Evan Spiegel: How Snap's Founders Choose What To Build Next

Spiegel and his cofounder spent 18 months on their failed college application startup, Future Freshman, before realizing they didn’t actually love using it themselves and that distribution dynamics made it a weak business. By contrast, they used the earliest Snapchat builds obsessively with friends. That emotional attachment convinced them to push through technical failures (including a three‑day outage) and investor skepticism. If you don’t genuinely love using what you’re building, it’s a red flag you may be forcing the idea rather than compounding a real pull.

His biggest lesson from both Stanford product design and early failure: don’t disappear for 18 months building in isolation. With Snapchat (initially Picaboo), they shipped a simple disappearing-photo app in a couple of months, showed it in a class, and immediately got critical feedback (“screenshots make this useless”). That led to a key innovation: screenshot detection and notifications. Spiegel emphasizes that 99% of ideas are bad, your initial hypothesis will almost always be wrong, and your real job is to test, iterate, and be willing to change direction quickly.

At Stanford he internalized a different business culture: instead of optimizing for cash flow and small wins (e.g., a local coffee shop), you target opportunities that can reach billions. Tech, unlike coffee shops, scales once the product is built—Snapchat was built once and now serves hundreds of millions. Because the odds of any startup succeeding are low, he argues it’s rational to aim big: if it does work, the payoff (impact and economics) justifies the risk and grind.

Spiegel regrets not embedding values early as they jumped from ~20 to ~2,000 people, importing micro‑cultures from Amazon, Google, and Meta. Snapchat now runs on three values—kind, smart, creative—and three leadership behaviors (including T‑shaped leadership). These are baked into performance reviews, promotions, and termination decisions. He draws a sharp line between being ‘nice’ and being ‘kind’: kindness often means difficult, direct feedback (“you’ve got something in your teeth”) rather than avoiding discomfort.

Snapchat’s entire design organization is just nine product designers, all with the same title, who exist to generate lots of ideas and prototypes. Every new designer must present work on day one to normalize failure and reduce fear. A weekly design critique reviews all new ideas. Product managers act as the ‘bridge’ between this flat, experimental design pod and larger, more hierarchical engineering and product orgs—mirroring the early dynamic between Evan (design) and Bobby (engineering). This structure lets Snap be both disciplined at scale and inventive at the edge.