Snap CEO: Building Snapchat, AR Glasses and the Future of Communication

Hi, everybody. I'm Nicolas Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Rent Fund. And today, I'm really thrilled. I'm here with, Evan Spiegel, the cofounder and CEO of Snap, the company behind the very popular Snapchat. Now it's used by nearly a billion people every day. He was 22 years old, turned down a $3,000,000,000 offer from Mark Zuckerberg, and has continued to build the company, which, by the way, in Norway of all places, was one of your first really, really big market. So fantastic to have you here. Thanks so much, Nikola. It's great to be on the on the show. And, yeah, we now reach more than 3,000,000 Norwegians. So very proud to, serve the Norwegian people. Now it started as an idea that, most people were thought was, like, totally ridiculous. A photo that disappears just after you look at it. So where the heck did that idea come from? Well, Bobby and I had grown up with social media. And on social media, everything was saved forever. It was public. It was like a big competition to see how many friends you had or likes you could get on your photos. And so it meant that people were only posting pretty and perfect moments, not, you know, the full set of, full set of emotions or full set of experiences they have that, you know, are really important to to relationships. So, I think the most important thing Snapchat did was create a new way of communicating with visual messaging. That was really the foundation of the service. Now today, it's diversified across a map that lets you see what your friends are up to or augmented reality lenses, of course, content with stories and spotlight. But the core of the service is really visual messaging between friends and family. So where so where'd you go? You're, like, 22 years old, no money, no app, no nothing. I mean, how do you how do you start? Well, I was in school at the time, and Bobby and I actually lived across the hall from each other. And so we started working on some projects together, one of which was called Future Freshman, which was a service designed to help people get into college. That was a total, failure. Only my mom signed up for our service despite both of our siblings applying for college at the time. So we got some strong customer feedback in the early days. We ended up, shutting down future freshmen, trying a few other things, and ultimately, creating peekaboo, you know, as Snapchat was called at the time, which I presented to, my class in in, junior year. When did you understand that the that you were onto something big? Oh, gosh. I mean, it it probably wasn't until about a year after we launched the service, when there were enough folks using it and continuing to use it, you know, in in a way that we thought maybe we …