Exact Formula Used To Build A $130 Billion Company! I Said No to $3B From Mark Zuckerberg!

You became the world's youngest billionaire at the age of 25. You got Mark Zuckerberg offering you $3 billion.

That was, uh, a fateful day for sure, but we decided that we'd rather go it alone.

Was there ever a day where you doubted that decision? Evan Spiegel is the co-founder behind one of the world's biggest social media platforms, Snapchat. He turned disappearing messages into a multi-billion dollar empire, redefining how we connect online. Evan, you don't do many podcasts, do you?

I don't do much public speaking at all, but I wanna share a bit more.

So let's go back to those early days.

So I was an introvert growing up, and I loved to build stuff. At school, I built my own computer. And once you start realizing that things that look really complicated on the surface aren't that difficult, you start wondering, you know, what else you can build, so that led to building Snapchat at 21. So I was an undergrad at Stanford, and we'd raised $485,000, had a $4.25 million valuation.

What a fucking deal.

But back then, there were a lot of apps that would get popular really, really quickly and then sort of fade away, and a lot of people told us that we shouldn't sell it. They said, "You're just sending photos back and forth. How is this gonna grow for the long term?"

But the growth of Snapchat was atypical, to say the least. It was like this virus, and it was reaching 75 million users on a monthly basis. So I wondered if you had any advice on the fundamental principles of success.

How much people care about what they do and the ability to move quickly is the predictor of success. And at Snapchat, we have a really small design team. It's nine people who are constantly generating an incredible number of ideas and products and features because 99% of ideas are not good, but 1% is.

I wanna know what they teach at Stanford because the success rate of creating some of the world's preeminent entrepreneurs is really, really high.

There were a lot of very good lessons. The first one is...

This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you wanna support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. Evan, when you look back over your earliest years and you, you try and make sense of the dots that connected in hindsight, I guess, as Steve Jobs once said, what are those dots?