Evan Spiegel, Snap

Evan Spiegel is the co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat. At Stanford, he enrolled in the product design program. In 2011, in a class project, he and two classmates — Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy — sketched out the idea for an app where photos disappeared. The insight was counterintuitive: in an era when everyone was obsessed with permanence and curation online, ephemerality might be the point. They built it. Spiegel dropped out before graduation to run it full time. What followed was one of the most turbulent ascents in Silicon Valley history. Facebook tried to buy Snapchat in 2013 for $3 billion in cash. Spiegel, 23 years old, said no. The decision was mocked at the time and later vindicated. Snap went public in March 2017 at a $24 billion valuation, making Spiegel — still in his mid-twenties — one of the youngest self-made billionaires in history. Spiegel has always argued that Snap is a camera company — that the camera is the starting point for how the next generation communicates, not a feature, but the interface itself. Snapchat pioneered Stories, a format that Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube all copied within years. It pioneered augmented reality filters at consumer scale. It built a maps product that shows where your friends are in real time. Every one of those ideas was imitated. Now he's making his biggest bet yet. Snap's sixth-generation Spectacles are AR glasses — a genuine attempt to build the successor to the smartphone. They overlay digital information onto the real world in real time. Spiegel believes the camera on your face will eventually replace the screen in your pocket. He and his wife Miranda Kerr run the Spiegel Family Fund, focused on arts, education, and human rights. In 2022 alone, he gave $20 million to a scholarship program in Stockton and wiped out the student debt of an entire graduating class at Otis College of Art and Design. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/evan-spiegel Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ Deel: https://deel.com/senra Axon by AppLovin: https://axon.ai/senra HubSpot: https://hubspot.com Chapters (00:00:00) Edwin Land Influence (00:02:01) Art Science Upbringing (00:03:27) Computers And Connection (00:05:50) Smartphone Addiction Lens (00:09:30) Building For Humanity (00:13:15) From Internships To Snapchat (00:17:02) Snapchat vs. Social Media (00:18:38) Stories And Vertical Video (00:22:22) Uncompromising Kind Culture (00:28:34) Snap Leadership And Design (00:37:38) AI Supercharges Snap (00:41:57) No Moat In Software (00:42:31) Beating the Clone (00:43:50) Messaging Network Effects (00:44:58) Camera Out of Pocket (00:45:49) Specs Market Reality (00:48:28) AR Platform Explosion (00:52:14) Vision-Led Product Design (00:54:09) Why Not Luxottica (00:59:11) Owning the Stack (01:03:02) Snap the Middle Child (01:08:04) Crisis Without Burnout (01:10:02) Snapchat Plus Growth (01:12:54) Rebuilding the Ad Engine (01:19:03) Subscriptions Over Ads (01:21:14) Fighting Giants With AI (01:22:04) Why Hardware Stands Alone (01:25:29) Snap Lab Origins (01:25:59) New Apps Beyond Snapchat (01:28:29) Focus And Founder Drive (01:32:14) Surfacing Problems Fast (01:36:08) Flat Culture Meritocracy (01:39:36) Last Company And Giving Back (01:41:15) Turning Down Billions (01:48:51) Snapchat Funds New Computing (01:51:24) Crucible Year And Schedule (01:53:56) Stress Reframed Meditation (01:56:09) Explainer In Chief (01:57:07) Closing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Senra?

  Super excited to talk to you. We've been talking a bunch before we started recording. I did a podcast on you like almost 10 years ago. It's episode, I think, 22 of Founders, based on this book on how to turn down a billion dollars. The thing that stuck out to me the most that when I read that book, because a lot of that story takes place when you're still in college, and you're talking about two of your entrepreneurial heroes. And Steve Jobs, makes sense, my entrepreneurial hero too. But you mentioned this guy named Edwin Land. And I'm reading this, and I'm like, how the fuck does a 21-year-old kid even know who Edwin Land is? I've done like 10 podcasts on him, read every single biography. Tell me what, like, how you discovered Edwin Land and what you admired about him?

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, he's so central to the history of photography. And so, you know, as we've set out to try to reinvent the camera and how people express themselves with the camera, we studied a lot, you know, about the evolution of the camera over time. I mean, one of the funny stories that we found out, the first selfie ever was taken by a guy named Robert Cornelius. And my co-founder, Bobby, his name is Robert Cornelius Murphy. So like, we found, just like by unpacking like the history of photography, a lot of interesting, you know, similarities and parallels. And we learned a ton from founders like Edwin Land, who transformed photography really by focusing on building amazing products and thinking about, you know, how to make sure those products fit into people's lives and uplifted humanity. I think, you know, if you look at instant photography and the role that that played in people's lives,

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Edwin thought of the camera as something that was incredibly personal, right? And I think, um, as we've looked at the sort of trajectory of technology, over the long arc of time, technology gets more and more and more and more personal. And so I think as technology gets more deeply interwoven in our lives, the founders who are thinking about making technology more personal and how it, you know, how the things they're inventing like fit into and support humanity, I think that's a real advantage.

• 1:49David Senra?

  But how does a 21-year-old kid decide? Because you even said it in the book, that you're like, "I want to build a company at the intersection of technology and liberal arts." What was happening, that you were interested like in doing that?

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Part of it was my background growing up. So I went to school in Santa Monica here, you know, and a school called Crossroads.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Crossroads, you know, the full name for Crossroads is actually Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences. So it actually is, you know, the intersection of science and art together. And actually, a lot of what this school is focused on is developing empathy, building empathy. And they have this thing called council, for example, where you sit with about 12 other students and, you know, speak from the heart and take turns expressing yourself. And the school is really oriented on how you build strong relationships, build empathy with other people. And so I literally, I grew up at a school that was so focused on the intersection of art and science, but then also wrapped all of it in, you know, a commitment to humanity, to understanding one another, to building relationships, you know, to giving back. I mean, the school is very anchored in community service. Our, our, three of our kids go there now, which is fun.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Some of the teachers are still there. But I think a lot of it was from my upbringing and that being a real focus. And then, you know, as I, as I got a bit older and I got, you know, into things like graphic design and I built my own computer, I was always sort of working at that intersection of art and technology.

• 3:11David Senra?

  Yeah, I think the perception of you is like, you're like this cool, like, you know, designer, but you're actually self-described as like a nerd growing up.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  My wife and I always joke, "It's cool to be uncool." So I definitely don't think of myself as cool. And, and my background really was, you know, in the computer lab. I mean, I, it's, it's one of the things that also inspired a lot of the work that we do. Because as I reflect on growing up, one of my frustrations or disappointments with the way that computers have been built over time is that they actually pulled us away from one another. So growing up, you know, during lunch, rather than being on the recess yard, running around with my friends, I was so inspired by what computers could do. I was obsessed with computers, so I was in the computer lab all day long. And computers, I think, you know, whether it was the mainframe or the desktop, you know, have, have sort of pulled us away from one another, away from society, brought us indoors, right into this very like, single-player experience.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  And so a lot of what I've thought about and a lot of what has inspired me is like, how do we take all these extraordinary benefits that computing brings to the world, but actually use it to support our connections with one another, our connections to the world? Can we build a computer that brings us outside, right, that we use together with friends? Because I think, you know, one of the side effects of my love of technology growing up was that it pulled me away from, you know, more social relationships or just running around playing on the schoolyard.

• 4:28David Senra?

  So wait, you had that philosophy even back then when you were in your twenties?

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of like what inspired how we thought about the evolution of Snapchat. I mean, even basic things like opening into the camera, right? It opens into your experience of the world, right? Not, you know, a feed of content from other people, not a messaging feed alerting you to what other people are sending you. It literally opens into your experience. And so from the very beginning, we've thought about like, how do we ground your experience of computing, like, in what is right in front of you in the present moment and inspire you to create from that?

• 4:58David Senra?

  Why do you think that the way computing was before, it would just isolate you? So essentially, you're just staring at a screen, getting materials pushed to you?

• 5:05Speaker 01

  I think the early versions of computers, just given their physical and technological constraints, right? Like, whether it was a mainframe, you had to go to like a building to use a computer, right? Or a desktop that you had to keep plugged into the wall. I think those physical constraints pulled you out of whatever environment you wanted to be in. I think the laptop and the mobile, you know, mobile phones are representative of this continuum of computing getting more personal. But I think today, people feel like, you know, I think they're spending seven or eight hours, on average, staring at screens. They feel like screens are pulling them out of the moment, or away from friends. Or when they're at the dinner table, they're looking at a phone instead of connecting with one another. And so, to me, there's this big question of like, how do we get all these amazing benefits of computing, but in a way that actually connect us with one another, connect us to the outdoors, connect us to the world? And that's so much of what we're working on.

• 5:50David Senra?

  If you like, just came to, if you were an alien, you came to Earth. I remember like, walking, like, to pick up my daughter from school, you could either sit in the car line, right? Or you could get out and like, pick them up. And this is like, many years ago. And so I had, I was like, I'm gonna walk. And I passed by 30 cars, and every single person in the line waiting to pick up their kid was staring at the phone. I'm like, that's not, like, that's an addiction. Like, that is a crazy thing. I was walking on the beach here the other day. This lady almost ran into me. This is a beautiful freaking beach. And she almost ran into me because she was looking at the phone. I was like, there's mountains and the Pacific Ocean here. What are you doing? That's a crazy thing to do. Is there anything else from Edwin Land that like, that inspired you, or that you think you like, you used either in the beginning of Snap or now?

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Before we jump into it, two things you said just like really inspired, inspired me. The first was like, uh, school drop off, like our kids insist that I walk them in every day. I'm like, I'm used to doing the long walk in while everyone's in the, in the carpool line. But I think to your point, what's fun about that is you get to connect with everyone and say hi to, you know, other parents and teachers and, you know, as I mentioned, some of the teachers that actually taught me when I, when I was there. But the second thing you said, which, which is so funny, my daydreaming right now, especially as we think about glasses and the future of computing, is really like, what if aliens are watching Earth right now? And they're like terrified that smartphones have like taken over humanity, that like we're spending all day long, like caring for these things and like plugging them in and like tending to them and like our lives are all oriented around like these little screens. And like, what would aliens do?

• 7:19Speaker 01

  And so like, part of my imagination has been like, what if aliens are sending specs, sending these glasses to save people from, uh, you know, their lives that I think have become so oriented around, around screens. So it's funny that you, it's funny you mentioned that. I love, I love thinking about that, like the alien perspective of, of humanity right now. I think for, for Edwin Land, I mean, there's a couple of other things that like really stood out to me. One, he was a statesman, right? And like behind the scenes, people really relied on his advice and he gave it freely. I mean, he was a, a big supporter of the US government, for example, was very thoughtful behind the scenes and providing advice to the US government, including technological advice. And, and so I liked that he had a commitment beyond just like, you know, his customers and creativity and these sorts of things. He really wanted to participate in building a better world and, and took that really seriously.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  And then I think if you look at a lot of his, um, you know, a lot of the, the investments he made around his laboratories and around his innovation, he was, he was famous actually, and, and back then this was quite unique, famous for uplifting women in those research roles, right? And I think like, he was a real champion of talent. He saw talent very clearly. You know, and I think, you know, at a time when people weren't, weren't as focused on that, weren't investing as much in that, he was really focused on uplifting the best possible talent regardless of folks' background.

• 8:34David Senra?

  I was just onstage at an event with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. When I looked over to my right, I noticed that on the sleeve of Eric's jacket, it said, "We win when our customers win." Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast, and the way that Ramp helps their customers win is by helping you save time, save money, and grow revenue. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%. The median company running on Ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only all-in-one platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top CEOs and founders that I know run their business on Ramp.

• 9:19David Senra?

  I run my business on Ramp, and you should too. Go to ramp.com today to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com.

• 9:30David Senra?

  We're both in LA. We both kind of avoid San Francisco. And we were talking, it's like, the people I admire the most, like Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs is trying to create technology that enhances humanity. Some of these weirdos in San Francisco are creating technology to eliminate humanity. Why is it so important for you to build technology that actually enhances humanity?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Well, I think fundamentally, like, my source of inspiration is humanity. Right? Like, I'm inspired by other people. I'm inspired by the extraordinary world that humans have created. I'm inspired by the relationships between people and my relationships with other people. And so, so much of what motivates me and animates what I like to do is about making people's lives better, right? And solving their problems. I mean, that's, you know, we all get to choose what we do. And we get up in the morning, like, that's what I like to do and what I want to contribute to the world. And I think, you know, the challenging thing, I think, is, you know, sometimes when you're working on new technology, it's so exciting and inspiring that you can lose focus on its impact on people. And I think we try to start

• 10:44Speaker 01

  With people, right? And really listen to people and what they respond to, how they're feeling about the products they're using. I mean, that's, that's one of the, you know, that was the co-inspiration of, of stories, right? Was, you know, people were saying, why is my social media feed in reverse chronological order? Why is it permanent? Why am I feeling judged all the time, you know, by how many likes or comments I have? That made us realize like the way that people have told stories forever, right? Is in chronological order. Uh, they're not, you know, permanently saved forever and publicly judged and liked and that sort of thing. And so it was just very easy for us to, you know, develop a, you know, a product where, you know, everything, all the images and videos were in chronological order. They deleted after 24 hours. You could start your day fresh the next day. Uh, they didn't have these likes and comments, which opened up this whole new world of self

• 11:26Speaker 01

  expression, right? Because instead of just trying to post what would look pretty or popular or perfect, people were sharing this whole range of human emotions. So, so much of what we do and what we're inspired by is just, you know, by the way people feel, what they share with us. And, and really this desire to help people build stronger relationships with one another.

• 11:42David Senra?

  I read this book about you, the one I did the episode on, you know, eight years ago. I think it's like how to turn down a billion dollars or something. He said something funny in the, there's a quote from you in the book. You're like, whoever invented the internet, why did they decide to make everything permanent? It's completely opposite. It's like this conversation, we haven't been recording it, but the conversation we just had earlier, it's like, that wasn't recorded. It was just a moment in time. We'll have memories of it, like different interpretations of it, but then we just move on to the next.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  I think that's a really good example of the way technology ends up shaping human behavior. So if we're not thoughtful enough about the technology we're building, it can have unintended consequences. So i- in this case, you know, one of the reasons why everything was saved forever is because hard drives, disk-based hard drives, right? Were expensive to write over. And so it was actually more expensive to go back and write over something enough to delete it than it was to just leave it there and write over it again, maybe sometime in the future when you want to save something new. And so no one was thinking about, you know, how to, how to erase things because it was just much easier to leave it there. Uh, and you know, maybe, maybe write over it when you had something new to save. And so a lot of the early work we even did with Snapchat was asking about how we can be certain that everything is deleted, right? And how we can make sure that everything is being written over

• 12:50Speaker 01

  because that wasn't a consideration for a really long time.

• 12:53David Senra?

  So in a very Edwin Landian way, you seem to like observe what everybody's doing and you have like this natural inclination inclination to like go your own path. But you had it at the very beginning. How old were you when you started Peekaboo, which turns into Snapchat?

• 13:09Speaker 01

  I think I was probably, I think, 20.

• 13:11David Senra?

  Where did this desire to do something different come from?

• 13:15Speaker 01

  My dad was always pushing me to get a job when I was younger. If I was ever around the house, he'd be like, "What are you doing here? Get a job." So I interned at Red Bull, for example. I interned at Braxis Bioscience. I mean, this was back in the day when we were racking GPUs to do early-stage drug discovery. I mean, that was my first experience with GPUs when I was in high school. And then I had a couple other really cool internships. But really, my first, more serious job was working at Intuit and working on this service called TextWeb, which was basically designed to help people with touchpad mobile phones build little micro-websites essentially and access them, primarily in India at the time.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  And so I had learned all these really interesting things about business during these internships, but fundamentally, I didn't really want to have a boss. But until I saw how possible it was to build something amazing, like with TextWeb, I think there was like three of us on the team. I did the least out of the team members. But the three of us on the team, or four of us on the team, were actually able to build and launch a service in India. I was like, "Wow." It's actually a lot easier than I thought to build things and to create things that can reach millions of people. And so that really inspired me. And simultaneously, I lived across the hall from Bobby, who I ended up starting Pekanboor Snapchat with. And he had a job at the time, too. And we both just loved building things.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  So we started working on this thing called Future Freshmen, which was designed to help people get into college. It was like a total failure, but we had loved working together.

• 14:50David Senra?

  This is an important part. Can you say why? Because I think you took an idea from there for your next business, why it failed.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there were a number of reasons why it failed. I think, first of all, we really focused on building the perfect product for way too long before we got feedback. So I think we worked for like 18 months to build this perfect, full-featured product, which was like in direct contravention to how I was always taught to build things, which is like build a product. Type, build an MVP, get in front of people, learn as quickly as possible. But we had, we had spent all this time building this like perfect piece of software. And we hadn't thought enough about distribution. And so while we built this great piece of software, our competitor at the time called Naviance, which I think still today is probably the leader in like this college application sort of software world. They had secured distribution through all the different college counselors, right?

• 15:41Speaker 01

  So like, what piece of software are you going to choose to help your kid get into college? The one recommended by the college counselors or the one, you know, from two kids at Stanford? I mean, I think it's a pretty easy, it's a pretty easy choice. So we just saw very early that we had no distribution advantage. And, you know, even if we loved our software, that people weren't going to use it. Because we didn't really have a scalable way to get in people's hands. And so around that time, when we saw the emergence of the App Store on iPhone and all this sort of thing, it was very clear that that was a distribution channel that we could really use and benefit from. But that we also needed to build things that we could build quickly, things that we really were going to use together with our friends. So that we could be the first early customers. And ultimately, Picaboo and Snapchat, you know, represented that.

• 16:25David Senra?

  Yeah, because in the book you talked about, we build a product, no one used it.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  It's tough when no one uses it, except my mom.

• 16:31David Senra?

  Move on to the next thing. So is Picaboo, which turns, obviously Snapchat. Was that, was there anything in between those two or was it?

• 16:39Speaker 01

  There were a couple of other like, you know, failed sort of experiments, I would say in between that. We were playing around with like different ideas for sort of like more private, like I wouldn't say social networks, but more private like groups and social sharing and things like that, you know. But nothing, nothing that really.

• 16:57David Senra?

  But it seemed like it was a direct counter to the existing social networks at the time.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the, the problem that we were experiencing was that, you know, the way that everyone was socializing at the time on, on Facebook, and I think Instagram was for just getting started at the time. But the way that everyone was socializing on Facebook was like a giant popularity contest. So it wasn't fun, right? I mean, everyone was competing for how many friends they had, how many likes they had. Everything was about pretty photos and in college, like we, we wanted to have fun with our friends. But the alternatives, you know, at the time with text messaging, for example, were. So clunky. I mean, if sending it, people forget, like, sending an image via text message back then took like a minute, two minutes, right? Like to send MMS, you know, it was crazy. And so part of the core invention of Snapchat was actually just making it really fast to send images,

• 17:45Speaker 01

  you know, which, which made a huge difference in people's ability to use images to communicate. Because back then, you know, images were for documenting things. They were for saving memories forever, right? And the reason why like photography has exploded and, you know, I think there are more, there are more selfies taken on Snapchat than on iPhone in total, right? Which is a crazy stat. But that's because people are using images to communicate. And so like we, we, you know, in, in inventing Snapchat in response to kind of this documentary culture around photography and this feeling of public and public pressure about the way that people were expressing themselves and communicating online. Snapchat really, especially because the camera was on the smartphone, transformed the way that people communicate by allowing them to communicate with images.

• 18:29David Senra?

  So did you think you were building a messaging app or a social network?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  A mess, I mean, it's a, it's a messaging service.

• 18:35David Senra?

  But even back then?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:37David Senra?

  You thought about as messaging app?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we talked, I mean, it only had messaging for the longest time until we introduced stories. I mean, it was only a messaging.

• 18:44David Senra?

  Stories is like, gotta be one of the best inventions ever in terms of like the apps that we use. Like how, I mean, now, obviously, everybody, like, it's on every single app. Like, you, you were the first one to come up with that. And it's, I think there's like stories on LinkedIn and like Pinterest or some shit now. It's just places they shouldn't be, it's there.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Going back to, to the early days of the smartphone, if you remember, you know, Apple was really talking about like, hey, when you're gonna watch video on your, your iPhone, you're gonna turn the video, the, the phone sideways, right? And watch horizontal video. And a lot of, you know, the first year, you know, several years of Snapchat, almost all video online was like horizontal video in the feed. And so when we came out with vertical video and we said, no, we think everyone's gonna watch video the same way they hold their phone all day long, right? Vertically, where people were like, what? You know, we had, we spent, you know, a ton of money at back, back then with, without AI, right? Like, just helping average. Advertisers recut their video to make it vertical. And we had to convince them, showing them that like the completion rate was nine times higher

• 19:45Speaker 01

  when they use vertical video instead of these little like postage stamp sized horizontal videos. But for us, like, it was just obvious, right? That people were gonna wanna watch video the same way they hold their, their, their phone. They don't wanna turn their phone to, to watch video.

• 19:57David Senra?

  But do you see what I keep trying to get to? And like, this is not normal, though. Like, you, you, you're very comfortable. I'm trying to figure out, because like the whole point of me having these conversations, like this entire show is just like, who am I intensely interested in talking to? And there's something interesting, like, I still don't understand. Where the hell did this like confidence in your own judgment and disregard for the need to conform come from? Because it's obviously, so like today, like, let me give you some background. I remember the first version of Spectacles, the ones you, you bought in a, in a vending machine. I bought them. I wanted them so badly and you were out of stock. I bought the, like, the ugly fucking blue color. I did not want bright blue fucking glasses. I'm a grown ass man.

• 20:42David Senra?

  But I was like, these are, this is so weird. This is so interesting. And you were like 10 years ahead of everybody else. Where the hell does that come from?

• 20:52Speaker 01

  You know, I, I'm not sure, I'm not sure exactly. You know, I think like a lot of this stuff just like really appears obvious to me and to us, right? Like, it's, it was obvious to me that, you know, if you looked at the evolution of computing, that like, holding this tiny little screen in your hands was not the future of computers. Like, it makes absolutely no sense, especially for humans that wanna like live and work hands-free, right? They wanna be able to see one another and like interact with the world. And so, I think when, like, things like that just seems so, just seems so obvious. And, and we're fortunate, right, to be able to invest consistently behind that vision. Because I think like the hard part is not necessarily seeing what the future could look like. I think a lot of people have different visions for the future.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  I think the thing that's been maybe different about Snap or Snapchat is like our determination and consistency in pursuing that vision. I mean, with stories, right, like, you know, the first six months of stories, no one used it. I mean, I remember sitting in a board meeting and we were like, we think stories is gonna be a big thing. You know what I mean? Like, this is the, you know, we think this is like the future of how people are gonna, you know, wanna share, you know, on internet services, on Snapchat. And The board's like, well, no one's using it. You know, and we're like, okay, but it's new. So it's going to take time. So like, let's give people time to discover it, to learn about the features. And then, you know, maybe by the next board meeting or the one after that, like, it was growing super rapidly. So I think, you know, the hard part is not necessarily having the vision for the future.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  And oftentimes, it just seems very obvious that the hard part is delivering it, right? Getting there.

• 22:22David Senra?

  Were you disagreeable when you were a kid?

• 22:25Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 22:26David Senra?

  If I ask him, the people you have working with you, is Evan disagreeable? Would they say yes?

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Strong opinions loosely held. No, I think, um, I, yeah, I think, like,

• 22:39Speaker 01

  I think I've always felt comfortable seeing something differently or advocating for something different.

• 22:43David Senra?

  Would people that work with you describe you as uncompromising?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah.

• 22:48David Senra?

  Okay. This is Steve Jobs element.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but at the same time, like, we've tried to build a really different culture. Because like, one of my, one of my, you know, that, you've mentioned the Walter Isaacson book. Like, that book broke my heart, right? Because I think that that book, you know, that book essentially called Steve a bad father, which I thought was not, not only unfair, but it also,

• 23:12Speaker 01

  you know, sort of made the case that like, Steve believed that like, you could only achieve these sorts of things if you were uncompromising, but uncompromising with a, a taste of mean, essentially. And for me, watching Steve and seeing how people spoke about him and, you know, there are plenty of stories of, you know, folks who felt really close to Steve and felt really inspired by Steve, and also stories of people who felt like Steve was mean, right? And my big question to our team was like, could we achieve something really extraordinary? Could we build a culture that was incredibly creative, but at the same time is kind, right? So with our three values, it's kind, smart, creative. And kind is the first one for a reason. And what we really wanted to do was create a culture that's uncompromising,

• 23:57Speaker 01

  but at the same time, very kind and supportive. Because that, we think that that is, you know, the best, sort of, and most fertile ground for creativity. If people feel afraid, it's very, very hard to be creative. I mean, fear is almost like the, the opposite of, of creativity.

• 24:12David Senra?

  There's actually, did you ever read Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar? His autobiography called Creativity?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  No, I always wanted to.

• 24:18David Senra?

  Okay, that's another book. I just gave you one book or give you another one. But you can, Ed's actually doing the show and I can't wait to talk to him. Cause he worked for Steve Jobs or worked with Steve Jobs longer, more consecutive years than anybody else. I think they worked together for like 24 years. I would just buy the book today and just skip to the end. There's like a 20 page afterword called The Steve We Knew. And his whole point after the book came out, he's like, he wasn't, that's not the Steve I knew. And they, well, his point was that in the, earlier in his career, there was a lot of these stories. Yes, he was like that, but he learned and evolved on how to be a better leader. And so in that like 20 page afterword, Ed is telling the story of how he evolved over time. Fucking 45 year old Steve Jobs not, of course not gonna be the same as 21 year old Steve Jobs. So I think that's like a very important point to make.

• 25:03David Senra?

  How do you reconcile though? Because like, there's a lot of people that are famous about this, like Elon. I just heard, somebody was telling me a story, Michael Moore, it's from Sequoia, said the same thing. Like you actually camaraderie is dangerous and kindness is dangerous for your teammates because you can't deliver honest feedback and like tell them if their work isn't up to par or whatever. How do you, how do you balance that? Like be kind, but also honest if the quality of the work isn't there?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's a big difference between kind and nice.

• 25:31David Senra?

  Okay.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Huge difference. When you're being kind, it means you really want the best for somebody, right? And sometimes that means a tough conversation. Sometimes that means, this means saying, we're just not there yet on this project we're working on. Or, hey, the way that you delivered that like really isn't working or whatever it is. Nice is about making people feel good, right? Kind is about wanting the best for them. And so I think for us, our culture is oriented around kindness, which is a much deeper expression of care for somebody else and involves tough conversations. One of the great things about having a best friend or you know, a partner is that they're honest with you, right, about your shortcomings and help you evolve and make you better. And that comes from a place of love, right?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  And so I think kindness in many ways is essential because it allows people to hear that feedback. So one of the big problems, I think, you know, in a more hostile Work environment is people are more resistant to feedback because they don't hear it coming from that positive place of wanting you to grow and develop. And I think that expression of kindness for us is one of the things that helps people grow fast, right? And ultimately, at a company like Snap, our goal is just help people grow as fast as humanly possible, you know, so that we can meet the needs of our customers and of all of our business, et cetera.

• 26:43David Senra?

  Who plays that role for you? Who tells you the truth?

• 26:46Speaker 01

  My wife is brutally honest in a very loving way, in a very loving way. And it's super important. But I also, you know, I grew up with, and one of the things I love about being in LA is a lot of my high school buddies are here, right? So I have friends who, you know, I've grown up with, who've always been real with me. And, you know, that's a huge benefit of being here in LA because when I get to hang out with my friends and talk to them about what I'm going through or what's going on, like, I can count on them, you know, to be honest.

• 27:14David Senra?

  I think I like what Charlie Munger said. He says, anybody engaged in complex work, this paraphrase of his quote, anybody engaged in complex work, it's very useful to find somebody to help organize your thoughts with. And I think he was referencing really, you know, the role he played with Buffett, where, you know, Buffett was the main guy, obviously was 100 times richer than Charlie, but Buffett knew that Munger was special and he let Munger shape his mind. Do you have anybody like that? Not like high school friends are different, like, they were more like peers or have like an understanding. You have a very unique lived experience for somebody that's, you know, still in their mid 30s.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, Bobby, who's my co-founder, has really been that for me. And I think we approach the world differently and see the world differently. So I think that's really valuable. But, but I would say like, I rely on our leadership team and broadly our company to help me do that. I mean, that's, that's the fun part about innovating is it's a dialogue, right? It's not like issuing commands, like, let's go build this. It's like having a real intense debate and dialogue about what's best for our customer and what we should do, what we should prioritize. So I think like, for me, it would be a real shame if I only got that from, you know, maybe if it was Charlie Munger, I'd feel differently, you know? But, but I think for me, what's so important is to make sure I'm getting that sort of feedback and having that kind of dialogue with lots of members of our team or mentors as well.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  You know, that's, that's a hugely valuable.

• 28:34David Senra?

  What does the leadership team look like?

• 28:36Speaker 01

  You know, it's probably on like the Snapchat side, it's like roughly 10, 10 or so people. And like, you know, it's funny, even in the architecture of our building, right? We, we have a circle table, right? For a reason, I really like everyone to sit around a circle and have a dialogue where we're all talking from an equal position around that table, right? So like that, like it's that sort of mentality where like everyone is expected to contribute. Everyone has an equal seat around the table that you get that sort of really helpful dialogue.

• 29:06David Senra?

  Are these people that started at Snap and like got through the ranks? Are they former founders? The reason I ask you is because one of the most interesting ideas or surprising ideas I've had so far been having these conversations is I talked to Toby Luque, the founder of Shopify, which was like that, that conversation blew my mind, the way this guy thinks. And he was going through a very difficult time and he didn't know what to do. And he actually tells a story on the podcast, I think, where he's like, he went to a Slack channel and they had like former founders and he's just like, I need your help. And he essentially built very much like Rockefeller did, like built it. Like the team around him is just founders. Is that what yours look like? Is it people that you like poach from other companies? Like what, what does this look like?

• 29:45Speaker 01

  I would say it's incredibly diverse set of backgrounds. Some folks are from other companies. Some folks, you know, have, have spent their entire career at Snap, you know, more or less. Some, you know, some folks around the table are, are founders, right? Who've joined Snap. So there, there isn't like a one, you know, one size fits all model. I think we're really fortunate to draw from lots of different backgrounds.

• 30:07David Senra?

  Is there a lot of turnover?

• 30:08Speaker 01

  I would say at points in Snap's history, there has been a lot of turnover. Not currently, I mean, knock on wood. But the business changed so quickly, right? I mean, there were periods of time when we went from, you know, having a hundred people to over a thousand people in like 18 months, right? And like the skill sets that like we, we were slow to build what we needed to support, you know, that scale of a team. And back then there weren't the AI tools that are available today that make a lot of those things easier, right? To operate at that, at that scale and that quickly. But yeah, there are periods where the company has just changed a lot and it's required a different skill set. And during those periods of intense change, we have seen turnover. I mean, sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional because folks, you know, maybe are misaligned with where we're trying to take the company.

• 30:52David Senra?

  Yeah, the reason I ask, because I think conversations like these, the other podcast, Founders Podcast that I'm doing, I think it's important for entrepreneurs to realize, there's not like one right way to do things. Tobi told me, there's probably 100 right answers here, you gotta do the one that's best for you. And so I'm just curious, do you have a philosophy on like turning over the top people to the team? Because if you look at Larry Ellison, you read biographies of him, he thought the fact that he kept the core product team, the core product team on Oracle together for like multiple decades was a huge advantage. His person he mentors, if you ask Elon who he admires, he says Larry Ellison. He's like, I want fresh blood, I think is the term, over and over again. Do you have an opinion here?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  I think it's different in different parts of the organization. If you look at the core product and design team, that's a very small team. I think it's currently like nine people. It usually fluctuates between like eight and 12 people at any given time. Many of the folks on that team have been at the company for an incredibly long period of time, and they usually join out of school, like right out of high school, or sorry, right out of college. I don't think we've had some interns, but no one joined right out of high school. They typically join right out of college. And we spend a huge amount of time investing in their growth and building things together. And so I think it's really important to have that longevity, because those are folks who really understand how we build products at Snap. And that's something that I think really has to be learned.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  I haven't found anyone who's just been able to like enter Snap. And certainly, folks can contribute right away, but it takes time to learn what makes Snap.

• 32:25David Senra?

  Say more about that. That's interesting. Why does it take so long?

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Because ultimately, I think the way that we build products at Snapchat is just fundamentally different than anywhere else in the world. And so I've yet to see someone come into Snapchat with all the skills and all the understanding necessary to be able to really deliver value in that role. The closest we come are probably folks out of art school, because they're used to such a rapid iteration process and are used to making things in extremely high volume. And so they are a good fit for the Design culture at Snap, which is really about very rapid idea generation and creation. I mean, every week I'm with our design team for several hours and we're just looking at new work.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  I mean, new work every week, hundreds of ideas, right? Hundreds of concepts, you know, iteration, et cetera. And really, you know, kind of together as a group, working through like a critique process. And so I think, um, you know, the art school folks are prob- adapt the easiest to that culture because they're used to such a rapid velocity of work. But at the same time, we're really trying to overlay that deep empathy for people, right? That deep connection with how our community feels and what they're looking for. You know, we're, we're also trying to cultivate like a very positive and fun environment around that. Like we're laughing half the time in these design meetings, right? And, and playing around with ideas.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  And I think creativity can really thrive in that environment of like levity and fun. And so I think that combination and that velocity of, of creativity and product development is something that people have to adapt to typically when they come to Snapchat.

• 34:11David Senra?

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• 34:56David Senra?

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• 35:34David Senra?

  If I was to sit in on one of these design meetings, you said there's like nine to 10, 12 people and you. Like, what would I see?

• 35:43Speaker 01

  You would just be looking at a ton of work. I mean, we would just be talking through, you know, a huge volume of ideas across the service, or maybe even ideas for new services and that sort of thing for a couple hours.

• 35:56David Senra?

  These last a couple hours? You're going over, when you say volume, like hundreds of ideas?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, easily.

• 36:02David Senra?

  In a few hours?

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:04David Senra?

  And are you like leading this discussion? Like, how?

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we're all contributing, batting stuff around, you know what I mean? Laughing and iterating and, you know.

• 36:12David Senra?

  Why is the volume part so important?

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Because the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. It is critical. And the most toxic thing you can have is people attached to, attached to an idea instead of constantly thinking about, like, ideas are free, right? There should be a zillion of them. And if we can do that and create that culture where there's like just a, an endless flow of ideas, you're very lucky, you're much more likely to get lucky by finding good ones.

• 36:42David Senra?

  So how many of these do users of Snap ever see?

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Tiny, tiny, I mean, less than 1%, probably, maybe 1%.

• 36:52David Senra?

  And what's the process? Like, comes up, like, how soon from, it comes, an idea comes up in the meeting to, you like it, it gets in front of one of your users?

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Well, now that's happening incredibly quickly because designers can ship code with, you know, all these new AI tools. So the whole world of design is changing, I think, very rapidly. Because now, you know, many of our designers are just empowered. If they've got something, we think it's cool, let's, you know, let's get it in the app and test it like immediately. So I think design to code is happening way faster than ever before.

• 37:25David Senra?

  So there's an intense design culture at Snap, there always has been. You describe yourself as a designer?

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I mean, that's my background.

• 37:33David Senra?

  Yeah, and that's what you described, like when you started, that's right. And so talk a little about like what you think AI will do to a company like yours, where it seems to be like a design-first culture.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  I think AI is like probably the best thing that's ever happened to Snapchat, which is great. I think the reason why is because we've always had a ton of ideas and a deep connection with our community and our customer, but we've always had very limited resources and we're up against monopolistic companies. And so we've essentially been engaged in like trench warfare with monopolies for 15 years, right? And I think what's so funny, like, you know, you look at the last 15 years, we learned very, very early on that there's no mode in software, which was an incredibly powerful lesson, right? All of our ideas, the things that we invent, people just try to copy right away and it's easy to do that with software. But what's fascinating about the world today is that it has never been easier, right?

• 38:27Speaker 01

  I mean, almost instantly, you can copy nearly any piece of software. And so because we learned that lesson very early on, we've evolved our business to really focus on the things that are hard to copy, right? A network effects business of people communicating with one another, these platforms, right? Like our augmented reality platform or our content ecosystem that are not just pieces of software that you can, you know, easily copy, but ecosystems of people communicating with one another or creators making content that people are watching or people building augmented reality experiences. All of those sorts of things are very hard to copy. So from, you know, over the last 15 years, we've really honed our business perspective for this moment, right? Because we saw how easy it was to copy software. So in terms of our business and the way it meets our customers, I think we are well

• 39:11Speaker 01

  positioned for the huge transformation that's happening. At the same time, our core business is software development. So we're able to get a lot of the benefits of the extraordinary transformation in software development without the same risk to our core business because we build network effects over time and, you know, thought about how to position ourselves for this, this moment. So AI is changing every single team at Snap. It's changing the way that everything gets done at Snap. And because our core business is software development, I mean, in the last three months, there's been profound change, but to imagine, I mean, 18 months from now. The way that Snap operates will be completely different than the way it operated last year.

• 39:53David Senra?

  There's so many founders, and I don't know how many, almost none of them are saying this on the record, but they tell me, they're like, I'm trying to figure out, I should not be running my company anymore. I'm trying to figure out how to build AI to run my company. They are trying to literally replace themselves. They're like, it's just gonna be so much better than I am at doing this. It should be doing this. I should not be doing this.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  I think that's certainly true in terms of like the operational lift. But at the same time, right, like that, the vision and creativity and connection to your customer has never been more important. And so I think if anything, it's going to enable founders to run teams that are much more operationally effective and require less of their time to operate the business. And instead, hopefully pivot more time towards that sort of creativity and ideation and meeting customers where they're at.

• 40:38David Senra?

  What's one of the most surprising ways that AI has changed how Snap operates internally?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  I don't necessarily think this is like a surprise per se, but I do think, you know, and I feel like this is old news because everyone in the world has been saying it, but like,

• 40:56Speaker 01

  the change in how software is written since the beginning of this year is profound. Our core business is writing software. And now that these models are good enough to write more and more complex pieces of software on their own, like the job of a software engineer at Snap is like profoundly and forever changed, right? And I think the more that we can embrace that and make that easier and teach people how to do that really effectively, like it's just transformational for our core business. Because as I mentioned, like we have been up against companies who don't have new ideas, but have infinite resources, right? And we've got lots of new ideas, but very limited resources. And that's been a real challenge.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  And so it's been hard to see a path forward for Snap up against these giants without AI tools. And now with AI tools, you're like, wow, we basically have an infinite number of engineering resources? Like, that's a pretty profound change for Snap. And the rate at which that, I guess I would say the rate at which that has happened has surprised me.

• 41:56David Senra?

  You said something very interesting. You said you realized a long time ago that software has no mote. The experience that taught you that lesson, was it stories?

• 42:04Speaker 01

  No, the first time that the big sort of wake up call was when

• 42:11Speaker 01

  You know, Facebook at the time carbon copied Snapchat to make Poke. Do you remember this?

• 42:15David Senra?

  Yes.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  And Mark Zuckerberg recorded like him saying the word poke is the notification sound. He was like so excited about this. And we were like, wow, like, OK, this is a good, you know, this is a really good lesson for us. It ended up being super helpful to Snapchat.

• 42:31David Senra?

  In the book, you call it the greatest Christmas present you ever received.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Ever. The nervousness going into that holiday period, right? I mean, they literally put it, download Poke at the top of every single Facebook app, right? And it was, it was just a clone of Snapchat. And then to, on, you know, on Christmas Day, see Snapchat number one in the App Store in that context was, it was huge, huge for us.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  But that was, that was the first time we realized like, OK, we're going to have to be really smart about how we build this business and invest in the things that are hard to copy.

• 43:01David Senra?

  Do you remember how old you were when this was happening?

• 43:05Speaker 01

  I don't know what that had been, that would have been 2012, 2013, so 22 probably.

• 43:10David Senra?

  You were super young, super young to take on.

• 43:15David Senra?

  That's, that had to be terrifying.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  I mean, to be, living in my dad's house with like three of my buddies from college, you know, and like this huge company, you know, set their sights on, on us. I mean, you know, it was definitely a formative experience, I would say.

• 43:30David Senra?

  So then realizing software has no moat is that direct insight leads to deciding bizarre decision, I think, correct in hindsight, for a, what people consider a social network app or a messaging app to get into hardware and make glasses. Those two things are related?

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think, but even before that, right, a real focus on messaging. So the other key, like the other key foundational insight of Snapchat that really changed the company was at that time, if you recall, people were very focused on like a very simplistic model of network effects. And their very simplistic model was basically the more nodes you have in the network, the more valuable the network is, right? And what we realized was like, that wasn't really true if you weren't using those network connections. So actually, you know, what reflects the value of the network is, you know, are the people that you actually talk to and communicate with, especially the ones you communicate more frequently, are they a part of your network? And if they are, then you can accrue the vast majority of the value in that network

• 44:35Speaker 01

  very, very quickly without having the same scale or the same size, right? So what Snapchat showed was that if you just have one good friend on Snapchat, right, they might represent half of your communication, right? Because they're super important in your life. So you don't need 500 friends on Snapchat, you just need your best friend on Snapchat. And that's what helped the service really grow and take on, you know, these much larger, these larger competitors. What really prompted the work on glasses in the beginning was the feeling that we were always competing with that lock screen camera button, right?

• 45:08David Senra?

  What do you mean?

• 45:09Speaker 01

  And so, do you know on the iPhone, there's a lock screen camera button?

• 45:11David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  So Snapchat opens to the camera, right? And we always want you to choose to open Snapchat, to share a moment with your friends and your family. And you're making a choice between having to unlock your iPhone and go and open Snapchat and take a snap, or just using that lock screen camera button. And that lock screen camera button is on your phone and it's in your pocket. And so, you know, when we were trying to reinvent the camera and change how people were using their camera to help them communicate, one of our fundamental questions was like, how do we get the camera out of your pocket, right, off your phone, to make it easier for you to, you know, share and express yourself, or communicate your point of view, or communicate what you're doing? That was really the prompt that led us to explore glasses, because back in the day, you know, we just made camera glasses. But I think as part of that journey, and as part of starting to work on camera glasses, not only did we realize, first of all, that the market for camera glasses is very small, right?

• 45:57Speaker 01

  That ultimately, your phone is very good for taking photos, even if you're on a jet ski, or even if you're rock climbing, people still use their phone, you know, to take a photo. So that, you know, meant that we had to push way harder and faster to our full vision for glasses.

• 46:12David Senra?

  When did you learn the market was small? Because you couldn't even keep these things in stock. I told you, I had to big, ugly, blue color, like, it was a fine color, but you know what I mean?

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think even, you know, I think we were shipping like hundreds of thousands of units. You know, I think 100,000 units in hardware is kind of like the first threshold of like, okay, you've got a product people are interested in and want to buy. But even at a couple hundred thousand units, I just didn't see a path to it being like a... Hundreds of millions of units because ultimately at the end of the day, the bar that we set for any product we develop is that it has to be 10 times better than the next best alternative. And when we looked at how people were using specs at the time, it just wasn't 10 times better than pulling your phone out of your pocket. You know, and maybe in some use cases it was if you really wanted to be hands free or, you know, that kind of thing. But, but it just wasn't 10 times better than the amazing camera you had on your phone.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  And so we really then set out to try to push towards as fast as we could our true vision for computing.

• 47:11David Senra?

  That was how many years ago when you started?

• 47:14Speaker 01

  That would have been 20, like 2016, 2017. We were really pressing into, you know, the more advanced parts of augmented reality glasses. And I think, you know, if you look at the step by step approach we took, the first generation had one camera. Right. The second generation had two cameras with depth. The generation after that added a display. The generation after that added an operating system and developer platform. That's the version that's currently in the.

• 47:39David Senra?

  What's the generation I used yesterday?

• 47:41Speaker 01

  That came out in 2024.

• 47:42David Senra?

  That's generation four or five?

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Four or five, yeah. And that was the first time we really offered a developer platform. So the folks could start building and creating all these experiences.

• 47:51David Senra?

  Okay. So can you explain your evolution of glasses? You said basically you don't think it was glasses, it's just another form of computing?

• 47:58Speaker 01

  So to go all the way back, the initial thesis was let's get the camera out of your pocket. Right. But at the same time, you know, on the phone, we were so constrained in what we could build. Right. I mean, you have this tiny little screen. We're watching augmented reality just take off on the phone. Hundreds of millions of people every day are using these augmented reality experiences on this tiny little screen.

• 48:18David Senra?

  Let's pause real quick there because this is another, I think, example of what I was trying to freaking figure out about you earlier. And I kind of went crazy. So.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  We still haven't figured it out.

• 48:25David Senra?

  I know. Well, it might take a few more conversations. You're talking about all these people using augmented reality. They're in, you're talking about the filters you added or the lenses and stuff to Snapchat.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:36David Senra?

  Did you get that idea from another company? Where'd that come from? Were you the first one?

• 48:38Speaker 01

  We bought a startup called Luxury that was working on those, uh, working on those lenses. And then Bobby really pushed the vision of turning that into a platform. And once we turned into a platform and built these developer tools called Lens Studio, so that anyone could build lenses, then it just took off.

• 48:54David Senra?

  That's what got me. Me using Snapchat because it's a little older than like you're the typical people using it. But did this launch after Stories?

• 49:01Speaker 01

  That must have launched after Stories.

• 49:03David Senra?

  So how many years into Snap do you think that you've added this other feature?

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Probably three or four years, something like that.

• 49:12David Senra?

  Oh, that's actually way sooner than I thought.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Something like that.

• 49:14David Senra?

  Way sooner than I thought, because you were working on Snapchat for how long? Fifteen?

• 49:17Speaker 01

  About fifteen years, yeah.

• 49:18David Senra?

  Fifteen years. Okay, so go back to what you were saying. Then you found hundreds of thousands or millions of people now using?

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Hundreds of millions of people are now using AR, like every day.

• 49:26David Senra?

  But back then, this is, they're engaging with AR through this feature, but this is before you did the glasses?

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's sort of concurrent with the, sort of concurrent with the glasses and maybe concurrent with the second generation, I want to say, by the time we really had an augmented reality platform. But you know, the original thesis behind creating lenses was just people, a lot of people thought it was weird to just take a selfie, right? Tons of folks were taking selfies to express themselves, but like, a lot of people were like, why would I just take a selfie?

• 49:55David Senra?

  Especially if you're ugly. I don't want to be reminded what I look like.

• 50:01David Senra?

  Could put some dog ears on me.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  So, so you know, or vomit a rainbow, right? So people, people had a reason to-

• 50:08David Senra?

  I was covering people in flowers.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  So I think, I think lenses really gave people a reason to express themselves and to share with their friends. But then, you know, after we built out the Lens Studio developer tools and this kind of thing,

• 50:23Speaker 01

  the platform just exploded. Now, you know, people have made millions of lenses, all sorts of different ways for people to express themselves, not only with selfies, but also lenses that changed the world, as you experienced. And, and we just found that people were incredibly constrained by this tiny little smartphone screen and needing to use their thumbs to interact with augmented reality. And it was so clear that we needed to embed it in the world for it to be successful. And we were going to need to create the device to do that. Because no device even came close to the vision that we had. So we've really just pushed over the last decade to make that vision possible. And then later this year, you know, we're launching the first consumer version, which will be a, you know, a big, a big step for us.

• 51:04David Senra?

  One of my all-time favorite quotes is from the book Zero to One. It says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." This is exactly what AppLovin has done with their new advertising platform, Axon. Axon is the most powerful advertising platform in a generation. Axon allows you to capture undivided attention. Axon ads are full-screen videos that are watched for an average of 35 seconds, retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch in minutes. You set the goal and Axon achieves it. No complex setup, no expertise needed, and Axon scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers.

• 51:49David Senra?

  Other businesses have seen immediate results, scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. And most advertisers aren't even thinking about this channel yet. Less than 1% of advertisers have access to Axon, so you want to get started quickly. And you can do that by going to axon.ai/cenra. That is axon.ai/cenra. You used the word vision when we were talking before we started recording. I think this is interesting. You literally see it, see what you want. You said you have a problem designing a product if you can't see it in your mind. Can you explain more about that?

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think in general, with my life thus far, with the things that we build, I see them very, very clearly, even before we've built them. And I kind of know what I want, I know how I want it to work. And I also know that if I can't see it, then we're off track. And so I think really trying to stay true to that feeling and that vision and that focus is just so, so important. And that doesn't mean not being open to other people's ideas, other people's creativity, et cetera, but like... I think, you know, yeah, I just very, very vividly can see what we're trying to create.

• 53:09David Senra?

  I'm going to explain or describe an experience that I read about. You tell me if it's similar to the one that you experienced where when that legendary meeting that happened when Edwin Land 70, Steve Jobs 25, they're sitting across, they're in a conference room, sitting across a table from one another. And they talked about, they're like, they don't really consider themselves inventors. It's kind of funny because Edwin Land had the third most patents, you know, in human history. They said they discovered products, that they would literally be looking at an empty table and see the final form of what they're doing. And then they reverse engineer from that and essentially, you know, prod their entire organization to invent the technology to invent the product. Is that the similar experience you're having?

• 53:47Speaker 01

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

• 54:09David Senra?

  Is that not what you've been doing the last decade with the glasses? Because you made a choice. You're like, other people are partnering with existing companies like Luxottica, who I think is a very fascinating story. I told you before, I did this crazy episode of Founder's Podcast, I think it's episode 394, on Leonardo da Vinci, which is just one of the craziest, he's an orphan and he built one of the most, you know, to this day, most powerful and like such a dominating companies in his industry. But you chose not to do that.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  There's a lot of reasons why I don't think that's right.

• 54:40David Senra?

  Let's go into them. We don't have an end here. As much as you can share that, you know, but I'm very interested in your philosophy behind the decisions you're making is what I'm trying to get to.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  I think there's like a number of challenges. Obviously, I think it's much more harmful for Luxottica than it is for Meta. I think Meta needed to partner with Luxottica because the Meta brand, I think, is not something that people want to put anywhere near their face. So I think, I think that Meta really needed, I think what's, what's challenging for Luxottica is they took like the most iconic Crazy high margin product and they destroyed the margin and then they associated with Meta. So like I think like that, like we'll see if that pans out over like a longer period of time. If that was the right brand choice for them, but I can definitely see why Meta needed, needs to camouflage their brand, which I think a lot of people don't resonate with and don't like with, you know, the Ray-Ban brand.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  But I think people are misreading, I think, the dynamic of what's happening. When you have Meta Ray-Bans on the shelf next to a regular pair of Ray-Bans and they're both about the same price. Right. And it's, you know, I love to just walk into a sunglass hut or whatever and talk to them. Hey, what's going on? What's selling? What's on? It's like, well, you can get the Meta Ray-Bans and have a camera for about the same price as the regular Ray-Bans. Why don't you, you know, try it out for your upcoming vacation? I think that that's a smart strategy if you want to move a lot of volume, but I don't know if that builds a durable business over time. And the reason why I don't know if that builds a durable business over time is if I look at successful hardware companies over a long period of time, we can look at Apple, we could talk about Tesla, for example. Early adopter is the wrong term, but they really try to start with

• 56:22Speaker 01

  premium or even luxury positioning around a very passionate early adopter group that believes in their vision. Right. Think like the Tesla Roadster, right? Or the early iMac or the early iPhone. And they build a brand by starting with those early enthusiasts who like believe, right? And the electrification of the world, the transformation of the power, you know, the power grid, how we're going to, you know, move things around. Or in the case of Apple, you know, a revolution in the personal computer, right? That everyone's been doing phones wrong and that like, you know, having this, you know, personal computer in your pocket, you know, would be really transformational and they really activate that that passionate group of enthusiasts. And then over time, they work with that really passionate group of enthusiasts to, you know, grow into the mass market

• 57:06Speaker 01

  while preserving their premium positioning, which means high gross margins. Then they take those high gross margins and they reinvest in R and D, which widens their lead. And like, that is the story, I think, of successful hardware companies. And I think it's very, very hard to start with. A super broad-based, low-margin consumer product and try to work your way into premium positioning. So I think if you look at specs and like what we've tried to do, even like your early experiences with the with the brand, right? We're innovative and different and again oriented around a group of enthusiasts and early adopters who like want to see the world differently, who want to participate in the cutting edge of technology. And I think if we're able to build the brand that way and build our own brand around that,

• 57:50Speaker 01

  that will allow us to sustain, you know, our margins over time, which will allow us to reinvest, which ultimately will give us a big competitive advantage.

• 57:58David Senra?

  I want to go back to wanting to control most of like actually building your own hardware. You said something, even the marketing though, I think like you gotta give you credit to the marketing you guys were doing back in the day for the first spectacles. Where like there wasn't like a store you could just walk into, it's not the experience you described. It's like you would like airdrop these vending machines. And then I remember there's like a website and I'm not a fucking power user of Snapchat. I was just like, I want these glasses. And I would be like refreshing the the website to figure out, it's like, oh, okay, here's a new drop. And you'd have like a countdown, like we're, it's dropping and you wouldn't say where it is. And I'm in like Miami at the time, it's like, all right, it's dropping in Venice, I'm like, goddamn it. And then I wind up, the way I got them is you did a drop in New York and a friend of mine, I called him. And he went and stood in line and got them for me.

• 58:41David Senra?

  There's like a really unique and fun, like you just made it. I like this idea of, I was just talking to Brian Armstrong about this, founder of Pointbase, where he's like, everybody has shareholder letters, everybody has to write shareholder letter. Everybody has to do these analyst calls. And he's trying to find a way to like make them fun and like kind of like internet native and you know, there are forms of marketing. And not just analysts that are reading these things, like they could, if you, if you think about them and like, and think about like doing creative marketing, you could just drastically increase the amount of people that are getting information about your company. Why is it so important to you though, to control so much of the hardware that you're making?

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Control of the hardware is necessary to deliver an extraordinary customer experience in this space. And the intersection between the hardware and the software to deliver that customer experience is essential. So as we look at how other people are approaching this space, trying to cobble together components from a ton of different manufacturers and get them to all work really well in a super small lightweight form factor that's incredibly performant is just really, really hard to do. And so I think for us, if we want to really deliver this cutting-edge computing experience, doing that requires us to have a very high degree of control of the areas we can really differentiate.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  So for example, for us, the display components are an area where we really differentiate. We have an incredibly performant waveguide, which is like the glasses part of the lens, basically the lens of the glasses. And we've developed our own projector that's incredibly small that beams light into this waveguide. That's a big strategic advantage for us because the display components draw a lot of power. They're really important in terms of having that immersion and being able to have a very wide field of view when you're using the glasses, you can interact with the world. And then, of course, the resolution, the sharpness, those are the things that really, really matter. And so for us, in order to push those boundaries, there's no one that comes close to our ability to deliver on that product experience.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  So by doing it ourselves, I think we've created a competitive advantage that will show up in the product that the consumers will experience.

• 1:00:54David Senra?

  Say more about that line where you said it's important to control the parts that you can differentiate on.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Essentially, you're going to burn yourself out if you try to control everything. So it's really important to identify very early on, like where are the strategic points where you can create a totally unique customer experience by really investing in doing things differently? And for us, we've really thoughtfully picked out where can we play and do something that's really hard and do it differently that creates a sustained competitive advantage because it delivers such an awesome customer experience. So the display components are one. I can talk about that because it's public. But later this year, people will see a lot of these areas where we've invested and invented, fundamentally invented, new ways of doing things that I think consumers are going to love.

• 1:01:35David Senra?

  Another thing that like Edwin, like again, people should study Edwin Land. They should study all these history of entrepreneurs because you just realize they can come up with ideas too. We were talking earlier, it's like he wanted, he realized like if he did not have control, because he started, he wanted to be an inventor, not an entrepreneur. He had to learn to be an entrepreneur just so he could actually make money on his inventions. So therefore, he only wanted to make money so he could invent more things. He was not after, you know, just having piles of money. And anytime he tried to outsource, one, he let other companies get in between him and the end consumer, which he fixed that when he did Polaroid and the cameras. But when the manufacturing, he owned, the factories were in Massachusetts, for God's sake. He was manufacturing high-end technology in America.

• 1:02:19David Senra?

  And his whole point was just like, he didn't want to be a manufacturer, but he needed to control the things, so not like to get the cost down, but to be able to influence the end unit of the product.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, people, you know, I think would be stunned to learn that we manufacture core components in the US and the UK, right, in our own facilities, which allow us to do this really advanced R and D to push the boundaries of what's, you know, what's possible with these components.

• 1:02:44David Senra?

  Yeah, it's the same, same exact idea. So how are you going to distribute them?

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  I can't share all of our

• 1:02:49David Senra?

  That's fine.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  our secrets, but we can, we can regroup after the, after the launch and deep dive into all of it.

• 1:02:55David Senra?

  Okay, but I have a sense that you want to control that too?

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  I think it's important in terms of the customer experience.

• 1:03:01David Senra?

  Well, that's a surprise. All right, you just, you described, you wrote this like, I think it was your annual letter recently. And I forgot the term, you're basically the way you're positioning Snap. It's not like a little brother, but you described essentially like, you have the scale of some of these big players, but you don't have the trillion-dollar market cap, right? And you were, I think, I think at least once in this conversation, you described that you've been engaged in trench warfare. Why do you call it transfer warfare? And tell us some stories about this.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think the term I used in my letter was like the middle child. Right, because we're so much bigger than, you know, smaller competitors like Reddit or Pinterest or something like that, right? But we don't have the-

• 1:03:39David Senra?

  Did you just call Reddit small?

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  From like, you know, we're almost a billion folks using our service. If you look at like our daily active engagements, about like half a billion folks. So I think like, just in terms of the scale of engagement-

• 1:03:49David Senra?

  So wait, there's half a billion people using Snap every day?

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  About half a billion every day, yeah.

• 1:03:53David Senra?

  And a billion overall.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  And a billion about, you know, almost a billion.

• 1:03:57David Senra?

  So how many other services are that size?

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Maybe 10, maybe.

• 1:04:01David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Seven to 10, depends if you include China.

• 1:04:04David Senra?

  No, we don't. America, baby. All right, so wait, you're the, not the, I keep saying little brother, you're the middle child, say more about that.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  I'm the middle child, and I think, you know, I think what's interesting about that is like that, you know, and it's funny, we've got four kids at home, right? So part of it was like based on my own experience with our kids, where like a lot of attention is paid to the eldest child, right? And, you know, and they're, they've gotten so much bigger and they've grown up and, you know, our 15-year-old. And then the baby, right, is growing so fast, it's so exciting. And then I think somewhere in the middle, right, and hopefully this isn't the case in our house, there's like this period where, you know, you're changing and evolving and people don't know, what are you becoming, right? Maybe in the case for Snap, right, people are trying to understand, what is this glasses thing they've been doing for 12 years that they're about to like launch to the world?

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  What is the role, you know, Snap's core, Snapchat's core business is evolving, we're growing this huge direct revenue business that's growing really, really rapidly, and we're diversifying, you know, our advertising business with small and medium customers. So we're in this period of like very intense change, I think, for Snapchat. And as I mentioned, we're not as big as the giants and we're not as small as the, or smaller competitors. And so it's that really interesting moment that I think, you know, middle children also, you know, maybe experience where there's all this change happening and, you know, you're sort of stuck in the, in the middle.

• 1:05:26David Senra?

  Is this a stressful time for you?

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  It's so funny. My wife loves the Oura ring. She's obsessed. She markets this thing to everybody. She wants to compare scores and all this. So she finally, years and years later, was like, I'm going to try the Oura ring. And she was shocked to learn that there's the relaxed and stressed state. And I'm just in the relaxed state all day long. And so I wore it for a week and it basically was like, I sleep like seven or eight hours. I'm in the relaxed state all the time. She was like, what? So I think I really love periods of intense change. I'm inspired by it. I enjoy it. And so, well, yeah, it is stressful to some degree.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  I think the question is, how do you turn that stress into opportunity, into growth, into change? But I think what's really important is for our entire team and our organization to know what a high stakes moment this is for our business. Right? Like, at this moment in time, what will we become? We are in a transitional moment. And that's super, super exciting. And it means every second, like every minute counts. I would say more exciting than stressful, but it's a really cool moment for our company.

• 1:06:46David Senra?

  When you write something like that, obviously, is it more aimed at the broader investor community? Or is it aimed for internal consumption?

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  I always wrote them internally, but then they kept leaking and people liked them. So then I was like, we'll just publish it publicly going forward.

• 1:07:04David Senra?

  Brad Jacobs has started eight separate billion dollar companies. He said, "I've come to know a lot of extremely successful people in my life, and they all have one thing in common. They think differently than most people. All of them, to a person, have rearranged their brains to prevail at achieving big goals in turbulent environments where conventional thinking often fails." What Brad noticed is that great business leaders are pattern spotters. But you can't spot patterns if you can't see all of your data. Most businesses only use 20% of their data. Why? Because 80% of customer intelligence is invisible. It's hidden in emails, transcripts and conversations. That's where HubSpot comes in.

• 1:07:48David Senra?

  With HubSpot, all of your data comes together so you can see the patterns that matter. This is important because when you know more, you grow more. And that is a pattern that never fails. Visit hubspot.com today. That is hubspot.com.

• 1:08:04David Senra?

  I had this great conversation with Michael Dell, who's just awesome, like a great human being. Absolutely love that I get to spend time with him. I can't believe it. And he has that thing where it's like, he actually thinks it's important to, even if you don't have a crisis, to like induce one, like to create one. And he gave this fantastic, you know, he's reimagined his company. I mean, have you spent any time with him?

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  I have, yeah.

• 1:08:24David Senra?

  Okay, yeah, so like, that's probably, if I was you, I'd be like picking his brain. I'm friends with his son Zach and, you know, everybody has access to like the Bloomberg terminal. And Zach's like, I got the dad terminal. And it's just like, I get to like type in any question and get some crazy, you know, response from this 40, essentially he's been, you know, world-class contributor for four decades. And so like, I have an issue with supply chain. Well, guess what? Dell's seen everything about supply chains and he's like, can be very helpful. But his whole point was like, he knew that he, his company was on inflection point a few years ago. And he stood up and gave this, I guess this talk, I think it was a talk and he might have wrote it down. It was just like, you know, there's a company out there that is, you know, going to be faster than us, have better products, have cheaper products. And essentially they're going to come for us.

• 1:09:09David Senra?

  It's like, that company's us. Like, we are going to reinvent. We're going to figure out what our weaknesses. And instead of waiting around to be somebody else's meal, like, we're going to figure out how to reinvent our company. And on the podcast, the episode we did together, he was just like, if you don't have a crisis, you need to find one.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  I would say yes, with the caveat that like, I don't want our team to always feel like they're in crisis mode. I think I always try to be really cognizant of like where the team is at and like when we should sprint and run hard. And like when we actually need to take a step back and, you know, adjust, you know? So I think like always like staying in touch, especially at our size, right? We're like 5,000 ish people. You can really stay in touch with like the. Feeling of the organization and knowing when to like really, really push, you know, and when it's better to create a little more space for like ideation or experimentation.

• 1:09:59David Senra?

  So 5,000 people serving a billion, billion users. You mentioned you have a bunch of different revenue lines or ones that are growing. Like, how does, can you tell me about the ones that like are new?

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  The one of the new ones is our subscription business, which is growing really, really rapidly called Snapchat Plus. And I think it's a really good fit for Snap's culture. You know, we, we adopted the advertising model very early on. I think it's like well understood. It's a huge opportunity and we have a ton of engagement on Snapchat. So advertising is a big opportunity for us and allows us to offer our product for free, which is great. But I think, you know, the heart of Snapchat is, and our company is about building stuff that people love and that they want. And we were getting so many requests for all sorts of, you know, new and different features from our, the most passionate members of our community. And we wouldn't, we can never really find time to resource and invest in them.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  Because we were focused on things that everyone would use, not just like our most passionate, not just the most passionate Snapchatter. So we decided to build Snapchat Plus, which is essentially gives you access to like new fun features on Snapchat. We listen to our community and the things that they, they want and we'll test stuff and release new things for Snapchat Plus. And for like four bucks a month, you can join Snapchat Plus and get access to all of these new, these new features. That's now grown to like 25 million subscribers, which is like ESPN scale of subscribers. And I think in the last quarter is growing 60% year over year at like a billion.

• 1:11:24David Senra?

  Don't make me do public math. Is that a billion, you run rate?

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Uh, we're doing a bit like, yeah, like a billion run rate, growing 60% year over year.

• 1:11:29David Senra?

  That's incredible.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  And it's a really good fit for what we're great at, which is making new stuff that people love and want to pay for. So I think it's, it's like culturally been a, been a great fit for, for our company.

• 1:11:38David Senra?

  It kind of ties to what we were talking about when you're design meetings earlier. Where it's just like, we're looking at hundreds. How often are you doing these design meetings earlier?

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Once a week.

• 1:11:46David Senra?

  Okay. So every week you're going through hundreds of new ideas, some of which wind up for features for Snapchat Plus.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 1:11:53David Senra?

  Okay. So that's perfectly in time. What, what did you say earlier about, what else are you going to do with, do you think like you're going to add to that? Or do in the future, if you want to talk about it?

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  For the subscription business, I mean, we got a zillion. Ideas in the backlog, so we're just going to keep shipping new additions and features.

• 1:12:09David Senra?

  Do you think you eventually increase the price?

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  Uh, maybe, but I think it's so early right now. Yeah, we have done tiering. So one of the things that has been really popular, we released something called Lens Plus. So I think Snapchat, the camera itself, it's probably the most used like Gen AI camera service, like in terms of like image, video generation, this kind of thing.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Just because of how many people are using our camera every day. But we, you know, so we release a bunch of these Gen AI lenses and we give a number of uses for free. But then if folks want to upgrade to Lens Plus because they're loving it and using them all the time, they can do that. And that's, that's grown nicely for us too. So Lens Plus is at a slightly higher price here. And then we have, you know, the Platinum Plan or whatever that you can get rid of ads and, you know, unlock more features, that kind of thing.

• 1:12:54David Senra?

  What did you change about the advertising business? You said something about you just basically adopted at the beginning of what was there and available and maybe known. And how's that changed over time?

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  There's been a couple huge shifts for us in the past couple of years. So, you know, the core of our advertising business from the early days really grew around, you know, a small number in the, you know, in the hundreds of large customers in the United States, really built around a brand business. And it grew very, very quickly throughout the, you know, the history of the company. But our advertising mix almost looked like the inverse of like a Google or a Meta. So Google or Meta, the vast majority of their revenue comes from small and medium sized customers. And a small amount of their revenue comes from, you know, large, large customers, especially here in the US. We had like the inverse. We had most of our revenue coming from this small group of, of large customers. And then a very small amount of money coming from small and medium customers.

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  Part of that was because, you know, at the time, many years ago, we didn't have a really robust, lower funnel advertising business, you know, where people can optimize against, you know, events that happen in their app or, you know, people making purchases on their website. And we hadn't really built out a lot of those capabilities. And small and medium customers really care about that. They want to see their return on ad spend right away. So despite having this enormous scale and all this engagement, the ad offering, especially in the lower funnel, was immature. So over the past couple of years, we built out that entire lower funnel advertising offerings. We can really drive performance for customers, for small and medium customers. And we've been really rapidly growing that small and medium, that small and medium customer segment.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  So we're doing like this really difficult transformation to make our sort of inverted, mostly large US customers advertising around upper funnel and brand goals into like mostly small and medium customers advertising against lower funnel goals. And that's just been a transformation of like every part of our advertising business, the way that we go to market on the sales side, the engineering and product work that's happening.

• 1:14:51David Senra?

  Yeah, I'd be curious like what that looks like. Because if you're doing the inverse, you have these giant brand deals. I'd have to imagine these giant brands spending a ton of money, right? I'd have to imagine then you have to employ a ton of salespeople, right, in a way that Google and Facebook do not.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's certainly one part of it, for sure.

• 1:15:06David Senra?

  So that'd be more profitable too, because they kind of have like a self-service product.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think, you know, large customers rightly want a lot of bespoke service as well. So our engineering team was spending a huge amount of time building bespoke solutions for really large customers who want to measure things in a specific way or want a really unique integration or unique offering. And now our engineering team is spending a huge amount of time serving lower funnel customers at scale, right? And so rather than doing like-

• 1:15:33David Senra?

  Building a product they need to adapt to.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  That small, yeah, that small and medium customers can really easily, you know, sign up for unused.

• 1:15:40David Senra?

  Are you getting rid of the bespoke? Are you trying to like-

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  We're doing a lot less bespoke, but we also find that these large customers, they want to drive lower funnel outcomes too. So a lot of it is teaching our sales folks, you know, who were used to living in this more brand, upper funnel oriented world to sell into lower funnel objectives for large customers.

• 1:15:58David Senra?

  It was actually a weird idea that just came to mind because I just did this episode called How SpaceX Works. So there's this guy named Max Olson, who he still needs permission to publish a book, but essentially he's like, hey, I want to tell the story of the history of SpaceX as it happened, and I'm going to use their internal- To do so. So he's got access to like the first 10 years. I hope SpaceX allows him. I've seen a copy of like the advanced copy that you can't sell yet. It's called SpaceX Foundation. So he's like, well, in the meantime, I'm going to write an essay that tells the story of why this is important. And so I read the essay like three times, like this is fucking crazy. So I just did an episode of founders on it. And one of the most interesting things I never thought of is like, essentially, the aerospace industry, everything was bespoke. Everything was custom to the customer. And it's just like, well, if you do that, you can't scale.

• 1:16:43David Senra?

  And Gwynne Stratwell was, you know, a huge driver behind this. It's like, we're going to, you know, build a basic, good enough launch system that you adapt to. And then it took a while to educate them to adapt to it. But once they're adapted, then they just, I mean, now they're doing, I think, most launch providers would do two to four launches per year. That they do one every like two days. They did more load last year than every single other launch provider in like China, Russia, America, everywhere else combined. And that one idea where it's like, we can't do bespoke. We have to, we have to get this uniform. If we're going to scale this and we can't get to our goals if we don't scale it.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  And to take it a step further, they didn't have to deal with all the political pressure that NASA is under to put, you know, a certain factory here or a plant in this state. And you know what I mean? Like, I think, like, just out the gate, they were able to deliver rockets at a tenth the cost, you know, of a NASA or something like that.

• 1:17:37David Senra?

  Did you intentionally invert where you're like, Google and Facebook are doing it this way? We're going to try a different way. And then realizing, oh, we need to change. Like back then, did you make that decision consciously?

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  We saw that like if we really wanted to grow the ads business to be, you know, double digit billions over time, that we needed to have a lower funnel business with a diversified set of small.

• 1:17:57David Senra?

  But did you hope that wasn't true at the time, at the very beginning?

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  No, I just think we grew really fast on, you know, large customer brand advertising. They can move dollars very, very rapidly, right? That's one of the benefits. You know, if you're working with a large customer, they can move, you know, millions of dollars very quickly. If you have a couple hundred of those customers, you can build a very large advertising business very quickly. The question is like, how do you build a diversified, very, very big one over time?

• 1:18:22David Senra?

  Okay, so you can get big, but you can't get huge without it. Oh, okay. And you needed to get big. That was like, that was like, almost like stage one. You had to do it that way.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  And I'd say almost all these platforms, stage one looks like that.

• 1:18:33David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, even Facebook in the early days, it was display advertising, right? And then over time, they built out way more advanced systems optimizing against lower funnel goals. I'd argue like a Reddit or a Pinterest today. I mean, you know, to some degree Pinterest is building out lower funnel objectives and this kind of thing. But a lot of it is still, you know, large customer, upper funnel dollars. So I'd say almost all ad platforms start with that because you can grow very quickly. And then you use that to invest in building out much more sophisticated systems.

• 1:19:03David Senra?

  Yeah. And at the beginning, you said you really thought you were building a messaging app, not a social network. You studied the way messaging apps in other countries monetized. I feel like you have a lot of soul and so you prefer, I don't know if you can say this, but you would prefer almost if you had like an all subscription business. Because the incentives are more aligned.

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  I really love the subscription business. I wish we had done it earlier. I just, I love it. I love the direct connection to our customers. I love that it's directly related to the value that we provide them. And I think it's been really exciting to see that like, you know, I think unlike some of these other internet services, people are getting a ton of value from Snapchat, so much so they're willing to pay for it, right? And I think that's, that's, you know, it's also a sign to me that we're building something that's valuable.

• 1:19:47David Senra?

  I spent a lot of time with the Spotify team, Daniel, Gustav, Alex, the top three, three, three people there. And they just have this like soul in the game and they're really trying to build an app. Their whole thing is just like, when you're done using Spotify, do you feel good? And I'm like, well, you know, I spent an hour listening to music. I feel great. I spent an hour listening to, you know, Founders Podcasts or any other podcast. I feel great. Now they have audiobooks. Do you feel great? They're actually trying, it wouldn't have worked any other way. Like they obviously have some, they have. Somewhat of an ad business, but I think they're they told me they're the second most paid subscribers in the world, I think behind Netflix. And, you know, they did that in relatively short amount of time. Like, I'm friends with Jimmy Iovine, he was on the show. And he told me some outlandish shit.

• 1:20:30David Senra?

  He's just like, when Apple bought us, Spotify only had three million paid subscriber. I want to take a run at them. And now they think of like 250 million. But there is something about like, if you do have this soul, if you're trying to put something good into the world that is not just trying to maximize usage, you know, on an app that's not good for you. It's just more aligned. I didn't ask you that before, but I just got that the sense that that's how you are. You have any idea the size that you think it could get to? Because you have how many pages? You said 20.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  25 million subs.

• 1:21:01David Senra?

  Over what? And when did you like start it?

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  It was like two, three years ago, something like that.

• 1:21:05David Senra?

  Still, it's pretty goddamn fast.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  Let's see, you know, I'm excited. It's obviously grown quite rapidly and I think it'd be a big, a big revenue driver for us.

• 1:21:14David Senra?

  All right, let's go back to the more difficult times in Snapchat's history. I want to know more about this like trench warfare. That's a great line that you had.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  I think, given that we're up against such large monopolistic competitors, like every day is a fight. Every day is about putting one foot in front of the other because they just have so much scale. And I think for us, you know, creativity has been historically the force multiplier that's allowed us to break through and take ground, right? But I think as I look towards the future, what makes me so excited and the, you know, the reason why I brought that up is like creativity combined with AI should allow us to move incredibly quickly in this environment and overcome a lot of the resource constraints that we've had historically. And that's something that that's really different about, you know, the next decade for Snap.

• 1:22:04David Senra?

  Do you ever foresee the hardware being a separate business?

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  It essentially is. So it's a wholly owned subsidiary today. The brands themselves, you know, they're adjacent to one another, but they're different brands. In many ways, it's a different customer, although not entirely different. So I do think that they'll, they'll grow in different ways over time.

• 1:22:26David Senra?

  Why did you make the decision to start a separate company?

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  The hardware business at its core is just so different than the internet service business that we operate with Snapchat. And it even requires a different execution style. With hardware, you cannot make a mistake. The things that we are doing today will show up in two years from now. And if we made a mistake, it's a huge problem. And it'll cost us another year or whatever to fix it. I mean, that's type of precision and operational rigor is just night and day different than Snapchat, where if we break something today because we're moving quickly, it's fine. We'll fix it this afternoon and move on. And so culturally, they have to be different companies and different operating styles.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  And then I think in terms of the brand and where we're trying to take the Specs brand, I think Snapchat has always tried to be fun and whimsical to make sure that you feel comfortable expressing yourself. Snapchat never takes itself too seriously. And while I don't think Specs is going to take itself seriously necessarily in a way that's weird or not true to who we are, what we're trying to do is incredibly serious. We are trying to reinvent the computer. We think that the way that people have been trying to make it more human. And we think the way that people have designed computers for the last 50 years is robbing us of who we are and our humanity. And that people are going to want a new type of computer.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  They want a computer that allows them to use AI and access AI in different ways, that brings them closer together with their friends and the world. And so that vision and mission, I think, deserves real focus and dedication. And in some ways, while it shares that same root and philosophy and idea that animates Snapchat, it's approaching it from a very different perspective.

• 1:24:22David Senra?

  When did you, in your mind, realize that this had to be two separate companies?

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  In a lot of ways, they've operated quite separately, right? They have the same sort of G and A support, but Snap Lab, which, you know, it was the precursor to Specs Inc. Has operated as an independent, relatively independent part of Snap for a long time.

• 1:24:43David Senra?

  Different location, separate, not shared office space? Explain the organization.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, nearby, in some cases, shared office spaces. In some cases, definitely not, depending on what we're working on. Leadership team, all that sort of stuff. I think, you know, historically, it's been quite separate.

• 1:25:01David Senra?

  Yeah, did you ever read about, I'm sure you did, but like, Steve Jobs was very adamant about when he was inventing something new, it could not be in the same building. Had to be a completely different team. I don't think they separated it out, you know, I don't think it spun out different like entities inside of Apple, but he wanted, he's like, you can't even be in the same building. That was like really, really important.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it makes sense to me because I think focus is just so critical when you're trying to build something new.

• 1:25:24David Senra?

  And differentiation, you don't want, you know, the opinions of other people outside of, you know, the people working on it. What was Snap Lab?

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  Snap Lab really incubated a lot of the Spectacles and Specs stuff.

• 1:25:36David Senra?

  Why'd you make the decision to start something like Snap Lab?

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  It was to house all the hardware development.

• 1:25:43David Senra?

  Okay, so it's not like Snap Lab was created and then you realize, hey, let's do hardware. It was the vehicle to do hardware or like?

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  I think it was sort of concurrent. I mean, when we started working on Spectacles back in the day, that was really the genesis of Snap Lab. I mean, that's what it was called initially.

• 1:25:59David Senra?

  Do you still have some kind of like R and D separate thing to like dream up new products? Or you just only focus on the app and the glasses?

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  You know, one of the things we're thinking a lot about now, and this is sort of what I mean about the sort of forced multiplication of AI and creativity, like, the core Snapchat business is really well positioned to launch new app categories today, right? Because we have a massive amount of distribution. We've got tons of great ideas and brilliant creative people. And now with AI, we actually have the resources to make that possible. So inside of Snapchat today, and in our design team, we're thinking a lot about what types of new apps and services, internet services.

• 1:26:38David Senra?

  But a separate app from Snapchat or?

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  A separate app from Snapchat. But we can use Snapchat as a launchpad for these new services because it reaches almost a billion people.

• 1:26:48David Senra?

  Do you have any other apps? I don't even know.

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  There's an app called Saturn, which we acquired, which is a totally new way to think of calendaring. So if you look at calendars today, not only are they kind of really entrenched into like the business world, but because they are, it makes it almost impossible to easily share calendars with friends, right? And calendars are all today oriented around email, right? Rather than your phone number and your text messages. But all of your planning and the way that you're working together with your friends is happening in your text messages, right? And around your phone number. And so the Saturn team has had a lot of really great insights about what the future of a calendar should look like. And so that's a separate app that's now owned by Snapchat, that's integrated with Snapchat and gets distribution through Snapchat, but is a standalone service.

• 1:27:32David Senra?

  Why would people use it? Like, give me a use case.

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  Because it's a calendar built for your friends. So like, it is so difficult. I mean, I don't know if you've experienced this with your partner, but with my wife, like, it's so hard to get my work calendar to match with her work calendar. It's like, almost impossible. And let alone get that to map to our 15-year-old's calendar, right? And, you know, everything he's got going on after school. And so I think all of a sudden, there's a solution that like, works really well for our 15-year-old, who doesn't have like, a whole corporate email and whatever, but like, wants to share his calendar with friends, right? We can have visibility into each other's calendar, and it all works centered around your phone and your mobile number, right? So it actually is a social calendar, rather than being like, a work-oriented calendar. And that just makes things easier.

• 1:28:17David Senra?

  How much do you use email?

• 1:28:17Speaker 01

  All the time.

• 1:28:18David Senra?

  I push everything to text or WhatsApp.

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  Really? I push everything to email.

• 1:28:23David Senra?

  Oh, well, you probably have like an army.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  I use email like text message. There's no army. No, I use email like text.

• 1:28:29David Senra?

  How do you balance focus? Yeah, obviously Snapchat's working, the app, specs, working, and will continue to like, grow. How do you balance like, inventing new things with focusing on what you already have? Like, how do you think about that? Are you just, you just need to invent new things? That just, you have like, a compulsion for this?

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  It's a really great question. I see a huge amount of opportunity in the products and services that we have today, and I think we need to continue to constantly iterate and evolve them and make them better. And that ultimately, that's what our customers, our community expects, right? They want us to constantly innovate for them to make their lives better. So I think we have to tirelessly do that. At the same point, there's nothing more valuable than focus. Focus is, arguably, my primary role in our company is helping to drive focus and prioritization. So I almost don't see them necessarily as trade-offs, but as just an ongoing part of running our business, right? Making sure that we're being really clear about focusing on the areas where we see the biggest opportunity.

• 1:29:42David Senra?

  Yeah, if somebody asks me, like, okay, you've read 400 of biographies on history's greatest entrepreneurs. They always want to give me a top 10 idea list. And I was like, I can do one better. I can distill everything down to one single word: focus. And so while you were talking, I was just looking up because I save all my notes and highlights for every single book I've read. I have a personal AI that is only trained on all the transcripts for my podcast, every single highlight from every book, every single note. And Edwin Land, one of my favorite quotes of his, he says, "My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had." He was obsessed with focus. The reason I ask you this is because you spend any time with Tony from DoorDash?

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  Not a lot, no.

• 1:30:23David Senra?

  Okay, we just recorded this intense conversation, and I'm gonna have to do it again like every six months because I still can't. The guy's got so many ideas. I don't buy individual stocks. I don't really give a shit about anything but making podcasts and try to do this intense focus. So I don't think about investing, I don't think about anything else. Just do what I'm doing every day, wake up and do it seven days a week. But I don't know anything about the finance of DoorDash. All I can tell you is, he's, I think, 41 years old. I've never come across another person that gives me like young Jeff Bezos vibes. And I'm so tempted to just like back up the truck and like, I'm just gonna, there's a vibe. I'm gonna vibe investors because everybody's like, oh yeah, you know, you got 60%. Of, I think right now he has 60% market share of food delivery. You're out of your goddamn mind if you think that that guy is just thinking about food delivery.

• 1:31:06David Senra?

  He is, he's gonna build, and he already is, I think they launched six new products, including their own hardware. There's something about this conversation that's reminding me of this, where it's just like, he's gonna be focused on, you know, what they're excellent at, but he's got grandiose ambitions. To the point where like, he's just like, there's no way in hell Bezos was gonna stick with books and CDs and movies. Like, it's impossible for that kind of personality type to be that way. So yeah, I was just curious if like, you, if there was something in you that, basically like your love of ambition.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  I think ambition is the wrong word. I do think like,

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  I think like creation and problem solving is really what I, what I love to do.

• 1:31:54David Senra?

  I think you're right, ambition is the wrong word. It's like, they see a series of problems and they think they can solve it better than anybody else.

• 1:32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think there's like, something so incredibly gratifying about doing that. It's awesome. You know, and to see the way it makes people's lives better, the way they respond to it, like that's, that's like the best. It's awesome.

• 1:32:14David Senra?

  Your focus, basically every day when you wake up is like, you're attacking what you feel is like the biggest problem in Snapchat? Is that how you organize your day? Like, how do you go about this? I heard you on another podcast say that like, you kind of get turned on, you didn't use these words, but like, you're like attracted to hard problems, like you want like difficulty, you want to spend your time solving the hardest problems.

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  I think it's absolutely essential for us to go after solving hard problems, especially as we look at like the long-term success of the, the business. I think that ultimately like that is where value is created. So I think a huge amount of what I'm, I'm thinking about is like, how can we make our community, our customers' lives better? And, you know, what are some really, really hard problems that we think we can uniquely solve?

• 1:33:00David Senra?

  I meant more about like the existing problems in like how you spend your time, how you allocate your time is a better word, like. The existing problems in the business.

• 1:33:09Speaker 01

  How do I allocate my time across the existing problems?

• 1:33:11David Senra?

  So Elon's famous for like, what is the bottleneck here? And like, I'll find out in my entire empire where the bottleneck is. I'm going physically there and I'm going to sit there and dedicate all our resources. In that essay I told you I read about the history of SpaceX, there's a NASA guy, a guy from NASA, visiting SpaceX. And they're like, when there's a problem, there's like a flash mob appears. So Elon has a very specific way. And I heard you on another podcast saying like, you're attracted to problems. So I'm just curious, like, I'm not talking about problems you could solve, like in future product development. I'm saying literally, like, you're running a giant company. There's all kinds of stuff that's not going well.

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my Monday morning, for example, is like two to two and a half hours in the specs business, going through the risk dependencies. Red, yellow, you know, red, orange, yellow, green. What are we doing to solve it, right? And what progress are we making? And how can I help? I mean, that's how I start my week.

• 1:34:07David Senra?

  You and I were looking at this book I gave you before we started recording, and it was a photographic history. I think it's called like Fearless Genius or something, or Ferocious Genius. And it's about Steve Jobs. And you open to a page and Steve had a shit list. And you're like, I have a shit list too. It's like the five hardest problems he's got to solve. And many of them don't have solutions yet. So it's similar to that.

• 1:34:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think what's most important for me is creating a culture where people are raising their hand and bringing those problems early and often, right? Like, that is mission critical across the organization, right? Like, we can't solve a problem that we don't know about. We can't solve a problem that someone isn't escalating quickly. You know, and so I think it's really beyond just like making sure that we're staying focused on the issues that we need to get resolved and, you know, launch blockers or whatever they are. Culturally, we have got to make sure that like, that is, you know, how the team is operating all day, every day throughout the organization.

• 1:35:00David Senra?

  How do you ensure that information gets to you, though?

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  I think one of the things that's really, I stole this from Walmart, which I thought was great. They have a Friday meeting called In It to Win It. They have their leaders from across the company, not just like super senior leaders, but leaders from across the company around the world all get together for about an hour and they essentially raise their hand and say, hey, the shopping cart ball bearing is not working properly. We got to get this thing fixed, right? And who's ever in charge of the shopping cart ball bearing can raise their hand and give a response, or they can say, I'll get back to you, or whatever it is. But that's multiplied across the entire company. And the thing that they found was like, their leaders would go out into the, into stores, into the community, and they would hear about problems. And then they'd solve the problem just for the store, but they wouldn't solve it for the company. And so in it to win, it allows them to solve these problems company-wide. And so we do

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  the same thing for specs, for Snapchat, like bring the problems forward, right? I mean, you can also, the even simpler way to do it, I love to just walk around and talk to our people, right? And just hear about what's going on, hear about the issues impacting them. But I think unless you create these like structures and processes in the company to actively surface it and build that culture, it's hard to, it's hard to do that. And I think, you know, it's just so important.

• 1:36:08David Senra?

  So I heard you describe the design team as like a very flat, just like no hierarchy. Is the rest of the company like that? Like, how is, how do you actually organize?

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  I'd say the rest of the company is certainly flatter than most, but you know, the design team is actually flat, right? Everyone's got the same title, like that kind of thing. But I think what's so important for Snap is that we're like a ruthless meritocracy. You know, we like in the beginning of the early days, you know, it's kind of silly now, but in the early days, we would just make up people's titles, like just make them hilarious. Like you could come and join Snap and like make up whatever you wanted to be called, because the whole point was like, who cares about your title? And if you're focused on your title, you're focused on like the exact wrong thing, right? Like that, like we were going to die if like we were a company that's focused on title and hierarchy and, you know, getting ahead, right? Rather than focusing on the customer. I mean, I think that's like a huge, huge problem. So I'd say like the company, yeah,

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  of course, you know, we've got great leaders, we invest a lot in our leaders. But one of the things that I think makes Snap so unique is like, no matter who you are, where you are in the company, you can have a huge outsized impact. I mean, it was, it was fun. I got some great like intern feedback. One of our interns like came to me and was like, you know, it's funny, like I came to Snap and like, wasn't even really clear like who my manager or leader was, because everyone was so helpful and everyone was like guiding me and providing mentorship and working together with me. And so I think that's sort of like one team feeling is really important.

• 1:37:31David Senra?

  So how do you make sure that anybody in the company can make a major impact, though?

• 1:37:35Speaker 01

  First of all, setting that expectation, like that's what we expect at Snap. It's not just like, you know, that we try to enable it. That's like, if you see a problem and you can fix it, you can solve it. Like, we're going to celebrate that and lift that up and not be precious. Like, oh, this is my thing, my territory. Like, that's, that is, I think, you know, I think people respond really negatively to that in our, in our culture. So I think, you know, sometimes that creates problems because the swim lanes are less clear. I mean, people are solving problems across the organization, across teams, they're working together. And I think, you know, just making sure that we have culture and leaders who are rewarding that and reinforcing that behavior is so important.

• 1:38:13David Senra?

  Have you studied how Jensen organized his company?

• 1:38:16Speaker 01

  Not in depth. I mean, you would, you would be the expert, I'm sure.

• 1:38:19David Senra?

  Not nearly, but I did do two podcasts on him. There's a great book called In Video Way that goes into this. But yeah, I haven't found anybody else that, especially at that size, that has like a completely flat, you know, as flat an organization as possible. I think he's got like 60 direct reports, like, I mean, it's pretty wild. And he describes this as like, people are worried about like being able to manage like AI that's smarter than them and AI agents that are smarter than them. He's like, I do this every day. All my 60 direct reports are smarter than me in their domain and I would be able to manage them and orchestrate them perfectly. It's just, it's like very fascinating. Like, I'm always curious, again, I think the founder-led companies are a reflection of the personality of the founder. Like, the founder is the guardian of the company's soul and it only works if it is like built around who you are and the philosophy that you have.

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think, you know, generally speaking, I would expect the world to move towards flatter structures and much larger spans of control because like the communication and organization tax today is like night and day what it was 20 or 30 years ago. Like, so I think companies are still thinking in this like sort of industrial mentality where communication was very high friction. That doesn't make a lot of sense in terms of the way that companies are organized and operated today. So I would imagine that more people will move to much, much wider spans of control, much flatter organizations, and I think that'll be helpful.

• 1:39:36David Senra?

  I'm not really interested in people's first company. I'm interested in their last company. Is, you feel like this is your life's work, this is your last company?

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  I think Specs is probably my last company, I would guess. I always said I would never do it again, and now I find myself doing it again with Specs. And it's just, you know, I hope that like, in the not-too-distant future, I can also think about more ways to like, give back to society. I mean, our family does a lot. We have like, a family fund, we've got, you know, the SNAP Foundation. We like, are constantly thinking about how to, you know, support LA, you know, and hopefully in the future, like, you know, more broadly.

• 1:40:17David Senra?

  I love charity, but the best way to be charity is to build a company and a product to make somebody else's life better.

• 1:40:22Speaker 01

  I think that's like, one way to contribute, for sure. But I think like, I think there are lots of ways to contribute to making the world better. And I think, I think Specs, like, the biggest problem that I see today is people spending seven or eight hours a day on their computer, and spending their life operating a computer. I think that is like, a disaster for our society. And I think like, we have to change that. And if we don't, like, we are headed in a really bad direction. So I think Specs, if we can attack that problem, and even shift two hours of the eight hours a day you're spending hunched over like this, to you looking out at the world, and going for a walk, and spending time with your friends, and playing together with them, like, that's massive for the world. So I think like, I really wanna like, land the solution to that problem, for sure.

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  But I think that there's a lot of problems out there, and I think, you know, over a longer period of time, I wanna think about like, more ways that I can make an impact.

• 1:41:15David Senra?

  You're just reminding me, I wanna go back to this interesting decision for you to go in on AR, at a time when almost everybody was thinking that VR was the path. And I've heard some funny, you say some funny things about that, but, so don't let me forget that, but, I guess, this line of questioning that I'm on right now, is really, what I'm trying to get to, is just like, you're famous for turning down billions and billions of dollars, real fast, to sell the company. I think the book that I read on you eight years ago, was called How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars, or something, they made a reference to it. Trying to get like, what is motivating you? Like, you know, I study entrepreneurship. Obviously, my entire life as founders. Every during the day, I make founders podcasts. At night, I hang out with founders. This is my whole life. And I think the common misconception is that entrepreneurs are driven by money.

• 1:42:00David Senra?

  And I would argue they're driven by control. And if you're talented and you want to build a product that makes somebody else's life better, and you maintain control, you wind up with money anyways. But their primary motivation is not money. Clearly, your primary motivation was not money. I think there's a line in the book said that you would never work for anybody else. Like, take us through the decision of just like, I don't give a shit about your billions of dollars. I want to do this.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  Well, I think, you know, I should, I would never underestimate the fact that like Bobby, our investors were smart. They allowed Bobby and I to both sell 10 million bucks of stock very early on. Obviously, that would have been worth maybe a lot more now, but like, but very early on, which meant that like, you know, we were able to see, to, you know, support a family, buy a house, like whatever it was, right? So I think like, very early on, money like was no longer a consideration.

• 1:42:51David Senra?

  But 10 million is not a billion.

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  But 10 million is more than enough money to live a really great, comfortable life.

• 1:42:58David Senra?

  But you see what I mean here? Like, it's still an unusual decision on your part, especially when you were, how old were you when you make, the first time you turned down a multi-billion dollar acquisition offer?

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  Probably 20, I don't know, young twenties, yeah.

• 1:43:12David Senra?

  Okay. Don't downplay, like, that's another, see, we've gone over a series of unusual decisions that you keep making. So like, explain to me like, why? I wouldn't do it either. Like, I'd hope I wouldn't do it because my, I guess my, the work I'm trying to do on founders podcast to give you, like, I want to like, to the degree that there is any influence that the podcast has on future generations of entrepreneurs, it's like, right now, the entrepreneurship ecosystem, they celebrate because incentive structure is fucked up. They celebrate start, scale, sell. You started, you scaled, you didn't sell. The 400 biographies, there's not a single biography that I've read where it's like, guy started a company, two years later, he sold it for billions of dollars, and he spent the rest of his life as a... Is an investor, I'm sorry, almost threw up in my mouth at the thought of this.

• 1:43:57David Senra?

  They don't write books about that. Why do you take yourself out of the game? Like, the whole point. Like, Elon's the richest person on the planet. You think he'd ever do that? No, he like puts his chips back in there, wants to build shit.

• 1:44:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:07David Senra?

  This is one of the things I admire about you. So like, how the hell do you make that decision in 22, 23, 24?

• 1:44:12Speaker 01

  Well, I think we loved what we were doing. I mean, Bobby and I just loved working together. We loved making stuff. We saw a huge opportunity for the service. And fundamentally, the service was so different than what else was out there. And it was very clear that like, we would have had to compromise on our vision and values if we sold the company. I mean, you think about almost every choice was the opposite of what was happening at the time, right? It was like, permanent, public, social media on a feed. We were doing like, private messaging, private ephemeral messaging, right? No public likes and comments, right? With like, opening into the camera, not a feed, investing in things like augmented reality. When everyone was investing in virtual reality, thinking that people were actually gonna like, wear a TV on their face.

• 1:44:53Speaker 01

  Like, it's insane. Like, it was insane. And I think like, it makes no sense. And I think like, we looked at that and we were like, wow. Like, you know, if that's like, the direction people wanna go, like, that's scary for the world. Now, it's great in many ways that like, all of these services have adopted our inventions. I mean, when we talked about, I mean, in 2012, 2013, the importance of privacy? People looked at us like we were insane. I mean, literally. They were like, what are you talking about privacy? Like, what? Like, that, remember, that was like, the world, remember Mark Zuckerberg being like, the world's gonna be open and connected. Everyone's gonna share everything. Like, what? Like, and it was just so wrong in terms of the direction of the world and like, what people actually wanted. And so I think like, you could imagine a world without Snapchat, without these inventions. Like, I think the world would be like, a worse place.

• 1:45:38Speaker 01

  It's so, it's so interesting right now. There's a lot of concern about social media and the way that it makes people feel, right? What's fascinating is when Snapchat is studied separately from social media, there's study after study, independent studies that show that Snapchat makes a positive impact on people's friendships, on their well-being, that is fundamentally different from social media. Because in those same studies, it shows that Instagram, TikTok, whatever, make people feel bad, right? And so what I find so interesting is that Snapchat itself represents something different and a connection to your friends and family that actually makes your life better. And so even though it's challenging to continue operating a business, to compete with these folks, who have a very different worldview

• 1:46:17Speaker 01

  and a very different direction for how they want the world to move, I worry about a world without Snapchat. I worry about a world that doesn't try to fight for this different set of values and this different way of thinking about things.

• 1:46:32David Senra?

  One of the benefits of reading a biography is you see the evolution of an idea over time, where your decision not to sell as a young man in his early twenties, right? You might have had a faint idea that, first of all, I think you love being an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs need businesses. What is an entrepreneur that sold his business? It's like, nothing. You're just sitting on the sidelines doing nothing. So you shouldn't sell your, ever sell your best idea. That's what I said back in 2018 when I made the first podcast about you. It's like, this is, I think you even said this, like, I don't think I'm gonna come up with a better idea than this. So I'm gonna now dedicate my life to working on my second best idea? How the hell does that make sense? For money that I'm gonna get anyways in the future, and most of which I won't even spend in my lifetime? But you have that kernel of the idea. But now you use this great articulation of that.

• 1:47:17David Senra?

  It's like, that idea almost grew and solidified over time. And then there's things in the future that had to happen that you didn't know were going to happen, and you realized that was the right choice. Such as, social media gets a really bad rap. It has terrible PR. All the polling is like, people, even though they're addicted to these things, they seem to not make their lives better. Where like, you actually, if you separate that out, and you've built something where people are actually happy and feel good about using the product, that's worth more than money.

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  100%. Yeah, and you have to have it impacted the scale of a billion people around the world who use our service to talk with their friends and family, build stronger relationships. Like, that's inspiring to me.

• 1:48:05David Senra?

  There was two conversations I had on this podcast that surprised me. The first one was of Daniel Ok of Spotify, and the next one was Toby Lukay of Shopify. I get those confused all the time. Daniel said something interesting, or he was even willing at the beginning. He thought Spotify needed to exist in the world, that he didn't want to sell it, but if he thought selling it would increase the likelihood that it continues on this world, then he was willing to do so. And then, so that shocked me. And then Toby Lukay said something that was fascinating, where he thought if it was not for this new invention of AI and its current format, that he was close to finding... he didn't think he would be the best CEO of Shopify, so he'd find somebody else to do that. Because in both cases, they wanted what was best for the company.

• 1:48:51Speaker 01

  I think for me, I see Snapchat as the best possible vehicle to reinvent the computer. So if you think about Snapchat, we have this core, cash-flowing, profitable business, right, in Snapchat, that we're able to then use to reinvest in what has been a very long-term speculative project to reinvent the computer. And Snapchat has really been, in addition to changing the world in its own way, a real vehicle for enabling this evolution of computing. And so I think for me, that's one of the real benefits of running and controlling Snapchat today, is that we've been able to very consistently invest in advanced technology and R&D over an incredibly long period of time to build a real competitive advantage, but also to build a world-class product that we wouldn't have been able to do without Snapchat.

• 1:49:34David Senra?

  Oh, I never even thought about that, like that. So you view Snapchat as a means to reinvent computing?

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

  It's an incredibly important part of it, because without a hugely profitable cash flowing, I mean Snapchat's almost a $7 billion revenue business, right, almost in the Fortune 500. People, you know, make fun of us for not being profitable enough. We're taking a lot of that core cash flow from Snapchat and using it to reinvest in winning this future of computing. What's very unique about Snapchat is we've been able to do that now for, you know, we've invested in glasses for 12 years. We've been able to very consistently invest in a way that no VC would ever in a million years support.

• 1:50:09David Senra?

  Would there ever have been a world where you only built software?

• 1:50:19David Senra?

  There's too much of this art design background with you. And then I'm sitting here as you're talking and describing this to me. And I didn't even think about your business in those terms yet, which is why it's valuable to sit down and have conversations like this. It's like this guy's two heroes built the best hardware of all time in both of their industries.

• 1:50:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think ultimately-

• 1:50:36David Senra?

  And Jobs is famous for saying, "If you want to build great software, you have to control the hardware."

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

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

• 1:50:54David Senra?

  So the answer is no. There was no world in which Evan only builds-

• 1:50:59Speaker 01

  So think about how early we started doing it. I mean, this was back in 2014. We started investing in hardware.

• 1:51:06David Senra?

  Yeah, I think you're really misunderstood. Because I did an entire podcast about you. I've listened to all your interviews. And I'm still learning things right now from talking to you.

• 1:51:16Speaker 01

  That's fun, right?

• 1:51:17David Senra?

  Yeah, no, it's definitely a lot of fun. But we need to do a better job of telling the story, man.

• 1:51:21Speaker 01

  Well, I think the best way to tell a story is through the product, right? And I think that's what's so exciting about this year and why I articulate it as a crucible moment. Because we are inflecting and transforming Snapchat at the same time that we're launching a whole new product category that we've invented. So this will be a seminal year for our company.

• 1:51:38David Senra?

  So what does your schedule look like during a year like this? I've heard like-

• 1:51:41Speaker 01

  It's insane. Yeah.

• 1:51:42David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:51:42Speaker 01

  It's completely insane.

• 1:51:44David Senra?

  Tell us more.

• 1:51:44Speaker 01

  Untenable. No, this is like a seven-day-a-week job.

• 1:51:49David Senra?

  How do you balance that, though? Because you have young kids at home. And I heard in very intense times, you were talking about sometimes you had to get up before they were awake and you went home every day after they were asleep.

• 1:52:01Speaker 01

  There's a lot of days like that right now. I mean, I'm back in, definitely in that mode. I always try to keep Sunday protected. We go to church as a family. We go to brunch. And then I spend the afternoon with our kids. And that's super important to me. But other than that, it's full on.

• 1:52:20David Senra?

  So early mornings, late nights, all the time.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:52:23David Senra?

  And your biggest issue is that you're redesigning, you're inventing new hardware. Because is that like, I don't want to diminish Snapchat, but it sounds like it's at scale, it's profitable, you're adding a lot of product features.

• 1:52:34Speaker 01

  With Snapchat, we do need to re-accelerate the advertising business, but I think given the transformation we've undertaken over the last three years of the advertising platform, like that, that is coming, right? We're seeing the growth in the small and medium customers. We're diversifying the advertising business. We've built this direct revenue business. So I look at Snapchat and like, I see a path, you know, to a lot more revenue over the, over the coming years. And so I think that's, that certainly has been a huge focus of the last several years. And then I think, you know, the core specs business this year will mark the real beginning, you know, of the next chapter of that story as we transition from being, you know, a developer platform to a consumer product, which is really challenging thing to do.

• 1:53:13David Senra?

  All right, so you have an insane schedule. I have a feeling based on you have like the simmering intensity about you, like are these actually your favorite times to be running the company?

• 1:53:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 1:53:27David Senra?

  Why?

• 1:53:28Speaker 01

  Because every decision, the way you spend every minute really matters. And I think that's exciting because I think it's, we're at a real inflection point in the company in terms of, you know, if you think about the last 12 years of my life that I've invested in, you know, creating this new vision for what a computer can be and, you know, and I almost said the number of days. And in some number of days, we're about to share that with the world. And like, that's incredibly, incredibly exciting.

• 1:53:56David Senra?

  How do you handle the stress though?

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  Huge on meditation. Kriya meditation changed my life.

• 1:54:01David Senra?

  What's it called?

• 1:54:02Speaker 01

  Called Kriya.

• 1:54:03David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

  Unbelievable. Meditation was like never like a fit for me. You know, I always like, they're like, try TM, like learn your mantra. Like it just like never clicked. Kriya is like incredibly energizing, you know, involves like breath work and it's like, to me, it's like, I mean, wow, you know, it's like, it's super powerful.

• 1:54:20David Senra?

  Is this like a daily practice?

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  When I can, yeah. And I try to exercise every morning, you know, Kriya as much as I can, you know, a couple of days a week.

• 1:54:29Speaker 01

  And obviously playing with our kids and hanging with my wife, like that's the. That's the stress management regime.

• 1:54:36David Senra?

  Yeah, I feel like all the great entrepreneurs, it's like the best quote I've ever heard describe this kind of mentality was this guy named Herb Keller, who was the founder of Southwest Airlines, which is the most successful airline, I think about selling commodity products, right? Most successful airline of all time, I think it was profitable for 40 straight years. And he was asked one time, they're like, "How do you handle the stress?" He's like, "I don't handle it, I like it." He's like, "I'm not doing this, like, I wouldn't start a company in a hugely competitive environment if I wanted to take an easy path through life."

• 1:55:07Speaker 01

  But I think what he did there and like how he explained that, what's really powerful about that, and I think this is what a lot of founders do, is they reframe it, right? Like, if you can reframe stress as an opportunity, it's gonna, it's gonna be great. I mean, in the early days, like, I hated speaking publicly when we created our company. I didn't like it. Like, my innate nature, I mean, this goes back to like growing up in the computer lab, right? Like, I just did not want to do public speaking. I didn't want to do company-wide Q and A. You know, I'm like, "If I want to communicate with the company, I'll send an email," kind of thing, right? Like, crazy. And like, one of our board members was like, "Evan, like, it's your job, like, too bad, figure it out." And literally, I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna learn how to love it. Like, I'm gonna learn how to love public speaking. I'm gonna learn how to love doing a, you know, live Q and A with our team." And I do now. Like, I love it. I love doing Q and A with our team.

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  And so I think that ability to like reframe things that like appear like a challenge or feel like something you're uncomfortable with, like, that's, that's really important.

• 1:55:58David Senra?

  Yeah, you'll see this in the history of entrepreneurship. Thomas Edison, Henry Kaiser, Edwin Land, they viewed as problems are just opportunities in work clothes. It's like, "This is an opportunity, we just have to get to work to actually do it." There's been this new thing that's popped up where, I'm glad you, you like actually developed a skill set and to tell your own story, to communicate this, because companies are trying to hire like a chief storyteller. It's like, "Yeah, that's the founder." Like, Edwin Land, go back, again, we talked about Edwin Land and Steve Jobs a lot today. It's like, they would tell you the person that is best able to tell, and it's not even had to be that articulate. It's just you care more about anybody else. You know more about anybody else. Just educate us on what it's, why your product exists and what makes it special. And who else could do that but the person that was there when it was just

• 1:56:43David Senra?

  one person, two people and a laptop?

• 1:56:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll never forget like when I was a lot younger, I was starting the company, had the opportunity to meet President Clinton, right? And his advice was like, "The job is explainer in chief. That is the job. Like, you gotta go around and explain this stuff to everybody so they understand, you know, their role at Snap or Snap's role in the world. And I think that's super valuable.

• 1:57:04David Senra?

  Well, you're doing a good job, Ed. I appreciate you taking the time for this. I do want to end on one of my favorite quotes. This is from that book that I read about you almost a decade ago. The, I guess I'll give a little context here. You dropped out of Stanford with five classes, six classes left, but you decided to walk with an, for an empty diploma, right? And you regretted it. And then you told this beautiful, this is a direct quote from you. It says, "It only recently occurred to me while preparing this, how totally absurd this whole charade was. It reminded me that oftentimes we do all sorts of silly things to avoid appearing different. Conforming happens so naturally that we can forget how powerful it is. We want to be accepted by our peers. We want to be part of the group. It's in our biology.

• 1:57:46David Senra?

  But the thing that makes us human are those times we listen to the whispers of our soul and allow ourselves to be pulled in another direction. It's very obvious that you listen to the whispers of your soul. I'm very glad that people like you exist. Thank you very much for taking the time to have this conversation."

• 1:57:59Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:58:00David Senra?

  Yeah, awesome, man.

• 1:58:01Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 1:58:02David Senra?

  I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.