platform with hundreds of thousands of developers who are building all sorts of amazing lenses, and so they get to share all their creativity through the world on our platform. I think today actually people use lenses 8 billion times a day in our camera. I think there's like 14 billion Google searches a day. So we're like almost 8 billion, almost the size of wow.

But yeah. So what gave you that ideas right, that day that I still remember that we had this conversation, I think on Friday, that you wanted to create these lenses or filters. What insight that you got that gave you the conviction to do it?

Well? Lenses and the technology that looks very created at the time solved a really important problem for us. And that problem was that when people initially open up Snapchat and see the camera, sometimes it can be a little scary, right? It's scary to create something. You're not dropped into a feed of other people's content. You're dropped into your own personal experience, your life through our camera. And what we heard from people was that sometimes they didn't feel comfortable taking a selfie, right? There wasn't necessarily a reason for them to do that. And lenses all of a sudden gave people amazing new ways to express themselves, to lower that barrier to creativity, to take away that fear of making a snap and sending it to your friend, because you can vomit a rainbow or have heart eyes. And it gave people a whole new range of visual communication through our camera. So I think for us, as we look at developing new technology, we're always trying to lower that bar to creativity, to help more people express themselves. And I think lenses have been really powerful in terms of doing that.

So this is interesting. Multiple times in this conversation you talked about this community feedback. And this is, I feel like, so challenging for so many founders and CEOs, right? Because when you start the company, there's a small community, and then you become snap, you know what? 700 million plus users. How do you and your company become big? How do you keep in touch with the community? Do you feel ever that you are isolated from your community and that become a challenge for you? How do you stay close to the audience?

I think it's a really great question. Oftentimes it's not. So I think a lot of people maybe focus more on user research or market feedback or data science or things like that. I'm often trying to just draw inspiration from my conversations with people about their experience of the world. Right. And so, like, when you talk with someone and they say something like, gosh, why do people take so many selfies? That's so Weird. Like, I would never feel comfortable taking a selfie. That sparks like a little thought, like, wow, that's really interesting. I wonder if there are other ways that we could make people feel more comfortable doing that or more fun. And then you see the technology that looks free had created at the time, you're like, wow, that's a really interesting opportunity to solve that problem that somebody shared. So for me, so much of that inspiration just comes from talking to people and hearing their stories, and not necessarily from a whole bunch of data science and user research that is super valuable. And fortunately, because there are 900 and some odd million people who are so passionate about our products, we're getting an avalanche of that feedback all the time. But for me, it's usually those deeper and maybe more nuanced sort of narrative stories that I hear from people out in the world that are most inspiring.

But how do you do that? So when you were young, it was much easier to do it. Now you're older, you're much more famous, much more recognizable. I still remember even when you were 24, we were going to Japan and people wanted to take selfie with you. When you have that kind of brand and recognitions, how do you keep in touch with younger people? Also, you're getting older now, so how do you do that?

Well, for starters, we've got four boys at home, and the oldest is 14. And he is absolutely not afraid at all about sharing his perspective, nor his friends. I think that's one of the really great things about young people and customers in general. They're not afraid to share their feedback and they won't hold back. So I think it's really in terms of my sort of curiosity about the world, asking people what they're thinking, what products they're using, how they feel about those products, and just being generally a curious person about the way other people are feeling and navigating the world.

Yeah, that's so interesting because Jack Mouth said once, I think that when you're 25, you want to spend time with people who are 45, but by the time you become 45, you need to spend time with people who are 25. You learn from younger people. So let's go back to business building. So snap, early start. You didn't have that many people. I think 50 employees took the company to 50 million users or something like that. Why did you keep the organization too small at that time? And what are the big key learning at the beginning that you learned that you would like to share. A lot of the founders who Are listening to this call.

Well, back in, when we started Snap, we were one of the first companies to build cloud first. So unlike a lot of other companies that had started around that time who had to go out and rack servers and data centers and these sorts of things, we were able to really leverage Google Cloud and then focus mostly on the customer experience and as a result have a much smaller team. So we had a smaller team very, very focused on the customer experience and on innovating. And I think that really helped the company stay ahead and continue to grow. Obviously, the space that we're in, especially digital advertising, is to so competitive. And Snapchat was born after Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and WhatsApp and you name it, we came last, so to say, in that group of companies. And so it was really our ability to innovate and move really quickly that was so important. And I've also found that smaller teams are just able to move faster. It's one of the reasons why our design organization, for example, remains very small today with no hierarchy. It's a flat sort of team structure. And I think that enables a lot of creativity. And certainly as you start scaling a company and as you know, growing a company really fast, there's a lot of challenges that come along with that. So I think staying as small as possible, as long as possible is pretty helpful.

So you were, I might get the age around 22, 23, and it's publicly telegraphed pretty well. Facebook offered you a $3 billion offer or something like that, and that's a lot of money. One of the investors at Instagram said Kevin Systrom always wanted to work for Facebook or now called Meta. And he was first chance he sold it. It takes a lot of discipline, a lot of courage not to sell a company primarily a consumer business. What made you keep going and keep building the business rather than selling to a large company?

I think there were a couple of things that were really important. One, we just felt like the opportunity was so big back what, 13 years ago now, or whatever it was 10 years ago, the company was still very small. Mobile in and of itself was still very small. There was at that time still a big emphasis on the desktop web. We saw that there would be a huge amount of growth in terms of smartphone adoption. But also we believed in terms of Snapchat's growth. And I think that's certainly been the case. So we saw a really big opportunity in front of us. And then Bobby and I just really enjoyed what we were doing. We loved what we were doing. And we were really worried that if we worked for somebody else, we wouldn't have the opportunity to continue to fulfill our vision. Which, you know, really ran counter to what social media was doing at the time. Right. As I mentioned, it was a heavy focus on permanence. It was a big popularity contest, a huge public friends list and collecting likes and comments. And Snapchat was really about your close friends and family and having a more private communications service. And so I think the services were really quite at odds with each other and we were concerned that we weren't going to be able to continue to follow our vision. If you remember, around the time, I think Starting back in 2014, we started investing in glasses as well, because we realized that but smartphones ultimately had a lot of limitations and we really wanted to push beyond that. So I think if you just look at how we've tried to grow the company over time, it's been so important that we've been able to stay true to our vision and invest against that.

Yeah, there's definitely no doubt about it that your conviction that you stick with your conviction is pretty admirable. So let's talk about recruiting for a second because you have a very differentiated, I don't know if it changed now, but at least when I was there, very differentiated recruiting philosophy. Like you hired people like me who never worked in a tech company and never ran a company and you hired a general counsel who was not a traditional general counsel. Like we can go on and on. And then you decide to build a company in la, which was very gutsy move at that time and probably one of the most successful IPO out of Los Angeles and building LA community and your commitment to la. So walk us through. First of all, I know you got massive pushback on all those things. I'm sure how many people called you to fire me in first month. So what gave you conviction to hire people who are non traditional? And why did you decide to build a business in LA when all of your investors and everybody was telling to go to Bay Area?

I think maybe first and foremost we can talk a little bit about Los Angeles and the difference it's made in terms of our business. There was definitely some pressure early on to build the business in the Bay Area. Certainly now today we have a really big office in Palo Alto, a big office in San Francisco, of course in Seattle as well. So we invest really heavily where there's really great talent. But in the early days when there was that pressure to move to the Bay Area, we just got together as A team. It's actually the first time we used council at snap, and Council is this thing where we get together. Yeah.

Explain the council.

Yeah, yeah. Get together in a small group and basically take turns sharing our perspective. And I think it's a really good opportunity for people to find a way to connect and empathize with other members of the team that they maybe wouldn't get to otherwise. And I think perhaps most importantly for our culture, it really reinforces listening because you're spending most of your time in the circle listening and going back to creating great products. So much of that is about listening and empathizing, and so I think it helps really reinforce that practice. But all that to say, we got in a group, we heard everyone's perspective about whether or not we should move to the Bay Area or stay in Los Angeles. And I think what was really clear from that conversation was just how valuable Los Angeles was for our company. It's an incredibly creative and diverse city. Our office at the time was on the beach on the Venice Boardwalk. I think there's something like 10, 15 million people that walk on the Venice Boardwalk every year. And so they would come by our office and give us feedback and ask for help fixing something in the app. And. And that sort of close proximity to our community from all around the world was really, really powerful and valuable for us. And so that wasn't something we felt like we could get in the Bay Area, but it definitely meant that we had to hire and move a lot of engineering talent from other cities, especially the Bay Area, to Los Angeles to help grow snap.

Yeah. No. Your commitment to LA from very early days of your life is incredible. Right? You know, you build a company, you're from la, you lived in LA forever, you wanted to build a company in LA and you wanted to support the. And also we can talk about Snap foundation, what Snap foundation is doing to support the LA community. So that's very admirable, your commitment to la. So if you were today have to go build a business based on your recruiting. You didn't answer, why did you hire me? But I still think about it. Why I'm happy to tell you. Yeah, go ahead.

Well, I think one of the things that was really interesting about the early days of snap, we got a huge amount of inspiration from Tencent. And Tencent, I think most folks know, runs sort of the largest messaging business in China. And they were able to diversify that messaging business over time into many other areas of business, basically using that messaging flywheel to move into payments and content. Et cetera. And that was really inspiring to us. And they still have a leader there named Martin Lau and he's the Chief Strategy officer. And it was really interesting because we started finding other very large Chinese companies that had this sort of similar Chief Strategy Officer style role that sort of went beyond maybe what would be considered a more operational coo, but was a real partner to the COO in terms of growing the business. And we thought that that was a really helpful and powerful role to have at Snap. And so started looking for someone with the background to help us in that way. And you popped up on the launch.

And it worked out great for. I really enjoyed that four years. It was really fun and really help our partnership. So let's go through the early days. Look, so Snap went through insane growth, right? I think we went from 50 to 600 to 1200. The company grew massively and went public. So there's a few areas I want to double click. So number one is that what would you say to other founders who might be listening this call or other investors who are invested in this business, like, what are your two or three big learnings that you would tell young Evan not to make the same mistake?

One of the things that's so incredibly challenging about scaling that quickly is protecting the company's culture. I think culture is such a critical differentiator for companies, certainly here for snap, and it's what has allowed us to continue to innovate over time and to build a really resilient business in such a competitive market. And ultimately, I think people talk about culture at a very high level in sort of a fluffy way, but for us, it really is just a collection of repeated behaviors. Right. Your culture as sort of an output of the way that people behave on a day to day basis in the office, the way that people treat each other. And from the very early days, we defined our values as kind, smart and creative. Bobby and I were just sort of like, what kind of people do we want to work with? We're like kind, smart, creative. And those values were so important to the company. But as we scaled really quickly, we didn't have the mechanisms to make sure that our team, especially our new team members, were learning those values, learning what they meant in practice in terms of the behaviors, and then also being held accountable for those behaviors and those values. And it took us too long, I think at least a year to figure out that we needed to move way faster to build the right mechanisms to reinforce our values. Otherwise we would lose the culture to people who were coming in from all sorts of different companies like Amazon and Meta, Google, et cetera. And so I think for us, in hindsight, if we had been more clear about the values, how those translate to behaviors, and then how that shows up in our performance review processes and things like that, that the company would have been able to protect its culture a lot more effectively through that period of time.

Ipo, you made a very bold call to go public earlier than anybody. Uber had to push out that founder company to go public. And even today, companies like, like Stripe has not gone public. Right. So so many of company just decided to stay private. Why did you decide to go public in 2017 when the company is 5 years old? What was your thinking behind it?

There were a couple things that really influenced our thinking. And you're right. At the time, it was very popular to think about sort of really delaying an IPO or drive it for a very long period of time. Part of that, I think was an artifact, the fact that Meta had waited a long time to go public because of the 08 financial crisis. So I think a lot of companies had sort of deferred and stayed private longer. And so that sort of become a popular thing. We knew from the very beginning that we wanted to build an independent company. That was really our goal at Snap. And so we saw a lot of appeal in going public in terms of our ability to access capital very easily, our ability to tell our story as a company, to do it early enough that we could build in the sort of processes and rigor you need as a public company very early on in the life of the company. Because as I got advice from more folks who had taken their companies public, if they waited too long to institute a lot of the processes you need, whether it's stuff as basic as your financial processes and reporting processes, or other things like IR and your ability to communicate publicly. If you wait too long to build out those processes, it can be really painful to try to adapt the company to do that later on. And so I think it was really helpful for us to set that intent with our board, with the company more broadly to say we want to run a company that can go public. So we started from a very early stage, building out all of these processes, thinking about running the company in that way. And ultimately, I think that helped us go public earlier and it reduced, I think, the conflict or pressure we might have otherwise had with our investors, because venture investors have a limited fund life right at seven or 10 years or something like that. Ten years might be the outer boundary. And so I think as founders are engaging with their investors, the path to liquidity is a really important part of that conversation. And so this allowed us to also align our interests with our investors and say, this is the path we see to liquidity, let's work towards it together. And ultimately we want to build an independent business.

But do you find it frustrating that some of other companies, they don't go public and they don't have to deal with investors like me now these days who only care about the quarter? I actually don't care about the quarter, but, but a lot of investors do care about the quarter short term. So how do you find it frustrating and do you wish that you would have stayed private or do you think that was the right decision?

I definitely think it was the right decision for the company. It's given us a huge amount of flexibility that I don't think we would otherwise have had as a private company. But certainly we've also run the company in a way that is very long term oriented. And I think sometimes that means that, that we're not optimizing quarter to quarter, we're optimizing for the long term success of the business. For shorter term oriented investors who are trying to play the stock day to day or quarter to quarter, I think that's not the right fit for our shareholder base. We've been very clear since we started building the company that this company is going to orient itself towards our long term success. And we've invested really heavily in things like AR glasses that we believe represent the future of computing, even though they don't contribute near term profit. So I think just clearly communicating that vision and making sure we attract the right long term oriented investors has been really important.

So let's go talk about camera and glasses. I remember during the ipo Snap said we are a camera company and so many people ridiculed what is a camera company. Now obviously, fast forward eight years later, everybody is not talking about augmented reality. People probably talk about AI the most. And the second thing you hear is augmented reality. As you pointed out, you start building glasses in 2014. So 11 years ago, this is again another example that you are one of the. Again I'm not flattering you, it's my belief and I said that before and that's why I joined Snap when you called me is that you have an incredible insight about product and understanding what the world is going to. So 11 years ago and now it's kind of obvious somewhat, at least you can think about why somebody will want to do augmented reality. But 11 years ago, why did you start thinking about glasses? And then I want to say, why did you, in ipo, want to call yourself a camera company?

I think going back to why we started working on spectacles or glasses, we really saw a lot of limitations around the way that people use computers today. So I think whether you're using a desktop computer and you're sort of hunched over your desk with this big monitor, or whether you're staring down at a small smartphone, it feels like we've had to sacrifice so much as human beings to access all the benefits of computers. And the benefits have been extraordinary. They've transformed our world and our society. But I don't think we've thought a lot about how to make computers more human to really fit the needs of humans. And by that I mean basic things like keeping us grounded in the real world. Right? Allowing us to enjoy the world around us ourselves, while still benefiting from computing. So rather than standing behind a desk or looking at a small screen, actually just being present in the world and being able to access the power of computing. Things like being able to share experiences, those are really, really important things in our day to day lives. That's what connects us to our friends and our family. The ability to do stuff together, go run around the backyard, the soccer ball, or blow bubbles with our one and a half year old, that's. Those sorts of shared experiences, I think are really important and powerful, but they're not something that computers support today. Right? You can play a game on your smartphone connected to somebody halfway around the world, but not share that experience together. And so augmented reality glasses allow you to play games and to experience things together with your friends and your family. And we think that's really meaningful. And then people have had to learn all these wacky things like the keyboard and the mouse and to be able to navigate computers rather than just using computing the way that they're used to interacting with the physical world. And so we saw a lot of opportunity to change computers so that you can just interact with them totally naturally. And we really decided to take a step by step approach to getting there. So the very first pair of our glasses was just a camera. And the idea was to bring the camera out of your pocket, off the smartphone and to allow you to capture moments hands free. Right. Because just using a computer hands free is a really powerful step forward in terms of our ability to use computing more naturally. That, of course, then evolved to the two camera version of Spectacles, which allowed people to capture depth and was a real stepping Stone in terms of augmented reality, because we're able to start understanding the depth map of the world around you. The version after that introduced the first tiny little display. Our current developer version has a full operating system. And then the version coming next year will be the first time that people have a standalone consumer form factor. AR glasses. And so it's been an incredible journey, but the entire way it's been motivated by this vision of really making computing more human.

So how did you think about it? Right. You talked about how you get inspiration from people every day talking about it. And you were building Snapchats, people sending messaging and videos. Suddenly you said, you know what, I need to build this augmented reality platform. How did it in 2013 or 2014? What was the catalyst for you to think about it? Because I don't think anybody was talking about it at that time. This augmented reality platform, as far as I can tell, maybe the audience will correct me in the comments, but as far as I can remember that you were the first person who talked about augmented reality in 2014.

Yeah, I don't think it was. And certainly we weren't the first to talk about augmented reality. I think people have been really focused on augmented reality for a long time, and it might be helpful, maybe worth clarifying. A lot of times people talk about augmented reality as a technology. We think about augmented reality as a philosophy. There's this vision that the digital world and the real world are actually one, that they're deeply intertwined, but that then we need to build software, we need to build computers, et cetera, to reflect that vision, that they're not two distinct things. But I think 13 years ago or 11 years ago, when we started working on our or glasses, people still viewed computers or the phones as separate, the Internet itself as separate and distinct from the real world. And that's where a lot of that frustration comes from. People feel like, oh, I'm stuck behind a desk getting work done, or man, I feel like I'm always looking at my phone instead of participating in a dinner table conversation. And so I think people sometimes get frustrated by the limitations of the technology they use. And if we can try to change people's entire concept of a computer and how they use it, we might change their relationship with technology and with the world more broadly in a really positive way.

So these glasses are spectacles. What do you think it looks like five years from now or ten years from now? How do you envision the world will look five to ten years from now?

I think one of the things that's going to be most exciting is that a lot of the physical constraints of the world today will go away, right? And this is part of this long term trend that maybe we should call like the digitization of everything. Right? So when I was a kid, you know, music went digital. That was a big deal, right? The ipod, a thousand songs in your pocket, right? Instead of music being on physical media, it became digital and it led to a huge explosion in the discovery of music. Rather than having to buy albums, we've had, there are singles now and you can experiment and experience music in a totally different way. And so the digitization of music, I think really changed our relationship with music. The same thing happened with movies as well, right? And we've seen this huge explosion driven by the digitization of film. I think what we're going to see with augmented reality and with glasses is the digitization of more and more and more of the physical world. So to take a, you know, very practical example, you may have what, three or four televisions on the wall in different parts of your home. You don't need that. With augmented reality glasses, you can have a television screen anywhere, anytime. Our kids collect Hot Wheels cars. They've got 100 Hot Wheels cars that they continually squabble over and race together across the kitchen floor. What's really interesting with augmented reality glasses, all of a sudden you can have any car you want in any style, play with it together with your friends, you can reduce the environmental impact. You can actually create a bigger business opportunity for brands that make these sorts products that can still monetize that product but in a digital format. And so I think we're going to see this whole trend happen over the next 10 years, let's call it, where more and more things that we're used to seeing as physical objects become digital and as a result get all these incredible digital characteristics of being extremely portable and personalizable and flexible in a really new.

That's a great, very big vision. So two that vision come true. What needs to happen? Is it just building devices and the software, or do you need a complete developer platform? And obviously now the competition is coming into the marketplace or quote, unquote, we want to talk a little bit about it. How do you think they're thinking about the world versus how Snap is thinking about the world, how that compares or contrast in your mind? And how do you think Snap can win this battle in 5, 10 years?

One of the huge benefits we have is we've had this singular vision for see through AR glasses for such a long period of time that we're the only player in the whole game that has the entire vertical stack. And what I mean by that is we have our developer ecosystem with hundreds of thousands of developers and millions of lenses that have been built. Our own proprietary developer tools called Lens Studio, where people can build these sorts of experiences. Our own rendering engine called Lens Core that is able to really flexibly and across platforms in a really performant and low power power way, render lenses in the environment. We of course have Snap os, our own Linux based operating system, and we've worked for a very long time to develop our own optical engine, meaning the projector system and the waveguide that allow you to actually put these digital objects into the physical world. And so because we have this tightly integrated vertical stack, we're able to deliver a product experience that's really unlike anything else available out there because it's so low power, because it's so performant, and because it has such a rich ecosystem of developers who have made all these amazing experiences. So I think our view is that that vertical approach and vertical integration is a huge competitive differentiator for us.

Kind of like Nvidia CUDA operating system. They have the hardware and the software.

Yeah. And you can almost think of Cuda as the backend for a lot of the way that people are going to experience computing in the future. Right. There's sort of this AI backend. You can think of specs as the AI front end. Right. And I think that's one of the really exciting opportunities for us.

So then how do you get people to adopt something new?

Right.

You know, people still use aol, email. I know people, they do. So how do you get people suddenly? You know, you have a generation who grew up with a keyboard and I'm one of them. How do you get all these people to buy glasses and buy spectacles because you need the volume to bring the developers. How do you do that?

I think one of the real benefits we have is now that Snapchat itself reaches more than 900 million people, we have just enormous reach with our community to educate them about ar. And because our community uses Snapchat so frequently, they're very familiar with augmented reality already using it on mobile. And I think that sort of familiarity is really important because this is such a new and different technology. So we have a really, really large community that's already familiar with AR and that. And then as we look at glasses, one of the things that's so clear to us, and this is really the bar we set whenever we're building any new product, it has to be 10 times better than the next best alternative. And if it's not 10 times better than the next best alternative, it's going to be really hard to activate people to get excited about it or buy it. And that's one of the reasons why we push so quickly along this roadmap from camera glasses to building full featured immersive AR glasses. Because camera glasses just aren't 10 times better than taking a photo with your phone. Right. And I think that's the case today with smart glasses. Right. It's almost the difference between a feature phone and a smartphone. Right. A smartphone can do so many things because it's truly a platform, whereas a feature phone I think is very limited. And that's a lot of the education we're going to have to do to the broader community. The difference between smart glasses that really can't do a whole lot and specs that are a full featured computing platform. But ultimately what we've always learned is that that building a great product is the best way to engage our community.

So do you think you need to sign distribution deals? Like even when Apple launched iPhone, they partnered with AT&T, right? That's exclusive and ATT boot. So do you think they need this kind of distribution partnerships?

I think there's a lot of opportunity in the distribution space for sure. Because one of the most important things is just gonna be helping people try this product because it is so new, because it is so different.

Gotta go see it. I was on the line, bought the first iPhone, I saw that and that was the aha moment. So how do you make people do.

That's what we're. I can't give away all our secrets, but that's what we're working on.

So, you know, I'm going to ask a lot of dumb questions because I'm not the tech guy here. So you think in 10 years I can use glasses to send my emails, text message my friends, snap you if I need to, and review all my documents?

I don't think that that's 10 years. I think that's next year.

You think?

Yeah, I do.

Okay. That's a very exciting future. So is the camp Spectacles has phone built into it or it works on WI fi?

I can't share all of the product specifications we have for the next generation product, but the product that we currently offer today for developers has wi fi.

Obviously it's a huge vision and you know, probably if you can make that happen and the world will change, will look very different. So two questions actually. First, let's start with it. Obviously, AI, how does AI fit into with augmented reality? Do you leverage AI or AI is more for different stuff. So how does AI and augmented reality coexist or partner? How does that work?

I think maybe the best way to think about it is augmented reality or specs as the user interface for AI. So I think today the primary way people interact with AI is through chatbots, which is one way to interact with AI, but it's still very high friction. Right. Because the AI doesn't have a lot of context about where you are or what you're doing, what you're looking at, what you're working on. So you have to describe all of it, right?

Yeah. And a lot of data that AI gets is also wrong. So they put it out there.

Yeah, yeah, that's certainly a challenge. But one of the issues with a chat based interface is just how much work you have to do to describe your problem to AI. Right. So if you're trying to get your, your car fixed, you have to write out all the issues you're having with your car and what's going wrong and this and that and the other thing. One of the fascinating things about glasses is that they're context aware, right. They know what you're looking at. And not only that, they're able to actually render out into the real world tips and instructions from AI. And so one of the really exciting things we just announced at awe was the ability for specs to pass their world, understanding their depth method map to large language models so that large language models can actually annotate the world and help provide instructions. We gave some examples. Your car's overheating and you pop the hood and you say, hey, my car is overheating, what should I do? And AI can actually annotate the engine compartment fixed to the right places in space, which is just a lot more helpful than trying to solve that same problem through a text based interface. So I think those are some of the ways that people are going to use AI and AI agents with glasses. And we thought a lot about how to architect our operating system in a way that large language models can make good use of lenses and all of the other tools that are available in specs today.

You've been working on this over 11 years and achieved incredible milestones. What can go wrong? It's a massive undertaking. And it's a massive undertaking, which is a business a bit different than core Snap business obviously was built on the idea of Snap. So how do you operate two different businesses and how that also create constraint for you?

Yeah, well, I think it's very similar to Snap in that Snapchat in the sense that we've always worked to try to make software and computing more human. So we talked at the beginning of this conversation about stories and the way that it design software to reflect the way humans have always told stories, or when we built ephemeral messaging that was about making conversations feel more like real life. Face to face conversations that weren't recorded forever, or vertical video because people would rather hold their phones vertically. So we designed full screen vertical video. So all of those things were about making software interactions feel more natural and more human. And this initiative has been really about making computers themselves more more human and really reflecting the way that we're used to interacting with the physical world. But to your point, building hardware is very difficult. And not only that, but building the developer ecosystem and the operating system as well. One of the reasons why we set out to do this is because it's hard. And that's one of the things that I really love about working on something like specs, is that it's incredibly challenging to copy an entire developer ecosystem, developer tools and a rendering engine, of course, our own hardware, like our optical engine. And so as we've been able to innovate in this space, I think as you pointed out, because it's so difficult, it's also a lot more challenging for our competitors.

So they will not be able to easily copy like stories and other stuff.

Yeah, it's not a software feature. It's a lot more complex than that. And I think to your point, that means things can go wrong. But that's also why we've been on an 11 year learning journey to figure out how to build and distribute hardware.

Do you think you have all the resources you need to bring your vision to a reality?

I think there are always ideas that we leave on the table because we can't fund them. But what we've seen historically building Snap is just that constraints are really, really powerful and they require you to focus. The best thing, I think rather than throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. I think what we've found, building specs is having that really singular focus and point of view has en to build a truly amazing product experience.

All right, to finish up, I'm going to do some shit talking. I know you don't like doing that.

I will not participate in that.

I got to spice things up a little bit. So actually you just brought up that constraint Is good. How do you feel about people are paying out $300 million to hire one engineer?

I mean, that sounds like a rumor to me. I don't know.

You say you don't believe it.

I mean, I think ultimately talent is really, really important in anything, and people are really focused on trying to win in the AI space right now. And there are some folks who are further ahead and some folks that are further behind. And people believe that this technology is so valuable that they should pay an extraordinary amount of money to try to catch up.

So I will do the shit talking. I think it's a PG13, so I'm okay using bad language. So. So my view is if you suddenly pay a lot of money, you kill the motivation. And the other thing is that if you hire a lot of people and you're hiring people just because of compensation, it also create a bad corporate culture because people start wondering why they're getting. At least that was my experience from limited operation and operating expenses. Snap. That your compensation not aligned with throughout the organization creates a lot of challenges. And also, I think if you hire a lot of people, if you don't know how to manage them, that also create a lot of problem. So jury is out. I don't think you can buy love with money. You cannot build a company just throwing money at it.

You should apply for one of these jobs.

I know I'm not good. Clearly, people can tell from my asking questions I was not that good at math, writing code. Okay, so maybe the final question. And then we're going to wrap up on lighter notes. So obviously, 11 years later, a lot of people are trying to get into competition. You are pretty used to competition, but does that worry you or you feel good about the journey that you're on and you think you're well positioned?

Well, I think sometimes people underestimate compounding growth. And I think if you look at our vision for glasses 11 years ago and the learnings we've been able to compound over time, and the ecosystem and technical advantages we've been able to compound over time, I think those are going to result in a truly spectacular and differentiated customer experience. But we'll have to see, and I can't wait for people to try the new generation of specs.

Can we do a podcast when that comes out? Am I welcome back. All right, On a lighter note, how do you keep yourself sane? There's a lot going on in the world, Highly competitive, and being a tech company CEO is very difficult right now because we're going through a platform shift. And platform shift is very scary. I think we just did some analysis. If you look at each of them, if you look at just retail, my colleague Anja put together a really nice slide. I'll send it to you. If you look at the pre Internet leader versus Internet leader versus mobile app, yes, some of the incumbents are still there, but you have new incumbents. So platform shift always create winners and losers. So if you're a CEO of a large company being large, that incumbency is actually the most vulnerable. When there is a platform shift, obviously I'm assuming it's very challenging time for all CEOs. So how do you keep yourself sane? How do you keep yourself unwind so that you can stay focused?

As you mentioned, we're here in Los Angeles and one of the benefits that has is that a lot of my high school buddies and whatnot are still here la. Of course, I've got a wonderful wife, four kids. So I've got a real. And you know, my parents, God, God bless, they're still alive and live, you know, 10 minutes away from us and very active. Yeah, yeah. So I think, you know, I just feel really fortunate to have a really strong community around me and that's, you know, that's always the best way to stay grounded, to have fun and yeah. To keep some real perspective, I think, you know, in such a fast paced environment. Environment.

All right. With that, thank you, Evan, and thank you for listening.

Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Thank you again for tuning in and I really hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Subscribe to our show on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast so that you don't miss an episode. See you next time. All opinions expressed on this podcast are solely those of you, the host and guest are for general information purposes only and do not constitute professional investment advice.