How to Win When Software Is Not a Moat: Evan Spiegel on Distribution, Design Velocity, and Snap's "Crucible" Year
Lenny's Podcast
In this conversation with Lenny Rachitsky, Snap co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel addresses a question the host frames bluntly: why has almost no consumer social app launched and lasted in the 15 years since Snapchat appeared? Spiegel's answer centers on distribution rather than product quality. He also argues that Snap learned something 15 years ago that much of the industry is only now discovering with AI: software features are easy to copy, so a company has to build its defenses elsewhere. The discussion then covers how Snap organizes a very small, flat design team to keep inventing, how AI is changing the way that team works, why Spiegel calls this year a "crucible moment" for the company, and why the CEO thinks human acceptance, not technology, will set the pace of AI adoption.
Why consumer social is so hard: distribution before product-market fit
Rachitsky opens with the historical record as he sees it. Since Snapchat launched, he says, the only comparable successes are TikTok, which he considers more of a media platform than a social one, and Threads, which he calls "cheating" because it sits on top of Instagram. Everyone wants to build a social app, and almost everyone fails.
Spiegel responds that both examples are really stories about solving distribution, which he considers one of the hardest problems in consumer technology today. Snapchat, he says, benefited from timing: mobile phones and the App Store were new, people were downloading lots of apps, and there was a real appetite to try new services. Instagram had launched only about a year earlier. That appetite no longer exists in the same way, and people download far fewer apps now.
In Spiegel's reading, TikTok solved distribution with money, an approach he describes as genuinely innovative. The company spent billions of dollars subsidizing both sides of its video marketplace, acquiring viewers and paying creators, to bootstrap its ecosystem. Threads solved it by drawing on Meta's existing distribution across its other products. His broader point is that consumer technology focuses heavily on whether a product is right and has product-market fit, while founders spend far too little time figuring out distribution. He sees that as a major differentiator.
Close friends, not network size
Spiegel then explains how Snapchat found its own path to distribution. At the time, the prevailing belief was that social networks had network effects that made the biggest networks the stickiest and most valuable, so nobody could beat them.
Snapchat's different insight, as Spiegel describes it, was that what matters is not connecting someone to the most people but to the right people: a best friend, a partner, a spouse, the handful of people they care about most. He argues that is where most of a network's value lies. Snapchat grew partly on the tailwind of the App Store and mobile distribution, but also through a growth model that was about close friends rather than friend count.
Distribution as the new challenge in the AI era
Rachitsky connects this to a thesis he has been developing. AI entered product development in the middle, with code autocomplete, and has since expanded to writing, reviewing, and testing code and helping generate ideas. He expects it to keep moving outward toward strategy and ideation, and he suspects distribution will become the new moat and the biggest challenge because AI won't help much there.
Spiegel agrees and adds one qualification: the most exciting periods in technology are when new platforms emerge, and much of the value tends to come from those shifts. Many of today's big consumer companies, such as Uber and Snapchat, were born on mobile. He expects next-generation form factors like glasses to create a new surface on which people can build generational consumer companies. Rachitsky remains more worried about startups, saying that so much launches every day that getting attention against incumbents feels very hard.
Being copied constantly, and learning that software is not a moat
Rachitsky lists Snap inventions he considers widely copied: Stories, early AR glasses (Spectacles, which preceded Meta's entry), swipe-based navigation, and hold-to-record video. Asked what the next thing to be copied will be, Spiegel points to Instagram Plus, which had just launched. Snap recently reached 25 million Snapchat+ subscribers and more than a $1 billion revenue run rate, which he suggests was probably enough to get Meta's attention. Rachitsky notes that the name, too, was copied.
Asked how it feels to be copied again and again, Spiegel says it is certainly better than making things nobody wants to copy. It does force Snap to be very deliberate about strategy. Reflecting on the last 15 years, he says Snap essentially learned back then that "software is not a moat," which he believes everyone is now discovering with AI. Because Snap's software features were so easily cloned, the company started looking for more durable advantages.
The first was ecosystems and platforms: relationships between creators and Snapchatters, and the augmented reality platform on which developers have built millions of lenses. Individual software features are easy to copy, he argues, but a full ecosystem or platform is very hard to replicate. The same logic shaped Snap's investment in hardware, where he says it is extremely difficult to copy a fully vertically integrated AR stack.
Rachitsky asks whether network effects, the classic moat, are therefore insufficient. Spiegel says they are an important piece of the puzzle but not enough against software cloning. Snap holds many patents and tried to protect its ideas, but in software it is easy for others to copy or iterate on them. What Snap has found hard to copy is a platform that supports relationships among creators, developers, and the community.
Why keep investing in hardware
Rachitsky notes that Snap is working on two of the hardest businesses there are, consumer social and hardware, and recalls earlier efforts including Spectacles and a camera drone. Spiegel confirms that the next product, Specs, is launching this year.
His explanation starts with personal history. He grew up on computers, built his own in middle school, and spent lunch periods in the computer lab doing graphic design. What he noticed was that computers, and now phones, often isolate people: they took him off the playground, and today he sees his 15-year-old and friends hanging out together while looking down at their phones. He sees a large opportunity for technology that brings people together and keeps them grounded in the real world.
At Snapchat, he says, the team saw people using AR on small phone screens and interacting with their thumbs, which he likens to looking at the world through a keyhole. With people now spending, by his estimate, seven or eight hours a day on screens, he believes computing must change to fit better into people's lives. People get enormous value from computers, but he thinks the cost is meaningful.
He describes a multi-year roadmap. The first Spectacles, which he dates to "2014 or something like that," were simply meant to get the camera off the phone and out of the pocket. Later versions added a second camera for depth, then a display to overlay digital objects onto the world. The 2024 generation introduced Snap's operating system so developers could build full-featured software for Specs ahead of a consumer launch. He argues that people are frustrated with phones, "hunched over like gremlins," and that Snap has built a new computer that gets people outside, connects them with friends, and frees their hands. It has been roughly 20 years since the iPhone, he says, so it is time for something new.
Specs versus heads-up-display glasses
Rachitsky, who had tried an early version of Specs, describes air-bending, placing virtual plants around his house, drawing in space, and multiplayer features. He asks how to keep people from being constantly distracted by content beside the person they are with.
Spiegel says social norms will play a big role, but he distinguishes Specs from heads-up-display glasses. Specs, he says, anchor content in the world, directly in the field of view, rather than attaching a small screen to your face that shows text alerts. He does not find notification use cases compelling and doesn't think most people want phone notifications on their face, so he considers that concern less pressing. The important thing, in his view, is showing people new ways to hang out with friends while wearing Specs. He also criticizes the placement of heads-up displays: when you glance at the display in the corner while talking to someone, you end up looking at their crotch. He does not believe that behavior resonates with customers or will become widespread.
Two kinds of organization: the Loonshots model
On how Snap keeps innovating relative to its size, Spiegel points to Loonshots by Safi Bahcall, saying that reading it explained much of how Snap already thinks. His summary of Bahcall's argument: delivering a product at scale usually requires a large organization with hierarchy, structure, and operational rigor. In such organizations, people focus on promotions and the next rung of the hierarchy, which makes them risk-averse and less willing to try new things. Innovation, by contrast, thrives in very flat structures with no fancy titles, freedom to try things, fail quickly, and float crazy ideas.
The successful companies, in this account, have both kinds of organization, and leadership's job is to create a healthy relationship between them. Otherwise, the small innovative team dismisses the large organization as bureaucratic and slow, and the large organization sees the innovators as "jokers" who don't drive the business or serve customers. Leaders must build mutual respect and dialogue across that divide.
Spiegel says this matches Snap. The company must run as a large public company serving almost a billion customers, with a highly reliable service and effective operations. At the same time, it has a very small design team, oscillating between nine and 12 people, with no hierarchy, that constantly creates new things. Much of Snap's innovation, he says, comes from the dialogue between the two, because engineers working on reliability and customers also have great ideas. Rachitsky likens this to fast and slow thinking in Kahneman's System 1 and System 2. Spiegel stresses that new ideas can come from anywhere, but it is critical that the design team stay flat.
The Evan–Bobby model and the velocity of design work
Spiegel says much of how Snap was built was modeled on his original working relationship with co-founder Bobby Murphy. Murphy had a heavy computer science and statistics background but liked design and empathizing with customers. Spiegel studied product design at Stanford, a program then housed in mechanical engineering, and took some computer science classes. Their mutual respect and enjoyment of talking through products produced much of Snap's early innovation. The company has tried to scale that dialogue between engineers and designers while keeping an environment where people feel comfortable offering crazy ideas.
For the design team, Spiegel says, the most important thing is velocity. He meets with designers for a couple of hours every week to look at new work, which he guesses amounts to hundreds of ideas weekly. That approach blends two parts of his education. Stanford's product design program emphasized empathy and human-centered, iterative prototyping. He had also studied at Art Center and Otis in Los Angeles, where the expectation was to produce new work constantly and face a "brutal" critique process. He wanted both: deep empathy for what people want, and a high-velocity work ethic of making things every week and discussing them as a team, since so much learning happens in critique. The team's favorite saying, he says, is that if you want to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas.
Listening to customers without building what they ask for: the origin of Stories
Rachitsky raises Keith Rabois's contrarian view, from an earlier episode, that consumer founders shouldn't talk to customers at all. Spiegel disagrees. He says you must talk to customers and share your idea as early and often as possible, though that doesn't mean following their advice. Surveys, in his view, are not very helpful; long conversations of an hour or two about how people use technology and how they feel about it teach a great deal. He calls customers an endless source of inspiration.
Stories is his example. Users kept asking for a "send all" button so they could blast snaps to all their friends. At the same time, conversations about social media revealed that people felt pressure because posts were permanent and accompanied by likes and comments, so they only shared polished, perfect things. They liked that Snapchat let them express themselves without that judgment. Digging deeper, the team found that people thought reverse-chronological feeds were strange: the end of a birthday party would appear first, then the middle, then the beginning.
Snap listened to all of this but built something different. Stories let people share with all their friends without spamming them, removed public metrics like likes and comments to reduce pressure, disappeared after 24 hours so everyone could start fresh, and, perhaps most importantly in Spiegel's view, ran in chronological order, the way people have always told stories. The feedback shaped the design, but the team didn't build exactly what users requested.
He adds that the process was iterative. Early concepts resembled a status update showing what friends were up to even when no snaps were exchanged. Through more conversations and iteration, that evolved into Stories, along with gestures now taken for granted, such as tapping forward and backward and full-screen vertical content, which he says were new at the time.
Screenshot detection: making disappearing photos credible
Another story Spiegel tells concerns the early days, when people dismissed the premise of disappearing photos because anyone could take a screenshot. That summer, working out of his father's house, he and Murphy enjoyed using the product but kept hearing that it made no sense.
Their solution exploited a technical quirk. Because users had to press and hold to open a snap, the team realized that taking a screenshot while a finger was on the screen triggered an event that effectively reported the finger had lost contact with the screen. Apple did not provide an API for screenshot detection at the time, but this touch event let Snapchat infer that a screenshot had occurred and notify the sender. Spiegel says the community didn't mind if someone saved a snap; they just wanted to know. He credits this invention as one of the first things that gained real traction and helped Snapchat spread as a new way of communicating.
Why Snap waited to hire product managers
Rachitsky cites his research showing Snap had about 200 employees before hiring its first PM and asks whether that was a mistake. Spiegel says his view of product management grew out of his view of designers. In the traditional tech org structure, he argues, designers mostly produce visuals in response to PMs, rather than shaping product direction, strategy, vision, or new innovation. He did not want that culture at Snap, which was modeled on the design-engineering partnership he had with Murphy.
So his early position was not that Snap didn't need PM work, but that designers should do it. If designers needed PM support, the message was essentially to do it themselves, which he believes helped designers take a more active role in product development.
Today, at Snap's scale, with legal requirements and trust and safety considerations, he says getting a product out "really does take a village." PMs now play an important coordination role, synthesize inputs such as data science analysis, and convene working groups. As the company gained capabilities it lacked early on, PMs became important for bringing those people together and delivering the right thing at the right time.
AI, the PM–designer–engineer "standoff," and design as a deliberate bottleneck
Rachitsky mentions Marc Andreessen's description of a three-way standoff among PMs, designers, and engineers, each believing AI makes the others unnecessary. Spiegel says a standoff sounds dysfunctional, though he likes that people are rethinking how work gets done, which he considers imperative given the extraordinary rate of change. He thinks designers feel vindicated after years of parents asking why they weren't studying computer science. Many Snap designers now ship code, which he calls a big and meaningful change. Removing friction between idea and impact at the scale of nearly a billion users is, in his view, empowering for designers who feel these tools may somewhat level the playing field for creative people.
Rachitsky observes that easier building seems to be producing a lot of merely okay products, and wonders when design will have its moment as a differentiator. Spiegel says that at Snap, design has always acted as an intentional bottleneck: things must be approved by design to ship. He acknowledges this sometimes annoys people and slows shipping, and that a good idea from a PM or engineer may ship more slowly than it should if its creator can't work well with design. But he considers the bottleneck essential for a cohesive customer experience. You can tell, he says, when different teams own different pages of an app without a coherent through line.
Staying close to the product and the customer
Asked about his hands-on involvement in details, Spiegel says building things is what he loves and what gets him "skipping to work" in the morning, while acknowledging that there are more talented experts on every area. He doesn't think this applies only to founders. Whatever the company or role, he believes staying close to customers and to how the product serves them is the most important thing a leader can do. He subscribes to the "old school" approach of walking the floors and talking to customers. Asked whether this matters especially for consumer products, he says no: it matters for any company that wants to differentiate on product experience.
How Snap hires and develops designers
Snap hires designers solely on their portfolios, Spiegel says. He doesn't care where someone worked or their level of experience, and most designers join straight out of school rather than from big tech companies. He looks for two things.
The first is range, which he treats as the line between art and design. Someone with a strong, distinctive personal style is expressing their own point of view, which can be beautiful but is art. Design, in his definition, means empathizing with an audience and building something that resonates with them, which requires the ability to make things that look completely different. A portfolio where everything looks the same signals an artist rather than a designer.
The second is the story behind the work. He interviews every designer who joins and typically asks them to pick any piece they feel strongly about, love it or hate it, and explain why they made it and what they learned. That reveals their process, and he wants a team whose members approach invention differently. He sees varied backgrounds, such as 3D animation or electrical engineering, as a major strength.
On developing young designers, his main method is helping them make lots of things and get lots of feedback from customers, teammates, and him directly. On their first day on the design team, new designers present work, which sets the tone. Once people get comfortable with that velocity, he says, ego melts away: when you are producing a thousand ideas, it doesn't matter that most aren't great. The goal is to eliminate "preciousness" about any single idea. Snap also rotates designers across products rather than leaving them on one area for long, to bring fresh perspectives and avoid boredom. He mentions that Snap has one of the largest maps in the world and the biggest AR platform, which he describes as exciting opportunities for designers.
Rachitsky recounts that Jenny Wen, who moved from design leadership to IC work at Anthropic, found the constant critique the hardest adjustment. Spiegel adds a counterweight: there is no gate on showing him work. Anyone can put any idea on the list for the weekly meeting regardless of how good others think it is, because over-reliance on critique can filter out great ideas.
Designers shipping code, guardrails at scale, and organizing AI around jobs to be done
Rachitsky mentions a big tech company that requires designers to ship a quota of PRs. Spiegel says shipping code is not a requirement at Snap. The design team has always had a "just figure it out" attitude; he recalls a team member who had never done 3D graphics taking online tutorials and getting going. So he doesn't think people need to be pushed to adopt new tools.
The bigger question, he says, is how not to break things at nearly a billion users when almost anyone can submit a PR. Snap has built AI tools and guardrails both to let more people contribute code and to reduce bugs. It now has automated code review that he believes has detected close to 10,000 bugs. On the internal version of the app, employees can shake the phone to report a problem, and agents now debug what went wrong and can suggest a fix. He expects that, fairly soon, agents will implement the fixes too.
To bring "order to that chaos," Snap started from the jobs to be done for its community and advertisers. For Snapchatters, those include downloading the app, adding close friends, and using lenses; for advertisers, they include joining the ad platform and configuring campaigns. Listing these jobs made it clear where agents could help and where to build cross-functional teams supported by AI tools. It also gave Snap a way to track progress against business outcomes for each job. He wants a thousand flowers to bloom with agent experimentation, while keeping the focus on what matters to the community and advertisers.
How the CEO job changed, and learning to communicate
Looking back over 15 years, Spiegel says the hardest thing to grasp is how much the job changes. Early on, he helped design the product while also answering customer support emails, sorting out legal filings, and raising money. Over time, the job became about leadership: selecting and developing people, building culture seriously and creating structures to sustain it, setting strategy, and managing through major changes such as the pandemic, rebuilding the advertising platform, and now AI. He says he could never have anticipated this, but finds it energizing.
His biggest area of growth has been communication. He recalls meeting President Bill Clinton early on, who described the presidency as being essentially "explainer in chief." Spiegel says he returns to that idea often, since so much of his job is explaining things to employees, shareholders, and the world in ways that make sense and inspire. He admits he was "unnecessarily dismissive" of communication early on.
The only way to improve, he says, was doing it. He was reluctant to hold all-hands meetings or Q&As and preferred to send an email, until a board member told him, in effect, that this was his job. He decided to learn to love it, and says he now genuinely enjoys the tough questions and learns from them.
Rachitsky asks about Rahul Vohra of Superhuman, who stepped back from tasks he disliked to focus on what he loved. Spiegel says that is only partly possible for a CEO. The role carries responsibilities and operational rigor that are not always enjoyable or glamorous. If he only wanted to work on product, he would take a different job at Snap. He stays because he enjoys leading the company's direction and sees a large opportunity to change how people use computing, through Snapchat and Specs. He acknowledges he would probably spend more time with family and have more fun on some days in a different role, but calls this a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
The "crucible moment" and being the middle child
Rachitsky raises Spiegel's year-end letter describing this year as a crucible moment, and notes the contrast between Snap's scale and a stock that hasn't performed well, with investors pushing for changes. Spiegel explains the framing: Snap is nearly large enough to enter the Fortune 500, nearly at a billion monthly active users, and about to launch Specs after 12 years of investment. At the same time, it is still not net-income profitable, because it chose to invest heavily in the future.
This year, he says, Snap must prove it can be a strong, profitable business that keeps growing in reach and engagement, citing new products such as topic chats and Spotlight, and roughly 200 million people playing games on Snapchat each month. The reason this matters, in his framing, is that winning long-term with Specs will be very hard without a solid foundation. After a couple of years of rebuilding the ad platform and go-to-market efforts, and rapid growth among small and medium-sized advertisers, he wants to show the foundation is strong enough for the next chapter. He calls it a turning point and an "all hands on deck" moment.
He also describes Snap as a "middle child": much larger than Pinterest or Reddit, far smaller than Meta and Google. That position brings enough scale to do interesting things, but also the risk of being overshadowed by older siblings while younger ones get attention. Middle children, he says, have to define themselves. Getting Specs into consumers' hands is part of that, because after talking about Specs for so long, it is hard for people to understand Snap's next chapter without something they can actually use.
Screens at home
Spiegel has four sons, aged two, six, seven, and 15, and approaches screens differently for each. The two-year-old gets no screen time except during haircuts, which he struggles with, when he watches YouTube videos of Bobcat tractors. The six- and seven-year-olds watch movies occasionally and don't have phones; over Christmas they received ModRetro handheld consoles from Palmer Luckey's startup, a gift from the TBPN hosts. The 15-year-old is "all in" on technology for school, friends, and Snapchat.
On AI, Spiegel says he recently asked his kids at breakfast how their schools approach it, and the answer so far has been "not really." The kids experiment at home and beta-test Specs with him, and his eldest, Flynn, is the most fluent with AI tools. He argues that children are born imaginative and that AI lets them turn any idea into something almost instantly. He wants his kids to have that experience and believes deep integration into education will be important.
How Spiegel uses AI, and his contrarian view
For his own work, Spiegel has built an agent in Glean, which integrates Snap's dashboards, documents, and data. It combs through what is happening across the company and flags what he should focus on, occasionally catching things he hadn't noticed. Combined with weekly notes from leaders listing three things from the past week and three ahead, plus usage metrics, he feels he has a good sense of company hotspots. He says AI is enabling the kind of flat, fast-moving leadership structure he has always wanted. He uses Glean for this because it is, for Snap, the most secure way to access internal documents, while noting that Claude can build all sorts of things.
More broadly, Snap is working on agents that handle entire workflows. His example is a go-to-market agent that takes a product idea and writes the spec, identifies who needs to sign off, helps with legal and trust-and-safety risk analysis, and writes go-to-market materials such as blog posts. The team is now working on generating visuals as well, all in one shot. He ties this back to jobs to be done: if a job is defined clearly enough, an agent can be built to do it. Snap has been using Claude for much of this work.
His contrarian view is that the industry focuses too much on technology, when humanity matters more because humanity decides how technology is adopted. He believes people are massively underestimating how much human comfort with AI advances will determine their deployment. Technology leaders, he says, assume people will blindly adopt new technology, but he expects a period of significant societal pushback against many AI-driven changes. He argues the industry and the world should put humanity first and ensure tools advance human goals, not just business goals. Rachitsky adds that AI labs face a dilemma between warning about risks and frightening the public, citing surveys showing AI's poor popularity, and suggests Snap's long, playful use of AI shows another side of the technology.
Lightning round
Spiegel recommends The First 50 Years of Apple by David Pogue, especially the first half built on interviews with around 150 early Apple team members, and The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, which he describes as covering the vulnerability of global shipping and predicting a world in which the US has a harder time securing global waterways. He loved Marty Supreme, calling it a full-throttle experience. Through his kids he is rediscovering Pokémon and thinks the franchise has much more room to grow. His motto: "You have two ears and one mouth. Use them in that proportion."
His all-time favorite lens is the vomiting rainbow, for the joy it brought people; his least favorites are the aging lens or face swap. He notes that face swap relied on real-time, on-device machine learning that was cutting-edge at the time, and that Murphy created Snap's generative AI lab about a decade ago.
He closes by acknowledging widespread concern about how AI will change society, while saying he sees much to be optimistic about in making computing more human, which he says is Snap's focus as it prepares to share more later this year.
You guys have a billion monthly active users. Why is it so freaking hard to build a durable, lasting, social consumer product?
So much of consumer technology focuses on do I have product market fit? People don't spend nearly enough time thinking about distribution and figuring out distribution.
I feel like Snap has always been punching above its weight in terms of just how much new stuff comes out of your team. Stories, AR glasses, swipe-based navigation.
We have a very, very small design team that is constantly innovating and creating new things. Your first day that you join the design team, you present work. You're making things. If you want to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas.
People copy you. As a human, how does it feel just to see this consistently happen?
15 years ago, we essentially learned that software is not a moat, which is something that everyone is discovering today with AI.
You describe this coming year as the crucible moment.
It's a real turning point. We're in an industry where so much of the conversation is focused on technology. Humanity is far more important because humanity dictates how technology is adopted. Technology leaders think that folks will just blindly adopt new technology as it comes out. There's going to be a huge amount of societal pushback on a lot of the changes that are coming with AI.
Today my guest is Evan Spiegel, CEO and co-founder of Snap. Evan is one of the very few humans in the world who has successfully built and scaled a lasting consumer social app. In the 15 years since Snapchat launched, there are essentially zero social consumer apps that have launched and stuck around. Snapchat has over 1 billion monthly active users, is generating over 6 billion a year in revenue. People post over 8 billion AR lens photos a day on Snapchat.
And over the years, Evan and his team have invented the concept of stories. They had the first AR glasses product in the market. They invented swipe-based navigation, the camera being primary, and also back in the day, face swapping, making people look older, and so many of the things that are just copied throughout the entire industry.
If this is truly the golden age of consumer products, like many people say, AI is going to enable, there's a lot that we can learn about how Evan and his team think and operate and are able to continue innovating. This is a rare podcast interview with Evan, and we cover a lot of ground.
Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny's product.com for a year free of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Evan Spiegel.
Evan, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it.
I want to start with just trying to understand and help people understand why is it so freaking hard to build a durable, lasting consumer product, and in particular a social consumer product. And just to give people this context, I don't think people realize this, but since you launched 15 years ago, there's basically TikTok, which is not really social, it's more of like a media platform, I'd say, and then maybe Threads, which I think is cheating because it just sits on top of Instagram. Basically, nothing else has worked other than Snapchat 15 years ago. And in spite of everyone just like, everyone innately just wants to build a consumer product, social app, it's just like where everyone first goes, everybody fails. Nothing works. Why is it so hard? What do you think people don't get?
I think it's really interesting, you know, in terms of the examples that you just shared, right, of TikTok and Threads, because you just shared two examples of people who figured out distribution. And I think that that's actually one of the hardest things to figure out in consumer technology today.
We were so fortunate when we created Snapchat, the mobile phone, you know, and the App Store were just getting started. So, people were downloading lots of new apps all the time. They were really excited about trying new services. You know, Instagram, I think, had started a year before Snapchat or something like that. So, there was a real appetite to try new apps and new services, and that's not the case today. It's a lot harder to get distribution for new ideas and new services. People aren't downloading as many apps now as they used to.
And both TikTok and Threads figured out distribution, which is why I think they're more recent examples of success. TikTok did it with money, which I actually thought was really innovative. They spent billions of dollars subsidizing both sides of their video marketplace, right? Acquiring customers to watch videos and then paying creators to make videos. And so they were able to bootstrap, you know, their ecosystem. And I think with Threads, obviously they were able to leverage the amazing distribution that Meta has across all their other products.
So I think so much of consumer technology focuses on, you know, am I building the right product? Do I have product market fit? Have I, you know, built something that's really going to resonate with customers, that they're really going to want to use all the time? And I think people don't spend nearly enough time thinking about, you know, distribution and figuring out distribution. And that seems to me to be a huge differentiator.
So, you know, as I reflect on the early days of building Snapchat, the thing that we figured out in terms of distribution, especially when it comes to social, was that, you know, back then people believed that there were network effects in social networks that meant that the more people you had using the service, the stickier that it is, right? And so there was no way to beat the biggest networks because those were the most valuable.
And what Snapchat figured out that was, I think, different was that, you know, despite the fact that there were much bigger networks that connected more people, what really mattered was connecting you to the right people. And so if you could just connect someone not to all their friends, but to their best friend, to their partner, to their spouse, the people that they cared most about in the world, that's where the majority of the value is in the network. And so that's what really allowed us to grow in those early days. You know, we had the benefit of the App Store and mobile distribution, but we also had a different way of growing our service, which wasn't about having the most friends. It was about having your close friends.
That is so interesting. It's something that I've been thinking a lot about actually, this idea of distribution, because of AI. If you think about just where AI has come into the market, it started originally just like helping people autocomplete code. That's something I've been talking about a lot on this podcast. So, it's like, okay, autocomplete code, okay, now it's writing all our code. Okay, now it's reviewing our code and now it's testing itself and now it's going to help us come up with ideas. So, it's like starting in the middle of the product development process and expanding out, and I feel like it will be very good at coming up with great ideas and developing strategy, like it's going up the, I don't know, the funnel or the timeline of building a product, and I feel like distribution is where it ends up being what ends up being the new moat and the new biggest challenge, because AI is not going to really help you there. So, it's really interesting that that's even more so true for consumer products.
I think that's absolutely the case, and the only thing I would say is, you know, the most exciting times in technology are when there are new platforms that get created, and that tends to be where a lot of the value comes from. You think about, you know, a lot of the big consumer technology companies today, they were really born out of mobile, right? Whether it's Uber, you know, Snapchat, some of those early generation companies that really, you know, got distribution and built themselves on mobile. So I think as we look forward to, you know, sort of these next generation form factors, things like glasses, there's going to be a whole new set of opportunities and a whole new surface for people to build generational consumer companies, and I'm really excited about that.
Especially if they have distribution already. It feels like that's going to be like, I'm just worried for startups. It's going to be very hard to get distribution, just like there's so much launching every day. There's so much to pay attention to, and it just feels very hard for a startup to get any attention against existing incumbents.
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Something that has always been really interesting to me about Snapchat is it feels like you guys have just innovated so much over the years. You guys basically just invent all the things. People copy you, benefit greatly from it, and it's just kind of wild to watch. And just a few examples that come to mind: stories, you guys created. You were very early on AR glasses; you guys launched Spectacles before Meta got into this stuff. Swipe-based navigation. I think you guys started the idea of holding to do a video versus a photo. There's probably a bunch. First of all, what's the next thing someone's going to steal, do you think?
Oh gosh. Well, I just saw Instagram Plus launch. So I think that's the latest rip, you know.
Which is a subscription plus.
Yeah, I think, you know, we just hit 25 million subscribers on Snapchat+, more than a billion revenue run rate, so it was, I think, probably enough to get Meta's attention that it's a good time to copy.
And the plus, he's just even taking the plus as the name. Oh my god. Let me just ask you, as a human, how does it feel just to see this consistently happen to you? You guys come up with something awesome, someone rips it off, benefits hugely from it, and you just have to keep doing that again and again.
You know, it's certainly better than making stuff that people don't want to copy. So, I think, you know, in many ways, it's a blessing that we've been able to continue to innovate, to make new things that really resonate with folks and that ultimately people want to end up, you know, copying from Snap. So, I think it certainly beats the alternative, but it does, you know, mean that we have to be really thoughtful about our strategy.
And so I think, you know, one of the things, it's been an interesting time for me to reflect a lot on, you know, our strategy over the last 15 years, because, you know, 15 years ago we essentially learned that software is not a moat, right, which is something that everyone is discovering today with AI, right? But 15 years ago, because all the software features that we could create were so easily cloned by our competitors, we started to think about how to build a more durable business, how to build a business, you know, that had bigger and more effective moats.
One of the first things we did was focus a lot on building ecosystems, right? Whether those are, you know, the relationships between creators and Snapchatters, whether that's the platform we built around augmented reality where, you know, developers have built millions of these lenses. So it's very easy to copy hard or, you know, software features; it's very hard to copy or to replicate a full ecosystem or a platform. And so, you know, we realized that the more that we could build a platform around our business, the more that we could build an ecosystem with creators and developers, the harder it would be for folks to just copy that.
And then it also informed a lot of our thinking about investing in other places that are really hard to copy, including hardware, where it's really, really challenging, you know, to copy our fully vertically integrated stack around augmented reality. So I'm certain there's a lot more to talk about there. But I think, you know, we learned early on that software is easy to copy, and so it's really important to build more durable moats.
That's really interesting hearing this from you, and I was going to get to this later, but we can talk about this now. This big investment you've been putting into hardware. Like, you would think network effects would be the moat. That's what everybody's always trying to get to because that's classically a great moat. Are you saying that that's maybe not even as great a moat, or that's just not enough and then you need something more, like, say, hardware?
I think network effects are certainly an important piece of the puzzle for sure. But I don't think they're enough when it comes to these sorts of software, you know, software cloning. And so, you know, despite the fact that we've got a ton of patents and we protected all these ideas, the way that it works in software is that it's quite easy, you know, for folks to copy or iterate on top of these ideas. And so I think in addition to network effects, it's really important to try to build, you know, businesses that are more defensible by truly building out a platform that can support relationships between creators, developers, and the community, because that in of itself we found is incredibly difficult to copy.
It's so interesting. Like, if you think about it, you're working on two of the hardest types of businesses, a consumer social platform and hardware. And I love that you're doing that. And this hardware investment, you've been at it for a long time there. You had Spectacles, you had drones. I don't think people remember this drone that could take photos of you. And then you have Specs coming out. Is it Specs or Spectacles, the name of what's coming out, by the way?
Specs is coming out this year.
Specs. Okay, cool. We're going to talk about it, but maybe you've already answered it, why this is something you're so passionate about, but why this kind of ongoing investment in hardware?
Well, I think to, like, take a huge step back, I love computers. I grew up using computers all the time. I built my own computer when I was in middle school. You know, I fell in love with graphic design and would spend, like, every lunch period in the computer lab.
And I think one of the things that I noticed about computers, and I think today with mobile phones, is that in many ways they isolate us from one another, right? They actually take us out of our social interactions. They took me off the, you know, playground at recess and, you know, put me into the computer lab. Or, you know, if I look at our 15-year-old today and his friends, right? You know, sometimes when they're hanging out, they're all looking down at their phones even though they're all together. And so, I think there's just such a big
opportunity to build technology that actually brings us together, that keeps us grounded in the real world rather than removing us from it. And that's something that we realized early on with Snapchat, right? We were innovating, building Lenses and augmented reality, but ultimately we saw that people were using AR on these tiny little phone screens, right? That required you to use your thumbs to interact. And so it was almost like interacting with the world through like a keyhole, rather than actually staying grounded and being able to interact together with friends. So it just seems so obvious that as computers play a bigger and bigger role in our lives, I think today people spend seven or eight hours a day on average on screens, that something has got to change to make this technology fit better into our lives, right? We get enormous value from computers, but at the same time, I think the cost is quite meaningful and I think they need to evolve.
So with the early version of Spectacles, I guess that was back in 2014 or something like that, the initial idea was just to get the camera off the phone, right, out of your pocket and allow you to more easily take snaps out in the world. But we then sort of built a road map from there, right, where we added a second camera to get depth. We added a display to be able to overlay digital objects into the world and help you interact with them. And then with the last generation in 2024, we released our operating system, which now allows developers to build full-featured software inside of Specs, in preparation for the consumer launch.
So, I don't know. I think the time is right for a new type of computer. I think people are frustrated with the cost of using phones and computers today. They're kind of all hunched over like gremlins. And we can build a new computer. We have built a new computer that brings people outside, that helps them connect together with their friends, that frees them up to actually use their hands to interact with the world, and that to me is really exciting. I think it's a whole new chapter and gosh, I mean, what, it's been 20 years or something since the iPhone, so it's about time for something new, I think.
So I got an early preview of the Specs and it's extremely cool. I learned how to be an airbender. I put plants all over my house. Drawing all over the place, and there's multiplayer features, which is very cool, which I think is part of the idea, right? Is you're connecting with people versus sitting in like a VR environment on your own. Like I worry about the being connected all the time. So I imagine that's like a new thing we have to figure out. How do we not just get hooked on just watching things on the side instead of looking at someone we're with? Do you have any thoughts there? Just like is there a solution to that other than just like social norms?
I do think social norms will play a big role, but I also think one of the things people experience with AR, Specs, unlike these heads-up display glasses, they don't just put an annoying little screen that's stuck to your face on the glasses. They actually anchor content in the world, which is really different, right? They put that content directly in your field of view rather than requiring you to look down at some little screen or get some text alert or notification.
So I think, frankly, I don't think those use cases are very compelling. Like I don't think receiving phone notifications on your face is a valuable proposition for most folks. So I don't think we necessarily have to worry about that, because I think most people don't want that. I think what is going to be really important with Specs is showing people all the incredible new ways they can hang out and connect together with their friends wearing Specs. But I don't think it'll be disruptive or notification-based or something like that.
One of the things that I really dislike about the heads-up display glasses is when you're looking at the little heads-up display in the corner, you're actually looking at your friend's crotch while you're talking to them if you check the heads-up display. So the position is just very strange. And I don't think that that's something that really is resonating with customers, nor do I think that's something that's going to become a widespread behavior.
I want to go back to this idea of how to innovate. I feel like Snap has always been punching above its weight in terms of just how much new stuff comes out of your team, how many inventions happen, considering the size of the company and the history. What do you find needs to be true for innovation to happen? What do you do to allow for all these great ideas to emerge?
The best sort of academic overview or summary, I think, comes from a guy, Safi Bahcall, who wrote a book called Loonshots. It's really worth reading. It's all about the innovation process, and actually when I read it I was like, oh my gosh, that kind of explains a lot of how we think about innovation at Snap. And I think to summarize the academic version, we can talk about what we've developed and built at Snap, but to summarize, essentially his findings are that basically if you want to deliver a product at scale, you usually need quite a large organization. A large organization needs hierarchy and structure, a lot of operational rigor. And as soon as you have an organization that's very large and very structured like that, people become very focused on getting a promotion, right? Getting into the next step of the hierarchy. And that means that all of a sudden, they become a lot more risk-averse. They're not really as willing to try new things. They're very focused on achieving the goals that have sort of been set for them in this operational hierarchy. And that makes it very, very challenging to innovate.
Now, on the flip side, structures that are really healthy and constructive for innovation typically are very, very flat, right? That's the same for our design team, for example, where there's no one that has a fancier title or a role. There's a lot of flexibility in terms of the ability to try new things and fail quickly and put up crazy ideas. And what he basically finds is that the companies that are very successful actually have both types of organizations inside their company, and that the leaders of the organization are the ones who are responsible for creating a healthy, functioning relationship between the two types of organizations. Because what ends up happening in a lot of companies is that the small innovative team becomes critical of the large organization. Oh, they're so bureaucratic and slow. They don't innovate, things like that. And then the larger organization is like, oh, what are these jokers doing? Just innovating. They're not really driving the business. They're not supporting our customers. And so a lot of tension actually arises from the different organizational structures.
And so the leadership responsibility, and I think Safi does a really good job looking throughout history at what leaders have cultivated really constructive and powerful relationships between the more innovative or flat parts of the organization and the more structured and hierarchical parts of the organization. How you create that mutual respect, how you create that dialogue between those parts of the organization, is so important.
And so when I read that, I was like, "Wow, that actually sounds quite similar to what we have at Snap." We have to run a large public company, serve almost a billion customers. That means our service needs to be really reliable. It means that we need to operate really, really effectively to serve our customers. And at the same time, we have a very, very small, it sort of oscillates between like nine and 12 people, design team that is constantly innovating and creating new things. And I think the beauty of what I love about Snap is that the dialogue between those two teams is where a lot of that innovation happens, because a lot of our engineers working to serve our customers or working on reliability have a bunch of great ideas, and so do our designers, and as long as they're in dialogue, really great things can happen.
There's someone, I forget who this was, but they described this approach as the fast thinking and slow thinking part of the organization. Kind of like Kahneman's System 1, System 2 approach. It's interesting, the fast-moving, let's say, what do you kind of call this innovation team, or do you have a label for this, like the let's-come-up-with-new-ideas part of the org?
Well, I think it's really important to acknowledge that new ideas come from everywhere, and we want that. But I think the design team in particular, and we call it the design team, it's really important that they have a flat, non-hierarchical structure where new ideas can come from anywhere. I mean, I think that is absolutely critical.
So in terms of how you operationalize this, is the key to the innovation you've seen this specific small design team who can work, like, talk about just how you actually operationalize this sort of way of working.
Yeah, I mean I think it's an important part of it, but a lot of how we built Snap was modeled actually on mine and Bobby's original relationship, right? Where Bobby has a heavy-duty computer science and stats background, mathematical and computational science, but he really likes design and likes thinking about building things for customers and empathizing with them. I have a design background, right? I was in the product design program back at school, which actually was part of the mechanical engineering department at the time. I took some computer science classes, so I sort of knew what I was talking about when it came to computer science. So we both had mutual respect for each other and our skill sets and our backgrounds, and both enjoyed talking together about the types of products we wanted to create, and that dialogue created a lot of innovation. And so a lot of how we've thought about growing the company over time is strengthening that dialogue between engineers and designers and creating an environment where folks feel comfortable throwing out really crazy ideas.
But I think for the design team in particular, the thing that is probably most important is the velocity of design work. So I typically meet with our designers for a couple hours every week and we just look at work. I mean, new work every week, hundreds of ideas, I would guess, on a weekly basis. To me, if I think about where I learned how to design and build things, I have sort of an interesting combination, because I went to Stanford for the product design program, which is really focused on empathy, right, in this iterative process of understanding what people want and building prototypes and iterating, but really centered on empathy, right? Human-centered design.
And then at the same time, I had also been to art school. So I had studied at Art Center, I'd studied at Otis here in Los Angeles, both great art schools. And so I was used to this grinding expectation that you were making new work all the time, and then just an absolutely brutal critique process on a regular basis. And so for me, as I thought about the parts of my education that I really liked, it was this combination of really developing empathy with people and the types of products that they want in their lives, but at the same time having this really high-velocity work ethic where you're not just thinking all the time about new products. You're actually making stuff every week, all the time, and then you're talking about it as a team, because that critique process is where so much of the learning sort of happens. So I would say that the velocity of work is really important, because our favorite saying is, if you want to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas. That's really, really important.
I just had Keith Rabois on the podcast. I don't know if you know this about him, he has many contrary takes. One is if you're building a consumer product, do not talk to customers. Like, not only is it not useful, his advice is it's harmful, because it can infiltrate your subconscious and it just doesn't lead to great things. What's your perspective on that?
Wow, that's really interesting. I would say you have to talk to customers, you have to share your idea. You should share your idea as quickly as possible, as frequently as possible. It doesn't mean you need to take people's advice or feedback, but it's really important, I think, to listen. And I think for me, it's not the survey model of listening. I don't think that's particularly helpful. But I think going deep and talking with someone for an hour, two hours about how do they use technology, how does it fit in their lives, how do they feel about the products they're using, you can learn so much. And I think customers are an endless source of inspiration when it comes to building products.
So pro talking to users, because I feel like you've been really good at just like, here's what it'll be and here's how it should be, and even though people may not understand this is what it should be, trust me, it'll work really well. What's that balance of just like, here's what I'll pay attention to, here's what I won't?
Well, let's use Stories as an example, right? So back then we were hearing from customers all the time, I want a send all button. I want a send all button. It's so annoying to select everybody on my list of friends on Snapchat. If you just give me a send all button, then I can blast snaps to everybody all day long, and that would be really great.
And at the same time, we were talking to people about their use of social media, right? And they're like, "Oh gosh, social media, I feel all this pressure, right? Everything I put up there is permanent all the time. It's got all these likes and comments, so there's all this judgment. So I only feel like I can put pretty and perfect things up there. And I just don't like that pressure. That doesn't feel good. I actually love the way that Snapchat allows me to just express myself and share with my friends without that sort of judgment and pressure." And so we thought that was really interesting. And so we dug deeper into how people were using social media. We found that one of the things they thought was really weird was that everything was in reverse chronological order in the feed. So the feed back in the day, the timeline, right, when people posted photos, they would always find that the end of the birthday party appeared first in the feed, right, and then the middle, and then the beginning of the party.
So everything was sort of, you know, just like played in reverse in the feed, which was really strange to folks. So, we listened to all of that, right, and heard all of that. But then we came up with something totally new and different, which were Stories, right, that were responsive to the feedback, right? They didn't, you know, create a send to all button, but they did create a way to easily share with all of your friends without spamming them all day long. They removed, you know, public metrics. They didn't have, you know, likes and comments and things like that to reduce pressure. They disappeared after 24 hours so that everyone could start the day fresh again, you know, the next day. And they, you know, maybe most importantly were in chronological order, which is the way that people have told stories, you know, since the beginning of time. So, I think that's an example where like listening is incredibly valuable. All of those insights that we, you know, received just from listening to folks made a huge difference in the product design process, but we didn't build exactly what they asked for. We empathized and then, you know, came up with something new.
That is such a great story. I love hearing these stories of features that everyone's using now and how they came to be. Was there like a moment of just like this is the way, this is the story concept that you remember, or was it kind of this very gradual evolution?
It was iterative because in a lot of ways some of the early ideas, you know, started more around like a status update. You know, that was sort of like, you know, how could you know what your friends on Snapchat were up to even if you weren't sending snaps back and forth. And so, you know, it sort of started there and then, you know, again, through talking to people and iterating, understanding what folks were really looking for, we ended up, you know, ended up with Stories and some of the gestures, you know, that people maybe take for granted today, being able to tap forward through stories and backwards through stories, full screen, right? Vertical content. Those were all really new things at the time.
Is there another story of something that you all built that just like was interesting and of how it came to be? These stories are so interesting and people don't know these histories.
You know, one of my favorite stories was around screenshot detection actually in the early days, because when we first built Snapchat and we, you know, shared with people, oh, you could send photos that disappear, everyone said, "No, you can't. You can always take a screenshot. What do you mean you can send things that disappear? That makes no sense."
And so, you know, we thought a lot. I remember that summer, you know, after school, we went home, when we were working out of my dad's house, and Bobby and I were just going back and forth and we were like, you know, we were having fun using the product. We were sending, you know, photos back and forth, but people would just keep saying, "Well, this just, it's not about disappearing photos because you can just save them. Like, I don't get it." And one of the things we invented at the time, we figured out a way, we realized that if you were pressing and holding to open a snap and left your finger on the screen and you took a screenshot, it would basically trigger, you know, an event on the phone essentially that made the phone, would essentially report that your finger had lost contact with the screen, right? That's what the screenshot mechanism did. So even though Apple didn't provide an API at the time to let you know that a screenshot had been taken, there was a way for us to essentially detect this touch event to learn that a screenshot had happened, and then we would just send a notification back to the sender that, oh, you know, the recipient had taken a screenshot.
And that for us in the early days, you know, really resonated with our community because they didn't mind if somebody, you know, saved one of their snaps. They just wanted to know. And I think that, you know, that early invention was one of the first things that really got a lot of traction in the early days and I think, you know, helped Snapchat spread as a new way of communicating.
That is really cool. I can't imagine Snapchat existing without you figuring that out. That feels like such a core mechanic. Something that is also really, I'd say, famous in the PM community about Snap is you guys waited a long time to hire product managers. I've done all these research reports on just like how long it took the top companies to hire their PMs, and the number I saw is you had 200 employees before you hired your first PM. I'm curious if you think that was a mistake, waiting that long, and just your current thoughts on product managers, just like how they fit into Snap. A lot of people listening to this are PMs and so I'm just curious how you feel.
A lot of my view of product management was actually driven by my view of designers and the role that designers should play. And one of the things that I, you know, was concerned about in the tech community, you know, if you look at the traditional tech org structure, you know, designers really are producing visuals. They're not really producing the product direction or the strategy or the vision or, you know, net new innovation, right? They're really responsive actually, I think, in many cases to the PM saying this is what we're building, now go make me some visuals. And I absolutely did not want that type of culture to take root because, again, as I mentioned, we modeled a lot of the, you know, way that we develop products here at Snap on that early relationship between myself and Bobby, really this, you know, this harmonious relationship between design and engineering, and how important that dialogue is to building great things and great products. And so, you know, I think in the early days my view was not that we don't need PMs. My view is that designers should do that work. So that's essentially, you know, what we would say to our designers, which was like, you know, hey, if you need PM support, why don't you just do it yourself? What's the big deal? And I think that really helped, frankly, designers play a more active role in the product development process.
Now today, you know, at a company operating at our scale, you know, if you look at the legal requirements, our approach to trust and safety, you know, it really does take a village to get a new product off the ground, and product managers play a really important coordination role in all that, in addition to synthesizing, for example, data science analysis and bringing together the working group to try to solve problems or innovate or make the product better. So I think, you know, as the organization grows and there becomes, you know, all of these different capabilities that the company didn't have in the early days, you know, whether it's data science, you know, you name it, product managers play a really important role in bringing all those folks to the table and making sure we deliver, you know, the right thing at the right time.
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There's this interesting question that everyone's asking right now. Marc Andreessen put it really well when he was on the pod. There's this kind of like three-way standoff right now between PMs, designers, engineers, where they each think they are the future and you don't need the other with AI, and everyone's wondering what's the more important core skill. I imagine your sense is now AI makes designers even more powerful and so this is even more the way to approach. Talk about just like how you think this shifts this triad with AI enabling people.
Well, it sounds highly dysfunctional if folks are having that standoff. That is not a good thing. But I do like that people are thinking about doing work really differently. I think that's imperative at this moment of time. The rate of change is extraordinary.
Look, I do think designers feel vindicated in a lot of ways, right? You know, a lot of designers had parents who were saying, why aren't you studying computer science? You know, what are you going to do with this skill set, drawing things? You know, this doesn't make any sense. And I think today, you know, a lot of our designers are now shipping code, which is extraordinary, right? And that's a really big and really meaningful change in terms of the way that design works here at Snap and the way the creative process works. And so I think removing friction from the creative process and being able to go from idea to, you know, impact at, you know, the scale of almost a billion people using Snapchat is really empowering and exciting for designers who feel like these tools, you know, maybe level the playing field to some extent for creative people.
Yeah. But what I feel like, I don't see this happening yet, but I feel like because now it's so much easier to build, people are shipping all these okay things. And it feels like design should have its moment of glory right now as a differentiator of like, okay, this is actually awesome. I haven't felt that yet and I'm curious if that's what will begin to happen.
Well, I think for us, design actually has always operated as like a bottleneck at the company, which is incredibly important, right? It's intentional that things need to be approved by design to ship, and sometimes that really annoys people, you know, and it does slow down the shipping process. Sometimes it means that if you don't know how to work well with design or get your ideas in front of design, that like some really innovative or cool new thing developed by, you know, a PM or developed by an engineer maybe doesn't get shipped as fast as it should. But that bottleneck is really, really important because that's what results in a cohesive customer experience. And I think, you know, I think you can see when an app has been built by, you know, teams who are responsible for different, you know, pages of the app, right, or different parts of the experience, but there isn't really like a cohesive through line. And I think, you know, for us at Snap, you know, having design really actually be that bottleneck in terms of helping to, you know, manage what we're shipping and, you know, what it looks like and how it all works together, I think is really important.
That's a good segue to something I wanted to ask you about, which is you're famously very in the weeds on everything that is going on, all the things that are shipping. You're very close to the pixels. I'm curious how that's evolved for you over time. Like, are you still in there looking at everything that's about to ship? And what's your just philosophy on founders having to be involved in, let's say, the pixels and the details of the product?
First and foremost, like, yeah, this is what I love to do. Like, I love building things. I love, you know, making new products, services for our community. That is like what drives me. I really, really enjoy that part of the process. So, you know, it's not work to me. It's something that I really just love doing and love doing together with our team. And so I think for me, like that, you know, in addition to all the great people I get to work with here at Snap, like the thing that, you know, wakes me up, you know, with a smile on my face every morning, the reason why I'm skipping to work, is because I, you know, I am in the weeds on what we're building and shipping to our community.
That being said, there are always smarter, better, more talented experts, you know, working on all the different things that we have going on. But I really do like staying close to what we're creating.
I don't think it's relevant just to founders. I think no matter what type of company you're running or your role in the company, staying close to your customer, staying close to the product and the way that it's serving your customer is the fundamentally most important thing you could possibly do. I think, like, I absolutely subscribe to like the old school, like, walk the floors, talk to your customers, get out there and stay in touch with what's actually happening with your service, with your community, with your team. And I think that's probably the most important job that any leader can do in any company, is stay close to their customer, stay close to their team.
Do you feel like especially for a consumer and consumer social product, this is extra important, to just be like extremely in the weeds on everything that is shipping and, say, having your design team have to approve everything? Do you feel like that's especially important for consumer?
I don't think it's especially important for consumer. I think it's especially important for any company that wants to deliver great products to their community, right? A lot of companies have different points of strength, right, and differentiation, but if you want to, you know, differentiate on the product experience, I think it's really important that leaders stay very close to that.
Is there anything special you look for in the designers you hire, knowing that they're basically running the show and just approving everything and just kind of like the right hand to Evan? Is there anything in particular you look for when you're hiring these designers?
Yeah, there's a couple really important things. First of all, we make all of our, you know, hiring decisions just based off portfolio. So, like, that's really all we want to see. Like, I really don't care where you've worked or your level of experience. In fact, most people join our design team right out of school, you know, not from a big tech company or something like that. And really what I'm focused on is understanding the portfolio. And I want to see two things from the portfolio.
The first is a really wide range. And that is the difference between art and design. So there are lots of people who have a very distinct style, right? They have a very distinct way of building things and creating things. That really is art, right? They're expressing themselves and their own personal point of view on the world. And it can be very beautiful, but it is not design. Design is really about, you know, empathizing with your customer, empathizing with your audience, your viewer, whoever it is, and then building something that really resonates with them. And that means you need to have an extraordinary amount of range. You've got to be able to build and create things that look totally different. So, when I'm going through a portfolio, you know, the first thing I'm looking for is like, are they building stuff that all looks the same? Or are they building things that look really different, right? That, you know, have been responsive to different sets of needs. And that's how I know that they're a designer and not just an artist. And then, you know, the other thing I want to
understand and, you know, typically, you know, I interview every designer that joins our team and what I want to understand is why and the story behind the work that they created. So typically what I'll do is just say, hey, you know, pick something in your portfolio, anything you feel strongly about. You know, you could love it, hate it, I don't care, you just have to feel strongly about it, and just tell me the story of why you made it and what you learned through that process. And I think, you know, pretty quickly you can understand, you know, someone's process in terms of, you know, building something or inventing something, how do they go about it. And I'm really trying to make sure that we have people who have different ways of doing that on our team. One of the strengths of our design team has been that people come from lots of different backgrounds, right? They might come from 3D animation or they might come from electrical engineering, and like, that's a real strength to have folks who see the world differently and have, you know, totally different sets of skills.
So as I was preparing for this chat, I talked to a bunch of people that worked at Snap over the years, and I've integrated their ideas throughout already. But one that came up that I thought was interesting is I hear you spend a lot of time developing young design talent and that's a big focus of yours. Can you just talk about how you develop young design talent?
Well, I think the number one way to develop young design talent is just help them make lots of stuff and get a lot of feedback from, you know, whether it's our customers or, you know, their teammates or, you know, myself directly. And so one of the things that we do that's different at Snap is, you know, your first day that you join the design team, you present work. And it's really, really important that, you know, the first day that you show up on the team, you're making things. And that just sets the tone for the rest of your, you know, experience on the design team and growth on the design team, because really that's what we're all about. And so I think folks who can get comfortable very quickly in that velocity of making things, that's where, you know, the ego sort of melts away, because, you know, when you're creating a thousand new ideas, who cares that most of them are not great ideas? That's totally fine, right? What we want to get rid of is that sense of, you know, preciousness that people have around ideas, where they feel like, oh, I've got this one really perfect great idea, and if people don't love it, that means that I'm not a great designer. It's like, no, that's ridiculous. We all, you know, need to just create as many ideas as possible that will lead us to, you know, some really great ideas hopefully over time. And so I think for young designers, establishing that velocity of ideation very early on is really, really important.
And then the other thing we do that I think is different, although I don't know, I've never really worked anywhere else, you know, is we don't allow designers to get stuck on specific products or verticals for very long. We like to make sure people are rotating through different parts of the product to bring new ideas and fresh perspectives, and also to avoid getting bored. Like if you're a great designer and you're stuck, you know, designing the chat experience for three years, like, I mean, how boring is that? It's really exciting, I think, at Snap to be able to work across all of these, you know, highly engaged product services. We have one of the largest maps in the world. We have this huge, you know, the biggest augmented reality platform. Like, these are really exciting opportunities for designers, and it's important that we're rotating them across, you know, all of these different products so they're not getting stuck.
I had Jenny Wen on the podcast. She was head of design for Claude and Cowork, and she was like a director at Figma, and then she came to Anthropic and moved to just IC design again. And I asked her what's the hardest part of that move, and she said it's just all the crits that she has to deal with now, just so much criticism and constant feedback, and she forgot about that part of it. So it's interesting that's such a core part of the way you, like, the thing that people have to learn essentially and get good at.
Well, and one of the things that's so important, right, about our design team and our design culture, one of the things that we try to do is there is no gate to showing me work every week. So there is no, you don't like any idea, it doesn't matter, you know, how good people think it is, how bad it is, you can bring it to that design meeting, get it on the list, and share your work and your idea. And that is so important because I think, to your point, you know, sometimes people overrely on this critique process and great ideas get filtered out. And so I think creating this culture on the team where, like, you can bring anything to the design meeting, there's no, you know, filtering process, I think is just so important.
You mentioned AI, how designers are shipping code. I have a friend who works at a big tech company and he just said all the design team, they're required to ship, like, I don't know, 10 PRs a month or something like that, or a quarter, which is such a new world. I guess one is just, like, how do you think about designers shipping code? Is that like just do it if you can, or is there like a requirement sort of thing? And broadly, I'm just curious how AI is changing the way your team operates. What are just like a few things that have been impactful in how your team operates that are AI-driven?
Taking a step back, it's definitely not a requirement to ship code on the design team, but I think people are so passionate and curious about learning new things. I mean, one of the things, you know, we've always tried to do on the design team is just figure it out, right? I remember in the early days of some of the 3D graphics stuff that we were trying to do, one of our team members had never done 3D graphics before, and they're like, "Okay, let's just figure it out, right?" So they took some online tutorials and, like, you know, boom, like, we're off to the races. So I think the design team has always been really flexible in terms of, you know, their curiosity, learning new things. And so I don't think you have to, like, push people or create a requirement or something like that for folks to want to adopt new tools and want to, you know, want to ship code. I think, you know, the big question now that everyone and anyone thinks they can, you know, submit a PR is, like, how we don't break things at a billion, you know, nearly a billion user scale, right? That's really important. So I think what we've really tried to do is also develop AI tools and guardrails to make it easier for more people to, you know, participate and submit code, but also reduce the likelihood that, you know, we're going to have some sort of bug. You know, we've got automated code review now. We've, I think, automatically detected, like, close to 10,000 bugs at this point, probably. You know, we have a system at Snap where, you know, on the internal version of the app, you can shake to report, you know, your problem, and agents now, you know, debug exactly what happened, what went wrong, and, you know, it can actually, like, suggest a fix. And I think, you know, in pretty short order it'll be implementing the fix as well, which is pretty crazy.
So I think, you know, taking a step back, there's so much excitement around the way that AI is going to change the way that companies work. Obviously software companies in particular, like ours, I think are on the cutting edge of the way that AI is changing how things get built and what gets done. We really wanted to bring some, like, order to that chaos. And so the way that we did that was really by starting with the jobs to be done for our community and our advertisers. So getting really, really basic and, you know, straightforward on, okay, you know, for Snapchatters, right, our jobs to be done. And it's as simple as, like, get people to download the app, right? Get them to add their close friends, you know, get them to, you know, I don't know, use Lenses, something like that. On the advertiser front, right, it could be, you know, bringing people into the ad platform, configuring their campaign, etc. And so by listing out all these jobs to be done, you know, really for the community journey and for advertisers as well, it became very clear where we could use agents, where we needed to be very focused in terms of building cross-functional teams around those jobs supported by AI tools. And it's also given us, I think, a really helpful mechanism to track our progress against the business outcomes for each of those jobs. So I think, you know, for us, while I think at this moment in time you certainly want to, like, you know, have a thousand flowers bloom, and people are building agents and experimenting, I think at the same time making sure that we stay focused on what matters to our community, what matters to advertisers, is really, really important.
Okay, I want to take a step back and think about, just kind of reflect back. It's been 15 years since you've been working on Snap. You launched about 15 years ago. I'm curious, just, what are some of the maybe biggest lessons, maybe the hardest lessons you've learned over the past 15 years, things that you're like, "Oh, I didn't realize this as I was starting this company"?
You know, I think it's hard to comprehend how much the job changes over time. I mean, it's really quite extraordinary to go from, you know, my job, you know, in the early days with Bobby and I, I was, you know, helping design the product, but I was also answering customer support emails. I was, you know, trying to get our legal filings sorted out. I was trying to raise money, right? As, you know, the company grows and things evolve, like, so much more of the job is about leadership, right? About making sure you're really developing people, selecting the right people to be on the team, developing the culture, doing that really, really seriously, and, you know, in some ways creating a structure that can enforce that, you know, to have a cohesive culture and a vision around the company. You know, it becomes about strategy, right? Managing through, you know, enormous change, like what we're seeing with artificial intelligence today, but also, you know, several years ago managing through the pandemic, or managing through rebuilding our advertising platform as the landscape, you know, changed. So the job has just changed so dramatically, and I think that that's part of what's so energizing about it, what I enjoy so much about it, but it's also something I, like, never in a million years could have anticipated when we were first getting started.
How have you most changed and, I guess, evolved over that course? What's like a big area that you've improved in?
You know, one of the big focus areas for me was learning how to communicate more effectively. You know, both to our team, but also, you know, here on a podcast or with the world. I mean, so much of the job is about becoming a great communicator. I remember I had the opportunity to meet President Clinton at one point in the early days of the company, and he was like, you know, it's very interesting, you know, being president is really like being explainer in chief, and your job is actually to just explain stuff to people and help them make sense of the world and the company and their role in it. And I always thought that was really interesting, and I go back to that a lot. So much of my job is to explain things to our company and, you know, to our shareholders, to the world, in ways that really make sense and can inspire folks and help us to all move in the right direction. So I think communication just becomes such a core skill, and I think in the early days I was, you know, unnecessarily dismissive of the really important role of communication.
For founders that are hearing this and are like, okay, I'm going to work on this, what most helped you level up in this space? Is it, like, coaches? Is it people around you? Is it just doing it?
You know, just doing it is really the only way. You know, and I remember that was really the advice, like, one of our board members gave to me, because I was so reluctant. I didn't want to do an all-hands. I didn't want to do Q&A. You know, in the early days of the company, I was like, what? You know, I'll just send an email. And he's like, what are you doing? Like, he's like, too bad, Evan. Like, this is your job. And I think that was really, really good advice. And so literally I was like, "Okay, fine. You know, this is a core part of my job and what I need to learn how to do. I'm gonna learn to love it. I want to love it. I want to get up there and, you know, get in front of our company and really enjoy, you know, answering all these really tough questions and, you know, digging into the business with our team." And now I really do. You know, I've learned to really enjoy that dialogue with our team. And I learn so much from the questions that folks ask. And I love that openness. I think it's just such an important part of our company and who we are.
I had Rahul Vohra on the podcast a while back, the founder of Superhuman, and he went through a similar, I don't know if this is what you went through, but he went through a transition where he loved what he was doing and then ended up being pushed by VCs and leaders to, like, okay, you got to do these other things, and then, like, okay, I really don't like this, and I'm going to find a way to do the thing I really enjoy, because that's going to reflect in so many ways across the business and help us succeed. Is that something you went through, or just, like, okay, I just want to get back to the product and building?
You know, I think that's only partly true if you want to stay in the CEO job. Like, I think the CEO job has a lot of requirements that are not necessarily things, you know, that you love to do in the morning. There's a huge amount of responsibility that comes along with being CEO. There's a lot of operational rigor that I think needs to be developed. I think not every part of the CEO job is glamorous. So I think if, you know, if I just wanted to work on product, I would pick a different job at Snap. But I think because I really like leading our company and leading the direction and strategy for the business, and because I see a huge opportunity in transforming the way that people use, you know, computing in the future, you know, both through Snapchat but also with Specs, I think this is the right role for me right now. I mean, certainly I would spend more time with my family and probably have more fun on some days if I was in a different role or, you know, more focused on design, but I think the opportunity for a business like ours at the scale, you know, that we have, it's a, you know, it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me. And, you know, despite its challenges, I do like the CEO job.
So, kind of along those lines, you put out this letter, I think it was the end of last year, where you described this coming year as the crucible moment for Snap. It's so interesting, just, like, you guys have a billion monthly active users. That's just absurd. I don't think people realize this. You're making six billion a year in revenue, something like that. One of the very few social networks that lasts, that is durable, with, like, a very valuable, interesting audience. On the flip side, the stock hasn't been killing it. There's, like, these investors coming at you trying to tell you to change all these things. I guess just thoughts, reflections, and what do you think people are missing about where this might go? Well, that's really
One of the reasons why I called this year a crucible moment. I mean, the company's almost at the scale of entering the Fortune 500, which is really exciting. It's almost at a billion monthly active users. It's about to launch Specs after 12 years of investment in this future computing platform, but at the same time it's still not net income profitable, for example, because we've been investing so heavily in the future and making the choice to do that. And so I think this is the year that we have to prove that Snapchat can be a really strong profitable business, that it continues to grow both in terms of the reach of our audience and their engagement with new products, whether it's topic chats or Spotlight or, I think we've got 200 million people playing games every month on Snapchat now, so gaming is becoming a big part of the engagement drivers on Snapchat.
And the reason why that's so important is that it's going to be very hard for us to win long-term in Specs without a really solid foundation. And so I think we need to demonstrate that after a couple years of rebuilding our ad platform, rebuilding our go-to-market efforts, really accelerating the growth of the small medium customer part of our business, which has grown really rapidly for us, that this year we have a really solid foundation to launch the next chapter in the company's history. So it's a real turning point for Snap that's really exciting, but it's definitely an all-hands-on-deck moment for the company.
You had a really interesting way of describing Snap in the market. You called Snap the middle child. Talk about just what that means.
Yeah, I think one of the things that's so funny about our service is that while we're very, very large in terms of the scale of our audience, in terms of the scale of our business, we're much larger than a Pinterest or Reddit, for example, we're also way smaller than Meta and Google. And so we occupy this very interesting sort of middle position in the market. And I think that comes with a lot of benefits because we're big enough, we have enough scale to do really interesting things. But it also comes with the challenges of being overshadowed in some cases by our older brothers, and maybe sometimes the younger kids are getting more attention.
And so I think, again, as in this crucible moment, it's part of defining who we are as a company and who we are as a business, and I think one of the things that will play an important role in that is getting Specs out to consumers, because I think right now we've talked so long about the role that Specs will play in the world. We've worked on developing the platform for so long, but without something that you can really play with and hang on to and use yourself, it's hard to really understand the next chapter of Snap's journey.
So I think one of the biggest challenges that middle children face is defining themselves, right? Standing out from their older siblings and younger siblings. And so I think this is a moment and a year when Snap is really going to define itself, and I'm really excited about that.
Speaking of middle child, you have a number of children, and I'm curious, going a whole different direction, what's your just policy on screens and devices, having built Snapchat and then also Specs? Just how do you think about devices and your kids?
Well, we've got a real range. We've got four boys, two, six, seven, and 15. So we approach it very differently for all the kids at different ages. For the 2-year-old, it's like zero screen time. We really just want to essentially read with him and play, explore outside and those sorts of things, but not really focus on screens unless he is getting a haircut, because he really struggles with getting his haircut. So when he gets a haircut, he really loves Bobcat tractors, those four-wheel sort of Bobcat tractors, and he loves to watch YouTube videos of people driving Bobcat tractors around. So when he gets his haircut, he can watch people drive Bobcat tractors, but other than that, no screen time.
For the six and seven-year-olds, they are, I would say, infrequent movie watchers, but other than that, again, we don't give them phones or anything like that. In fact, it was really fun over the holidays for Christmas, I gave them that new, I think Palmer Luckey has a startup where they are sort of remaking...
I have one of those.
Yeah, it's really fun. Yeah.
ModRetro.
Yeah. ModRetro. So the TBPN guys gave me two of them for our kids for Christmas. And so they get to spend a little time on those in addition to watching movies every now and then. And then with the 15-year-old, he is all in on technology, whether he's using it for school or whether he's using it to talk with his friends or using Snapchat. So it really depends on kids and where they're at developmentally, but I think for us that's been our approach.
Is there anything you're doing with AI in your kids? Like maybe even the older one, just like AI education sort of tools, ChatGPT?
Yeah, it's so funny. At the breakfast table the other morning, actually, I was just asking them a lot about how are their teachers talking about AI at school? How are they thinking about integrating it in the curriculum? Are you guys using AI all the time? And I think the answer so far has been not really, which I think is interesting, but certainly our kids play around with it at home. They are beta testers for Specs, which is really fun. I really love using the glasses together with them and some of the really cool experiences there. And Flynn, who's the eldest, is probably most fluent in using AI tools.
But what I think is so fun, as a kid, I think all of us as kids, right, are incredibly imaginative, right? We're all born creative. We have all these amazing ideas to share. And I think what's so cool about AI is how, in nearly an instant, you can take any idea you have and make something. And so I think that's so empowering for young people. It's certainly an experience I want our kids to have. And I think it's going to be so important to deeply integrate into the way that education works today.
Yeah, it's interesting. Snapchat has always been really good at allowing you to create and make you feel like a superstar. Just create all these really crazy lenses and filters and all these things, and it's interesting, AI, just like vibe coding, just unleashes so much creativity, and kids are so imaginative already.
Absolutely.
So interesting. Okay. Well, to close out our conversation, I'm going to take us to a couple recurring corners on the podcast. One is AI corner. So the question is, what's a way you use AI in your, let's say, work that is just interesting, that might be interesting for other people to learn from?
Well, one of the things that I really love about AI at Snap, I've got access to all of our dashboards and documents and data. And so we have Glean that integrates all this data for me. And I've built just an agent that will go and comb through everything that's happening in the company and let me know what's up, what I need to focus on, what I need to catch. And every now and then it really catches something that I hadn't realized or need to focus a bit more on.
And so I think we're just so fortunate to have so much structured data in our company. I mean, for our leaders, they also send me every week kind of the three things from the week and three things looking ahead. And so I can very, very easily get a sense for the hotspots in the company, the priority areas, and combined with all of our dashboards and metrics about the way that people are using our service, I feel like I have a really good sense for what's happening in the company. So I think what's been most exciting for me in terms of AI is that it's enabling, I think, the type of leadership structure that I've always wanted, which is very flat, very fast-moving, and I think having an AI copilot to help me do that has been a big deal.
And that agent, you built it in Glean? Is that where it lives?
Yeah, that I've done in Glean, which is great. Obviously you can build all sorts of stuff in Claude, but Glean for us is the most secure way to access all of our different documents and dashboards and things like that.
Is there anything interesting in your AI stack? There's, sounds like, Glean, Claude. Is there anything else that's interesting, maybe some people may not think about?
I think one of the things that we're thinking a lot about is just taking the entire workflow and enabling it with an agent. So for example, taking a product idea and, with our go-to-market agent, taking that product idea, writing the spec, identifying the relevant folks who need to be involved in sign-offs and understanding it, right, actually helping to do the risk analysis on the product, right, from a legal, trust and safety perspective, writing the go-to-market materials like the blog, etc. We're working now on actually building the visuals as well, but doing that in one shot is really wild. So I think there's all sorts of examples like that across the company in terms of the way that agents can play a really massive role in changing the way that we work, and that's connected to how we think about those jobs to be done, right? So if we can define a job to be done clearly enough that we can build an agent to do it, that can really create a lot of lift.
Where do you build this agent? What platform do you use?
We've been using Claude to do a lot of the work across Snap. Yeah.
Sweet. Okay. I'll take us to another recurring corner on the podcast. Contrarian corner. What's something that you believe that a lot of other people don't believe? What's kind of a contrarian take about anything that comes to mind?
Well, I think for me, we're in an industry where so much of the conversation is focused on technology, and I think maybe my contrarian point of view or my contrarian angle is humanity is far more important than the technological developments, largely because humanity dictates how technology is adopted, right? I think, for example, right now people are massively underestimating the role that human adoption and human comfort with advances in artificial intelligence will determine its deployment. Right? I think technology leaders think that folks will just blindly adopt new technology as it comes out. And I think we're going to enter a period of time where there's going to be a huge amount of societal pushback on a lot of the changes that are coming with AI. And so I think a lot of our focus as an industry, but more broadly in the world, needs to be putting humanity first, right? Making sure that the tools we're developing are advancing humanity's goals in addition to business goals. And I think in our industry, at least, that's a bit contrarian.
Yeah. Just so we don't need to go too far down this path, but it's so hard for the AI labs, I think, to on the one hand be like, okay, this is really dangerous if it gets much smarter and we need people to know this because this is happening and moving quickly. On the other hand, how do you not just freak everyone out and make everyone so afraid of where things are going? It's like, what do you do? What's the right thing for them to do? And because of all of that doom and gloom, I'm sure you've seen these surveys, AI is like below ICE in terms of popularity, and like below Iran. It's like, this isn't going great. I don't know what I would do if I were a lab. And I guess that's like a benefit of Snapchat, is you guys have been in AI for a very long time, and it shows you the playfulness of it all, and it doesn't have to be that serious.
Anyway, with that, Evan, we reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?
Let's give it a shot.
Okay. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
Gosh. Well, you know what I just finished was The First 50 Years of Apple by David Pogue. I thought it was great. I would recommend the first half, because he interviews like 150 early Apple team members, and the stories are just great, and there's a lot of learnings in there. So I really enjoyed that. What else have I read recently? There's a great book, maybe relevant for this particular moment, called The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, which actually touches a lot on the vulnerability of global shipping. Like, the global economy is built on global shipping, and it sort of predicts a world where the US is going to have a much harder time securing the global waterways, and what does that mean for the way that we build things and organize ourselves as a society? So...
That sounds quite familiar these days.
Quite relevant for the given moment.
Yeah.
Awesome. Is there a recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed?
I mean, I feel like this is so typical, but I loved Marty Supreme. I thought that movie was off the charts. And I was like, I don't know, I'm not used to watching stuff that extreme, you know? I mean, I was like on the edge of my seat the whole time. It's like a full-throttle movie experience. Highly recommend.
I've not seen it yet. I keep hearing amazing things.
It's very intense. Yeah.
Okay. I'm ready for that.
Next question. Is there a product you recently discovered that you really love? Could be an app, could be clothing, a gadget, anything.
Well, I think through our kids right now, I'm just rediscovering Pokémon, which is so fun. It's so great. And I think there's so much art to it and personality and character, and what an amazing brand and franchise. And I think my general view is there's just so much they could do to grow that IP and franchise, at least if our kids are any indication.
First mention of Pokémon in the lightning round. Next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life?
You have two ears and one mouth. Use them in that proportion.
Nice. Final question. You guys have created many lenses over the years. I'm curious if you have just like a favorite lens, like all-time favorite, and then all-time least favorite, the worst.
I mean, all-time favorite is probably the Vomiting Rainbow. I think that just brought so much joy to so many people, which is great. Least favorite, probably like the old lens, I don't know. Or face swap. I just, right.
Those are intense. Yeah.
Wow. Flashback. And you guys were the first to do that, right?
Yeah. I mean, that was all early days real-time machine learning transformation on the device. So that was pretty cutting edge at the... I mean, I don't think people realize, like, Bobby created our Gen AI lab like 10 years ago, a decade ago or
something like that.
What a time. The face swapping era, the early use of generative AI in action.
Wow. I forgot that was another innovation. And then there's like businesses and apps that just built that as a whole business and then all went away as far as I can tell. Wow. That was a good time. All right. Well, Evan, is there anything else you wanted to share? Anything else you want to leave listeners with before I let you go?
I think it's such an exciting time. Obviously, I think there's a lot of concern about the way that artificial intelligence is going to change our society, but I think there's so much to be optimistic about in terms of the way that computing can become more human and that's really what we're focused on. So, really excited to share more about all the stuff we've been working on later this year.
Evan, thank you so much for being here.
My pleasure. Thanks, Lenny.
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