Snap, Crackle, Pop

Snapchat founder and CEO Evan Spiegel energizes LMU future entrepreneurs

Why create a photo-sharing app that automatically deletes images after a few seconds? On the surface, it would seem self-defeating.

To Evan Spiegel, however, it made perfect sense. Spiegel is co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the camera-centered social media company best known for its “ephemeral” photos and videos, which disappear after a set time.

In an early insight, Spiegel had noticed that social media, by its very nature, “takes the fun out of communicating with friends.” Only about 1% of life’s special moments made it onto social media, Spiegel said. Snapchat offered a new avenue “for sharing the other 99% of your life in a way that wasn’t permanent, wasn’t about collecting status or about being performative.” 

Key design features involved getting rid of “likes” and “comments” and making sure snaps “go away after 24 hours, so people feel like they can start fresh every day.”

The tech billionaire recently shared his story in a fireside chat hosted by the Entrepreneurship Society and co-sponsored by CBA student organizations and the Center for International Business Education. The April 21 event filled to capacity the 350-seat Hilton Center for Business main auditorium.

Together with co-founder Bobby Murphy, Spiegel created Snapchat in 2011 while they were both undergraduates at Stanford University. In 2015, Spiegel became the world’s youngest billionaire at 24.

Today, the Santa Monica-based company has nearly 5,000 employees and more than 850 million active monthly users worldwide — half of them posting on a daily basis.

Rebranded as Snap Inc., the company went public in 2017. In addition to the app, it produces smart glasses (Snapchat Spectacles), personalized stickers (Bitmoji) and facial modification software (Looksery). Spiegel’s current net worth is estimated at $2.4 billion.

In his hour-long conversation, the 34-year-old entrepreneur shared lessons learned about leadership, creativity and managing stress. He discussed the value of failing fast. His and Murphy’s first startup — Future Freshman — had been a college search and application website in competition with now-dominant Naviance. The two friends abandoned the unsuccessful enterprise after 18 months, “which was probably too long,” Spiegel said. 

A Los Angeles native, Spiegel had taken design classes at Otis College and the ArtCenter College of Design as a high schooler. Later, as a product design/mechanical engineering major at Stanford, he presented an ephemeral messaging app for a class project. He and two classmates built out a prototype and launched Snapchat (originally called Picaboo) from Spiegel’s family home in Pacific Palisades. By late 2012, Snapchat had one million users. 

The app found instant success in Norway, “which makes sense,” Spiegel explained. The Baltic nation was at the vanguard of cheap, high-speed wireless networks, key to transmitting data-heavy image files. 

Spiegel spoke about the decision in 2014 — at a time when he was still living under his dad’s roof — to turn down a $3 billion offer from Mark Zuckerberg to buy Snapchat.  

It wasn’t a hard decision. “We loved what we were doing,” he said, referring to a still deeply satisfying partnership with Murphy, now Snap’s CTO. Joining Meta, the co-founders agreed, would hamstring their ability “to keep growing the business and follow our vision.”

That vision was and still is to “bring computing into the world around you, to share it with your friends and family, to interact together and see the same thing.” By contrast, Meta famously seeks to transport people into the metaverse.

For the past 11 years, Snap has been developing lightweight augmented reality (AR) glasses far different from the helmet-like virtual reality (VR) headsets that “take people out of the real world and put them into simulated environments,” Spiegel said.

A collaboration with the Walt Disney Company reflects this direction. In 2020, Spiegel approached the entertainment conglomerate with a proposal “to evolve the Disney theme park experience.” During the pandemic when the parks were closed, Snapchat team members prepared detailed 3D maps of Disney attractions and then designed AR overlays to work with Snapchat’s smart camera and smart glasses, allowing park-goers to interact with their favorite characters.  

In a lightning round toward the end of the evening, Spiegel — who is married to Australian model and businesswoman Miranda Kerr, with whom he has three young children — shared with future LMU entrepreneurs the best advice he’d ever received:

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

And the worst advice: “Retire.” 

And his most stressful moment as an entrepreneur: “The time Snapchat went dark for three days. We pushed a change, went to bed, and woke up the next morning to realize it didn’t work anymore. We thought, ‘We’re done. It’s over,’ But we pieced it back together, fired it back up, and people kept using it.”

Diane Krieger is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in publications at Tufts University, Johns Hopkins University, Caltech and The Idaho Statesman, where she was the resident philharmonic and theater critic. She also was on the staff of USC Trojan Family Magazine and USC Chronicle for many years. Krieger’s story titled “China’s Migrant Mothers” appeared at the LMU Magazine website in October 2024.