Snapchat is not social media. Social media is about performing for an audience. Snapchat is about talking to your friends.
We had 200 million monthly active users and Twitter still could not figure out how to make money from it. That is the saddest sentence in startup history.
TikTok proved the format worked. They just did what we should have done — paid creators, added music, and actually built a business around it.
For three months in 2021, Clubhouse felt like the future of social media. Elon showed up. Oprah showed up. Everyone was in a room.
The problem with social media is not the content. It is that one company controls the algorithm, the data, and the rules. We are changing that.
Instagram is fake. Everyone knows it. We built BeReal because we wanted to see what our friends actually look like at 2pm on a Tuesday.
Facebook wasn't about technology. It was about identity. People wanted to be themselves online.
We built Snapchat because we wanted to talk to our friends without every message living on the internet forever.
15,000 lip kits. Sold out in under a minute. That's when I knew this wasn't a hobby.
Instagram is my store, my marketing, and my focus group all in one. I don't need a mall.