This is pretty funny playing chess in the pub.
Cheers. Cheers. Good to see you. Good to see you. Thanks.
Give me the Snap 2026 update: product, business. Just what do you spend your days thinking about?
We've described it as the crucible moment. Actually, we described it as that towards the end of 2025, and it is just proving to be true in a major way for a couple of reasons. One, we're about to reach a billion monthly active users, which is a big deal for us. We're really excited about the progress in the core Snapchat business. We're also on the verge of net income profitability, which is really exciting for us, especially as we invest really meaningfully in hardware and our Specs glasses effort. That maybe brings me to the last point, which is that Specs are coming to consumers for the first time later this year. After 12 years of investment in glasses, in the next generation of computing, in trying to make computing more human, it's actually coming. It's a pretty extreme time at Snap. Then, we're doing all of that while transforming the business with AI. It's a pretty full-on moment.
Why have Specs been hard to get right? Like, the vision you guys have had for a while, I think it has generally existed for a while. There were precursors like Google Glass. Actually, was it a precursor, or did you guys have Specs before that?
We've been working on Specs probably since 2014. I think Glass came out in 2013, I want to say. Anyway, similar times.
You guys have been working on Specs since very early on. Describe some of the technical challenges, because it seems technically challenging. There's a lot of miniaturization challenges, but maybe give us an overview of why Specs are hard to make work.
The technical challenges are extraordinary. I think the promise of Specs is that you take the capability that people have experienced and passed through VR, but put it into a see-through glasses form factor. That's the space that's unoccupied today. You basically have very low-capability smart glasses or AI glasses, which are like AirPods with a camera, and then you have very high capability virtual reality devices like the Vision Pro. I think the sweet spot for Specs coming later this year is the wearability of normal glasses, but the capability of a true spatial computer, something like a Vision Pro. The idea, and I think the promise of glasses, or at least what I love about glasses, it actually brings computing into the world. I think this is something that computing has suffered for a very long time, that it's just by its nature, has been isolating. When I was growing up, I loved computers. I built my own computer, but to use a computer you had to be in the computer lab at lunch when all your friends were on the schoolyard. I think phones have continued that trend of pulling people into the screen rather than bringing people into the world, helping people share experiences together with their friends. The promise of see-through glasses is like, you and I can sit across from each other, play a game of chess, design something, build something, watch something together. That's totally unlike any computing experience that exists today.
What do you think in, say, 10 or 15 years time that computing mix looks like? There's going to be some amount of glasses. Will smartwatches still have a place, or will the glasses do that? Maybe it's useful for the wrist measurements. Do you also have an Amazon Alexa-style AI speaker and how many with you, if so? But I'm just curious, as you think about moving… You're describing moving beyond the smartphone. What do you think that new equilibrium looks like?
I don't necessarily think we're going to move beyond the smartphone. I think the smartphone is actually going to play the most important role of legacy—
Move beyond solely a smartphone.
If you look at the capability of glasses, at least when it comes to Specs, what I actually would estimate is that a lot of the large-screen use cases are the first to move. If you think about what's so interesting about Specs, you can have a huge TV with you almost anywhere, a giant screen with you almost anywhere. Why would you pay thousands of dollars to put two or three TVs in your home when you can have any size screen through lightweight glasses? I think the same goes for a desktop display or a laptop. I think that's really valuable when you're traveling of course. It's super frustrating for me to work on a tiny laptop.
Battle station. Yeah, exactly. Especially someone's looking over your shoulder. I think it's really hard to get things done on the road. One of the earliest things that glasses take is say working ergonomically on a flight where you're not hunched over your laptop, hunchback style, but what else moves, and also, what other devices do you think are in the mix?
When you think about use cases moving, I do think the screen-based use cases certainly are probably the best example of that. What I'm more interested in though, and where we're investing most of our time, is actually on the net new experiences that didn't exist before. I think that actually is what made the phone so meaningful. The desktop is still the best for word processing. It's still the best for information retrieval and getting things done. The phone is amazing for mobile communication. Where glasses are really going to be extraordinary are experiences. I think that's a really big deal. It's a big deal in terms of the way that people also want to engage with the world now. Young people in general, it's not a secret, folks want experiences. They want to do things together. They want to see the world in a new way. That's actually what glasses provide. To me, what's so exciting is not necessarily replacing the television on your wall. It's playing laser tag with my kids outside in the glasses, putting dinosaurs in the backyard, building Lego with them together. I think those are the sorts of experiences that show people that computers can actually bring folks together in the real world, rather than have us all staring down at a little screen. Yes.
Maybe also usefully AGI-proof where the future is that you are at Coachella with your Snap Spectacles. Meanwhile, Claude is off working on your desktop and doing the actual work.
This is hilarious. Developers have already built ways to just, through Specs, monitor what your agents are doing, and you can just check in and go on with your day. I think it's commonplace here in San Francisco. People will just carry their laptop around. They're at the bar, they'll quickly open it up, check on the progress, and then move on. It's like the joke about the more senior people are in the org, the smaller the screen. The developer has two parallel monitors. Meanwhile, the boss is 'sent from my iPhone'. It's that, but for everyone, is that everyone will be able to just monitor the agent's progress from the Specs. I do think that's one of the really cool ways that computers are changing. I do think the paradigm that we all have to operate our computers all day long is going away, and I think that's hugely positive. Yeah.
What has been hard in the development of Specs like battery, screens, motion sickness? There's all these things people talk about in the context of AR and VR. I'm curious, as you're at the coalface, what has been a challenge to crack, or where does some of the Snap IP come in, in terms of defensibility you guys have built? Yeah.
Gosh. I'd almost want to say everything is hard about fitting a computer into a pair of glasses, but I can talk through the different pieces of our platform and how we've thought about it. One of the things that makes Specs so unique is that we actually own every single piece of the stack. Everything from the developer tools called Lens Studio to the rendering engine called Lens Core, which we've now honed over a decade on mobile phones, especially low-end mobile phones, which is important when you're trying to manage power and thermal on a small device like that, but also our own operating system, as well as our own optical engine. The waveguide, which is the piece of glass there in front of your eye, and the projector itself, some other fancy stuff that we haven't announced yet, but all of these pieces really work together to be able to fit a full-fledged immersive computing experience into a pair of glasses. All of those things are very hard. Building a ground-up operating system on Linux was really difficult to do, but it's way more performant than trying to repurpose Android. We learned that.
You don't use Android, you build your own OS for it.
Yeah, Android is way too bloated to work effectively on a pair of glasses. I think that's why you see the most recent Google experiment, Project Aura, has a huge compute pack. We just don't think it's realistic for people to carry around a compute pack to use glasses. The latest coding models are very good at working with Linux. Like, they have a lot of training data for that.
Have you found Claude Code or Codex useful for developing in this environment, which is pretty different to what people envisage, the standard Claude Code project?
Claude is transforming software development, full stop, at Snap in every part of our organization.
Can you describe a little more what that looks like?
Yeah. I think it's extraordinary. Now, more than two-thirds of new code is written by AI at Snap. That's happened really quickly. I think the rate at which these models are getting better is just extraordinary. I think for us, we're really excited because we're so fortunate to be in a software business that has network effects, thank God. We've got a service that connects people to one another, but fundamentally, at its core, it's a software business. The way that we write software, run our business is changing so dramatically. And at the same time, I think we're insulated from some of the effects of other software businesses that I think are being cannibalized very quickly by AI.
You have been much more of a believer in the AR form factor than almost anyone I know for a very long time. What gave you the conviction that this is the right form factor?
So much of what we do, actually, everything we do starts with humanity. Computing needs to be in the service of humanity, that ultimately, humans are the ones that decide how technology is adopted. I think too often in the technology industry, we're focused on technology first rather than people first. I think that's a huge mistake. I think when you start with people first, glasses become so obvious. They're already worn by billions of people. They sit right in front of your eyes in terms of being able to deliver a computing experience. You can operate them hands-free. As humans, it's a big deal. We do a lot with our hands. Having computing in a pair of glasses, I think, is a better fit for our day-to-day lives. Then, of course, having them at eye level and ear level gives glasses a really good understanding of the world around you, which is so important if you want to make computing more human. If you want to have computers understand the world and people, which we think is so key for getting the benefits of computing, but again, also for bringing people together.
Is it fundamentally a heads-down versus heads-up thing? You think the heads-down smartphone way of being is fundamentally a bit antisocial, and heads-up is a more engaged, connected way of being?
I think that's one part of it. But I also think if you want to build a computer or design a computer that actually understands the world around you, fundamentally, it has to be out of your pocket. Ideally, because most of our human sensors for understanding the world are on our head, I think that to me is a really good fit for our glasses technology, in terms of the way that we can architect a computer that actually brings people together and fits better into their lives.
I feel like one thing that sometimes happens in the early stages of a new tech paradigm is that there's a lot of heterogeneity, and people think there'll be a lot of specialization, and then it all collapses. In the very early days of smartphones, like go back to '05, '06, it's like, 'Oh, you'll have like the BlackBerry with the keyboard for people doing a lot of emailing.' You remember like the Nokia N-Gage, that was like almost a PlayStation PSP-type gaming platform. There was this view that you should have all these different types of smartphones. Then everything collapsed into just the single iPhone/Android form factor, and there's just going to be a big touchscreen, and that's it. That's the only modality. Do you think something similar happens with Specs, where right now there is full VR, as you say, there's like smart glasses, the very lightweight version, and then there's your Specs which are kind of between those two. Do you think full VR, like Apple Vision Pro, has a place in five or 10 years, or do you think everything just collapses into this form factor?
VR may have a specialized role for more immersive training environments or things like that. Surgeons and flight simulators and stuff.
But even then, I think folks really are going to want to be able to wear glasses and work together. You're going to want to be able to see your copilot when you're in your virtual cockpit. I think glasses are a better fit. Again, most things that humans do, because at the end of the day, we're very social species. That's one of the things that makes humanity so special. I think the idea that we're going to use technology that fully shuts us off from the world, or results in us looking at the world through a screen. I just don't think that's realistic. Yes.
Apple does have with Vision Pro the look-through feature. But yeah, it's fundamentally you're a little blocked off physically.
Yeah. That's pass-through VR, where they re-project the world on a screen. But I can't imagine a huge swath of humanity wanting to interact with the world through—Pass-through VR. A screen. I don't think that's a fit for who we are as a species.
What do you think the ramp-up of Specs looks like? When should I expect to be seeing a lot of them out in the street?
Certainly, later this year we'll make them available. I think the early audience will be early adopters, folks who are really passionate about technology. I don't think folks remember like the Macintosh. In 2026 dollars, a Macintosh was $8,000. It was really expensive. And I remember vividly my godfather, bringing—
You're talking about the 1984 Macintosh. Yeah, yeah.
I remember my godfather, when I was young, bringing us our first Macintosh. He was so passionate about computing, the possibility for computing, that really changed my life. I remember playing around with Kid Pix. When I think of early adopters, I think of my godfather. I think of folks who really want to experience what's next in computing. I think that's who Specs are going to appeal to initially. They certainly won't be $8,000. I think that's a little pricey, but I do think that it's really important to engage that group of folks, especially as you look at how technology diffuses through society. I think the folks who are most passionate about this technology are also the ones who are going to become evangelists, who are going to show their family and friends, who are going to build new Lenses. We already have so many developers building Lenses for Specs, creating new experiences. Almost every day, there's a new Lens that's published.
As I think about the smart glasses success that has existed so far, a lot of it is the GoPro competitor in a way. Where it's like... Even when I played with smart glasses, and I had a super early version of the prior Specs, which was many years ago at this stage. It's fun if you're skiing or again, doing some cool hands-free activity. Is that an interesting market? You could say, 'Oh, it's a niche, but actually lots of people like doing these activities and sharing them.' It pairs nicely with the main part of your business. I'm curious, is that like a random niche for you or a big deal, the kind of GoPro substitute?
The problem for us is that it violates one of our fundamental principles for making new products. Look, we learned that the hard way because we built camera glasses more than a decade ago, I guess. We learned it the hard way. We also saw a lot of opportunities. We thought it was really cool to get the camera out of your pocket. Put the camera at a place where you can record hands-free if you're kayaking or something. Gosh, wouldn't that be cool to have a point-of-view video? The problem is it's not 10 times better than the next best alternative, which is the phone. The rule for us in product design, or when we're investing in a new product, investing in a new idea, if it's not 10 times better than the next best alternative, then there is no point in investing in it. I think one of the other problems that we see is as a result, the market size is also quite small, and the willingness to pay is very low. If you look at camera glasses today in the low hundreds of dollars, maybe 150 bucks, 200 bucks to buy camera glasses. I think what's fascinating is if you play that forward, the problem with camera glasses, if you're really successful, right, you really won't have been able to build a platform because they don't have an operating system. They don't understand the world. They don't run applications. Therefore, you're going to get undercut on price very quickly. The prize at the end of that rainbow, I think, is very small, and the customer benefit is also negligible when you can just pull out your phone when you're kayaking and make a great video, or if you're really hardcore, put the GoPro on your head. I think we just didn't see a path to that being a 10 times better product.
Okay. It's not the right market. Then the way I think about new platforms is oftentimes customers buy them for a killer app, and then that gets an install base, and then they discover there's lots of other things that they'll use them for. You remember the initial adoption of personal computers and just early PCs. A business might say, 'Okay, I want a computer that can run a spreadsheet, and I'm buying this spreadsheet box, and it's a screen, and it's a computer and a keyboard and everything for running spreadsheets.' You realize it can do other things like, 'Oh, yeah. Okay, cool.' Later on, you start doing other things with it, but it really started as the thing running the spreadsheet. Do you think there's a similar adoption pattern for Specs where people buy it because you can get a full-size screen anywhere, and then they realize there's games on it, and then they realize there's other things they can do, or do you think people will be adopting it for a broad variety of use cases?
In today's day and age, I think the killer app concept is a little bit of a mirage, frankly, and so instead, I think—
You're telling me all my ideas are wrong. Terrible instinct for developing Specs. This is good. I'm learning a lot.
No, I think, I understand why people see it that way. I just think that today, especially with how easy it is to develop software, what's actually more important is to develop a platform where people can go after lots of different use cases that are highly relevant and highly valuable to them. I think you're already seeing that today in enterprise software, for example. We have a calendar app called Saturn, which is really cool. It's actually built around your friends and your family, built for mobile. The team was using an enterprise service for bug reports, and this thing probably cost like $100,000 a year. Today, they built a replacement for it in a day, saved $100,000, but more importantly, they were like, 'This is a way better tool for us. It's built bespoke for me. Yeah, I love this tool.' Where I think we're at in 2026, which is fundamentally really different, is that there's literally going to be bespoke software for people that they're going to be able to imagine that they're going to be able to build and create really quickly, that they can get an enormous amount of value from. This idea of one-size-fits-all software, I don't think, is as relevant in this new world.
Your vision for Specs is that you have a new platform, and you just have the era of custom software, where you think up what you want your Specs to do, and they can do them.
With Lens Studio, Lens Studio is becoming more and more agentic. I don't want to ruin all the surprises that we have coming later this year, but I think what's so exciting about the promise of this platform is that anyone could build almost anything and see it in the real world, incredibly quickly. That's a big change from the way that a gaming console works, where you really need that killer piece of software. I think what's so interesting about the future, and I think what's so different about Specs, is that people are going to build software that's best for them, and maybe they'll share it with friends or the world. But because building software is so easy now, it's a fundamental paradigm shift.
Have you vibe-coded any, in Lens Studio, any of your own? Can you share what you've done, or some of that stuff, or what people at Snap have done?
Almost daily, people are playing around and building new things in Specs. Playing around, building incredible new tools. It can be everything as silly as like a little airplane game, like drag your hand around and fly an airplane through the clouds. Or some folks are also, I mentioned that, that use case of seeing what your agents are up to and being able to work together with them. That was also built with agents. I think the entire engineering paradigm, the way that software is built now enables a totally different way of thinking about Specs and about our platform, and frankly, overcomes the biggest hurdle that we were facing, which was the App Store lock-in and moat. That's always been the biggest questions people have asked about a new computing platform. How are you going to overcome the 1 million apps or 2 million apps on the App Store that are locked into the Apple ecosystem? Today it's so easy to write software. I'm sure you've seen my favorite graph has been the iOS app submission graph, which is like bumbling along flat, and now it's just exploding into the right. The internal charts, as you can imagine, at Stripe are similar to that, where the rate of new business creation is just massively spiking. It's unbelievable. That to me is super exciting. I think that that unlocks a whole new way of thinking about Specs and our operating system, Lens Studio, et cetera.
Move my king to... Okay.
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I want to talk about your core business a bit. Who do you compete with? Is it you narrowly compete with other mobile-first social apps, or is it you're competing with other entertainment forms? Like Netflix is actually a competitor because it's also a thing that you could do with your time. I'm just curious how you think about the set of competitors that you have.
I think our competitors are primarily messaging services. I think that's... The core of the services messaging. When we launched Snapchat, it had no social features beyond messaging. That's always driven the growth of the service. I think then secondarily, the camera as well. If there's a moment happening in front of you, which camera do you choose to use? Do you capture with the Snap camera or your lock-screen camera? I think that's another thing that we think a lot about. I don't think people realize the scale of the number of selfies, for example. It was so funny. I think Apple announced last year they were like, 'There's been 500 billion selfies captured on iPhone this year,' or something like that. I'm like, I sent a message to our team. I was like, 'That seems like so small.' Like what? How weird is that? Sure enough, they came back, and they're like, 'Oh, well, over a trillion selfies have been captured on Snapchat.' I think when you... In over the same period, and—
That's so many. It's so many.
Yeah. We lowballed what we announced publicly. I think what's funny about—
Sorry, that's 1,000 per MAU. Per…
If there's been a trillion selfies lifetime.
A year period, almost a billion monthly active users.
That's a lot. I think that's a lot.
So, but I think people don't realize the scale and the engagement in the Snapchat camera. So a messaging service of the competitor, and then how does the business work? I actually don't know that much about how the business works. You're approaching a billion MAUs, and then monetization is mostly advertising for them. Or how do your different revenue streams break down?
We've got two major revenue streams. One is advertising, the other is direct revenue. The direct revenue business is relatively new for us. I think over the last like two or three years. We just announced we hit 25 million Snapchat+ subscribers, over a billion run rate on the direct revenue business. That's been growing really nicely for us. Then advertising, of course, whether that's on the map, we've got a product called Promoted Places and actually really powerful closed-loop measurement around that. A lot of folks care right now about driving folks into their retail locations and Promoted Places plays a huge role in doing that.
There's been a general trend, I think, of businesses directly monetizing, like having their equivalent of direct revenue be more relevant with AI because the inference costs are real. If you are like... Maybe the prior generation of companies were very heavily ad-dominant. Whereas if you look at ChatGPT or Claude or something like that, they have to have the various tiers of subscriptions, $20 a month and $200 a month. Because you can just use a small amount of compute or a lot of compute. Do you see similarly direct revenue becoming a bigger deal for Snap in the future? Because you're just going to have more computationally expensive products? If you're using a lot of computationally expensive Lens Studio stuff, like you can potentially burn a lot of compute as a user of Snap.
Yeah. That's one... One consideration for us. I think, of course, we have a Lens+ tier of our subscription service, which gives you access to more of our AI tools and editing tools. I don't think people realize that the Snapchat camera is one of the largest image and video generation platforms in the world, just given the frequency of engagement. One of the ways we do monetize that is with the Lens+ product. But I think for us, if I look at our subscription business, it actually just really aligns with our company's ethos and also our core skill set. If you think about like what Snapchat has been good at over the past decade, it's been making products that people really love. We would always get emails from customers asking for new features, different features, more bespoke features like app themes, for example. We never had the resources to work on it. We were like, 'Oh gosh, like we can't build something for a tiny subset of our community,' even though they're so passionate about the product and about what we're creating. I think what's been so fun about Snapchat+ is that we've been able to dedicate the resources to build this long list of features that our most passionate Snapchatters really want and are willing to pay for. It really aligns, I think what we love to do, and I think what we do best, which is making cool new products with our community and what they want, which are more bespoke features from us.
Sorry, is there a difference between what your paid customers tend to want versus what your free customers tend to want?
Not necessarily, but I think the most passionate Snapchatters always have requests for how we can make the product better. We can't always resource all those requests. But now with Snapchat+, we have an avenue where folks are really passionate about the service, they want a new feature, they let us know we can build that for our subscribers. I think that's been really exciting.
Do people have good ideas generally?
People have great ideas and an endless number of great ideas.
How do you expose yourself to product ideas from the community?
Especially if you say it on podcasts.
Yeah, yeah. Of great customer emails, but online on comments. Every time I post a video, I'm getting comments with people telling me what we should do differently. I think that's one of the great things about engaging with our community.
People think of social networks and messaging apps as network-effects businesses where the bigger they are, the better they work as products and businesses because your friends are there. They are almost the… They are the textbook example used in business school discussions of network effects. That is somewhat true, but there's also an element where you have anti-network effects and diseconomies of scale as a social network. One is as you get more popular, there's more kind of fraud and spam problems and things like that. But there's also a question of what is the 'id' of the social network. Maybe teens using a product don't necessarily want their aunts and uncles on it because the vibe is all wrong. Or maybe Silicon Valley insiders prefer Quora. You remember Quora was around when we were first starting out, and it was originally like a very Silicon Valley insider product. Now it's a much broader product. As I think about Snap, one of the things you've done well is you've kept it cool, and you've avoided the 'ick' of it feeling like it's too big, which again, sometimes social networks run into. Maybe you can comment on that phenomenon and how you think about the risk in general.
It's fascinating because you've tapped into two of the most important kind of ideas in social. Or at least two of the most important findings that we've had. The first one, which is, I think maybe the most important, was that when we were starting Snapchat, you're right. The belief was that the bigger the network was, the more valuable it was, and folks had a whole model for that for how they thought about it. What Snapchat proved was actually that it's not about the size of your network or the number of people you can contact on your network. It's about who you actually talk to. That tends to be a much smaller group than the total size of the potential network, or even your total number of friends. In fact, most of your conversations, I would guess, on a daily basis, are like with your wife. Maybe with some of your close friends, maybe some of your closest coworkers. But it's actually a very small group of people that you talk to the most. That broke the model of social media, which was the more friends you have, the more engaged you have, the more value there is. We actually said, 'That doesn't sound right.' I think people spend most of their time talking to the folks who are most important to them. If we design a service that's all about talking to the people who are most important to you, your close friends, and we design a service that's really, really great at that. You may not send snaps all day to your 400th friend, but certainly for me, I love seeing what our two-year-old is up to throughout the day. My wife sends me little Snaps, and it makes my day. It's the best part of my day seeing what he's doing and what he's up to. We've really built a service that's great for your close friends. That doesn't necessarily mean that you need the largest possible network. You just need the most important people in it. I think that that was one of the reasons why Snapchat was able to grow. Because when we were first getting started, we just heard from everyone, you're never going to be able to compete with Meta. There's no way because they've got a bigger network. Then I think the second lesson is a follow-on from that, because the other thing that we found is that as Facebook grew and Instagram grew, there was so much pressure to add more friends. Because if you remember back in the day, their entire business was based on the newsfeed. In order to have content in the newsfeed, you needed to have friends. In order to have more content, you needed to add more and more and more friends to have a newsfeed that had more posts and therefore, more advertising opportunities. That created a really precarious problem. Because I think what folks found is after they added a certain number of friends, they got to a place where they actually didn't know who they were friends with on Facebook. They didn't know who was going to see their content. There's a straw that broke the camel's back type phenomenon where then it inhibits posting, which is very dangerous. People felt really uncomfortable posting. That then accelerated, I think, this need to bring in public content, no longer friend content. Very, very quickly, the social network morphed into something that was much more about posts from BuzzFeed or something like that. Or other news providers than it was content about your friends. I think that's been another one of our key learnings over time. One of the reasons why Snapchat is a much more private service. You can't be embarrassed by your aunt on Snapchat because there are no public comments on your story. You can share with your friends and feel comfortable doing that without the risk of being embarrassed. Because the service is oriented around close friends, we don't have those same, many of those same challenges with a public newsfeed.
Your view is that if you think of a payoff curve for how good the product is relative to the number of friends you have on it. Again, the textbook view is that it just kind of goes up monotonically, whereas you're saying it starts off at zero because the product is no use if no one's on it. Then you're saying goes up pretty quickly to 10 or 20 people, but maybe hits a plateau and starts decreasing. I don't know, what are the numbers here? Potentially even less. Yeah. When does it start... When does a social network start having anti-utility from the incremental user?
I think we have to be careful to differentiate a social network from a messaging service. So at its core, because Snapchat is a messaging service, you can get the vast majority of the value even by having like one friend, two friends, three friends.
Those are the folks you talk to the most, and that connection is really, really important to you.
I think, as I mentioned, one of the big challenges of social networks was that in order to have enough content to drive enough engagement to grow the advertising business, there was a need to add more and more and more friends. Because the newsfeed was really reliant on new content. I think one of the things that we did very, very early on, and we could argue about how well we executed on this, but one of the things we identified very early on, was that we needed to open up to non-friend content. Publisher content, content from creators very, very early on. Rather than driving people to add friends, they could watch content from publishers when they ran out of content from their close friends. We moderated that content. We were one of the first companies to actually rank that content with AI, with our service called Discover. The fundamental thesis was like, let's not force people to add friends so they can watch more content. Let's just show them content from publishers or from creators.
Oh, that's very interesting. So your view is that the mistake would be one should add more people. You should get more connections on LinkedIn so that there is content in your feed and your view is that you should separate out the people you want to interact with and having stuff to do in the app.
Those are actually pretty separate concerns, and it's very dangerous to mix them. I think back in, it may have been 2016, 2017, we said the most important thing you need to do is separate social from media. The biggest mistake was combining them, and it creates a lot of perverse incentives. Instead, just add the friends that are important to you who are close to you. Use a service for messaging. Share with them if you want to with stories or things like that. Then, if you want to watch more content, great, we've got this whole world of content available to you from publishers and creators, et cetera.
Yeah. That's very interesting. Okay the other thing that, from a product point-of-view, I really associate with Snapchat is obviously persistence or lack thereof. The ephemeral nature and the norms around this have shifted a lot even over the course of my lifetime. I remember when I started using the internet, the norm, I don't know if you remember this, was that you did not use your real name on the internet. The internet's a scary place, and it would be dangerous for you to have your real name out there. Then we got okay with that. Then there was the era where everything got posted in perpetuity through social networks and everything else. Then we realized, "Huh, maybe everything being posted in perpetuity is not a great idea." I feel like people are still trying to figure this stuff out. I'm curious again, what you think the long-term equilibrium is of, do you want a central store of all the photos you've ever taken in your camera roll? Do you want everything to be ephemeral? If things are ephemeral, maybe you really wish you'd kind of kept that birthday Snap from a while ago. What is the long-term equilibrium here? Just online in terms of how people reason about data? Do we need more fine-grained control between a one-off disappearing message and kept forever? Maybe we need new product inventions.
I think my general thesis would be that it will probably mirror the way that we've been living for thousands of years, which is the vast majority of life is ephemeral. Then you save the things that are important. You don't write down every thought you have. You certainly don't record every conversation you have, although we're recording this one. I think for me, that's likely how things will evolve over time with technology. Certainly what we've seen with Snapchat. When we said, "Hey, it doesn't make sense that everyone's recording everything forever in terms of our conversations." in fact, that has an impact on the way people express themselves and share with one another. That sounded crazy at the time because literally everything was saved forever. We were talking about things like the importance of privacy, and the relationship between privacy and self-expression back in 2012. People were like, "What are you talking about?" This was at the time when everyone was saying, "We're going to be… Everything's going to be open and connected. We're going to share everything about yourself with everybody." That's just not how humans have lived for thousands and thousands of years. I think what's very likely looking forward is what's already happened. Which is the vast majority of communication products you use now have retention settings that delete your conversations unless you want to save them. I think that's true for Snapchat in terms of making Snaps as well. You may just want to send something that's silly to your friend, but if it's an important memory or if it's our two-year-old running around doing something cute, I'll just save it. I think people are going to interact with technology the same way they interact with the world, which is, save the things that are important and discard the rest.
