EVAN SPIEGEL

Co-founded Snapchat as a Stanford class project with Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown in 2011. App launched in 2011 as "Picaboo" then renamed to Snapchat.

Introduced disappearing messages — a concept the entire tech industry initially mocked. Turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook in 2013 when Spiegel was just 23.

Invented Stories — a format that was later copied by Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, LinkedIn, and basically every social platform on earth. Snap Inc.

went public in March 2017 at $17/share with a $24 billion valuation. Stock hit $83 in September 2021 before crashing below $8 in 2022.

Company has over 400 million daily active users and generates over $4.6 billion in annual revenue. Invested heavily in AR (augmented reality) — Spectacles glasses, AR filters/lenses used billions of times daily.

Snap Inc. (co-founder/CEO)

Spiegel is a product visionary who bets on where consumer behavior is heading, not where it is today. He invented disappearing messages when permanence was the norm.

He created Stories when feeds were the standard. He is betting on AR when most people still think it is a gimmick.

His style is contrarian by nature — he builds features the market does not yet know it wants. He also insisted on non-voting shares at IPO, maintaining absolute control.

Inventing the Stories format. Stories is now the dominant content format on the internet — used by billions of people across every major platform.

Instagram Stories alone has over 500 million daily users. Snapchat created the template that reshapes how people share content online.

Also, turning down the $3 billion offer looks brilliant in hindsight given Snap's eventual public market valuation.

Spectacles V1. Snap launched camera glasses in 2016 with viral vending machine marketing.

The hype was enormous. Then nobody used them.

Snap wrote down $40 million in unsold inventory. The hardware bet has continued with Spectacles V2, V3, and V4 (AR glasses), but none have achieved mass adoption yet.

The gap between Spiegel's AR vision and consumer readiness remains wide.

Spiegel believes the camera is the new keyboard and that augmented reality will be the next major computing platform. He thinks social media should be about close friends, not broadcast fame.

His philosophy is design-first and user-experience-obsessed — he personally approves major design changes. He is skeptical of advertising that interrupts and prefers formats that feel native.

Married to supermodel Miranda Kerr since 2017. They have three children together and Miranda has one son from her previous marriage to Orlando Bloom.

Spiegel is the stepson of no one notable — his parents are both lawyers in Los Angeles.

Dropped out of Stanford University to work on Snapchat full-time. He was two classes short of graduating.

He has said he learned more from building Snap than he would have from finishing his degree.

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