How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO)

Evan Spiegel, the co-founder and CEO of Snap, is one of the very few people in the world who has successfully built and scaled a lasting consumer social product. Snapchat has nearly 1 billion MAUs, and Evan and his team invented some of the most important consumer products and features, including Stories, AR glasses, swipe-based navigation, the camera as the primary UX, and a lot more. *In our in-depth conversation, we discuss:* 1. Why distribution is now the biggest challenge for creating a consumer technology business 2. How Snap innovates at scale with a 9-to-12-person design team: no titles, no hierarchy, hundreds of ideas reviewed weekly with the CEO 3. Why a pure software business is no longer a moat, and what actually creates durable competitive advantages today 4. How AI is changing the way designers work and why they’re now shipping code 5. Why every major Snap feature was copied and how that forced the company to work differently 6. Evan’s prediction that humanity’s comfort with AI will be a bigger bottleneck than the technology itself 7. This year’s crucible moment for Snap *Brought to you by:* WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: https://workos.com/lenny Vanta—automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI: https://vanta.com/lenny *Episode transcript:* https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/snapchat-ceo-why-distribution-is *Archive of all Lenny's Podcast transcripts:* https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w998p1gvtpu4193/AMdNPR8AOw0lMklwtnC0TrQ?rlkey=j06x0nipoti519e0xgm23zsn9&st=ahz0fj11&dl=0 *Where to find Evan Spiegel:* • X: https://x.com/evanspiegel • Snapchat: https://www.snapchat.com/@evan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-spiegel • Website: https://www.spiegelfamilyfund.com *Where to find Lenny:* • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ *In this episode, we cover:* (00:00) Introduction to Evan Spiegel (02:28) Why consumer social products are so hard to build (04:31) How Snapchat cracked distribution with close friends, not network size (05:50) Why distribution is the new moat in the AI era (08:39) Snapchat’s innovation track record (and why software isn’t a moat) (11:39) Why Snap is betting on two of the hardest businesses: consumer social and hardware (16:00) Specs use cases (17:56) The innovation process (21:34) The velocity of design work at Snapchat (25:07) Why Evan says you must talk to customers (26:06) The origin story of Stories (28:25) How screenshot detection saved early Snapchat (31:03) Why they waited to hire PMs—and what role they play now (34:41) How AI is shifting the designer-PM-engineer triad (36:10) Design as an intentional bottleneck for product cohesion (37:24) Why staying close to customers matters for any leader (39:39) What Evan looks for when hiring designers (41:57) How to develop young design talent (44:16) Designers shipping code with AI—and the guardrails needed at scale (47:20) Using jobs-to-be-done to organize AI transformation (48:50) How the CEO job has changed over 15 years (51:30) Learning to communicate (54:08) Why this year is Snapchat’s “crucible moment” (56:22) Being the “middle child” in tech (57:51) Screen-time philosophy with four kids (ages 2 to 15) (1:01:08) AI Corner (1:04:02) Contrarian Corner (1:06:04) Lightning round and final thoughts *Referenced:* • Snapchat: https://www.snapchat.com • TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com • Threads: https://www.threads.com • Snapchat+: https://www.snapchat.com/plus • Instagram Plus: https://help.instagram.com/26266751476298047 • Pixy: https://www.pixy.com • Specs: https://newsroom.snap.com/introducing-specs-inc • Bobby Murphy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Murphy • Hard truths about building in the AI era | Keith Rabois (Khosla Ventures): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/hard-truths-about-building-in-the-ai-era • Marc Andreessen: The real AI boom hasn’t even started yet: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/marc-andreessen-the-real-ai-boom • The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-design-process-is-dead • Claude Cowork: https://www.anthropic.com/product/claude-cowork • Figma: https://www.figma.com • Bill Clinton on X: https://x.com/BillClinton • Superhuman’s secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/superhumans-secret-to-success-rahul-vohra ... References continued at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/snapchat-ceo-why-distribution-is _Production and marketing by https://penname.co/._ _For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]._ Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

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

• 0:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  You guys have a billion monthly active users. Why is it so freaking hard to build a durable, lasting social consumer product?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  So much of consumer technology focuses on product market fit. People don't spend nearly enough time thinking about distribution and figuring out distribution.

• 0:16Lenny Rachitsky?

  I feel like Snap has always been punching above its weight in terms of just how much new stuff comes out of your team. Stories, AR glasses, swipe-based navigation.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  We have a very, very small design team that is constantly innovating and creating new things. Your first day that you join the design team, you present work. You're making things. If you want to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas.

• 0:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  People copy you. As a human, how does it feel just to see this consistently happen?

• 0:38Speaker 01

  15 years ago, we essentially learned that software is not a moat, which is something that everyone is discovering today with AI.

• 0:44Lenny Rachitsky?

  You described this coming year as the crucible moment.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  It's a real turning point. We're in an industry where so much of the conversation is focused on technology. Humanity is far more important because humanity dictates how technology is adopted. Technology leaders think that folks will just blindly adopt new technology as it comes out. There's going to be a huge amount of societal pushback on a lot of the changes that are coming with AI.

• 1:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  Today, my guest is Evan Spiegel, CEO and co-founder of Snap. Evan is one of the very few humans in the world who has successfully built and scaled a lasting consumer social app. In the 15 years since Snapchat launched, there are essentially zero social consumer apps that have launched and stuck around. Snapchat has over 1 billion monthly active users, is generating over $6 billion a year in revenue. People post over 8 billion AR lens photos a day on Snapchat. And over the years, Evan and his team have invented the concept of Stories. They had the first AR glasses product in the market. They invented swipe-based navigation, the camera being primary. And also, back in the day, face swapping, making people look older,

• 1:55Lenny Rachitsky?

  and so many of the things that are just copied throughout the entire industry. If this is truly the golden age of consumer products, like many people say, AI is going to enable. There's a lot that we can learn about how Evan and his team think and operate and are able to continue innovating. This is a rare podcast interview with Evan and we cover a lot of ground. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for a year free of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Evan Spiegel.

• 2:32Lenny Rachitsky?

  Evan, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it.

• 2:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  I want to start with just trying to understand and help people understand, why is it so freaking hard to build a durable, lasting consumer product, and in particular, a social consumer product? And just to give people this context, I don't think people realize this, but since you launched 15 years ago, there's basically TikTok, which is not really social, it's more of like a media platform, I'd say, and then maybe Threads, which I think is cheating because it just sits on top of Instagram. Basically, nothing else has worked, other than Snapchat 15 years ago. And in spite of everyone just, like, everyone innately just wants to build a consumer product, social app, it's just like where everyone first goes, everybody fails. Nothing works. Why is it so hard? What do you think people don't get?

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's really interesting, you know, in terms of the examples that you just shared, right? Of TikTok and Threads, because you just shared two examples of people who figured out distribution. And I think that that's actually one of the hardest things to figure out in consumer technology today. We were so fortunate, when we created Snapchat, the mobile phone, you know, in the App Store were just getting started. So people were downloading lots of new apps all the time. They were really excited about trying new services. You know, Instagram, I think, had started a year before Snapchat or something like that. So there was a real appetite to try new apps and new services, and that's not the case today. It's a lot harder to get distribution for new ideas and new services. People aren't downloading as many apps now as they used to, and Both TikTok and Threads figured out distribution,

• 4:06Speaker 01

  which is why I think there are more recent examples of success. TikTok did it with money, which I actually thought was really innovative. They spent billions of dollars subsidizing both sides of their video marketplace, acquiring customers to watch videos and then paying creators to make videos. And so they were able to bootstrap their ecosystem. And I think with Threads, obviously, they were able to leverage the amazing distribution that Meta has across all their other products. So I think so much of consumer technology focuses on, am I building the right product? Do I have product-market fit? Have I built something that's really going to resonate with customers that they're really going to want to use all the time? And I think people don't spend nearly enough time thinking about distribution and figuring out distribution. And that seems to me to be a huge differentiator.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  So as I reflect on the early days of building Snapchat, the thing that we figured out in terms of distribution, especially when it comes to social, was that back then, people believed that there were network effects in social networks that meant that the more people you had using the service, the stickier that it is. And so there was no way to beat the biggest networks because those were the most valuable. And what Snapchat figured out that was, I think, different was that despite the fact that there were much bigger networks that connected more people, what really mattered was connecting you to the right people. And so if you could just connect someone not to all their friends, but to their best friend, to their partner, to their spouse, the people that they cared most about in the world,

• 5:36Speaker 01

  that's where the majority of the value is in the network. And so that's what really allowed us to grow in those early days. We had the benefit of the App Store and mobile distribution, but we also had a different way of growing our service, which wasn't about having the most friends. It was about having your close friends.

• 5:51Lenny Rachitsky?

  That is so interesting. It's something that I've been thinking a lot about, actually, this idea of distribution because of AI. If you think about just where AI has come into the market, it started originally just like helping people autocomplete code. There's something I've been talking about a lot on this podcast. So it's like, okay, autocomplete code. Okay, now it's writing all our code. Okay, now it's reviewing our code. And now it's testing itself. And now it's going to help us come up with ideas. So it's like starting in the middle of the product development process and expanding out. And I feel like it will be very good at coming up with great ideas and developing strategy. Like it's going up, I don't know, the funnel or the timeline of building a product. And I feel like distribution is where it ends up being. What ends up being the new moat and the new biggest challenge? Because AI is not going to really help you there.

• 6:33Lenny Rachitsky?

  So that's it's really interesting that that's even more so true for consumer products.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  I think that's absolutely the case. And the only thing I would say is, you know, the most exciting times in technology are when there are new platforms that get created. And that tends to be where a lot of the value comes from. You think about, you know, a lot of the big consumer technology companies today, they were really born out of mobile, right? Whether it's Uber, Snapchat, some of those early generation companies that really got distribution and built themselves on mobile. And so I think as we look forward to, you know, sort of these next generation form factors, things like glasses, there's going to be a whole new set of opportunities and a whole new surface for people to build generational consumer companies. I'm really excited about that.

• 7:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  Especially if they have distribution already. It feels like that's going to be like, I'm just worried for startups. It's going to be very hard to get distribution, just like it's there's so much launching every day, so much to pay attention to. And it just feels very hard for a startup to get any attention with existing, you know, against existing incumbents. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Repli, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies.

• 7:54Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 8:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  Something that has always been really interesting to me about Snapchat is it feels like you guys have just innovated so much over the years. You guys basically just invent all the things. People copy you, benefit greatly from it, and it's just kind of wild to watch. And just like a few examples that come to mind, stories you guys created, you were very early on AR glasses. You guys launched Spectacles before Meta got into the stuff. Swipe-based navigation, I think you guys started. The idea of holding to do a video versus a photo. There's probably a bunch. First of all, what's the next thing someone's gonna steal, do you think?

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh. Well, I just, I just saw Instagram Plus launch. So I think that's the latest rip, you know?

• 9:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  Which is a subscription.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, we just hit 25 million subscribers on Snapchat Plus, more than a billion revenue run rate. So was, I think, probably enough to get Meta's attention that it's a good time to copy.

• 9:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  And the plus, he's just even taking the plus as the name. Oh, my God. Let me just ask you, like, as a, as a human, how does it, what is it, how does it feel just to see this consistently happen to you? You guys come up with something awesome, someone rips it off, benefits hugely from it, and you just have to keep doing that again and again?

• 9:54Speaker 01

  You know, it's certainly better than making stuff that people don't want to copy. So I think, you know, in many ways, it's a blessing that we've been able to continue to innovate, to make new things that really resonate with folks, and that ultimately people want to end up, you know, copying from Snap. So I think it certainly beats the alternative. But it does, you know, mean that we have to be really thoughtful about our strategy. And so I think, you know, one of the things, it's been, it's been an interesting time for me to reflect a lot on, you know, our strategy over the last 15 years. Because, you know, 15 years ago, we essentially learned that software is not a moat, right? Which is something that everyone is discovering today with AI, right? But 15 years ago, because all the software features that we could create were so easily cloned by our competitors,

• 10:37Speaker 01

  we started to think about how to build a more durable business, how to build a business, you know, that had bigger and more effective modes. One of the first things we did was focus a lot On building ecosystems, right? Whether those are the relationships between creators and Snapchatters, whether that's the platform we built around augmented reality, where developers have built millions of these lenses. So it's very easy to copy hardware or software features. It's very hard to copy or to replicate a full ecosystem or a platform. And so we realized that the more that we could build a platform around our business, the more that we could build an ecosystem with creators and developers, the harder it would be for folks to just copy that. And then it also informed a lot of our thinking about investing in other places

• 11:22Speaker 01

  that are really hard to copy, including hardware, where it's really, really challenging to copy our fully vertically-integrated stack around augmented reality. So I'm certain there's a lot more to talk about there. But I think we learned early on that software is easy to copy, and so it's really important to build more durable modes.

• 11:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's really interesting hearing this from you. And I was going to get to this later, but we can talk about this now, this big investment you've been putting into hardware. Like, you would think network effects would be the mode. That's what everybody's always trying to get to, because that's classically a great mode. Are you saying that that's maybe not even as great a mode? Or that's just not enough? And then you need something more, like, say, hardware?

• 12:02Speaker 01

  I think network effects are certainly an important piece of the puzzle, for sure. But I don't think there are enough when it comes to these sorts of software cloning. And so despite the fact that we've got a ton of patents and we've protected all these ideas, the way that it works in software is that it's quite easy for folks to copy or iterate on top of these ideas. And so I think in addition to network effects, it's really important to try to build businesses that are more defensible by truly building out a platform that can support relationships between creators, developers, and the community. Because that in and of itself, we found, is incredibly difficult to copy.

• 12:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's so interesting. Like, if you think about it, you're working on two of the hardest types of businesses, like consumer social. Platform and hardware. And I love that you're doing that. And this hardware investment, you've been at it for a long time. There you had spectacles, you had drones. I don't think people remember you had this drone that could take photos of you. And then you have specs coming out. Is it specs or spectacles, the name of what's coming out today, by the way?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Specs is coming out this year.

• 13:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  Specs. Okay, cool. We're going to talk about it, but just maybe you've already answered it. Why this is something you're so passionate about? But why, why this kind of ongoing investment in hardware?

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Well, I think to like, take a huge step back. I love computers. I grew up using computers all the time. I built my own computer when I was in middle school. You know, I fell in love with graphic design and would spend like every lunch period in the computer lab. And I think one of the things that I noticed about computers, and I think today with mobile phones, is that in many ways, they isolate us from one another, right? They actually take us out of our social interactions. They took me off the playground at recess and, you know, put me into the computer lab. Or, you know, if I look at our 15 year old today and his friends, right? You know, sometimes when they're hanging out, they're all looking down at their phones, even though they're all together.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  And so I think there's just such a big opportunity to build technology that actually brings us together, that keeps us grounded in the real world, rather than, you know, removing us from it. And that's something that we realized early on with Snapchat, right? We were innovating, building, you know, lenses and augmented reality. But ultimately, we saw that people were using AR on these tiny little phone screens, right? That required you to use your thumbs to interact. And so, you know, it's almost like interacting with the world through like a keyhole, you know, rather than actually staying grounded and being able to interact together with friends. So it just seems so obvious that like, as computers play a bigger and bigger role in our lives, you know, I think today people spend seven or eight hours a day on average on screens,

• 14:35Speaker 01

  that like, something has got to change to make this technology fit better into our lives, right? We get enormous value from computers, but at the same time, I think the cost is quite meaningful. And, and I think, you know, they need to evolve. So, you know, with the early, with the early version of spectacles, I guess that was back in 2014 or something like that. You know, the initial idea was just to get the camera off the phone, right? Out of your pocket and, you know, allow you to more easily, you know, take snaps out in the world. But we then sort of built a roadmap from there, right? Where we added a second camera to get depth. We added a display to be able to overlay. You know, digital objects into the world and help you interact with them. And then with the last generation in 2024, we released the our operating system,

• 15:19Speaker 01

  which now allows developers to build full-featured software inside of specs, you know, in preparation for the consumer launch. So I don't know. I think the time is right for a new, a new type of computer. I think people are frustrated, you know, with the cost of using phones and computers today. They're kind of all hunched over like gremlins. And, you know, we can build a new computer. We have built a new computer that brings people outside, that helps them connect together with their friends, that frees them up to actually use their hands to interact with the world. And, you know, that to me is really exciting. I think it's, it's a whole new chapter. And gosh, I mean, what? It's been 20 years or something since the iPhone. So it's, it's about time for something new, I think.

• 16:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  So I got an early preview of the specs and it's extremely cool. I learned how to be an airbender. I put plants all over my house, drawing all over the place. And it's, and there's multiplayer features, which is very cool, which I think is part of the idea, right? Is you're connecting with people versus sitting in like a VR environment on your own. Like I worry about the being connected all the time. So I imagine that's like a new thing we have to figure out. How do we not just get hooked on just watching things out to the side instead of looking at someone we're with? Do you have any thoughts there? Just like, is there a solution to that other than just like social norms?

• 16:33Speaker 01

  I do think social norms will play a, a big role, but I also think one of the things people experience with AR, you know, specs, unlike, you know, these heads-up display glasses, they don't just put an annoying, like, you know, little screen that's stuck to your face on the glasses. They actually like anchor content in the world, which is really different, right? They, they, you know, put, put that content directly in your field of view rather than requiring you to like look down at some little screen or like get some text alert or notification. So I think, you know, frankly, I don't think those use cases are very compelling. Like, I don't think receiving phone notifications on your face is like, you know, a valuable. You know, proposition for most folks.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  So I don't think we necessarily have to worry about that because I think most people don't want that. I think like what is going to be really important with specs is showing people all the incredible new ways they can hang out and connect together with their friends wearing specs. But I don't think it'll be disruptive or notification based or something like that. One of the things that I really dislike about the heads up display glasses is when you're looking at the little heads up display in the corner, you're actually looking at like your friend's crotch while you're talking to them. If you check the heads up display. So the position is just very strange and I don't think that that's something that really is resonating with customers, nor do I think that's something that's going to become like a widespread behavior.

• 17:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  I want to go back to this idea of how to innovate. I feel like Snap has always been punching above its weight in terms of just how much new stuff comes out of your team, how many inventions happen, considering the size of the company and the history. What do you find is needs to be true for innovation to happen? What do you do to allow for all these great ideas to emerge?

• 18:19Speaker 01

  The best sort of academic overview or summary, I think, comes from a guy Safi Bakal, who wrote a book called Loon Shots. It's really worth reading. It's all about the innovation process. And actually, when I read it, I was like, oh, my gosh, that kind of explains a lot of how we think about innovation at Snap. And I think to summarize the academic version, we can talk about like what we've developed and built at Snap. But like to summarize, essentially, his findings are that, basically, if you want to deliver a product at scale, you usually need quite a large organization. A large organization needs hierarchy and structure, a lot of operational rigor. And as soon as you have an organization that's very large and very structured like that,

• 19:03Speaker 01

  people become very focused on getting a promotion, getting into the next step of the hierarchy. And that means that all of a sudden, they become a lot more risk averse. They're not really as willing to try new things. They're very focused on achieving the goals that have sort of been set for them in this operational hierarchy. And that is, that makes it very, very challenging to innovate. Now, on the flip side, you know, structures that are really healthy and constructive for innovation, you know, typically are very, very flat, right? That's the same for our design team, for example, where there's no one that has a fancier title or a role. There's a lot of flexibility in terms of the ability to try new things and fail quickly and put up, you know, crazy ideas.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  And, you know, what he basically finds is that the companies that are very successful actually have both types of organizations inside their company and that the leaders of the organization are the ones who are responsible for creating a healthy, functioning relationship between the two types of organizations. Because what ends up happening in a lot of companies is that, you know, the small innovative team becomes critical of the large, you know, organization. Oh, they're so bureaucratic and slow, they don't innovate, you know, things like that. And then the, you know, the larger organization is like, oh, you know, what are these jokers doing, you know, just innovating? They're not really driving the business, they're not supporting our customers. And so a lot of tension actually arises from the different organizational structures. And so the leadership responsibility, and I think, you know, Safi does a really good

• 20:31Speaker 01

  job looking throughout history, what leaders have cultivated really constructive and powerful relationships between, you know, the more innovative or flat parts of the organization and the more structural, you know, structured and hierarchical parts of the organization. You know, how you create that mutual respect, how you create that dialogue between those parts of the organization is so important. And so, you know, when I read that, I was like, wow, that actually sounds quite similar to what we have at Snap. You know, we have to run a large public company, serve almost a billion customers. That means, you know, our service needs to be really reliable and it means that we need to operate, you know, really, really effectively to serve our customers. And at the same time, we have a very, very small, you know, it sort of oscillates between

• 21:11Speaker 01

  like nine and 12 people, design team that is constantly innovating and creating new things. And I think, you know, the beauty of what I love about Snap is that the dialogue between those two teams is where a lot of that innovation happens. Because a lot of our engineers, you know, working to serve our customers or working on reliability, have a bunch of great ideas and so do our designers. And as long as they're in dialogue, you know, really great things can happen.

• 21:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  There's someone, I forget who this was, but they described this approach as the fast thinking and slow thinking part of the organization, kind of like Kenan's system one, system two approach. It's interesting, the fast-moving, let's say, what do you kind of call this innovation team? Or do you have a label for this, like, let's come up with the new ideas part of the org?

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's really important to acknowledge that, like, new ideas come from everywhere, and we want that. But I think the design team in particular, it's really important, and we call it the design team, like, it's really important that they have a flat, non-hierarchical structure, you know, where new ideas can come from anywhere. I mean, I think that that is absolutely critical.

• 22:13Lenny Rachitsky?

  So in terms of how you operationalize this, is that the key to the innovation? You've seen as this, like, specific, small, design team who can work, like, talk about just how you actually operationalize this sort of way of working?

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's an important part of it, but a lot of how we built Snap was modeled, actually, on mine and Bobby's original relationship, right? Where, like, Bobby, you know, has a computer science, you know, heavy-duty computer science and stats background, you know, mathematical and computational science, but he really likes design and likes thinking about, you know, building things for customers and empathizing with them. I have a design background, right? I was, you know, in the product design program at, back at school, which actually was like part of the mechanical engineering department at the time. I took some computer science classes. So I, you know, sort of, kind of, under, you know, you know, knew what I was talking about when it came to computer science. So we both, like, had mutual respect for each other and our skill sets and our backgrounds,

• 23:08Speaker 01

  and both enjoyed talking together about the types of products we wanted to create. And that dialogue created, you know, a lot of innovation. And so, a lot of how we've thought about growing the company over time is, like, strengthening that dialogue between engineers and designers, and creating, you know, an environment where, you know, folks feel comfortable throwing out really crazy ideas. But I think, you know, for the design team in particular, the thing that is probably most important is the velocity of design work. So I typically meet with our designers for a couple hours every week, and we just look at work. I mean, new work every week, you know, hundreds of ideas, I would guess, you know, on a weekly basis. That, you know, to me, you know, if I think about...

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Where I learned how to to design and and build things, I have sort of an interesting combination because, you know, I I went to to Stanford for the product design program, which is really focused on empathy, right, in this iterative process of understanding what people want and building prototypes and iterating, but really centered on empathy, right, human centered design. And then, at the same time, I'd also been to art school. So I had studied at Art Center, I'd studied at Otis here in Los Angeles, both, you know, great art schools. And so I was used to this like grinding, you know, expectation that you're making new work all the time, and then just an absolutely brutal critique process, you know, on a regular basis. And so, you know, for me, as I thought about, you know, the the parts of my education

• 24:34Speaker 01

  that I really liked, it was this combination of really developing empathy with people and what, you know, the types of products that they want in their lives, but at the same time, having this really high velocity, you know, work ethic, where you're not just like thinking, you know, all the time about, you know, new new products, you're actually making stuff every week, all the time, and then you're talking about it as a team, because that critique process is where so much of the learning sort of happens. So, you know, I'd say that the velocity of work, you know, is really important, because our favorite saying is, you know, if you want to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas. That's really, really important.

• 25:08Lenny Rachitsky?

  I just had Keith Rabois on the podcast. I don't know if you know this about his, he has many contrarian takes. One is if you're building a consumer product, do not talk to customers. Like, not only is it not useful, his advice is it's harmful, because it can infiltrate your subconscious, and it just doesn't lead to great things. What's your perspective on that?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Wow, that that's really interesting. I would say you have to talk to customers, you have to share your idea, you should share your ideas quickly as possible, as frequently as possible. It doesn't mean you need to take people's advice or feedback, but it's really important, I think, to listen. And and I think for me, you know, it's, you know, it's not like the survey model of listening. I don't think that's particularly helpful. But I think going deep and talking with someone for an hour, two hours, about how do they use technology, how does it fit in their lives, how do they feel about, you know, the products they're using, you can learn so much. And I think, you know, customers are an endless source of inspiration. When it comes to building products.

• 26:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  So you're pro talking to users because I feel like you've been really good at just like, here's what it'll be and here's how it should be. And even though people may not understand this is what it should be, I trust me it'll work really well. What's that balance of just like, here's how, what I'll pay attention to, here's what I want?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Well, let's use stories as an example, right? So, you know, back then, we were hearing from customers all the time, I want to send all button. I want to send all button. You know, it's so annoying to select everybody on my list of friends and Snapchat. If you just give me a send all button, then I can blast snaps to everybody all day long and that'd be really great. And at the same time, we were talking to people about their use of social media, right? And they're like, oh gosh, social media, I feel all this pressure, right? Everything I put up there is permanent all the time. You know, it's got all these likes and comments, so there's all this judgment. So I only feel like I can put like pretty and perfect things up there. You know, and I just don't like that pressure. That doesn't feel good. I actually love the way that Snapchat allows me to just express myself and share with my friends

• 27:03Speaker 01

  without that, that sort of judgment and pressure. And so we thought that was really interesting. And so, you know, we dug deeper into the, you know, how people were using social media. We found that one of the things they thought was really weird was that everything was in reverse chronological order in the feed. So the feed back in the day, the timeline, right? Like, you know, when people posted photos, you know, they would always find that like the end of the birthday party appeared first in the feed, right? And then the middle and then the, you know, the beginning of the party. So everything was, was sort of, you know, just like played in reverse in the feed, which was, was really strange to folks. So we listened to all of that, right? And heard all of that, but then we came up with something totally new and different, which were stories, right? That were responsive to the feedback, right?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  They didn't, you know, create a send all button, but they did create a way to easily share with all of your friends without spamming them all day long. They removed, you know, public metrics. They didn't have, you know, likes and comments and things like that to reduce pressure. They disappeared after 24 hours so that everyone could start the day fresh again, you know, the, the next day. And they, you know, maybe most importantly, were in chronological order, which is the way that people have told stories, you know, since the, since the beginning of time. So I think that's an example where like, listening is incredibly valuable. All of those insights that we, you know, received just from listening to folks made a huge difference in the product design process. But we didn't build exactly what they asked for. We empathized and then, you know, came up with something new.

• 28:25Lenny Rachitsky?

  That is such a great story. I love hearing these stories of features that everyone's using now and how they came to be. Was there like a moment of just like this is the way this is the story concept that you remember? Or was it kind of this very gradual evolution?

• 28:37Speaker 01

  It was iterative because in a lot of ways, some of the early ideas started more around like a status update. You know, that was sort of like, you know, how could you know what your friends on Snapchat were up to? Even if you weren't sending snaps back and forth. And so, you know, it sort of started there. And then, you know, again, through talking to people and iterating, understanding what folks were really looking for. We ended up, you know, ended up with stories and some of the gestures, you know, that people maybe take for granted today, being able to tap forward through stories and backward through stories, full screen, right? Vertical content, those were all really new things at the time.

• 29:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there another story of something that y'all built that just like was interesting and of how it came to be? These stories are so interesting and people don't know these histories.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  You know, one of my favorite stories was around screenshot detection, actually, in the early days. Because when we first built Snapchat and we, you know, shared with people, oh, you could send photos to disappear. Everyone said, no, you can't. You can always take a screenshot. What do you mean? You can send things to disappear? That makes no sense. And so, you know, we thought a lot. I remember that summer, you know, after school, we went home, we were working out of my dad's house. And Bobby and I were just going back and forth and we were like, you know, we were having fun using the product. We were sending, you know, photos back and forth. But people would just keep saying, well, this like this just, it's not about disappearing photos because you can just save them. Like, I don't get it. And one of the things we invented at the time, we figured out a way.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  We realized that if you were pressing and holding to open a snap and left your finger on the screen and you took a screenshot, it would basically trigger, you know, an event on the phone essentially that made, the phone would essentially report that your finger had lost contact with the screen, right? That's what the screenshot mechanism did. So even though Apple didn't provide an API at the time to let you know that a screenshot had been taken, there was a way for us to essentially detect this touch event to learn that a screenshot had happened. And then we would just send a notification back to the sender that, oh, you know, the recipient had taken a screenshot. And that for us in the early days, you know, really resonated with our community because they didn't mind if somebody, you know, saved one of their snaps. They just wanted to know.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  And I think that that, you know, that early invention was one of the first things that really got a lot of traction in the early days. And I think, you know, Helps Snapchat spread as a new way of communicating.

• 30:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  And that is, that is really cool. I can't imagine Snapchat existing without you figuring that out. That feels like such a core mechanic. Something that is also really, I'd say, famous in the PM community about Snap is you guys waited a long time to hire product managers. I've done all these research reports on just like, how long it took the top companies to hire their PMs? And the number I saw is you had 200 employees before you hired your first PM. I'm curious if you think that was a mistake, waiting that long? And just your current thoughts on product managers, just like how they fit into Snap? A lot of people listening to this are PMs, and so I'm just curious how you feel.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  A lot of my view of product management was actually driven by my view of designers and the role that designers should play. And one of the things that I was concerned about in the tech community, if you look at the traditional tech org structure, designers really are producing visuals. They're not really producing the product direction, or the strategy, or the vision, or net new innovation. They're really responsive, actually, I think in many cases, to the PM, saying, this is what we're building, now go make me some visuals. And I absolutely did not want that type of culture to take root. Because again, as I mentioned, we modeled a lot of the way that we develop products here at Snap

• 32:16Speaker 01

  on that early relationship between myself and Bobby, really this harmonious relationship between design and engineering, and how important that is, that dialogue is, to building great things and great, great products. And so I think in the early days, my view was not that we don't need PMs. My view was that designers should do that work. So that's essentially what we would say to our designers, which was like, hey, if you need PM support, why don't you just do it yourself? What's the big deal? And I think that that really helped, frankly, designers play a more active role in the product development process. Now, today, at a company operating at our scale, if you look at the legal requirements, our approach to trust and safety,

• 32:58Speaker 01

  it really does take a village to get a new product off the ground, and product managers Play a really important coordination role in all that. In addition to synthesizing, for example, data science analysis and bringing together a working group to try to solve problems or innovate or make the product better. So I think, you know, as the organization grows and there becomes, you know, all of these different capabilities that the company didn't have in the early days, you know, whether it's data science, you know, you name it. Product managers play a really important role in bringing all those folks to the table and making sure we deliver, you know, the right thing at the right time.

• 33:33Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 34:14Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 34:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  I imagine your sense is now AI makes designers even more powerful. And so this is even more the way to approach. Talk about just like how you think this shifts this triad with AI enabling people.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  Well, it sounds highly dysfunctional if folks are having that standoff. That is not, not a good thing. But I do like, I do like that people are thinking about doing work really differently. I think that's imperative at this moment of time. The rate of change is extraordinary. I, look, I do think designers feel vindicated in a lot of ways, right? You know, a lot of designers had parents who were saying, why aren't you studying computer science? You know, what are you going to do with this skill set? Drawing things, you know, this doesn't make any sense. And I think today, you know, a lot of our designers are now shipping code, which is extraordinary. Right. And that's a really big and really meaningful change in terms of the way that the design works here at Snap and the way the creative process works. And so I think removing friction from the creative process and being able to go from idea to, you know,

• 35:55Speaker 01

  impact at, you know, the scale of almost a billion people using Snapchat is really empowering and exciting for, for designers who feel like these tools, you know, maybe leveled the playing field to some extent for, for creative people.

• 36:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, what I feel like, I don't see this happening yet, but I feel like because now it's so much easier to build, people are shipping all these okay things. And it feels like design should have its moment of glory right now as a differentiator of like, okay, this is actually awesome. I haven't felt that yet, and I'm curious if that's what will begin to happen.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Well, I think for us, design actually has always operated as like a bottleneck at the company, which is incredibly important, right? It's intentional that things need to be approved by design to ship. And sometimes that really annoys people, you know, and it does slow down the shipping process. Sometimes it means that if you don't know how to work well with design or get your ideas in front of design, that like some really innovative or cool new thing developed by, you know, a PM or developed by an engineer maybe doesn't get shipped as fast as it should. But that bottleneck is really, really important because that's what results in a cohesive customer experience. And I think, you know, I think you can see when an app has been Built by, you know, teams who are responsible for different, you know, pages of the app, right? Or different parts of the experience, but there isn't really like a cohesive through line.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  And I think, uh, you know, for us at Snap, you know, having design really actually be that bottleneck in terms of helping to, you know, manage what we're shipping and, you know, what it looks like and how it all works together, I think is really important.

• 37:25Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's a good segue to something I wanted to ask you about, which is you're famously very in the weeds on everything that is going on, all the things that are shipping. You're very close to the pixels. I'm curious how that's evolved for you over time. Like, are you still in there looking at everything that's about to ship? And what's your just philosophy on founders having to be involved in the, let's say, the pixels and the details of the product?

• 37:48Speaker 01

  First and foremost, like, yeah, this is what I love to do. Like, I love building things. I love, uh, you know, making new products, services for our community. That, that, that is like what drives me. I really, really enjoy that part of the process. So, you know, it's, it's not work to me. It's something that I really just love doing and love doing together with our team. And so I think for me like that, you know, in addition to all the great people I get to work with here at Snap, like the thing that, you know, wakes me up, you know, with a smile on my face every morning. The reason why I'm skipping to work is because I, you know, I am in the weeds on, on what we're building and shipping to our, uh, our community. That, that being said, there are always smarter, better, more talented experts, uh, you know, working on all the different, uh, things that we have going on. But I really do like staying close to, to what we're, what we're creating.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  I, I don't think it's relevant just to founders. I think no matter what type of company you're running or your role in the company, staying close to your customers, staying close to the product and the way that it's serving your customers is the fundamentally most important thing you could possibly do. I think like I'm, I absolutely subscribe to like the old school, like walk the floors, talk to your customers, get out there and stay in touch with what's actually happening, uh, with your service, with your community, uh, with your team. And, and I think that's probably the most important job that any leader can do in any company is stay close to their customers, stay close to their team.

• 39:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  Do you feel like especially for a consumer and consumer social product, this is extra important to just be like extremely in the weeds on everything that is shipping? And say, having designed, your design team have to approve everything? Do you feel like that's especially important for consumer?

• 39:22Speaker 01

  I don't think it's especially important for consumer. I think it's especially important for any company that wants to deliver great products to their community. Right? Companies have different points of strength, right? And differentiation, but if you want to differentiate on the product experience, I think it's really important that leaders stay, stay very close to that.

• 39:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there anything especially you look for in the designers you hire? Knowing that they're basically running the show and just approving everything and just kind of like the right hand to Evan? Is there anything in particular you look for to, when you're hiring these designers?

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a couple of really important things. First of all, we make all of our hiring decisions just based off portfolio. So like, that's really all we want to see. Like, I really don't care where you've worked or your level of experience. In fact, most people join our design team right out of school, not from a big tech company or something like that. And really what I'm focused on is understanding the portfolio. And I want to see two things from the portfolio. The first is a really wide range. And that is the difference between art and design. So there are lots of people who have a very distinct style, right? They have a very distinct way of building things and creating things. That really is art, right? They're expressing themselves and their own personal point of view on the world. And it can be very beautiful, but it is not design.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Design is really about empathizing with your customer, empathizing with your audience, your viewer, whoever it is, and then building something that really resonates with them. And, and that means you need to have an extraordinary amount of range. You've got to be able to, to build and create things that look totally different. So when I'm going through a portfolio, you know, the first thing I'm looking for is like, are they building stuff that all looks the same? Or are they building things that look really different, right? That, you know? That have been responsive to different sets of needs. And that's how I know that they're a designer and not just an artist. And then, you know, the other thing I want to understand, and you know, typically, you know, I interview every designer that joins our team. And what I want to understand is why and the story behind the work that they created.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  So typically what I'll do is just say, hey, you know, pick something in your portfolio, anything you feel strongly about, you know, you could love it, hate it, I don't care. You just have to feel strongly about it and just tell me the story of why you made it and what you learned through that, through that process. And I think, you know, pretty quickly, you can understand, you know, someone's, someone's process in terms of, you know, building something or inventing something, how did they go about it? And I'm really trying to make sure that we have people who have different ways of doing that on our team. One of the strengths of our design team has been that people come from lots of different backgrounds, right? They might come from 3D animation, or they might come from electrical engineering. And like, that's a real strength to have folks who see the world differently and have, you know, totally different sets of skills.

• 41:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  So as I was preparing for this chat, I talked to a bunch of people that worked at Snap over the years, and I've integrated their ideas throughout already. But one that came up that I thought was interesting is I hear that you spent a lot of time developing young design talent, and that's a big focus of yours. Can you just talk about how you develop young design talent?

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Well, I think the number one way to develop young design talent is just help them make lots of stuff and get a lot of feedback from, you know, whether it's our customers, or, you know, their teammates, or, you know, myself directly. And so, one of the things that we do that's different at Snap is, you know, your first day that you join the design team, you present work. And it's really, really important that, you know, the first day that you show up on the team, you're making things. And that just sets the tone for the rest of your, you know, experience on the design team and growth on the, on the design team, because really, that's what we're all about. And so I think folks who can get comfortable very quickly in that velocity of making things, that's where, you know, the ego sort of melts away, because, you know, when you're creating a thousand new ideas, who cares that most of them are not great ideas?

• 43:02Speaker 01

  That's totally fine, right? What we want to get rid of is that sense of, you know, preciousness that people have around ideas where they feel like, oh, I've got this one really perfect, great idea, and if people don't love it, that means that I'm not a great designer. It's like, no, that's, that's ridiculous. We, we all, you know, need to just create. As many ideas as possible that will lead us to, you know, some really great ideas, hopefully over time. And so I think for young designers, establishing that velocity of ideation very early on is really, really important. And then the other thing we do that I think is different, although I don't know, I've never really worked anywhere else, you know, is, is we don't allow designers to get stuck on specific products or verticals for very long. We like to make sure people are rotating through different parts of the

• 43:47Speaker 01

  product to bring new ideas and fresh perspectives and also to avoid getting bored. Like if you're a great designer and you're stuck, you know, designing the chat experience for three years, like, I mean, how boring is that? It's really exciting. I think it's snap to be able to work across all of these, you know, highly engaged product services. We have one of the largest maps in the world. We have this huge, you know, the biggest augmented reality platform. Like, these are really exciting opportunities for designers and it's important that we are rotating them across, you know, all of these different products. So they're not getting stuck.

• 44:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  I had Jenny Wen on the podcast. She's the, she was head of design for Claude and Cowork and she was a, like a director at Figma. And then she came to Anthropic and moved to just Icy Design again and asked her what's the hardest part of that move. And she said it's just all the crits that she has to deal with now. Just so much criticism and constant feedback. And it's, she's forgotten about that part of it. So it's interesting. That's such a core part of the way you, like the thing that people have to learn essentially and get good at.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Well, and one of the things that's so important, right, about our design team and our design culture, one of the things that we try to do is there is no gate to showing me work every week. So there is no, you don't like, any idea, it doesn't matter, you know, how good people think it is, how bad it is, you can bring it to that design meeting, get it on the, on the list and share your work and your idea. And that is so important because I think to your point, you know, sometimes people over rely on this critique process and great ideas get filtered out. And so I think creating this culture on the team where like you can bring anything to the design meeting, there's no, you know, filtering process, I think is just so important.

• 45:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  You mentioned AI, how designers are shipping code. I have a friend who works at A big tech company and he just said all the design team, they're required to ship like, I don't know, 10 PRs a month or something like that, or a quarter, which is such a new world. I guess one is just like, how do you think about designers shipping code? Is that like, just do it if you can, or is there like a requirement sort of thing? And broadly, I'm just curious how AI is changing the way your team operates? What are just like a few things that have been impactful in how your team operates that are AI-driven?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Taking a step back, it's definitely not a requirement to ship code on the design team, but I think people are so passionate and curious about learning new things. I mean, one of the things we've always tried to do on the design team is just figure it out. Right? I remember in the early days of some of the 3D graphics stuff that we were trying to do, one of our team members had never done 3D graphics before and they were like, like, okay, let's just figure it out, right? So they took some online tutorials and like, boom, like we were off to the races. So I think the design team has always been really flexible in terms of their curiosity, learning new things. And so I don't think you have to like push people or create a requirement or something like that for folks to want to adopt new tools and want to ship code. I think the big question now that everyone and anyone thinks they can submit a PR

• 46:35Speaker 01

  is like how we don't break things at a billion, or nearly a billion user scale, right? That's really important. So I think what we've really tried to do is also develop AI tools and guardrails to make it easier for more people to participate and submit code, but also reduce the likelihood that we're going to have some sort of bug. So we've got automated code review now. We've, I think, automatically detected like close to 10,000 bugs at this point, probably. We've got, we have a system at Snap where on the internal version of the app, you can shake to report your problem. And agents now debug exactly what happened, what went wrong, and it can actually like suggest a fix. And I think in pretty short order, it'll be implementing the fix as well, which is pretty crazy.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  So I think, taking a step back, there's so much excitement around the way that AI is going to change the way that companies work. Obviously, software companies in particular, like ours, I think, are on the cutting edge of the way that AI is changing how things get built and what gets done. We really wanted to bring some like order to that chaos. And so the way that we did that was really by starting with the jobs to be done for our community and our advertisers. So getting really, really basic and straightforward on, okay,

• 47:50Speaker 01

  You know, for Snapchatters, right, or jobs to be done, it's as simple as like, get people to download the app, right, get them to add their close friends, you know, get them to, you know, I don't know, use lenses, something like that. On the advertiser front, right, it could be, you know, getting, bringing people into the ad platform, configuring their campaign, et cetera. And so by listing out all these jobs to be done, you know, really for the, for the community journey and for advertisers as well, it became very clear where we could use agents, where we needed to be very focused in terms of building cross-functional teams around those jobs, supported by AI tools. And it's also given us, I think, a really helpful mechanism to track our progress against the business outcomes for each of those, those jobs.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  So I think, you know, for us, trying to, you know, while, while I think in this moment of time, you certainly want to like, you know, have a thousand flowers bloom and people are building agents and experimenting. I think at the same time, making sure that, that we stay focused on what matters to our community, what matters to advertisers is really, really important.

• 48:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, I want to take a step back and think about, just kind of reflect back. It's been 15 years since you've been working on Snap. You launched about 15 years ago. I'm curious just what are some of the maybe biggest lessons, maybe the hardest lessons you've learned over the past 15 years? Things that you're like, oh, I didn't realize this as I was starting this company?

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's hard to comprehend how much the job changes over time. I mean, it's really quite extraordinary to go from, you know, my job, you know, in the, in the early days with Bobby and I, I was, you know, helping design the product, but I was also answering customer support emails. I was, you know, trying to get our legal filings sorted out. I was trying to raise money, right? As, you know, the company grows and things evolve, like so much more of the job is about leadership, right, about making sure you're really developing people, selecting the right people to be on the team, developing the culture, doing that really, really seriously. And, and, you know, in some ways, creating a structure that can enforce that, you know, to have a cohesive culture and a vision around the company.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  You know, it becomes about strategy, right? Managing through, you know, enormous change, like. What we're seeing with with artificial intelligence today, but also, you know, several years ago, managing through the pandemic or managing through rebuilding our advertising platform as the landscape, you know, changed. So the job has just changed so dramatically. And I think that that's part of what's so energizing about it, what I enjoy so much about it. But it's also something I like never in a million years could have anticipated when we were first first getting started.

• 50:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  How have you most changed and I guess evolved over that course? What's like a big area that you've improved in?

• 50:32Speaker 01

  You know, one of one of the big focus areas for me was learning how to communicate more effectively. You know, both both to our team, but also, you know, you know, here on a podcast or with the world. I mean, so much of the job is about becoming a great communicator. I remember I had the opportunity to meet President Clinton at one point in the early days of the company. And he was like, you know, it's very interesting, you know, being president is really like being explainer in chief. And your job is actually to just explain stuff to people and help them make sense of the world and the company and their role in it. And I always thought that was really interesting. And I go back to that a lot. So much of my job is to is to explain things to our company and, you know, to our shareholders, to the world in ways that that really makes sense

• 51:15Speaker 01

  and can inspire folks and help us to all move in the in the right direction. So I think communication just becomes such a core skill. And I think in the early days, I was, you know, unnecessarily dismissive of the really important role of communication.

• 51:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  For founders that are hearing this and are like, okay, I'm going to work on this. What most helped you level up in in this space? Is it like coaches? Is it people around you? Is it just doing it?

• 51:40Speaker 01

  You know, just doing it is really the only way, you know. And I remember that was really the advice like one of our board members gave to me because I was so reluctant. I didn't want to do an all hands. I didn't want to do Q and A. You know, in the early days of the company, I was like, what, you know, I'll just send an email. And he's like, what are you doing? Like, he's like, too bad, Evan. Like, this is your job. And I think that was really, really good advice. And so literally, I was like, okay, fine, you know, this is a core part of my job and what I need to learn how to do. I'm gonna I'm gonna learn to love it. I want to love it. I want to get up there and, you know, get in front of our company and really enjoy, you know, answering all these really tough questions and, you know, digging into the business with our team. And now I really do, you know, I've learned to learn to really enjoy that that dialogue with our team.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  And I learned so much from the questions that folks ask, and I love that openness. I think it's just such an important part of our company and who we are.

• 52:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  I had Rahul Vohr on the podcast a while back, the founder of Superhuman. And he went through a similar, I don't know if this is what you went through, but he went through a transition where he loved what he was doing and then ended up being pushed by VCs and leaders to like, okay, you gotta do these other things. And then like, okay, I really don't like this and I'm gonna find a way to do the thing I really enjoy. Because that's gonna reflect in so many ways across the business and help us succeed. Is that something you went through? Or just like, okay, I just wanna get back to the product and building?

• 52:57Speaker 01

  You know, I think that's only partly true if you wanna stay in the CEO job. Like, I think the CEO job has a lot of requirements that are not necessarily things, you know, that you love to do in the morning. There's a huge amount of responsibility that comes along with being CEO. There's a lot of operational rigor that I think needs to be developed. I think not every part of the CEO job is glamorous. So I think if I just wanted to work on product, I would pick a different job at Snap. But I think because I really like leading our company and leading the direction and strategy for the business. And because I see a huge opportunity in transforming the way that people use computing in the future,

• 53:40Speaker 01

  you know, both through Snapchat, but also with specs. I think this is the right role for me right now. I mean, certainly I would spend more time with my family and probably have more fun on some days. If I was in a different role or, you know, more focused on design. But I think the opportunity for a business like ours at the scale that we have, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity for me. And despite its challenges, I do like the CEO job.

• 54:09Lenny Rachitsky?

  So kind of along those lines, you put out this letter, I think it was the end of last year, where you described this coming year as the crucible moment for Snap. It's so interesting, just like you guys have a billion monthly active users. That's just absurd. I don't think people realize this. You're making $6 billion a year in revenue, something like that. One of the very few social networks that lasts, that is durable with like a very valuable, interesting audience.

• 54:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  On the flip side, the stock hasn't been killing it. There's like these investors coming at you, trying to tell you to change all these things. I guess just thoughts, reflections, and what do you think people are missing about where this might go?

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Well, that's really one of the reasons why I called this year a crucible moment. I mean, the company's almost at the scale of entering the Fortune 500, which is really exciting. It's almost at a billion monthly active users. It's about to launch specs after 12 years of investment in this future computing platform. But at the same time, it's still not net income profitable, for example, because we've been investing so heavily in the future and making the choice to do that. And so I think this is the year that we have to prove that Snapchat can be a really strong profitable business, that it continues to grow, both in terms of the reach of our audience and their engagement

• 55:36Speaker 01

  with new products, whether it's topic chats or spotlight. Or I think we've got 200 million people playing games every month on Snapchat now. So gaming is becoming a big part of the engagement drivers on Snapchat. And the reason why that's so important is that it's going to be very hard for us to win long-term in specs without a really solid foundation. And so I think we need to demonstrate that after a couple of years of rebuilding our ad platform, rebuilding our go-to-market efforts, can really accelerate in the growth of the small and medium customer part of our business, which has grown really rapidly for us, that this year, we have a really solid foundation to launch the next chapter in the company's history. So it's a real turning point for Snap that's really exciting,

• 56:17Speaker 01

  but it's definitely an all-hands-on-deck moment for the company.

• 56:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  You had a really interesting way of describing Snap in the market. You called Snap the middle child. Talk about just what that means.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think one of the things that's so funny about our service is that while we're very, very large in terms of the scale of our audience, in terms of scale of our business. You know, we're much larger than a Pinterest or Reddit, for example. We're also way smaller than Meta and Google. And so we occupy this very interesting sort of middle position in the in the market. And I think, you know, that comes with a lot of benefits because we're big enough. We have enough scale to do really interesting things. But it also comes with the challenges of, you know, being overshadowed in some cases by our older brothers. And maybe, you know, sometimes the younger, the younger kids are getting more attention. And so I think, again, as in this crucible moment, part of defining who we are as a company and who we are as a business.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  And, you know, I think one of the things that will play an important role in that is getting specs out and, you know, to to consumers. Because I think right now, we've talked so long about the role that specs will play in the world. We've, you know, worked on developing the platform for so long, but without something that you can really, you know, play with and hang on to and use yourself. It's hard to really understand, you know, the next chapter of Snap's Snap's journey. So I think, you know, one of the biggest challenges that middle children face is defining themselves, right, standing out from their older siblings and younger siblings. And so I think this is a, this is a moment and a year when Snap is really going to define itself. And I'm really excited about that.

• 57:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  Speaking of middle child, you have a number of children. And I'm curious, this is a whole going a whole different direction. What's your just like policy on screens and devices, you know, having built Snapchat? And then also specs, just how do you, how do you think about devices and your kids?

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Well, we've got a real range. We've got four boys, two, six, seven, and 15. So we approach it very differently for all the kids at different ages. For the two-year-old, it's like zero screen time. We really just, you know, want to, you know, essentially read with him and play, you know, explore outside and those sorts of things, but but not really focus on. On screens unless he is getting a haircut because he really struggles with getting his haircut. So when when he gets a haircut, he really loves bobcat tractors, you know, the those four wheel sort of bobcat tractors. And he loves to watch YouTube videos of people driving bobcat tractors around.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  So when he gets his haircut, he can watch people drive bobcat tractors. But other than that, no, no screen time for for the six and seven year olds. You know, they they are, I would say, infrequent movie watchers. But other than that, again, you know, we don't give them phones or anything like that. In fact, it was really fun for, you know, over over the holidays for Christmas. I gave them that new, I think Palmer Lucky has a startup where they are sort of remaking Game Boys.

• 59:16Lenny Rachitsky?

  I have one of those.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really fun. Yeah.

• 59:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  Mod retro.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, mod retro. So the the TBPN guys gave me two of them for our for our kids for for Christmas. And so they they get to spend a little time on those in addition to watching movies every now and then. And then, you know, with the 15 year old, it's he he we he is all in on on technology, whether he's using it for school or whether he's using it to talk with his friends or using Snapchat. So, you know, it really depends on on kids and where they're at developmentally. But I think for us, like, that's been our approach.

• 59:44Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there anything you're doing with AI in your kids, like maybe even the older one? Just like AI education sort of tools, chat GPT?

• 59:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so funny. At the at the breakfast table the other morning, actually, I was just asking them a lot about like, how are their teachers talking about AI at school? How are they thinking about integrating in the curriculum? Are you guys, you know, using AI all the time? And and I think the answer so far has been not really, you know, which I think is is interesting. But certainly, you know, our kids play around with it at home. There's they, you know, are are beta testers for specs, which is really fun. I really love, you know, using the glasses together with them and some of the really cool experiences there. And, you know, Flynn, who's the eldest, is probably most fluent in in using AI tools. But what I think is so fun, you know, as a kid. I think all of us as kids are incredibly imaginative. We're all born creative. We have all these amazing ideas to share.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  And I think what's so cool about AI is how in nearly an instant, you can take any idea you have and make something. And so I think that's so empowering for for young people. It's certainly an experience I want our kids to have. And I think it's going to be so important to deeply integrate into the way that education works today.

• 1:00:51Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Snapchat has always been really good at allowing you to create and make feel like a superstar. Just create all these really crazy lenses and filters and all these things. And it's interesting, AI, just like vibe coding, just unleashes so much creativity. And kids are so imaginative already.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:01:08Lenny Rachitsky?

  So interesting. Okay, well, to close out our conversation, I've got a couple. I'm going to take us to a couple of corners, recurring corners on the podcast. One is AI corner. So the question is, what's a way you use AI in your, let's say, work? That is just interesting. That might be interesting for other people to learn from.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Well, one of the things that I really love about AI, you know, at Snap, I've got access to all of our dashboards and documents and data. And so I built, we have Glean that integrates all this data for me. And I built just an agent that will go and comb through everything that's happening in the company and let me know what's up, what I need to focus on, what I need to catch. And every now and then, I really catch something that I hadn't realized or need to focus a bit more on. And so I think we're just so fortunate to have so much structured data in our company. I mean, for our leaders, they also send me every week, kind of the three things from the week and three things looking ahead. And so I can like very, very easily get a sense for the hotspots in the company, the priority areas, and combined with all of our dashboards and metrics about the way that people are using our service.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  I feel like I have a really good sense for what's happening in the company. So I think what's been most exciting for me in terms of AI is that it's enabling, I think, the type of leadership structure that I've always wanted, which is very flat, very fast moving. And I think having an AI co-pilot. To help me do that's been a big deal.

• 1:02:32Lenny Rachitsky?

  And that agent was, you built it in Glean? Is that where it lives?

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that I've done in Glean, which is great. Obviously, you can build all sorts of stuff in Claude. But Glean for us is the most secure way to access all of our different documents and dashboards and things like that.

• 1:02:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there anything interesting in your AI stack? There's, it sounds like Lean, Claude. Is there anything else that's interesting, maybe some people may not think about?

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  I think one of the things that we're thinking a lot about is just taking the entire workflow and enabling it with an agent. So for example, you know, taking a product idea and with our go-to-market agent, taking that product idea, writing the spec, making, identifying the relevant folks who need to be involved in sign-offs and understanding it, right? Actually helping to do the risk analysis on the product, right? From a legal, trust and safety perspective, writing the go-to-market materials like the blog, et cetera. We're working now on actually building the visuals as well, but doing that in one shot, you know, is really wild. So I think there's all sorts of examples like that across the company in terms of the way that agents can play a really massive

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  role in changing the way that we work. And that's connected to, you know, how we think about those jobs to be done, right? So if we can define a job to be done clearly enough that we can build an agent to do it, that can really create a lot of lift.

• 1:03:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  What do you, where do you build this agent? What's the platform to use?

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  We've been using Claude to do a lot of the work, you know, across Snap. Yeah.

• 1:04:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  Sweet. Okay. I'll take us to another recurring corner in the podcast, contrarian corner. What's something that you believe that a lot of other people don't believe? What's kind of a contrarian take about anything that comes to mind?

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  Well, I think for me, like, we're in an industry where so much of the conversation is focused on technology. And I think maybe my contrarian point of view or my contrarian angle is like humanity is far more important, you know, than the technological developments, largely because humanity dictates how technology is adopted, right? I think, for example, right now, people are massively underestimating the role That human adoption and human comfort, you know, with advances in artificial intelligence will determine its deployment, right? I think technology leaders think that folks will just blindly adopt new technology as it comes out. And I think we're going to enter a period of time where there's going to be a huge amount of societal pushback on a lot of the changes that are coming with AI.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  And so I think a lot of our focus as an industry, but more broadly in the world, needs to be putting humanity first, right? Making sure that the tools we're developing are advancing humanities goals, you know, in addition to business goals. And, you know, I think in our industry at least, that that's a bit contrarian.

• 1:05:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, and just so we don't need to go too down this path, but it's so hard for the AI labs, I think, to, on the one hand, be like, okay, this is really dangerous if it gets much smarter and we need people to know this because this is happening and moving quickly. On the other hand, how do you not just freak everyone out and make everyone so afraid of where things are going? It's like, well, how do you, what do you do? What's the right thing for them to do? And, and because of all that, of that doom and gloom, it's like, I'm sure you've seen these surveys, AI is like below ice in terms of popularity and, and like below like Iran. It's like, and this isn't going great. I don't know. I don't know what I would do if I were a lab. And I love, I guess that's like a benefit of Snapchat is it makes, like, you guys have been in AI from, for a very long time and it shows you the playfulness of it all.

• 1:06:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  And, you know, it doesn't have to be that serious. Anyway, with that, Evan, we reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  Let's give it a shot.

• 1:06:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  God, well, you know what I just finished was The First 50 Years of Apple by David Pogue. I thought it was great. I would recommend the first half because, you know, he interviews like 150 early Apple team members and the stories are just great. And there's a lot of learnings in there. So I really enjoyed, I really enjoyed that. I think. What else have I read recently? There's a great book, maybe relevant for this particular moment, called "The End of the World is Just the Beginning", which actually touches a lot on the vulnerability of global shipping. Like, the global economy is built on global shipping, and it sort of predicts a world where the US is going to have a much harder time securing the global waterways.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  And what does that mean for the way that we build things and organize ourselves as a society?

• 1:07:05Lenny Rachitsky?

  That sounds quite familiar these days.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  Quite relevant for the given moment.

• 1:07:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. Is there a recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed?

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  I mean, I feel like this is so typical, but like, I loved Marty Supreme. I thought that movie was off the charts. And I was like, I don't know, I'm not used to watching stuff that extreme. You know what I mean? I could, I was like on the edge of my seat the whole time. It was like a full throttle movie experience. Highly recommend.

• 1:07:33Lenny Rachitsky?

  I've not seen it yet. I keep hearing amazing things.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  It's very intense. Yeah.

• 1:07:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  Next question. Do you have a, is there a product you recently discovered that you really love? Could be an app, could be clothing, gadget, anything?

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Well, I think through our kids right now, I'm just rediscovering Pokemon, which is so fun. It's so great. And I think, you know, there's so much art to it and personality and character. And what an amazing brand and franchise. And I think, like, you know, my general view is like, there's just so, so much they could do to grow, you know, that IP and franchise, if, at least if our kids are any indication.

• 1:08:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  First mention of Pokemon in the lightning round.

• 1:08:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  Next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life?

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  You have two ears and one mouth. Use them in that proportion.

• 1:08:27Lenny Rachitsky?

  Nice. Final question, you guys have created many lenses over the years. I'm curious if you have just like a favorite lens, like all time favorite and then all time least favorite, the worst.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  I mean, all time favorite is probably the vomiting rainbow. I think like that just brought so much joy to so many people, which is great. Least favorite, probably like the old lens, I don't know, or face swap. I just.

• 1:08:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh, right.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  Those are intense. Yeah.

• 1:08:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow, flashback. And you guys were the first to do that, right?

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and that was all, that was all early days, real time machine learning, transformation on the device. So like, that was like pretty cutting edge at the time. I mean, I don't think people realize like Bobby created our Gen AI lab like 10 years ago, a decade ago, something like that.

• 1:09:13Lenny Rachitsky?

  What a time, the face swapping era.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  The early use of generative AI.

• 1:09:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow, I forgot that was another innovation. And then there's like businesses and apps that just set, that built that as a whole business and then all, all went away as far as I can tell. Wow, man, that was a good time. All right, well, Evan, is there anything else you want to share? Anything else you want to leave listeners with before we, before I let you go?

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  I think it's such an, it's such an exciting time. Obviously, I think there's a lot of concern about the way that artificial intelligence is going to change our society, but I think there's so much to be optimistic about in terms of the way that computing can become more human. And that's really what we're focused on. So really excited to share more about all the stuff we've been working on later this year.

• 1:09:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  Evan, thank you so much for being here.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Thanks, Lenny.

• 1:10:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.