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March 1 - March 6, 2018
it was easier for me to write this book than teach my mom how to use Snapchat.
“When everyone is tired and the night is over, who stays and helps out? Because those are your true friends. Those are the hard workers, the people that believe that working hard is the right thing to do.”
“That’s a million-dollar idea!”
Foreshadowing
If you take a hundred startups that manage to raise seed funding, only thirty-one of them on average will raise Series A funding. Only seventeen will raise a Series B; seven will raise a Series C; and two will raise a Series D. It isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, surprising that the success
Both of them had this ability to not invent products, but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed—it’s just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them.
Evan and Bobby knew Snapchat had value, because everyone who used the app used it all the time.
There was an understanding that we weren’t sending each other
National Geographic–quality photos of the campus scenery. We would send silly pictures and photos with funny captions meant to shock and provoke a reaction in our closest friends.
At parties, people would send Snapchats to friends who weren’t there. If you didn’t download Snapchat, you were missing out. Snapchat had a confusing interface, so users in high school and college frequently showed each other how to use new features and navigate the app. It’s a very visual app that’s often difficult to explain but easy to show to someone. People who knew the hidden features felt cool showing them to friends. Users delighted in discovering Easter eggs and features they didn’t know existed. This in-person sharing helped Snapchat grow quickly among young people.
If Instagram is the prettiest 1 percent of photographs, Snapchat would happily host the rest of the 99 percent.
funding—in his mind, what was the point of continuing to put any effort, no matter how small, into getting a degree?
I can relate
Conforming happens so naturally that we can forget how powerful it is—we want to be accepted by our peers—we want to be a part of the group.
But the things that make us human are those times we listen to the whispers of our soul and allow ourselves to be pulled in another direction.
“Because consumer technology has become popular culture, you really need to understand popular culture to be able to have an insight about it,” early Snapchat investor Jeremy Liew later said. “Then to be able to drive new innovation from that. I think Silicon Valley is such an isolated bubble, our reality is not the reality of a normal American in normal America. That is what is preventing as much insight and therefore innovation happening here.”
Leaving the meeting, they returned home and ordered a book for each of their employees: The Art of War.
Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.
While the difference may seem trivial, Snapchat became the fastest and easiest way to open an app and immediately start capturing a funny or interesting moment to share with friends.
“If you’re trying to help convince people that they want to join you, helping them understand all the pain they would have to go through is a valuable tactic,” Mark Zuckerberg later said when asked about Facebook’s acquisition strategy. Now, he intended to show Evan and Snapchat the pain they would have to suffer to compete with Facebook.
Why did Poke fail? It failed to solve any problems for young users, who were more than happy with Snapchat, and it solved a problem that didn’t exist for older users, who still didn’t get the appeal of disappearing content.
Poke was further hampered by the fact that teens were drawn to Snapchat because it explicitly was not Facebook, which was populated by their parents and collected everything they posted forever.
Within weeks it became clear that Poke hadn’t just failed—it actively helped Snapchat.
This illuminated an interesting contradiction in Evan: he wanted to throw big, inclusive parties, but he was also a very private, often secretive person.
Everything seemed to be going perfectly.
he preferred to take walking meetings so that others wouldn’t overhear him, and he noted that iMessage and emails are permanent records.
“If you want standard terms, invest in a standard company,”
Damn that's one way to do it
“We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.”
how many times have you put this book down to check something on your phone?
Super meta!
A players tend to attract and hire more A players, propagating a virtuous cycle that fills the team with talent; on the flip side, B and C players attract their peers, filling even the most promising young companies with mediocrity.
I believe this is also inspired from Steve Jobs and Apple
I think Evan Spiegel, the founder of Snapchat, understood our generation when he put a time limit on a picture message. Maybe he didn’t mean to, but he took technology backwards a bit, bringing us a little closer to what real human interaction is supposed be. It’s supposed to be a memory, not something tangible.
it all added up to a simple fact: if you didn’t have Snapchat, you were missing out.
Snapchat looked like an insignificant toy when it launched, but was actually a big improvement in communication for many people. The more you used it, the more fun and addicting it became.
If he turned down Facebook and ran Snapchat poorly, he would probably never get an offer this big again. But if he sold Snapchat, he would probably never again have an idea this great.
Aka "The Entrepreneur's Dilemma"
Tech startup acquisitions usually fall into three buckets. In rare cases, they’re good for both parties—a company could be doing very well but faces steep regulatory hurdles, like YouTube and PayPal. The acquirer gets a great deal in the long run, but it’s fairly clear that the startup could not have survived on its own. More commonly, one of the two parties gets a vastly better deal than the other. When the startup wins (Geocities, Broadcast), it sells at the peak of a bubble or at the peak of its own faddish popularity, then declines through mismanagement, a failure to innovate, or both.
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The clarity of Evan’s response showed how much he had learned. Evan began with the world at large, then narrowed to the tech world, then his main competitor, then Snapchat, considering this entire stack now and in the future.
Unlike many founders, Evan wasn’t aiming for the highest possible valuation right now. He was worried about the hurdles standing in Snapchat’s way and thinking strategically about how his moves now set up his options down the road on the way to a Snapchat IPO.
He was as obsessed with Snapchat being a permanent company as he was with Snapchat being an impermanent product. This is the best idea Evan will ever have. He will not sell it to someone else. And he will not screw it up himself.
That New Year’s Eve was a beautiful evening of contradictions. A picture-sharing company throwing a party that confiscated your phones. Newly famous youngsters celebrating an iconic holiday out of the limelight. There was a sense of wonder, looking back, at how quickly and awesomely this product and company had been built. But a taste of bittersweet, looking forward: the team would never be this cool, small, and tight knit again. It’s very rare that you realize you are living in the “good old days” when they are happening; but that night, it was clear. This was a special period that would
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Even in this secretive culture, Snap Labs is particularly notable for its clandestine operations. When Vergence agreed to sell, Miller called their first investor, early Facebook executive Charlie Cheever, and said, “We sold the company. We can’t tell you who. You’ll get a check in the mail.”
At first, they begin as silly, light projects between friends. But when there are millions of dollars at stake, people sue each other. And friendships are quickly thrown aside.
Facebook continually tried to copy Snapchat features without understanding the Snapchat community and why users were obsessed with the app’s focus on impermanence.
Essentially
Snapchat’s early ads were very basic and extremely costly compared to peers’ ad offerings—they charged advertisers hundreds of thousands of dollars for a very short spot, typically ten to thirty seconds. This was partially done on purpose to be prohibitively expensive and keep demand low, as Snapchat had a small team and was still building its infrastructure, both technically and organizationally.
Kind of a stroke of genius
But Snapcash’s failure did not negatively affect users’ experience—it was not a major design overhaul or bet-the-company change. Users simply ignored it. And Snapchat was cleverly designed so that it was easy for users to ignore features they didn’t like. Because of this, when Snapchat missed, they missed small. That is, misses didn’t cost them users. And when they hit, they hit big, with wild successes like Stories and Live.
Snapchat thrived in Venice because no one cared about tech or apps.
Depending on your age and Snapchat usage, you’re probably either thinking, “We finally mentioned DJ Khaled’s Snapchat!” or “What the hell did I just read?” Let’s step back for a minute.
Evan is focused on keeping Snapchat as the antithesis of Facebook and Twitter.
He now has two employees whose full-time jobs are to record his Snapchat stories and respond to Snapchat messages, which range from requests for consultations and surgery to medical questions to song requests for the music he plays in his office.
Alexis Madrigal, then an editor at The Atlantic, coined the term “dark social” in 2012 to describe the way we share articles and other links privately via messages and email. He estimated that 70 percent of referrals came not from the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, but from dark social. Snapchat has no links, so the entire rise of these little kingdoms has been through dark social, mimicking the way the app originally spread through high schools and colleges, being whispered about and texted person to person.
It turned out that the best way to get young Snapchatters to watch an ad was to have one of their own make it.
But humanity cannot be true or false. We are full of contradictions and we change. That is the joy of human life.
