Evan Spiegel
Appearances
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But it was very clear by the end of that 18 months or so that it was going to be really difficult for us to win. We were up against a company called Naviance, which had their own software suite, and they had a really good idea, which is they went to all the college counselors around the US in high schools and things like that and said, hey, tell everyone to use Naviance.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Make sure your students' parents are using our platform. And so they got a lot of distribution through all the different schools. And so obviously, you're going to use the platform that's being recommended by your college counselor, not an app made by two kids out of Stanford. And so we had a real distribution disadvantage.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And then we also realized even if we were wildly successful and we got the million students a year who apply to four-year colleges or something like that, we would have to then reacquire another million students the next year. And so we sort of had this realization that it was going to be really hard to build a big business and that we really ought to try something different.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And most importantly, try to build something that wouldn't take 18 months to build before we got great feedback. So to try to build something really simple, you know, that people could try and that we could collect feedback on faster.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think for us it was that we didn't love the product enough. I think if you really love the product and you love what you're building, what you're doing, you can fight through just about anything. I mean, that was really the case with the early days of Snapchat. We loved using the product. We were using it all day with our friends.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
So we just had an attachment to it that we never really developed with future freshmen because we weren't applying to college. So we didn't have that same, I think, connection with the product that we ended up developing with Snapchat.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Because I think that's what – the love and passion for what you're building and the love and passion for the people you're working with, that's what allows you to get through all the challenges that come when you try to build a business.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think if you don't love what you're doing – I mean I just absolutely love what I do and the team that we get to work with and, of course, the products that we make, the community we serve. And I think without that, just love for what you do, it can be hard.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think getting that feedback from your customers as quickly and early as possible is critical. Even if it's on like the back of a napkin, like, hey, here's what I'm thinking. This is what it's going to look like. What do you think about that? Because it's very hard to know whether or not you have a good idea unless you can put something in front of people and have them use it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I mean, that's almost one of the cardinal rules of the product design program that I guess we willfully ignored, which is that you should really rapidly prototype and get feedback as quickly as possible so that you know you're on the right track. I mean, even in the early days, you know, Snapchat before it was called Snapchat, it was called Picaboo. It was more focused on disappearing messages.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Very quickly, we learned that wasn't interesting to people. They wanted to communicate with pictures. They wanted to talk with pictures. So when we called the app Snapchat, we explained that it was 10 times faster than sending a photo via text message. People were like, oh, I want that. Like, that's something that I'll use every day.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And so it was just really interesting to get the feedback really early on, you know, with an initial version of the app that took, you know, a couple months to create.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I totally agree, and I think the challenge, someone, I think this was one of those Vanity Fair parties a million years ago. The souvenir was a lighter. And on one side, it's like the director is always right. And on the other side, it's like the customer is never wrong.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I think that's always the interesting challenge with a business, that you have to stay true to your vision, the reason why you're building a product, your philosophy. But at the same time, your customers are the people you serve. And ultimately, how they feel about your product is right, whether or not you agree with them.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think one of the things that was really helpful is that I did a semester, a quarter abroad in Cape Town. And I think taking a step back and being there sort of gave me perspective about what we were working on. I was working on it while I was still working on Future Freshman while I was there, but it really gave me like more perspective.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I think, you know, I just realized this is going to be really hard and I don't really love what we're doing. We got to find something else.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Yeah, I think it's so important to listen to those feelings, yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Well, I came back from Cape Town. I moved into a dorm at Stanford. One of my buddies who had been – Reggie, one of my friends who had been living in our fraternity before was also in that same dorm. So we were hanging out. And one day he was like, man, I wish I could send a disappearing photo. I was like, that's a super interesting idea. And we looked it up.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
There were a couple other apps that were doing some similar things. stuff at the time. Um, but they were very, they were much more like, like security focused. They weren't really focused as much on, on fun, you know? So that's a super interesting idea. And you could see really quickly that it was simple enough that we could build it and get feedback really quickly.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I think there were a couple important design choices that we made at the time. One was opening to the camera. We really wanted to be the – the tagline is the fastest way to share a moment. We wanted to be the fastest way to share a moment. And at the time, I don't know if you remember, the iPhone had like a shutter animation. So you would like tap the camera to open it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
It would take forever to like open up the camera. super slow, and there was a big toggle you had to choose between the camera and video, right? So there was all this friction in using the camera. So we decided we're gonna open the camera, we're gonna get rid of that animation, and you're gonna be able to go straight into capturing what's happening in front of you before the moment disappears.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
So I think that was a really important choice that we made. And then, of course, the choice to let people choose how long they wanted to let someone see their Snap, but with the caveat that you could always take a screenshot. And that was probably one of the most important pieces of feedback we got in the initial day. So we built the prototype of the app. I took it to my design class.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Here's this new app. It's called Picaboo. You can set a photo that disappears. You know, this is really different than social media. Social media is all about permanence and you're trying to look popular and collect all these likes and comments and pretty pictures. You know, that's the 1% of moments in your life. And here's Snapchat. This is, or Picaboo at the time. Here's Picaboo.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
This is for the other 99%. All the other moments that you might be embarrassed to post to all your friends, but that you want to share with your best friend or your family. Everyone's like, this is never going to work because you can always take a screenshot. This makes no sense. So it doesn't go away. You can take a screenshot.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I think one of the big inventions, and that's why I think it's so important to get this feedback, one of the big inventions that we made later that summer when Bobby and I were working out of my dad's house, we invented a way to detect if someone had taken a screenshot. And so we would send a little notification back that said, hey, you know, your friend took a screenshot.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I think that was part of what made the service fun, that, you know, you could set how long it would appear for your friend, but if they wanted to
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
save it they could take a screenshot but you would know that they saved it and i think that was one of sort of the early uh feedback loops of the product that helped you know make people feel comfortable using it for picture messaging how long was that journey between you having that conversation with reggie about wanting photos to disappear and the moment when you knew snapchat was going to be a big deal like how how long is that gap i would say it took until maybe um
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Certainly the following school year for me. So over that summer, Bobby and I went to my dad's house, worked a lot on the service, renamed it Snapchat, got a lot of feedback. When we were using it with our friends, everyone wanted like, hey, can I add a caption? Can I add, you know, can I draw on it? Because in the original version, it was just a photo.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But because people were, you know, using just our friend group, using it to communicate, we needed to add things like captions and drawing. So I think the Snapchat launched in the App Store about September of 2011. And it probably wasn't until late that fall, maybe, or even into the following beginning of 2012 that I was, I remember sitting in the back of my
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
classroom and we had a snap counter that would count the total number of snaps ever sent. And in the early days, it was like hundreds or a thousand or whatever. And I'd refresh the page and the number wouldn't change. But by that time, by the beginning of 2020, 2012, every time I refreshed the snap counter page, the number would go up and it would jump by one or two or 10. So
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
it was clear that people were using the service and communicating. And that's when I was like, oh, this is fun. Not only are we loving it with our friends, but there's more people using it too.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
There were a couple fateful choices that my parents made that I think had a huge impact. One was that they never let me watch TV. So they never let me watch TV, didn't want me to spend my time doing that, but at the same time would allow me to get whatever book I wanted. And that was a really, I think, formative experience for me. And reading a book, you get to use your imagination a lot.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
So I think all feedback is good feedback. All feedback is valuable. I think what you do with it is what matters. So for example, let's take the use of the caption tool, for example. We could have added a super clunky caption tool that took forever to use that was like social media, where you add the caption at the bottom of the photo and tap it and hashtag all this stuff.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
The way that we decided to implement captions to make it easier for people to communicate is all you have to do is tap on the photo right after you took it. So you'd snap, take the photo, tap. The keyboard would pop up. There was a little caption bar – you know the caption bar well – that still allowed you to see the photo behind it instead of it being sort of attached to the photo below it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
It was right on top of the photo. And then as soon as you hit enter, you could jump to the page where you select which friends you wanted to send it to. So I think what was more important than hearing feedback of, hey, I want a way to add a caption or express more in the Snap –
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
The way that we implemented that feedback and designed something really fast and easy to use is why that black bar caption is now, I think, synonymous with Snapchat and is well known around the world.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Yeah, I don't remember the exact sort of user statistics, but what was really, really helpful is that we had about a year of data. So if you remember back then, there were a lot of apps that were sort of like a flash in the pan, like they would get popular really, really quickly and then sort of fade away.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And so venture investors would kind of jump into these apps, and then the apps would get really popular and then kind of fade.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And so when we were raising money, one of the things that really helped us is we had a year's worth of data to basically show, hey, when people start using this product to talk to their friends, they keep doing it because it's really fun and it's better than text message-based communication. Visual communication is way more fun, more powerful, more expressive communication.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
than text-based communication. And, you know, people use it consistently once they learn how. And that was really important to the investors who were worried, is this, you know, just another flash in the pan type service? So we really just led, I think we had like three, maybe five slides of just the data.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Yeah, I think the biggest piece of feedback was just like, hey, this seems like something that these really big, powerful tech companies are just going to copy. And they're really tough to compete with. So we're not really sure we want to invest in something that's going up against these really, really big, powerful tech companies.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Certainly a lot of foresight in that one, yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think at that time too, you know, Snapchat came last after Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, like you name it, all of those services had come first. And so I think the idea that like, you know, and that was still at the time when people believed that network effects meant that you couldn't compete, right? Whoever has the biggest network is going to win. No one else is going to be able to compete.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
to try to paint the characters in your own mind. And that was really helpful. And because I wasn't watching TV, I had a lot of time on my hands. And so I like to build stuff. I mean, when I was young, I would make a little fake hotel in our living room and have a guest experience where my parents could come and try to stay at our hotel. And I got to use my imagination a lot at home.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And so I think there was that concern that, you know, oh, if these other competitors are much bigger and they have network effects, how are you ever going to grow? grow and compete. So that was a big piece of feedback. And then I think there was just a whole other group of people who didn't really understand what the service was and so weren't that interested. But Jeremy at Lightspeed reached out.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
His profile picture was a photo of him with Obama.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
uh and i was like oh okay it must be like a real now with ai you never know but but back then it's like okay must be legit so we met up with them and hit one of his partners that uh i guess his daughter used snapchat and loved snapchat and so they understood the service and what it was about and how she was using with her friends and so they ended up investing 485 000 at a 4.25 million dollar valuation what a fucking deal in hindsight how many users did you have at the time when you raised that capital
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I would guess about $100,000 or something like that. And the valuation was $4 million roughly? $4.25, yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
There was one moment where we accidentally took down the Snapchat infrastructure for three days. So the service stopped working entirely for three days. Actually, something broke, and it took us three days to fix it. And we were like, we're done. I mean, what are we going to do? The service has been on down for three days.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
It's a messaging service, you know, so people have been able to talk to their friends like, is anyone going to use it? And when we turned it back on, people just started using it again. And that gave us a lot more conviction and that, you know, we had a product that people really just loved using.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
The only thing that we ever saw work was friends using it with friends, telling their friends about it, and wanting to learn how to use it. Because communicating with photos was a new thing. I mean, people hadn't been talking with pictures before. And even the way people thought about photos. It was like a photo is for... saving a precious moment, right? Or like a family photo.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Like that's really how people were thinking about photos at the time. You weren't able – like that was just coming out of the digital camera, like plug it into your computer and upload the photos era. So there was this massive, I think, behavioral change of people realizing like, wow, like no, a picture is worth a thousand words. And now that I can take it instantly –
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
on my phone and send it with my friend in, you know, a couple hundred milliseconds, like, we can talk with pictures instead of just use pictures to save memories. I don't think we really remember that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And my parents never made me feel bad about turning the house upside down, moving chairs around to express myself and make stuff.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
No, not at all, no. I was more of an introvert growing up, so I think sometimes that made it harder for me to feel like I fit in.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I guess I was exposed to my first computer, gosh, probably... kindergarten, first grade, maybe around that period of time. My godfather brought over one of the early Macintoshes to show our family, and I got to try out things like kid pics and stuff like that. And then I guess later on in school, I went to the computer lab a lot.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Really anything. Yeah. Oftentimes they're oriented around solving a problem. So kind of coming back to that product design philosophy, like what problem are we trying to solve? How can we empathize with our, you know, community? Okay. Our creators are having friction, you know, posting to, to Snapchat.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Evan, you don't do many podcasts, do you? I don't do much public speaking at all, but I want to share a bit more. So let's go back to those early days. So I was an introvert growing up and I loved to build stuff. At school, I had built my own computer.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I really wanted my own computer, so the big breakthrough was when my mom said,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
you know if you build your own computer you can have it we won't let you connect it to the internet but if you build your own computer you can have it to play with and so that was probably by sixth grade i had a teacher who helped me you know take all the different pieces you need and put them all together to build a computer and i think the this act of you know putting together these pieces turn it on you know getting uh you know windows up and running um just made me realize why it
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
It's, you know, confusing the way that they're reading their story replies, or that's not working the right way. How can we make that easier? And then we'll just look at a ton of ideas.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
it seems so complicated on the outside when you're just looking at that tower, that box, right. Or, you know, and you haven't yet opened, opened it up and seen what's inside.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
They very often are getting feedback from one another, oftentimes are tackling projects together in small teams, you know, but all come together on a regular basis.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
More ideas, more feedback.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But those are all people who've never built a business before. Yeah, true.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Yeah, and I think ultimately you have to maximize your rate of learning. I mean, that's just critical.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And these were really, really just wonderful people. I mean, still, you know, in many cases, close friends. And I think, interesting, there was a moment I realized... David, Daniel, Bobby, and a couple other of our original engineers, all of them, you know, original engineers were musicians as well.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think it can seem really confusing or complicated, but as soon as you realize it's not that hard, uh, you know, to, to put it all together and to get started, I think there's something really empowering about that, about that feeling.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And it was really interesting, this moment, you know, because the early folks who were working on the engineering side of Snap were unbelievably creative and unbelievably creative. talented. And it was an interesting like aha moment because I think oftentimes people think of the disciplines as separate, like, oh, there's designers and then over there there's engineers.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I think so much of the magic actually is when those disciplines combine or crossover or people who really love and appreciate both.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Oh, absolutely.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think occasionally in the early days, we almost like over-indexed on the wrong types of experience, if that makes sense. So one of the things we really wanted to do was bring in people who were very, very experienced leaders who had run much bigger teams. That was like, if we want to build a big company, we got to find people who have run... big companies and big teams.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And so one of the early engineering leaders who joined our team, I think he was coming from working on a team of 300 or something like that at Amazon, was coming to a team of eight at Snapchat. But we were really thinking ahead about how can we hire people who can actually help us scale here and build something really big.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I think that sort of focus on leadership experience and experience leading at scale was really valuable. I think what was oftentimes a bit less valuable in those early days was almost more people who had very specific domain expertise. So there were people who had, you know,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
come for an interview or something like that and be like, well, I think what you guys should do is add likes because every other platform has likes. So if you just add likes, then people will use your service more and not really coming with the same open-mindedness and curiosity about, well, why is Snapchat doing it differently? Why don't you have likes and comments?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
How are you thinking about the service differently? And how can I change and grow and adapt to the way that you're thinking about it to help you grow faster? And so I think now one of the things we're always looking for in the interview process is adaptability. It's amazing to have prior experience, but the question is how do you apply that
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think this is much more the case now because if you go on YouTube, you can learn how to do pretty much anything.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
prior experience to a new context and change and adapt the way that you see things, change your perspective to be able to meet the needs of our business, which is different than other businesses.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
We have three values and three leadership behaviors. Three values are kind, smart, and creative. Those have been the values since the very beginning, really because Bobby and I were just having a conversation, like what kind of people do we want to work with? Kind, smart, creative, great.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But since then, and we can spend some more time talking about this, I think what was really fascinating over time was to learn, and by the way, 10 years ago, people were not talking about kindness at work. I mean, people would be like, sorry, what? No, kind, smart, creative, why kindness? What we found was that the relationship between kindness and creativity is really, really important.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But I think once you start realizing that things that look really complicated or confusing on the surface aren't that difficult, you start wondering what else you can build or what else you can create or how else you can experiment with something that seems impossible from the outside but really is just not that hard.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Because unless people feel comfortable coming up with crazy ideas, unless they feel comfortable that if they say they have some new idea and it actually isn't that great, that they're not gonna be laughed at, that they'll be supported, right? Unless you have that sort of supportive culture, it's very hard to be creative.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And so we learned over time that actually, wow, kindness is kind of the essential ingredient if you want to have a creative culture. But anyways, kind, smart, creative, smart, pretty self-explanatory. And then when it comes to leadership behaviors, there's three leadership behaviors or attributes we look for.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
We always differentiate between kind and nice. There's a couple examples that I think help with that. So for one, I think it's really kind to tell somebody that they have something stuck in their teeth. If you have something stuck in your teeth, you want to know about it, right? It might make you feel awkward. Certainly as the person pointing it out, it's a little awkward, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
If you just want to be nice, you pretend nothing's going on and you just say, oh, you know, nice to meet you, whatever. But if you're really being kind and you want to help that person, you say, you know, you've got something stuck in your teeth. You've got to take care of that. And I think that helps distinguish between, you know, niceties and being kind and really wanting to help somebody.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think another great example is if somebody is really struggling emotionally you know, at work or they're struggling to grow or they're struggling with, you know, to perform, you know, their duties at Snap, you know, the nice thing to do is maybe just make them feel good about it. Oh, don't worry. You know, I'm sure it'll be okay. The kind thing to do is really help them succeed, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Say, hey, this isn't working because you're doing X, Y, and Z. You know, here are some things to do to think about that differently, provide that really direct feedback. That allows people to grow. And that's the kind thing to do rather than just making them feel good about not meeting expectations.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Leadership values. Okay, there's three of them. The first one is T-shaped leadership. So we talk a lot about T-shaped leadership. What we mean by that is that you have a real depth of experience, a depth of expertise in a given area, and then a real breadth of understanding of the business overall and an ability to connect with lots of different types of people who think different ways.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Because you need to be able to connect your expertise to all the different areas of our business to really drive impact as a leader. I mean, I think that's one of like almost the hallmarks of running a business today is it's basically impossible to do anything interesting without a team, right? The way that the world works today is very complicated.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And it's really important that you have folks who have deep expertise, but then they have to apply it to all these other cross-functional areas, you know, so they have to have a familiarity with it and an ability to relate to people with different, you know, viewpoints or other, you know, areas of expertise. So-
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
We think everyone is a leader. So we do apply it broadly. But of course, I think it's really important as we're thinking about hiring or bringing in a new leader that this is something that we talk to folks about.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Yeah, that's almost maybe the easier one, right? If you can build on a real depth of expertise by going engaging with folks maybe outside of your comfort zone or in different parts of the business and build that curiosity and understanding, that helps develop, I think, that breadth of understanding.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think what's harder is if you're a generalist and you don't have that deep skill set or that deep area of expertise, it's really, really hard to bring enough value into to the team, right? And I think that's where people get frustrated with the idea of middle management, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Where it's like, oh, this is just a person who knows a little about a lot, but can't really help me solve this problem because they don't really know the details. They don't really understand how to help me grow as an individual or solve this tough technical problem.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And so I think that's why that area of expertise is so important because it's so hard to inspire people that you're working with if you don't know a lot about the area that you're working in.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Middle school was not the, I think, not the easiest time for me.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
That's a great question. I wish we had been more thoughtful about the leadership values and characteristics we were looking for back then. I think, you know, when you're working on a team of 10 or a team of 20, you're not thinking as much about what leadership characteristics are really important to us. It's more about, like, how do we survive tomorrow?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
You know, but I think over time, as we learned what leaders were really successful at Snap, we were able to, you know, to kind of look at those attributes and say, okay, you know, these are the leaders who really succeed here and drive a lot of value for our business.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
You know, as I mentioned, I sort of, you know, had trouble fitting in. I didn't do a lot of activities that some other schoolmates did, like, you know, sports and stuff. I played, you know, a
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I would have said everything's going to be okay. Really? Everything's going to be okay. You know, I think sometimes people are too focused on... making the right decision and not as focused on fixing it if they're wrong. And I think what I would've put more emphasis on is just how quickly are you changing your mind when you receive new information?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
How quickly are you fixing a problem or a mistake if you didn't make the right decision in the first place? And that's the feedback loop that is so mission critical to building a business in the early days. It has very little to do, obviously there's existential decisions, you know, and those can,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
you know, create some big problems for your business, but most decisions are not existential decisions. And the more important thing is to make a decision, and then if you're wrong, fix it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I think it's the when you're wrong, fixing it part that deserves most of the attention, and also how you can identify, you know, who your great leaders are, who, you know, who really talented folks on the team are, because they're very quick to point out, you know, I don't think we did that I think we should take this path, this other path that we maybe hadn't considered the first time.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I think it takes courage to say that in an organization rather than just say, oh, we're doing a great job.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
It's funny you say that because anytime someone comes to ask me about that type of people advice, like, what do you think we should do? I'm like, it sounds like you've already made up your mind. So, yeah, I think it is really important to act on that feedback, not be afraid to change direction quickly if you realize that you made a mistake. But as you point out, it's hard to do.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And the combination of not really playing sports with friends, spending a lot of time in the computer lab at lunch or after school, I think just led to me feeling a bit socially isolated at what is, I think, a tricky time for lots of kids. What were you like as a kid?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And sometimes it is worth seeing if your bet – You don't want to thrash the team and change your mind all the time. So sometimes, you know, it is sometimes worth seeing things through a little bit before you change.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
At that point, before we had scaled to a lot of, you know, thousands of people, I think we could have been much more clear on the culture, the kind, smart, creative piece, and really embedded that in the team prior to that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
to scaling, because one of the biggest challenges that we confronted was as we went from 20 people to 2,000 people, we basically imported all of these different cultures from all sorts of different companies. We imported an Amazon contingent who They really love their six-page documents. We, you know, imported a Google contingent, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And they're very focused on consensus-based decision-making. We imported, you know, a contingent from Meta as well. And I think we were too slow to be really clear about what our values were and what that looked like in practice, what those behaviors looked like. And I think if we had earlier and faster, so when we're evaluating performance, we look at our values, kind, smart, creative,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
behaviors attached to that that are actually research-backed and whatever. We did a whole study to understand which of those behaviors are really tied to performance and those values. But that gives people a really clear framework for the expectations for how to behave at Snap and our unique culture. There was a moment in time where I felt like we were losing control of our culture.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I wasn't happy with our company and the team. I remember I was complaining to a friend of mine. This is probably like your story of folks coming to you and saying, oh, it's not working. I was complaining to a friend of mine. And I was just like, man, I just don't like it. I don't like my job. I don't like what our company has become. And she just looks at me and she's like, then fix it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I was like. Great point. And I think that it had changed and grown so quickly that it was really hard to stay true to our values.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But I think I really took that advice to heart and just started trying to fix it with our team, getting really clear about the values, getting really clear about the behaviors, holding a higher bar and saying, hey, if you're not into the kind, smart, creative thing, that's OK. There are other companies with different cultures. But that really matters to us here.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And once you start realizing that things that look really complicated on the surface aren't that difficult, you start wondering, you know, what else you can build. So that led to building Snapchat at 21. I was an undergrad at Stanford and we'd raised $485,000 at a $4.25 million valuation. What a fucking deal.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I don't know if I was confident in myself per se, but I definitely was confident in my ideas. Like I was willing to take a stand for ideas that I thought were different, or I was willing to explore ideas that didn't seem popular at the time. Because I thought it was important. I was talking to my, my dad has been staying with us for a while, and I was talking with him.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
So I think it's less about the culture Bible and more about how you apply whatever your values are to your hiring processes, to your promotion processes, to whether or not people still work at the company. And so we were too slow to embed those values in our performance evaluation. And so I think if we had been way faster at just saying, hey, these are our values and what we stand for.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
This is what it looks like in practice.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And if you're not living up to that, this isn't the right home for you, like that would have helped shape the culture a lot faster also because immediately people see, oh, wow, if they're serious about their values and they're asking people to leave if they won't live up to their values, well, then I better get on board with the values or find another culture that fits my personality better.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think it's such a priority, but it's hard to understand what it means. I had so many people telling me, you've got to really focus on the culture, focus on the culture. You're like, what do you mean by culture? It's actually just how people behave. That's really what we're saying. What is the collection of group behaviors that are acceptable or norms in your company?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
So I think instead of using this big culture word, which I was hearing a lot, but not understanding how it was like tactically connecting to our business. I think when we're talking with founders, we should just be more specific about, you know, how people are living the values of their company every day through their behaviors.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And getting really real about that and serious. But, you know, the tough conversations come where it's like, well, that person's a superstar, right? But they're not really living our kindness value. And Bobby, I think, was so great on this. Bobby is like, Evan, there's no such thing as a brilliant jerk. If you're really brilliant, how could you possibly be a jerk?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And you're like, damn, I love that. So I think this concept that if you're really that smart, how could you possibly be a jerk to people? That, I think, really informed our approach to building out our team. And I think... Gives you that clarity in those moments where you're like, wow, but they're so smart or they're so talented.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
It's like, yeah, but if they're that smart and talented, why can't they just be kind of people?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think a lot of people in the early days, you know, told us that we should sell it. I mean, there were a lot of – there was one embarrassing moment I remember. I joined a conference call early with some of our lawyers, and I don't think they had known I had joined, and they were talking about, you know, this thing is basically going to zero, you know what I mean? This was in the early days.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Like, it's just a fad, you know, da-da-da-da-da. And I'm like, oh, hey, guys.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
They hadn't known I joined because I joined a minute or two early or something like that. So I think there was a lot of skepticism in the early days and a lot of people who said, hey, sell now while you can. You're competing in a really, really tough industry with a lot of big players, and you don't know if people are going to continue to love this product.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I was like, what stories do you think I could tell about growing up? What do you think? And he was like, oh, you should tell them you were definitely like a contrarian. I was like, what do you mean a contrarian?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But I think what they missed was our vision for the future. They only saw what was in the public. We were working on all sorts of and still are working on all sorts of amazing new products that give us conviction in the future and our ability to make products that people really love.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But I think from the outside, when you were looking at Snapchat, you're like, people are just sending photos back and forth. I mean, how is this ever going to be a business? How is this ever going to grow for the long term?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Yeah, that was a fateful, fateful day for sure.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think it was an initial email. And I think we met at some point and they were interested in what we were doing. And, you know, at that time they were working on a competitor called Poke, you know, and so they were kind of talking with us, hey, you know, we're exploring this space kind of thing. What do you think? And maybe you want to join Facebook.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think they had just acquired Instagram to probably like a year earlier or something like that. And our view was that Instagram had been wildly undervalued and that acquisition ultimately had given up like a massive, massive opportunity.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
He's like, don't you remember you wrote that article that was like an expose of the math program because you were – you basically interviewed all these teachers and kids and parents and wrote this whole expose about how the math program could be better. And he was like – it was sort of like – maybe better left unsaid in that environment.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
That's not technically the number, but it's what's been reported publicly, so we can go with that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
There was a real conversation about what it would look like and, you know, to join forces. But ultimately, you know, when we talked with our board and our investors, you know, we decided that we'd rather go it alone.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Yeah, I think we were definitely at my dad's house.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I wish I could say it was wisdom. I think it was just that Bobby and I loved what we were doing. We loved what we were working on. We believed in the future of it. And ultimately, we were able to convince our investors as well that our opportunity was much bigger over time. And so I think that's what gave us, I guess, the confidence in making that decision.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've known Mark for a long time.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
We had some interesting conversations about what it could look like for us to work at Facebook. I want to be so sensitive to those conversations that I don't want to speak out of turn. But he's very strategic and very good at identifying. At the time, they had a piece of software that was identifying what are the fast-growing apps so that they could pursue them for acquisitions.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think at one point I went up there. He came and met us at – we met at Cheryl's Condo in like Santa Monica or something like that. Cheryl had a condo there. And so I think that's where we first met. Bobby and I met him.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
He just explained that he was working on Poke and that it was for picture messaging and that kind of thing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
It was less so like not wanting to join a big company. I think fundamentally we wanted to build a business that was different. I mean you go back to our first blog post and the way that we talked about wanting to offer an alternative to social media, that we felt like social media was about being pretty and perfect and we wanted – a way to communicate with our friends that was fun.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But the school, to their credit, supported me and, like, let me publish it and, you know, I think created an environment where, you know, kids could challenge authority, which was really, you know, something that I learned was okay.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
The company ethos, the values, the visions were so divergent. It was very hard to imagine that like we could keep doing what we love in the way that we loved doing it, like as a part of that organization, because they're just oriented in a very different way.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Not a moment.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Yeah, all of our investors were supportive. They would have made a lot of money. Yeah, but they did something very smart early on in a prior financing round, I guess around that time or before then, where Bobby and I were each able to sell $10 million of stock. So we each had $10 million, and we were like, wow, we made it. You know what I mean? We have enough money forever.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And that allowed us to just swing for the fences. I mean, at that point, you're like, let's just go for it. So there wasn't that feeling of like, oh, no, I'm not going to be able to buy a house. I'm not going to be able to like – you know have a family we were like we each got 10 million bucks like let's let's go for it
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Yeah. And I think you have to be, to your point, you have to be careful about approaching these situations as like zero sum, like either we're going to like go big or, you know, and with the risk that we'll lose it all, or, you know, we'll, we'll sell the company.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think, you know, there are all sorts of creative solutions that allow founders to take some money off the table, take care of their families and still swing for the fences and build a big business. And venture capitalists are really aligned with the swing for the fences philosophy. Growth investors may be less so as the business gets bigger.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But when you have venture capitalists, I mean, they're, you know, they're looking for 10x, 100x return. So I think, you know, to find a formula that works for founders that allows them to, you know, take care of their families, but also swing for the fences is, I think, a valuable approach.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Last time I saw him was at the Senate hearings, I think, what, last year.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
2014, 2015.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Life was pretty good. I met my wife in 2014, which was a game changer for me. Why now? She's an incredible, just an incredible woman and really gave me
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
a huge sense of stability and a massive amount of support she has a she really cares about wellness that's something that she's really passionate about so it's like i live with a wellness coach basically every single day and you know to have that sort of stability and support system while going through you know building our business was just profoundly helpful how do you manage that though how do you manage a romantic relationship when you are piloting a rocket ship
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think one of the things that was really helpful is she's incredibly accomplished herself. She has her own business that she is working on called Core Organics, which is an organic skincare business. So she really understands that it's hard to be an entrepreneur and was always really supportive of my work and my commitment to my work and our team.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think that was almost something that brought us together, not something that pushed us apart. And I think it's interesting. I talk to a lot of people who sometimes say, hey, my relationship's been under strain because I'm working so much. And what I realize when I have those conversations with people is very oftentimes they met their spouse when they weren't working as much.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
They met their spouse 10 years ago, 15 years, 20 years ago, you know, when they were just getting started in their career. And I think, you know, it can be difficult when you have a much bigger job and it's all time, you know, all consuming. And your spouse is like, remember when we first met and you weren't working all that much, you were spending more time with me.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
From the minute I met my wife, we were both working flat out. And so I think this expectation that, you know, we both work all the time to support our business, support our family, do what we love to do, was kind of just built into the relationship.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
You don't do many podcasts, do you? I don't do much public speaking at all. It's a 2025 New Year's resolution for me, though, so we'll see. I'm trying to share a bit more. Why? I think it's really important that people understand our company and what we stand for, why we make the decisions that we make. And I think part of that is getting to know me.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
One of the things that's really been helpful that we started doing a couple years ago is just having Sunday family day, always family day. And that means everyone's at home. And so if our kids want to have friends over or whatever, that's totally fine, but they're not going to their friends' houses. Everyone's together. And just dedicating that time to our family is really important.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Oh, wow. She gives very, very candid feedback. Which is a gift, right? It's a gift. Yeah, and I think she's really passionate about areas that are different than what I'm passionate about. And so, you know, she's able to give me feedback in different areas or things that I really even wouldn't consider, you know.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think one of the challenges that I have sometimes is I can have a very harsh tone. Even if what I'm saying is really I'm trying to be helpful or kind or whatever, I was raised by – my dad was a litigator. My mom was a tax lawyer. I grew up listening to my dad. have very intense conversations on the phone all the time. And so in business mode, I can be very direct.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I don't think it's helpful, and I don't think people want to listen when you have a sharp or aggressive tone. And so I think she's always just encouraging me, like, hey, you could say the same thing, but in a slightly different way, and people will hear it better.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
100%.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Really? Literally nothing better in the planet. I mean, I have not found anything close. Why? Because the love and connection that you have with your children is unlike anything else that you'll ever experience. I mean, it's profound.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Well, I think Miranda probably juggles it better than I do. I think – and she's really committed to spending time with our children. I mean that's something that's so important to her and it's important to me. I don't think – I spend a lot of time actually over the years just – I found people who are extremely successful and just like ask them like, hey, how do you raise great kids?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Like you've been extremely successful. How did you do it? And my basic takeaway from like a hundred of these conversations was basically that parents that are actually committed, that can spend that time – with their kids and do it themselves, engage with their kids themselves, they tend to have really fruitful relationship with their kids and their kids seem to turn out really great.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And it breaks my heart that there are so many parents that can't spend that direct one-on-one time with their kids, or I guess in my case, one-on-four time with their kids, because that seems to be kind of the key ingredient is that connection with your parents. Being there.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Bobby and I started this business 13 years ago, and we have made a bunch of different choices along the way. But I think unless we talk about them, nobody knows. And so it's really important for us to share how we make decisions and our design philosophy and that kind of thing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
It's not my joke. We have appropriated that joke from, I think, Kara Swisher who originated it. But I think now that they've copied ephemeral messaging and stories, everything, you know, a lot of the stuff we've done in augmented reality. Of course, now they say they're working on glasses, which, you know, we've been working on for over a decade. I think I've earned that title. I don't know.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
One of the things that's incredibly irritating about it is they repurpose our inventions to make products that make people feel unhappy and bad about themselves. One of the things that was so fascinating just in the last year, there was a study out of the Netherlands, totally independent study out of the Netherlands. We weren't involved. Another one out of Australia.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And it was comparing, I think, like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. And it It basically found that Snapchat, the study determined there were no negative mental health implications of using Snapchat, but there were negative mental health implications of using Instagram and TikTok.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And in fact, I think the study in the Netherlands found Snapchat actually promotes well-being and helps promote your relationships as well. And so I think what's really frustrating is when people think because they've copied some of our features that the products are the same or that they do the same thing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
when our product is designed in a way that's very different, that's designed to support your relationships with your close friends and family, and ultimately is something that supports your well-being. And so what we never want anyone to think is if they're using stories on Instagram, that that's the same as Snapchat.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And even though they stole the name of the product or some of the functionality of it, the way that Snapchat is designed on the whole is something that can have a really positive impact in people's lives. And that's not something that people feel when they use Instagram.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
No, we didn't do that. I think one of the things that I really admire about Kevin Systrom is when they copied the stories feature, they stopped pretending that they were doing anything different. I mean, with things like Poke, they tried to sort of pass it off as their own creation. Oh, we're doing it a little bit differently.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
With stories, Kevin Systrom came out and just said, hey, we think this is a really great feature, this is a really great product, and we're gonna steal it and put it in Instagram, and we think you're gonna love it. And I think the honesty, at least, was admirable.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think even beyond that, media has really reshaped to focus on individuals. Individuals are what people are interested in. They're the ones who have distribution. So I think that the center of gravity has shifted away from the entity, like the business, to focus more on the individual characters and storytellers.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But back then, there were a lot of apps that would get popular really, really quickly and then sort of fade away. And a lot of people told us that we shouldn't sell it. They said, you're just sending photos back and forth. How is this gonna grow for the long term?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Thank you. Thank you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Thank you. Thank you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Well, what's really cool about product design is it... The basic concept is you don't need to wait around and wait for an idea to fall out of heaven or get struck by lightning.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
You can systematically create new ideas by listening to people, empathizing with them, and then basically prototyping solutions to the problems that they share with you and then iterating on those solutions by bringing those solutions back to them and saying, what do you think? Does this solve your problem?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And that may be one of the reasons why in some of these studies it shows that people feel better when they use Snapchat because they're not encountering really violent content when they're using Snapchat.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
So for me to be able to combine my love of making things with this process for making things that could be useful to people, making new products, that was really exciting to me. And the product design school was created by a really visionary guy named David Kelly. I had the opportunity to take a class from him, and it was really just an incredible experience.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I don't think so because I don't think saying extreme violence is not something we want on our platform. I don't think that's political. I think that's a values-based decision. Or saying we don't want to service pornography to our community. I don't think that that's a political choice. I think that's a values-based decision.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
So I think unfortunately right now in our culture, there's actually a real temptation to politicize things that are actually quite commonsensical. And so I think we have to avoid that temptation and instead focus on what are the values or the business choices that people are making.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I'm not sure. I think there's a moment in time when they seem to have a lot of support to do it. I think it'll be challenging for them in Europe, for example, where there's a lot of rules and regulations about prohibiting things like hate speech, for example, or terrorist content. And I think it'll be interesting to see how they navigate that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
It's certainly a lot less expensive to avoid moderating content. It costs money to moderate content, and that could be a consideration as well.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
That's a great question. I've seen some reports and some studies that show that if content is moderated, engagement can go down. Certainly, there are studies that show that negative content spreads much further and faster on social media for human reasons. But I'm not sure in this particular instance.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I don't read too much into it, to be honest with you. To me, it feels like more of a continuation of almost, you know, at least in the case, I think we can use Meta as the example just because they are essentially the social media market. And what's really interesting about their choices is what they've tended to do is sort of follow the political winds.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
So when Biden was president, and Mark's been very public about this, they did a lot of very proactive content moderation and And that was something that apparently, I guess, the White House at the time was asking them to do very proactively.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And now it seems like, you know, with the new administration, this new administration has a different approach to content moderation and Meta is following that. And so what I've seen mostly from Meta over time is that they're quite willing to sort of navigate the political landscape and follow, you know, really follow the lead of politicians here. Is that something to be admired here?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
No, I think it's definitely a survivalist approach for sure when you're such a large and powerful company, right? If you look at Meta, they have so much litigation with the government right now. The government is scrutinizing so many different aspects of their business.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And so when you're at that scale and you're controlled by a single founder, I think it's a survivalist instinct that means that depending on who is in the White House, you change your policies.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I love our country so much. I think that Americans across our country have an incredible spirit that has allowed us to overcome extraordinary challenges together. More recently, the COVID pandemic, longer ago, things like World War II, you know, where we came together, not only as a country, but more broadly in the world to confront, you know, the horror of the Axis powers.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
That was a fateful day, for sure. But we decided that we'd rather go it alone.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think our country in very critical and important moments comes together in really powerful ways. And that's something that really inspires me.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
He's on Snapchat. He's on Snapchat. Certainly on YouTube and Roblox, which he likes a lot. So that's sort of the current situation. You must have thought about this.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think in general our view – each of our children are so different. They're going to develop in different ways. So I don't think like a one-size-fits-all model is the right approach here. I think it really depends on where each of our kids are at at any given point and who they are and what they want to do.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think one thing I would really encourage them to be thoughtful about is their privacy, especially as young people. And I think there are a lot of young people at a very young age who are posting a lot of public content online. And I think it's very important to be thoughtful about those sorts of decisions because once you've posted something publicly, you can't get that back.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
A lot of the product design school at Stanford is oriented around physical products. Of course, now it's so much more than that. But when I was there at the time and it was under the mechanical engineering department, it was very oriented around physical products, understanding materials, but all part of this framework of how do we understand the problems that people are facing?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I think, you know, it's really important as we talk about technology that we focus on the healthy and constructive ways that, you know, Flynn, for example, at 14 can use technology like staying in touch with his friends and family. I think the real watershed moment for us as a family was up until the COVID pandemic, we didn't allow Flynn to have a phone.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
We really didn't allow him to use a computer. When the pandemic happened, he had to stay in touch with his friends. He had to be connected with his friends. We knew that that was vitally important for his well-being, right? And I think the challenge we have is almost the whiplash that young people are experiencing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Because throughout the pandemic, they were told, you can only talk to your friends on the computer. You can only talk to your friends on the phone, right? And then coming out of the pandemic, what they're hearing a lot from adults now is, stay off your phone. Don't use your phone at all. And I think both extremes are unusual.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And for us as parents, we think a lot about what's a healthy relationship with technology. Of course, we want you to go, you know, run cross country and hang out with your friends, you know, or go, you know, go for a walk, go to the mall and just talk.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But we know when Flynn's not with his friends, when, you know, they're spread out all over the world, you know, or they're after school trying to meet up, like, It's helpful to use technology. It's helpful to message your friends. And so I think we have to find this right balance of saying, cultivate a healthy, engaged lifestyle with all of your interests, your hobbies, your passions.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And then if you want to use your phone to stay in touch with your friends or watch entertaining content or play a game to relax, that's healthy too.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
We would probably say no. We have said no historically, although he hasn't really pressed the issue.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think it would be quite good for our business if they were banned. I think the bigger picture that we really have to figure out as a country and in terms of our relationship with China is to figure out the areas where businesses are going to collaborate and do business across the United States and China and areas where they are not.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
So you're probably familiar, many technology companies cannot operate in China for a variety of reasons. Maybe they don't have a license, they haven't been allowed to operate, et cetera. But they are allowed to operate here in the United States where we have an open market, a free market.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I think we have to be very thoughtful at this point in time as a country because being an open market has always been a massive strategic advantage for the United States. It's something that the United – free trade, things like that have been massively supportive of our economic growth.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
How do we empathize with them? And then how do we design solutions that solve those problems?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But we're now at a moment where I think we need to be thoughtful and say, with some countries, free trade in some areas makes a lot of sense. So if we're talking about kids' toys or diapers or you name it, right? Like, let it rip. That's good for both countries, and both countries, I think, can do business in those areas.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But when it comes to other areas, like, you know, information services, or maybe it's critical minerals, maybe it's some types of pharmaceutical, you know, compounds or ingredients— Those are areas where the countries aren't going to be able to collaborate because ultimately they have very different goals, ideologies, visions for the future.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I think the issue that the business community has right now is there's not enough clarity in that regard. So the more clarity the government can create and say, you know, the United States and China working together can say, hey, we agree. These areas are open for business. And these areas are areas where we're going to compete and we're not going to collaborate.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
That would help the business community. Because I think what's so frustrating, imagine being a Chinese entrepreneur right now, building this really successful company, and then the US government saying, hey, given our country and our values and the strategic relationship we have with China, this is not going to work.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think there's already some early flavors of that with folks really focused on data localization and whatnot. And that's sort of my point around I think we need to get really clear about with which countries are we going to have open free flow of data and trade and which countries are there areas where that might not work as effectively.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Yeah, that was really a game changer. So that class called Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital, and the class is a series of case studies basically led by entrepreneurs who come in and present the story of creating their business and lessons learned, and then it's an open Q&A. I got to listen to their amazing stories and ask them questions, and that was super inspiring to me.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
You know what? A lot of people warned us about going public. And they said there's going to be a lot of pressure to be short-term oriented and this sort of thing, that the quarterly scrutiny would be challenging for our business. Ultimately, I think the transition from being a private company to a public company was challenging. It's quite different. But
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But now I really think the discipline and the rigor around the quarterly performance, the need to forecast your business really effectively and then compare how you're tracking to your forecast, helps the company run in a much more effective way. So that sort of scrutiny, I think, can be really helpful for the leadership team and then the broader team in terms of running the business.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Now, where it can get difficult, is when it comes to long-term investment and innovation. So for example, right now, interest rates have gone way up. Folks are discounting cash flows at a much higher rate as a result. And so there's a huge focus on profitability for many, many businesses across all sectors, right? What we know is true for long-term innovation is that consistency really matters.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
You can't just flick a switch and turn on and off innovation, turn on and off investments in new products. It's very difficult and disruptive to do that. And so we've made a decision through this period of time, even though we've made some really difficult and painful
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
decisions to shut down some of our projects, we're still investing at a higher rate right now through this period of time, even though we know that that means that our share price might be lower because people are discounting our cash flows differently due to higher interest rates.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
So I think that's when it gets challenging, the actual reality of continuing to invest through challenging periods of time or periods where interest rates have gone
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Yeah, there are a bunch. You know, that piece of advice was so helpful to us, especially in the early days of our business. One of our first venture investors was like, hey, Evan, you got to get really good at saying no. He's like, you have almost no resources. I think we were a team of four people at the time.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
um you know and you're going to get all this inbound because the company's growing people are going to want to do partnerships or do an interview or what and just if you can just get really good at saying no and stay focused on your community stay focused on your customers like that's the that's the secret and that focus has really helped us over the years but as you point out there's there have been times where we've had to refocus or we've had to reassess uh areas of our business i think one good example uh were mini games we had an amazing hundreds of people at
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
using our mini games. And people loved them. It was an amazing platform. You could play real-time multiplayer games together inside of Snapchat. And ultimately, It was just clear that that was not going to be a really, really big business for us, at least at that time. And so we had to make the really painful decision to shut down our minigames business.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think that's a really good question. That is to some degree where intuition, you know, plays an important role, but it's also where feedback plays a really important role.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And that's why, for example, with our last generation of Spectacles that we announced last year, the fifth generation of Spectacles, our goal was just to get it into developers' hands as quickly as possible so that we can listen and hear, okay, so what sort of things do you want to build with Spectacles? What tools are available? What isn't there? What do you think would be really interesting?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Because the faster that we can learn from people actually using our product, the faster we can make it better and find that product market fit that's so important.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think the biggest thing that I took away from my time at Stanford and from that class was the focus on going after really, really big opportunities. And I think one of the things that's so different, growing up here in LA, I think a lot of the business community that I was exposed to is more focused on cash flow, right? Like how quickly can this business turn a profit?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
You have to be very careful in technology, I think, because things change slowly and then they change very quickly. And I think that was certainly the case with ChatGPT, right? People felt like, wow, this new technology came out of nowhere. But no, they'd been working on it for, what, a decade? I mean, you know, and consistently trying to make progress.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And so I think, you know, as long as you find something that you really believe can make a positive impact that people can use in a really compelling way, you're right that sometimes you have to be patient. But other times you can invent new things that bring that timeline in.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And so I think a lot of times our team is thinking about like, okay, yeah, sure, in the current trajectory, that could take a really long time. But what if we thought about it differently or invented some new piece of technology that could help us accelerate our vision to glasses that help people share these experiences that overlay computing on the world? And that's part of the fun too.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Did that piss you off? The only thing that frustrated me was that the Luxottica guys had actually come to us probably back in 2017. Who's that? Luxottica, Essilor Luxottica is the company that makes Ray-Bans. They had come to us in 2017 saying, wow, it's so awesome what you guys are doing with Spectacles. We love it. We should find a way to partner.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
So we talked with them, of course, all about everything that we were doing. And then they went radio silent and decided not to partner with us and then obviously resurfaced doing this with Meta. So I think ultimately it's something like that. I think ultimately... You learn a lot, I think, growing a business and really understanding how people do business.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I think it shows you a lot about the world. And I think it's so important for entrepreneurs to really know that if they've got a really compelling idea, they've got an amazing service, that they can compete, that they can build really compelling businesses, even though it seems impossible with such giant companies, whether it's Essilor or Luxottica, which is the giant in the glasses space, or
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
or meta, that I think Snapchat hopefully can be, you know, an example of a company that's been able to stay independent and compete with these really, really large businesses.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I really love that you jumped to education because I think it's so profoundly powerful. I mean, even in my own experience, my ability to learn such amazing things in such a short period of time and connect different ideas together It's an incredible tool for discovery and for learning. And so I can't wait for our kids to use these sorts of tools. I'm sure Flynn does to some degree.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
You know, how can we do that really predictably? How much cash are we gonna generate? At Stanford, the business culture is entirely oriented around, well, how big is that opportunity? Like, is that a huge opportunity? Is that opportunity big enough? Because if you're not going after something that could reach billions of people, that's not that interesting.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But as a thought partner, AI is just incredibly powerful. So I do think, especially for creative people, it should be an unbelievably powerful tool to be able to iterate, to get feedback, to explore different ideas, explore different options. Even when I'm writing something and I'm stuck on like, yeah, this just doesn't feel right. And I'm like, can you just give me 10 options?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
It's really helpful to brainstorm, you know, to find that right word.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I don't know. I think it's going to be really important that obviously people continue to write. And oftentimes, like my first draft is on a piece of paper, right? So I do think that that is going to be important. But I think the bigger question for me is whether or not AI will help people get better at asking questions.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Because ultimately, asking a great question and having someone who can help answer it is the key to learning. I mean, that's, I think, perhaps the greatest blessing of having a great teacher or a great mentor or a parent is that you get to ask all sorts of great questions and get those answers.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And so I think if we're now in a modality that really is all about asking the right question and doing that really repeatedly, if that can train us all to ask questions questions more effectively, that would be a very big deal.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think generally speaking, as we have looked historically at the evolution of technology, these sorts of foundational technologies, you're right that they've been disruptive, but they ultimately have massively positive and beneficial effects.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I mean, I think if you look at a foundational technology like the internet, a foundational technology maybe like the motor vehicle, an airplane, these are the sorts of foundational technologies that I think can really change the trajectory of the world and ultimately make people's lives better. I think the key will be how do we navigate that change together?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And that was a totally different way of thinking for me, combined with the venture capital approach, which is really to invest a lot of money early and scale quickly and then build out the business later after you've achieved scale, after you've achieved mass adoption.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And that'll be something that will be really important to do thoughtfully. And I think... You know, in many ways, the good news about this sort of technological change is it's always governed by people. I mean, folks, I think, almost overly fixate on new technology developments and don't think enough about what does actually the human adoption curve look like?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
How are we making this something that's easier to use, easier for people to understand, easier for people to integrate into their lives, into their workflows? And so I think a lot of the work for a big foundational technology like AI is going to be much more around how humans are interacting with it, interpreting it, understanding how it fits in their lives.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Much cheaper.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I mean, in some ways, it feels like we're emerging from like a two-year winter into an early spring. The last two years have been really challenging. We had to rebuild our entire ad platform, change the way that we go to market, really help advertisers find more success, and at the same time, do a lot of that for creators as well. We've seen it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
a tremendous growth in terms of, you know, I think last quarter, the creators posting grew something like 40% year over year. There was a billion public posts a month on Snapchat. And that's an area we've invested in a lot as well. But it's been a very challenging last two years.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
So I would almost say maybe like very, very early spring, you're starting to see, you know, some green shoots, but, you know, and the frost is melting.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
No, I think given the voting structure of the company, you know, Bobby and I have voting stock and non-voting stock is what's publicly traded. I think generally, you know, sometimes people will say, hey, if you guys ever, you know, want to retire or something, keep us in mind.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But I think, you know, in terms of, you know, kicking an offer over the sill or something, that doesn't make a ton of sense given our company structure.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Please, take it. Okay, good. Council is something that I stole from the school that I went to growing up called Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences, which is quite a unique school. And one of the things that they have at Crossroads is a council. And
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
You know, basically starting in middle school, you get together with a group of let's call it 10 or 12 classmates and you sit in a circle and there are three rules. It's, you know, speak from the heart, listen from the heart and be spontaneous.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
How much people care about what they do and the ability to move quickly is the predictor of success. And at Snapchat, we have a really small design team. It's nine people who are constantly generating an incredible number of ideas and products and features because 99% of ideas are not good, but 1% is.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And it's essentially, you know, turn-based storytelling where you go around the circle and, you know, it can be anything as simple as like, how was your weekend? Or, you know, what's a rosebud and a thorn from, you know, the last week? And it really creates an opportunity, A, for people to listen to one another because you're taking turns going around the circle.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But B, you get to know people in a very, very different way. And I saw how powerful it was in middle school. Middle school was a tough time, was a tough time for me. But in council, I was able to connect with my classmates, you know, in a really thoughtful and maybe deeper way that you wouldn't just kind of around the water cooler or whatever at the office.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And so for us, ultimately, when we came back, to LA and we were in the Blue House, one of the big decisions we were confronting at the time was whether or not we should move the company from LA to the Bay Area. And there was a lot of pressure, you know, hey, all the tech talent is, you know, in the Bay Area. It's really important for you guys to be up there for the talent.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Yeah, and I think it makes sense because it's so hard to create a business. Your odds of success are so low. So it's really important that you go after something really big so that if you're successful, that at the end of the day, there's a huge opportunity at the end of the rainbow.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And so we just got our team together and, you know, they had our first council and everyone went around the circle and shared their thoughts. Should we stay in LA or not? How did they feel about that? What did they think? And what was so clear Coming out of that conversation, we didn't even need to make a decision.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
It was just obvious that we believed in LA and wanted to be in LA, and the team thought it was actually something really important to our business, to our identity, to actually the way that we hired talent, because people had to really commit to moving to LA to be a part of the company. So that was the first time we used Council at Snap, and I saw how effective it was in the workplace setting.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Then as the business got a lot bigger and it became much more important to connect with people who were new to the company or worked in a different area of the company, Council became just a really useful tool for doing that. At Snap, we have council facilitators whose job it is to run these councils. And now many more companies are interested in doing this.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And we also help train companies or offer sessions for other companies to help them bring their team members together.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Yeah, and it's usually not sitting around a table. It's usually sitting on the floor in a circle, which, again, I think helps create that feeling. You know, when you're sitting in a circle, everyone is situated equally, which I think is a really important thing. As you mentioned, companies have a lot of hierarchy.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think it feels really different in a company when everyone's seated around a circle and everyone's voice is important and everyone's voice is heard, whether it's just saying, wow, you know. That was a really tough weekend. Or actually, I had an amazing time. I went out to dinner with my wife. It was fabulous.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I think people find new points of connection that they maybe wouldn't have found otherwise without it. Interesting.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
We are more than four days a week in the office on average. And is that by policy or is that just what's happening? That is by policy and also what's happening.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
During the pandemic, I thought I would never go back to the office. I was like, you know, going into the pandemic, I was waking up before our kids woke up. I was getting home after they were asleep. There was a moment I was like, what am I doing with my life? I'm never seeing our kids. What am I going to do? And the pandemic happened. And it was like a miracle.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I'm like, oh, my God, I get to see our kids every single day. I get to wake up and see our kids. And I have an open door policy. If I'm working from home in my home office, our kids can come in any time. It was only a problem once when one of our boys came in fully nude with two Oreos, which actually prompted me to consider going back to the office.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But I thought it was important for our kids that, hey, if I'm at home, I'm not shut away in my office. You can come in anytime with anything, and I'll help you out. Sometimes it meant they spent a lot of time sitting on my lap in meetings. But in any case, there was a period of time in the pandemic where I was like, why would I ever go back to the office? I'm here with my family.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But I think, you know, that the adrenaline and the teamwork that happened, you know, during the pandemic when we were all able to work together really effectively remotely, that was only possible because we had been working together physically for such a long period of time. We had all that trust built. We had all that shorthand built.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
We had that, you know, many times, you know, long roadmaps of ideas we had come up with to get physically together. And that really sustained the company through that period of time. It became clear to me that the culture was starting to fray, right? People don't learn the culture as quickly when they're alone and remote and separated all around the world.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I was really worried about our ability to consistently be creative, which is so important to our business if we weren't physically together. So ultimately, and especially after that Oreo incident, we thought it was pretty important to get back to the office.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
One of the things that we tried to do that helped team members is just give a pretty long runway. We made that decision pretty early on and then gave team members quite an extended period of time. I think it was like six or nine months. For folks who had extenuating circumstances, we would grant exceptions. And over time, that allowed people to adapt their lives.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Sometimes they'd rented a house or bought a house somewhere else and needed to move back to one of our hub office locations. And So we wanted to give people enough flexibility to do that, not just have them wake up one morning and say, come back to the office. That's not super thoughtful.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think what is exciting, though, about the technology business is the way that it scales. And so I think what's different than your coffee shop example is, Once you build a great service once, once we build Snapchat one time, it can scale to 850 million people around the world, right? Whereas you'd have to go build a new coffee shop on every street corner to scale the business.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
To me, it seems like the biggest differentiator is how much you care. I mean, that just seems day in and day out as I meet entrepreneurs and people working on businesses, how much do you care about your business, your team, your customer? And those are the entrepreneurs, I think, that are really successful. They go that extra mile. And that care can come from different places, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
It can be about the impact that people want to make in the world. It can be about something that people really want to invent. It can be their love of their customers and seeing the smile on their customers' faces. But How much people care about what they do seems to me to be quite a large predictor, if not the predictor, of success.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
That's one of the things I loved about your book is you said, hey, people are thinking about stress wrong, which I thought was really, really powerful. I wish more people talked about it that way because I think you just – anyways, you wrote it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
What I thought was hilarious – so this has been one of my hilarious findings from my ring over the last couple of days trying it out. I finally had enough days that it like gave me a stress score or whatever and I'm just not stressed during the day, which really lines up with like how I experience work. I don't find work to be very stressful.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think a lot of it has become very normal because over the years, we've grown our business and encountered all sorts of wild situations that at this point, it's just a daily normal thing. Yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
No. It's something that I need to work on, especially celebrating our team as well. Like, you know, just providing more of that really positive feedback, that's not something I do a ton, especially around, like, outcome-focused goals. When I see a great idea, if I see a great new idea, then I get really happy and excited. I love it. But, you know, to me, you know, some of these big corporate events
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
milestones, like the growth of the community is cool. I was talking to someone the other day, they were like, you should throw a party when you guys reach a billion people. I was like, oh my God, what a great idea. Why didn't I think of it? So I think we should celebrate things like that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
That would be a real problem for me because so much of creating products is about connecting with people and listening to people and being able to empathize with them. So like I absolutely under no circumstances can cut off my emotional response. I think I pick the things or the things that make me feel really happy are things like –
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
being with our children or something, or, you know, Hart did really well on his math test the other day. And I was like, awesome.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I got super excited about that. But I think to your point, one of the things I do regret at some point is not celebrating some of those great moments. I think, you know, sometimes as an entrepreneur, when everything is like going up into the right and going super well, you're always like, what's going to go wrong? You know, what could go wrong?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And so once I think you start seeing the world in terms of the potential to scale and the potential to build a product or service that can reach billions of people, it really changes the opportunities you identify or the services that you want to build.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And so you don't think about celebrating that great moment because you're thinking about, you know, the next day or what you could be doing differently to make sure the business can keep growing. And Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Thank you. Thank you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Thank you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I mean, I don't know if we want to go down this path and talk about entrepreneurship in Europe, but I think one of the real challenges in Europe is how small the different markets are in each country. And so I think what's really interesting when I talk to entrepreneurs in Europe, oftentimes they're very focused on growing first in their country and using that market as a stepping stone.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Thank you. I mean, our team members are extraordinarily talented at what they do across our business. And by nature, I'm just not very good at those things.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
But all the countries in Europe are quite different. There are different cultures and different languages. And so sometimes entrepreneurs can spend too much time trying to grow in Europe rather than what I've seen out of some companies. In Australia, for example, they're on an island. The first thing these entrepreneurs are thinking about is like, how do I go grow in the U.S. ?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
How do I go grow in China? How do I go grow in a really, really big market and get to scale really quickly? And then I can go reinvest and grow in Europe or grow in other countries where it might be more difficult to grow.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And so I think for me, the real secret, I guess, or not a secret, the focus of what I've tried to do over the years, as so many entrepreneurs do, is say, how can I spend more of my time doing what I'm good at, collaborating with our team, trying to create new products, be creative, and then have a team around me that's so much better at everything else that I couldn't possibly be better at.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Interestingly, it is the strategic advantage. To be 20 years old and to not know anything so that you can ask any question and not look like an idiot is the greatest gift in the world. I mean, I was almost always the youngest person in the room. Almost always. And that was such a blessing because everyone's like, oh, what are you working on? Oh, an app? That's cool.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I'd be like, yeah, actually, would you mind talking to me about the best ways to prepare your company to be public? And people are like, sure. So I think being able to use that naivete as the fundamental advantage to be able to learn quickly is so important.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Uh, hopefully never. I mean, that's the whole, that's like what I love to do is the curiosity, the asking questions.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I think they should really ask themselves if they love what they're doing. And if they really love what they're doing, that will be the fuel that will carry them the whole way. But there are so many people who are trapped building businesses or in jobs that don't really love what they do, who haven't found how to use their special gifts in a way that applies to the business world.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And I think so much of life is trying to figure out what is that thing that I can do that I just love that brings out the best in me and my talents. And I think not giving up in pursuing that is just so important.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
I had a lot of fun, and thank you for helping me with my 2025 resolution.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Unfortunately, like everybody, which is why I've caved.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Oftentimes what we've done with Snapchat is actually follow the growth. So looking for countries where people have already started using the product, already love it, are giving us a bunch of feedback.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
And then, you know, we'll send folks there or we'll figure out how to sort of build on the momentum or make sure it's localized properly and make sure we're working with local creators so that the content's relevant. But I think, you know, because our service is based on communication, you know, Snapchat doesn't really work unless you're using it locally. with a friend, you got to use it together.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
What we look for is just that momentum where friends are using it to communicate with one another and then figure out how to build on top of that with the content ecosystem or augmented reality and those sorts of things. What was your first idea that failed? Oh, my – well, there were – I mean I made an orange juicer at one point. But this – but I think the biggest failure was future freshmen.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
There were a lot of very good lessons. The first one is...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
Bobby and I – I was really fortunate to meet Bobby. He lived across the hall from me at our fraternity at Stanford. And we shared this love of making stuff. So we kind of worked on a couple of social ideas that were interesting. But – The one thing we decided to spend a lot of time on was Future Freshmen, which was designed to help kids apply to college.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Snapchat CEO: Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No To $3 Billion From Mark Zuckerberg! It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This!
It was something that we'd had direct experience with, so we could empathize with how difficult the process is. We had siblings who were also applying to college. So we spent about 18 months building a full-featured website. You could select the schools you wanted to go to. It would aggregate all the essay questions and requirements and make it really easy to to apply.