The very personal story of Evan Spiegel, the creator of the Snapchat service - an inside view

The world of Evan Spiegel - we are all just momentary visions in it
KURT WAGNER

Before Evan S. became Mr. Evan Spiegel, there were times when he wanted to be like everyone else.
')
Like, for example, in June 2012, when Evan Spiegel walked around the temporary scene set at the Stanford University football stadium to pick up a diploma for which he formally had no right.

Spiegel, who was then 22 years old, did not pass several tests at the final stage of higher education in the field of industrial design. But Stanford University allowed him to participate in the graduation ceremony with the condition that Evan would eventually complete his studies.

All his friends received diplomas, and the family of Evan was present at this celebration. To miss such a moment was very uncomfortable.

However, Spiegel never graduated from university. Now, he says, he regrets that he pretended to do it.

“It reminds me that we often do stupid things in order not to seem different from other people, ” Spiegel told USC Business School graduates last May. “It is so habitual to adapt to the system that we forget how much it affects us. But we are made a man by precisely those moments in which we listen to the quiet whisper of our soul and allow fate to pull ourselves in another direction. ”

Evan Spiegel now no longer needs to adapt, and there is no force capable of inducing him to do so: his authority is the management and management of the Snapchat company.

And Snapchat defines the activities of many people: investors, media companies, advertisers, and - most importantly - more than 130 million of its daily users. They follow Spiegel and play by his rules.

All this thanks to the Snapchat application, which works differently than anything that came before it. Messages are deleted automatically after reading. Users view vertical videos, not horizontal ones, because this is how they hold their phones. Publishers and brands are lining up to transmit their content to Snapchat, although it does not even redirect traffic to their own website - they cannot put a link to it within the application.

Unlike, say, Facebook, who knows about you as much as some of your closest friends, Snapchat does not offer you to tell him everything about yourself, and he does not follow you on the Internet, collecting your data. As a result, he does not bombard you with advertising that is very attached to your personality, which Facebook is known for and what Evan Spiegel thinks is “creepy”. (more on this further.)

Everybody peers in here, since Snapchat is a place everyone wants to go to. Here, presidential candidates exchange barbs and behind-the-scenes videos from the NFL and the Oscars. Four years ago, adolescents used rapchchat for sexting. Last week, Barack Obama used it to launch health care reform .



This cultural impact is a direct result of the work of Evan Spiegel, a young man of 25 years old, different from any 25 year old you’ve probably met. Some of these differences are strikingly obvious: he has his own Ferrari, he is a certified helicopter pilot, his girlfriend is a model of Victoria's Secret.

Some of them will not see, if not to observe his activities. His supporters say that Evan Spiegel is as strong in product development as Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. And if you think that this is a hyperbole, then you should talk to the people with whom we spoke when preparing this material: some compared it with Picasso.

This does not mean that you enjoy “hanging out” with Evan. He is self-willed and domineering and implements an impulsive style, alien to the technological community of Silicon Valley.

And while the generation of “two thousandths” supporting him leaves traces of his life on the Internet through such social networks as Instagram or Facebook and Snapchat, Evan Spiegel tries to escape from the system. He is fixated - for reasons he knows - on the idea of ​​privacy. He shares very few and very few; this is a practice that emerged, defining its role in Snapchat and the basic culture of the company.

All this seems to work - for now.

Create by empathizing

Evan Spiegel does not create a new Facebook or Twitter. To some, this seems obvious, but it is important for everyone to understand. Evan Spiegel is guided by the idea that people need an alternative for personal profiles that are so wary of Facebook and Instagram. It gives not a social platform, but a communication application with a large dose of entertainment on the side.

“We no longer have to record the“ real world ”and recreate it online,” Spiegel explained in a speech at a conference in early 2014. "We just live and communicate at the same time."

However, Evan doesn’t just have new ideas. He is also able to implement them.

Facebook tried twice and failed to play the Snapchat application with deleted photos. (He famously tried to get a Spiegel startup for $ 3 billion at the end of 2012.) Both Twitter and Instagram reproduced the format of Snapchat Stories, but with little effect.

But Evan Spiegel, unlike Zuckerberg, knows little about programming. He works through his vision and design. And this again shows the difference between Evan and others. Many of his ideas - most of which are incomplete and unusual - probably would not have passed even a preliminary test in companies like Facebook or Google.

When you, for example, open the Snapchat application, you are directly in front of the camera without any text or video support. And it pushes to create content, and not just to its consumption. Snapchat was the first to orient itself to vertical video, because this is how people keep their phones. This was contrary to the generally accepted horizontal layout of the video.

“It’s like building something with feelings, ” Evan Spiegel said at the Recode conference in 2014. “Desktop computers meant work. But from the thing in your hand or in your pocket, you want it to give pleasure, so that it is friendly and comfortable. ”

This does not mean that Evan Spiegel always acted correctly. “One of the remarkable features of the company is its willingness to produce a variety of products,” said Mitch Laski, partner at Benchmark Capital and one of the board members at Snapchat. “Evan has many interesting ideas, and he is absolutely fearless in promoting them. If the idea does not work, then it is perceived completely calmly.

Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony Entertainment, as well as a board member of Snapchat, spoke out likewise from the Code Media conference scene in February of this year. “I just think that people generally do not realize how difficult is what they did,” he said.

In Snapchat even works that does not work for others. After visiting the office of Secret, which developed the anonymous messaging application, in the fall of 2014, Spiegel considered buying the company in Las Vegas. But he did not want to pay more than half of the appraisal of this application at $ 120 million, and the transaction did not take place. Secret Company was closed in less than a year.

Evan Spiegel is lucky. Here is how it looks in numbers: with Snapchat - according to various sources - there are now about 130 million active users daily; a year ago there were less than 100 million. Snapchat is approaching 310 million daily active Twitter users (same sources). 65% of the US audience aged 18-24 uses this application - according to comScore ; three years ago was 24%. This audience represents the most important age group for advertisers, be it desktop computers, mobile devices, TV or even printed materials.

The company continues to grow. Snapchat — according to App Annie — ranked higher in the US app store for iOS than any other Facebook app throughout April. On April 24, Snapchat was in first place in downloads in 28 countries, nearly double the result of Facebook, Messenger, Twitter and Instagram combined.

Become a "great Evan"

To understand Evan Spiegel’s obsession with privacy, you can look at parts of his personal life that have been put on the Internet. They turned out to be quite a lot, special for a 25-year-old young man.

When Spiegel studied at Crossroads, a private school in Santa Monica, California, his parents (both lawyers) had a difficult divorce, which left many legal revelations about their personal lives unprotected in court documents.

When Evan Spiegel acquired celebrity status in 2013, journalists got those documents and published details that revealed the privileged life of the “golden” boy: as a teenager, Evan Spiegel received $ 250 a week for pocket expenses. When his father did not buy him the new BMW Evan wanted, the teenager left the protest with his mother. She bought him a car for 75 thousand dollars. He was not used to hearing no.



As his company grew in popularity, the popularity of Evan Spiegel himself grew. The American weekly celebrity magazine “People” wondered who he was meeting with - at first it was a model, which later appeared in the reality show “American Bachelor” (“The Bachelor"), then there were rumors that he was seen with an American actress, The author and performer of country songs is Taylor Swift.

Shortly after the LA Weekly newspaper published scandalous records of divorce, a series of unsightly sexual emails by Evan Spiegel were posted on the Gawker blog, which he sent as a student at Stanford University. Later that year, the post office of the American film company Sony Pictures was hacked and Evan Spiegel's correspondence with the director of this company Michael Linton was put on display. This correspondence showed that Spiegel kept his board in the dark on many important business issues, even on fundraising efforts.

Evan Spiegel has always been secretive, sources say, and the combination of information leaks and the ensuing troubles only reinforced his desire for secrecy. “It’s unfair that people who only want to twist and twist us as they please have the opportunity to spy on our private life,” he wrote in a note, which he tweeted after breaking into Sony’s mail. "It is unfair that people kidnap our secrets and make public what we would like to keep secret." This tweet, like all other Spiegel tweets, was then removed.

Evan Spiegel declined to be interviewed on this topic. All other Snapchat executives also refused contact.

What we really know from more than a dozen conversations with his colleagues and acquaintances — almost all of them were willing to speak only not on record — it’s that it can be very difficult to work with Evan Spiegel, especially for those who come from Silicon Valley where companies preach openness and controversy.

Information technology giants such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, organize regular general meetings, often discussing important business initiatives or plans related to product development. Employees have access to new applications before they are launched, and company executives take the stage to answer employee questions.

Snapchat meetings are rare and are mainly used to announce things like birthdays and work anniversaries. Officials rarely answer questions, and future products are not discussed. Many employees find out for the first time about the new product Snapchat, reading about it in the press.

Spiegel's obsession with privacy protection is enhanced by the company's physical location — a number of independent office buildings along Venice Beach pavement, which makes teams and projects separate from each other.

Employees, both current and former, say that information of all kinds is divided, as a rule, according to the principle of business need. One of the reasons why Evan Spiegel likes to have a discussion during walks on the sidewalk is that this discussion is more hidden, even though it happens in public, it is difficult to eavesdrop on someone’s conversation when people are talking among many people. .

This approach does not suit many. Several leading executives at Evan Spiegel left or were fired in the past two years, and many of them lasted less than a year and a half at work. The most famous case was the departure of the executive director Emily White, who came from Instagram and left a little over a year later. Sales manager Mike Randall left after seven months, head of human resources Sarah Sperling left after six.

Several important positions, including the sales manager and communications manager, have been vacant for more than half a year.

Everything goes through Spiegel, and his opinion is final. Former employees recall stories when Spiegel canceled almost completed advertising agreements at the very last minute. A dispute with Spiegel can really lead to dismissal. One of the fastest ways to earn a bad opinion of Spiegel about yourself is to recommend an idea or project simply because it worked somewhere else. Evan Spiegel wants to do things differently.

“When you go to work on Snapchat, then know that you are going to work for Evan,” said one source who has known Spiegel for many years. “Do not intend to teach Evan. You cannot teach him anything. ”

Spiegel is sure that he knows everything about current developments.

“I’m not the most outstanding manager,” said Evan Spiegel at Recode’s annual programming conference last year. “I'm trying to be an outstanding leader. And for me, this means striving to be not a great executive director, but a great Evan. ”

To become a “great Evan” means to show irrepressible curiosity, sources say. Spiegel likes to intensively “pump out” a person, meeting with him to get information on topics of interest to him, and then switch to someone else. His “teachers” in recent years were Nikesh Arora from SoftBank, Jack Dorsey from Twitter and Eric Schmidt from Google.

It seems that the source of power of those few leaders who succeeded in Snapchat, (about half a dozen of them, the assessment of the influence of each of them depends on who makes this list) is Spiegel's “access to the body”. With the exception of Imran Khan, who leads the strategy, none of the managers has any public image outside the company, which is most likely done intentionally.

When considering the methods of Spiegel's management, his supporters point to Steve Jobs, who did not use democratic principles in the management of Apple.

If it worked for Jobs, why can't it work for Spiegel?

It is no coincidence: in the office of Spiegel hangs a picture painted by Jobs.

Hollywood dream

Evan Spiegel went to school in Silicon Valley. But his home is in Los Angeles.

He likes to fly a helicopter along the coast. He loves design and is interested in high fashion. Spiegel met his girlfriend Miranda Kerr, a model who now feels at home in the Snapchat office, at a dinner at the French fashion house Louis Vuitton. A little later, he held a photo session with the Italian fashion magazine "Vogue".



Evan Spiegel is also smart enough to understand the brightness of everyday life, sometimes putting on inconspicuous sweaters and T-shirts for public speaking. When he appeared last year at a programming conference, he wore a plain white T-shirt a size larger than a triangular neckline from the James Perse collection, which was removed from a sealed bag just a minute before appearing on stage. “I buy them all the time from school, ” he said about T-shirts for $ 50.

Spiegel considers Los Angeles a city of his company. While Silicon Valley companies are building platforms, he intends to create a media and entertainment company.

A year and a half ago, he dedicated an entire section of his application to publishing content from brands such as ESPN and Cosmopolitan. It also explains why he wanted to buy a music label and why he signed agreements with sports owners such as the NFL and NBC. (Most of the sporting events do not interest Spiegel himself, although he is snowboarding and playing tennis as a teenager.)

His idea is to create not just an instant messenger, but such an instant messenger, which will also be fun and entertainment.

“This means that we can show people such content that will give them pleasure while they are waiting for the answer of their friend,” Spiegel explained at the conference.

Good news for Snapchat: video - the direction in which the company's all efforts are focused - is well suited for this strategy. Snapchat users are browsing 10 billion videos per day (there were 7 in January). Snapchat's main commercial products — Live Stories around events and Discover content from publishers — both largely depend on video content.


Statistics daily views video Snapchat

This focus is one of the many reasons why Snapchat is compared to Facebook, which is also extremely focused now on video, but rather on high-quality video from publishers and brands.

Chamet Pelikhepitiya, an unabashed venture capitalist and one of the former Facebook executives, offers a different comparison for Snapchat: “In the worst case, they are next-generation MTV, ” he told Bloomberg last May. “At best, the next generation of Viacom (American media conglomerate, including cable and satellite television networks).

Now it is not known how (or, perhaps, how quickly) Snapchat can turn its focus on video into an orderly business. The company has set a goal for itself to receive $ 300 million in revenue in 2016, an impressive jump from 50 million last year, but it still falls short of indicators that would make large advertisers regularly invest big money in them.

There is another small obstacle: the usual network advertising is completely built on targeting with its periodic adjustment based on information about you, collected from the history of views. That is why Facebook and Google make an awesome advertising performance targeting you. But Evan Spiegel, unsurprisingly, rejected such an approach.

“We’re going to avoid creating extensive profiles for people, ” Spiegel told AdWeek last summer. “We have a really big business here that respects the privacy of people using Snapchat.”

But Snapchat cannot always remain so “white and fluffy.” Common sense tells us that in the end, Evan Spiegel may soon have to decide how “creepy” his company will be. And, undoubtedly, this will be the decision only of Spiegel himself.

This is important precisely because sources say that Evan Spiegel is categorically opposed to ever making Snapchat a public company. Some say he intended to go public in 2017. Others think that this should happen in 2018 or later. There are those who would not be surprised if the IPO Snapchat will be held tomorrow.

Regardless of when this happens, Snapchat's relationship with the entertainment industry and publications will undoubtedly play a key role. And it is Los Angeles - not Silicon Valley - the place where entertainment rules.

“I often talk with people about conflicts between technology companies and content providers, ” Spiegel said in a keynote speech at a conference two years ago. “One of the biggest problems is that technology companies view movies, music and television as information. But directors, producers, musicians and actors see the same as feelings, as emotions. ”

"That is, not what you need to search, sort and watch, but what you need to feel."

Evan Spiegel makes Snapchat an integral part of the practice of everyday communication - and so far the world seems more than happy about it.