Snapchat’s no-profile boss
26-year-old billionaire isn’t your standard Silicon Valley publicity seeker
Most of the world’s internet billionaires do as much as possible to keep a public profile. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, incessantly updates his fans with tales of his travels, meetings with world leaders, and family photos. Elon Musk tweets furiously about the latest goings on at Tesla and SpaceX.
But search the internet for profiles of Evan Spiegel, and you will come up short. At 26 — an age that makes him the first self-made billionaire born in the 1990s — the founder of Snapchat is supposed to represent a generation that grew up with the internet and is supremely comfortable about sharing their lives online.
But Spiegel has eschewed the public profile of many of his peers. His Twitter account, set up in 2010, is empty, he has no open Facebook page, and interviews are exceedingly infrequent. He even keeps a low profile on Snapchat itself, despite it being a microphone for more than 150 million daily users including many of the world’s most glamorous celebrities, among them Spiegel’s fiancee, the supermodel Miranda Kerr.
But Spiegel and Snap Inc (the company’s new name after a recent re-brand) have never been ones to follow the Silicon Valley playbook. While almost every high-profile internet start-up sets up in the San Francisco Bay area, Snap is based across a smattering of buildings 560km down the Pacific coast in Venice Beach, Los Angeles.
When it released its first piece of hardware, a camera-enabled set of sunglasses known as Spectacles, Snap did not follow the traditional gadget launch cycle: a staged announcement, reviews with selected journalists, endorsements from “influencers” and advertising blitzes.
Instead, it dropped bright yellow vending machines in strategic locations, allowing a frenzied word-ofmouth buzz about the product to build up. And while Snap now has hundreds of employees, the company’s ethos flows directly from its mercurial leader.
Spiegel is said to exercise ultimate control over the company: he is said to hold few qualms about firing underperforming staff or executives and enforces a culture of secrecy.
After co-founding Snapchat (then known as Picaboo) in 2011 while still at Stanford University, the app — and its creator — rocketed to popularity.
In contrast to the messages and photos on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, which lingered in cyberspace long after outlasting their original use but often led to embarrassment later down the line, Snapchat allowed users to send photos that would self destruct after a few seconds.
Though the appeal was baffling to some, Snapchat’s carefree nature was a welcome relief for those who had become tired of social media and the subtle pressures it creates. It was this stress-free, in-the-moment atmosphere that drove the app’s success, rather than the explicit teenage photo sharing that many assumed.
Before long, Snapchat was seen as the world’s hottest app for under-25s, and all-powerful Facebook started to notice. In 2013, Mark Zuckerberg gave Spiegel a US$3 billion offer; one he thought couldn’t be refused. Spiegel’s swift rejection shocked Silicon Valley. It looked like the epitome of entitlement to believe an app that was barely two years old, had no revenue and which many had dismissed as a fad could be worth so much.
But it meant the world began to understand Spiegel as a different sort of founder.
Later he would tell students at the University of Southern California: “The fastest way to figure out if you’re doing something that is truly important is to find someone who will offer you a bunch of money to part with it. If you sell you will know immediately it wasn’t the right dream; if you don’t sell, you’re probably onto something, maybe you have showed Spiegel as a shrewd financial observer. The messages to Sony Entertainment boss Michael Lynton, a Snapchat board member who last week resigned his post at the Japanese company to become Spiegel’s chairman, included lengthy analysis of fundraising conditions, monetary policy and revenue opportunities.
Though Spiegel said he was “devastated” about the hack, it painted him as a precocious operator, in contrast to the brattish picture that earlier leaks had done.
Now, Snap is preparing for an initial public offering that is expected to value it at up to US$25b, having confidentially filed last year.
Buying into the company will be in many ways a direct bet on Spiegel, and his ability to turn the company into a media behemoth in the same vein as Google and Facebook.
The visionary founder role has worked for many a tech company, from Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But faith will be needed to believe Snap can grow into its expected valuation.
The company, which makes its money from full-screen adverts shown in between users’ posts and sponsored visual effects overlaid on photos, made US$367m in advertising revenue last year, according to estimates from eMarketer, although this will more than double to US$936m this year and US$1.76b next.
Spiegel and his co-founder Bobby Murphy will also reportedly exercise 70 per cent of Snap’s shareholder voting power, with new investors getting no votes in a dual-class share structure that Zuckerberg has used to keep control of his company. In that one way at least, Snap will not be so different from Facebook.
— Telegraph