Book of the week How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars
Virgin Books 304pp £14.99 The Week Bookshop £13.99 Despite being one of the world’s most successful tech companies, Snapchat “remains an enigma for many people over 30”, said Tim Bradshaw in the Financial Times. In this timely and entertaining book, Billy Gallagher describes how a photo-messaging app that first achieved notoriety as a “sexting tool” rose to become a $22bn public company used by 187 million people every day. It’s a story that “combines the best ingredients of many Silicon Valley narratives”: a “Steve Jobs-style perfectionist at the helm”, in the form of chief executive Evan Spiegel; a legal dispute between the company’s founders; and a “David-and-goliath battle with Facebook”. As a journalist specialising in Silicon Valley start-ups, Gallagher covered Snapchat when it was in its infancy, and he proves a knowledgeable and savvy chronicler who succeeds in the “difficult task” of explaining the app’s appeal.
Much like Facebook, Snapchat was born in the “bro” culture of young male tech entrepreneurs at college, said John Arlidge in The Sunday Times. Its three founders – Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown – attended Stanford together and, in 2011, they came up with the idea for a photo-messaging service where the photos “disappear shortly after they are viewed”. They reasoned that this would hold a special appeal for young people, because embarrassing content wouldn’t hang around. How right they were: Snapchat quickly became a phenomenon, and within two years it was valued at $1bn. At that point Brown, whom Spiegel and Murphy had ousted, launched a legal challenge against his co-founders, claiming that it was he who first came up with the idea. The suit was successful and he received $157.5m. Another of the book’s “interesting sub-threads” is the story of Snapchat’s wrangles with Mark Zuckerberg, said Antonio GarcíaMartínez in The Washington Post. The Facebook CEO became obsessed with buying the company and made two offers, the second of which – in 2013 – was for $3bn. When these were rejected, he set about trying to “crush” Snapchat instead, launching a rival app, Poke, that was a “shameless copy”. (It failed “miserably”.) Packed with personal detail and fly-on-thewall quotes, How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars is probably most compelling when recording Snapshat’s “birthing pains”; later sections, dealing with its attempts to monetise its product, are less absorbing. Nonetheless, this book will probably remain the “long-lasting” history of Snapchat’s early years.