Snapchat CEO: Why AI is creating a new consumer product boom | Evan Spiegel

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.

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

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 push back on a lot of the changes that are coming with AI.

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

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, and 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. 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, which is why I think they're 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, right? 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, you know, 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. So I, you know, 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, you know, 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, right? 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, 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.

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. So I think as we look forward to 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 and I'm really excited about that especially if they have distribution already.

Oh gosh, well I just saw Instagram Plus launch. So I think that's the latest rip.

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

You know, it's certainly better than making stuff that people don't want to copy. So, I think 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 copying from Snap. So, I think it certainly beats the alternative, but it does mean that we have to be really thoughtful about our strategy. And so I think one of the things, it's been an interesting time for me to reflect a lot on our strategy over the last 15 years because 15 years ago we essentially learned that software is not a moat, right, which is something that everyone is discovering today with AI. But 15 years ago because all the software features that we could create were so easily cloned by our competitors we started to think about how to build a more durable business, how to build a business that had bigger and more effective moats. 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 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 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 moats.

I don't, I think network effects are certainly an important piece of the puzzle for sure. But I don't think they're 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 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 of itself we found is incredibly difficult to copy.

Specs is coming out this year.

Well, I think to 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. 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 to recess and put me into the computer lab or if I look at our 15-year-old today and his friends, sometimes when they're hanging out, they're all looking down at their phones even though they're all together. 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 removing us from it. And that's something that we realized early on with Snapchat, right? We were innovating, building 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, it was almost like interacting with the world through a keyhole rather than actually staying grounded and being able to interact together with friends. So it just seems so obvious that 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 that 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 I think they need to evolve. So, with the early version of Spectacles, I guess that was back in 2014 or something like that, the initial idea was just to get the camera off the phone, right, out of your pocket and allow you to more easily take snaps out in the world. But we then sort of built a road map from there, right, where we added a second camera to get depth. We added a display to be able to overlay digital objects into the world and help you interact with them. And then with the last generation in 2024, we released our operating system which now allows developers to build full-featured software inside of Specs, in preparation for the consumer launch. So, I don't know. I think the time is right for a new type of computer. I think people are frustrated with the cost of using phones and computers today. They're kind of all hunched over like gremlins. And 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 that to me is really exciting. I think it's a whole new chapter and gosh I mean what it's been 20 years or something since the iPhone so it's about time for something new I think.

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

The best academic overview or summary I think comes from a guy Safi Bahcall who wrote a book called Loonshots. 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 what we've developed and built at Snap, but 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, people become very focused on getting a promotion, right? 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 makes it very very challenging to innovate. Now, on the flip side, structures that are really healthy and constructive for innovation typically are 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 crazy ideas and 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 the small innovative team becomes critical of the large organization. Oh, they're so bureaucratic and slow. They don't innovate, things like that. And then the larger organization is like, oh, what are these jokers doing? 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 Safi does a really good job looking throughout history what leaders have cultivated really constructive and powerful relationships between the more innovative or flat parts of the organization and the more structured and hierarchical parts of the organization. How you create that mutual respect, how you create that dialogue between those parts of the organization is so important. And so, when I read that, I was like, wow, that actually sounds quite similar to what we have at Snap. We have to run a large public company, serve almost a billion customers. That means our service needs to be really reliable. It means that we need to operate really effectively to serve our customers. And at the same time, we have a very small, it sort of oscillates between like nine and 12 people design team that is constantly innovating and creating new things. And I think 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 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, really great things can happen.

Well, I think it's really important to acknowledge that 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 where new ideas can come from anywhere. I think that is absolutely critical.

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 Bobby has a computer science, heavy duty computer science and stats background, mathematical and computational science, but he really likes design and likes thinking about building things for customers and empathizing with them. I have a design background, right? I was in the product design program back at school, which actually was part of the mechanical engineering department at the time. I took some computer science classes. So I sort of knew what I was talking about when it came to computer science. So we both had mutual respect for each other and our skill sets and our backgrounds and both enjoyed talking together about the types of products we wanted to create and that dialogue created a lot of innovation. And so a lot of how we've thought about growing the company over time is strengthening that dialogue between engineers and designers and creating an environment where folks feel comfortable throwing out really crazy ideas. But I think 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, hundreds of ideas, I would guess, on a weekly basis that to me, if I think about where I learned how to design and build things, I have sort of an interesting combination because I went to Stanford for the product design program, which is really focused on empathy, in this iterative process of understanding what people want and building prototypes and iterating, but really centered on empathy, human-centered design. And then at the same time, I had also been to art school. I had studied at Art Center. I had studied at Otis here in Los Angeles. It's both great art schools. And so I was used to this grinding expectation that you were making new work all the time and then just an absolutely brutal critique process on a regular basis. And so, for me, as I thought about the parts of my education that I really liked, it was this combination of really developing empathy with people and the types of products that they want in their lives, but at the same time having this really high velocity work ethic where you're not just thinking all the time about 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 happens. So, I would say that the velocity of work is really important because our favorite saying is, if you want to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas. That's really really important.

Wow, that's really interesting. I would say you have to talk to customers, you have to share your idea. You should share your idea as 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 I think for me, 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 the products they're using, you can learn so much. And I think customers are an endless source of inspiration when it comes to building products.

Well, let's use Stories as an example, right? So, back then we were hearing from customers all the time. I want a send all button. I want a send all button. It's so annoying to select everybody on my list of friends on Snapchat. If you just give me a send all button, then I can blast snaps to everybody all day long and that would be really great. And at the same time, we were talking to people about their use of social media. And they're like, oh gosh, social media, I feel all this pressure, right? Everything I put up there is permanent all the time. It's got all these likes and comments, so there's all this judgment. So, I only feel like I can put pretty and perfect things up there. 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 without that sort of judgment and pressure. And so, we thought that was really interesting. And so, we dug deeper into 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, when people posted photos they would always find that the end of the birthday party appeared first in the feed and then the middle and then the beginning of the party. So everything was just played in reverse in the feed which was really strange to folks. So, we listened to all of that and heard all of that. But then we came up with something totally new and different, which were Stories, that were responsive to the feedback. They didn't create a send to all button, but they did create a way to easily share with all of your friends without spamming them all day long. They removed public metrics. They didn't have likes and comments and things like that to reduce pressure. They disappeared after 24 hours so that everyone could start the day fresh again the next day. And they maybe most importantly were in chronological order, which is the way that people have told stories since the beginning of time. So, I think that's an example where listening is incredibly valuable. All of those insights that we 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 came up with something new.

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

One of my favorite stories was around screenshot detection actually in the early days because when we first built Snapchat and we shared with people, oh, you could send photos that disappear. Everyone said, no, you can't. You can always take a screenshot. What do you mean you can send things that disappear? That makes no sense. And so, we thought a lot. I remember that summer, 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 having fun using the product. We were sending photos back and forth, but people would just keep saying, well, this is not about disappearing photos because you can just save them. I don't get it. And one of the things we invented at the time, we figured out a way, 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 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 the recipient had taken a screenshot. And that for us in the early days really resonated with our community because they didn't mind if somebody saved one of their snaps. They just wanted to know. And I think that early invention was one of the first things that really got a lot of traction in the early days and I think helped Snapchat spread as a new way of communicating.

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, right? They're really responsive actually 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 on that early relationship between myself and Bobby, really this harmonious relationship between design and engineering and how important that dialogue is to building great things and great products. And so I think in the early days my view was not that we don't need PMs. My view is 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 really helped 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, 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 the working group to try to solve problems or innovate or make the product better. So I think as the organization grows and there becomes all of these different capabilities that the company didn't have in the early days, whether it's data science, you name it, product managers play a really important role in bringing all those folks to the table and making sure we deliver the right thing at the right time.

Well, it sounds highly dysfunctional if folks are having that standoff. That is not a good thing. But 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 do think designers feel vindicated in a lot of ways, right? A lot of designers had parents who were saying, 'Why aren't you studying computer science? What are you going to do with this skill set, drawing things? This doesn't make any sense.' And I think today, 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 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 impact at the scale of almost a billion people using Snapchat is really empowering and exciting for designers who feel like these tools maybe level the playing field to some extent for creative people.

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 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 some really innovative or cool new thing developed by 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 can see when an app has been built by teams who are responsible for different pages of the app or different parts of the experience but there isn't really like a cohesive through line. And I think for us at Snap, having design really actually be that bottleneck in terms of helping to manage what we're shipping and what it looks like and how it all works together, I think is really important.

First and foremost, like yeah, this is what I love to do. I love building things. I love making new products, services for our community. That is like what drives me. I really, really enjoy that part of the process. So 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, in addition to all the great people I get to work with here at Snap, the thing that wakes me up with a smile on my face every morning, the reason why I'm skipping to work is because I am in the weeds on what we're building and shipping to our community. That being said, there are always smarter, better, more talented experts working on all the different things that we have going on. But I really do like staying close to what we're creating. 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 customer, staying close to the product and the way that it's serving your customer is the fundamentally most important thing you could possibly do. I absolutely subscribe to the old school like walk the floors, talk to your customers, get out there and stay in touch with what's actually happening with your service, with your community, with your team. And I think that's probably the most important job that any leader can do in any company is stay close to their customer, stay close to their team.

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? A lot of companies have different points of strength and differentiation, but if you want to differentiate on the product experience, I think it's really important that leaders stay very close to that.

Yeah, there's a couple really important things. First of all, we make all of our hiring decisions just based off portfolio. So that's really all we want to see. 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. Design is really about empathizing with your customer, empathizing with your audience, your viewer, whoever it is, and then building something that will really resonate with them. And that means you need to have an extraordinary amount of range. You've got to be able to build and create things that look totally different. So, when I'm going through a portfolio, 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 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, the other thing I want to understand, and typically 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. So typically what I'll do is just say, hey, pick something in your portfolio, anything you feel strongly about, 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 process. And I think pretty quickly you can understand someone's process in terms of building something or inventing something, how do 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 that's a real strength to have folks who see the world differently and have totally different sets of skills.

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, whether it's our customers or their teammates or myself, directly. And so, one of the things that we do that's different at Snap is, your first day that you join the design team, you present work. And it's really, really important that 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 experience on the design team and growth 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 the ego sort of melts away because when you're creating a thousand new ideas, who cares that most of them are not great ideas? That's totally fine, right? What we want to get rid of is that sense of 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 ridiculous. We all need to just create as many ideas as possible that will lead us to 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, 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 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 designing the chat experience for three years, like I mean, how boring is that? It's really exciting, I think, at Snap to be able to work across all of these highly engaged product services. We have one of the largest maps in the world. We have this huge, the biggest augmented reality platform. Like these are really exciting opportunities for designers and it's important that we're rotating them across all of these different products so they're not getting stuck.

Well, and one of the things that's so important 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 how good people think it is, how bad it is, you can bring it to that design meeting, get it on the list and share your work and your idea. And that is so important because I think to your point, sometimes people overrely on this critique process and great ideas get filtered out. And so I think creating this culture on the team where you can bring anything to the design meeting, there's no filtering process, I think is just so important.