How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO)

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 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 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 to see this consistently happen? Fifteen 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. 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 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 LennysProductPass.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 trying to understand, and help people understand, why it is so freaking hard to build a durable, lasting consumer product, and, in particular, a social consumer product. 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 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.

In spite of everyone just wanting to build a consumer product, a social app, it's where everyone first goes. Everybody fails. Nothing works. Why is it so hard? What do you think people don't get? Well, I think it's really interesting in terms of the examples that you just shared, 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 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. Instagram started a year before Snapchat, or something like that, so there was a real appetite to try new apps and new services. 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.

Both TikTok and Threads figured out distribution, which is why I think they are 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, acquiring customers to watch videos and then paying creators to make videos. So they were able to bootstrap their ecosystem. With Threads, obviously, they were able to leverage the amazing distribution that Meta has across all their other products.

I think so much of consumer technology focuses on, am I building the right product? Do I have product-market fit? Have I built something that's really going to resonate with customers, that they're really going to want to use all the time? I think people don't spend nearly enough time thinking about distribution and figuring out distribution. That seems to me to be a huge differentiator.

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 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 it was. So there was no way to beat the biggest networks because those were the most valuable.

What Snapchat figured out that was different was that, despite the fact that there were much bigger networks that connected more people, what really mattered was connecting you to the right people. If you could connect someone not to all their friends, but to their best friend, to their partner, to their spouse, the people they cared most about in the world, that's where the majority of the value is in the network. So that's what really allowed us to grow in those early days. 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 where AI has come into the market, it started originally helping people autocomplete code. There's something I've been talking about a lot on this podcast. So it's like, OK, autocomplete code. OK, now it's writing all our code. OK, now it's reviewing our code, and now it's testing itself, and now it's going to help us come up with ideas.

It's starting in the middle of the product development process and expanding out. I feel like it will be very good at coming up with great ideas and developing strategy. It's going up the funnel, or the timeline, of building a product. I feel like distribution is 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 true for consumer products. I think that's absolutely the case. The only thing I would say is, the most exciting times in technology are when new platforms get created, and that tends to be where a lot of the value comes from.

You think about a lot of the big consumer technology companies today. They were really born out of mobile, whether it's Uber, Snapchat, some of those early-generation companies that really got distribution and built themselves on mobile. So I think as we look forward to 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. I'm really excited about that.

Especially if they have distribution already, it feels like that's going to be... I'm just worried for startups. It's going to be very hard to get distribution. There's so much launching every day, so much to pay attention to, and it feels very hard for a startup to get any attention against existing incumbents. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS.

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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 wild to watch. And 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 the 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. Which is a subscription. Yeah, I think we just hit 25 million subscribers on Snapchat Plus, 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. It's certainly better than making stuff that people don't want to copy.

So I think, 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 copying from Snap. So I think it certainly beats the alternative. But it does mean that we have to be really thoughtful about our strategy. And so I think one of the things, it's been an interesting time for me to reflect a lot on our strategy over the last 15 years because 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 that had bigger and more effective moats. So one of the first things we did was focus a lot on building ecosystems, right? Whether those are the relationships between creators and Snapchatters, whether that's the platform we built around augmented reality, where developers have built millions of these lenses. So it's very easy to copy software features. It's very hard to copy or to replicate a full ecosystem or a platform.

And so 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 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 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. 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 don't 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 cloning.

And so, 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 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 businesses that are more defensible by truly building out a platform that can support relationships between creators, developers, and the community, because that in and of itself we found is incredibly difficult to copy. It's so interesting. 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 you had 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 today, by the way? Specs is coming out this year. Specs. Okay, cool. We're going to talk about it, but just maybe you've already answered it, why this is something you're so passionate about, but why this ongoing investment in hardware? Well, to 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. I fell in love with graphic design and would spend 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 playground at recess and put me into the computer lab. Or if I look at our 15-year-old today and his friends, 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 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 built a roadmap from there, right, where we added a second camera to get 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 built a roadmap 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 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, 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 a VR environment on your own. I worry about being connected all the time. So I imagine that's 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? Do you have any thoughts there? Just, is there a solution to that other than just 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. 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 academic overview or summary, I think, comes from a guy, Safi Bakal, who wrote a book called Loon Shots. 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 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 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 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, and 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 oscillates between 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 one, system two approach. It's interesting, the fast-moving, let's say, what do you call this innovation team, or do you have a label for this? The let's-come-up-with-the-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, it's really important. We call it the design team. It's really important that they have a flat, non-hierarchical structure,

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 one, system two approach.

It's interesting, the fast-moving, let's say, what do you call this innovation team, or do you have a label for this? The "let's come up with the 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, it's really important. 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 think that is absolutely critical.

So in terms of how you operationalize this, is that the key to the innovation you've seen, this specific small design team who can work? Talk about just how you actually operationalize this way of working. Yeah. 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? Bobby has a computer science, 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. 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 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. New work every week, hundreds of ideas, I would guess, on a weekly basis. If I think about where I learned how to design and build things, I have an interesting combination because I went to Stanford for the product design program, which is really focused on empathy and this iterative process of understanding what people want and building prototypes and iterating, but really centered on empathy, human-centered design.

And then at the same time, I had also been to art school. So I had studied at ArtCenter. I'd studied at Otis here in Los Angeles, both great art schools. And so I was used to this grinding expectation that you're 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 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 contrarian takes. One is, if you're building a consumer product, do not talk to customers. 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? Keith Rabois on the podcast. Wow. That's really interesting.

I would say you have to talk to customers. You have to share your idea. You should share your ideas 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 they use technology, how it fits in their lives, how 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, 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, here's what I'll pay attention to, here's what I want? Well, let's use Stories as an example, right? 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 in Snapchat. If you just give me a send-all button, then I can blast snaps to everybody all day long, and that'd 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. 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, and then the middle, and then the beginning of the party. So everything was sort of played in reverse in the feed, which was really strange to folks.

So we listened to all of that and heard all of that, but then we came up with something totally new and different, which were Stories, right? They were responsive to the feedback. They didn't create a send-all button, but they did create a way to easily share with all of your friends without spamming them all day long. They removed public metrics. They didn't have likes and comments and things like that to reduce pressure. They disappeared after 24 hours so that everyone could start the day fresh again the next day. And they, maybe most importantly, were in chronological order, which is the way that people have told stories since the beginning of time.

So I think that's an example where listening is incredibly valuable. All of those insights that we 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 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

without spamming them all day long. They removed public metrics. They didn't have likes and comments and things like that to reduce pressure. They disappeared after 24 hours so that everyone could start the day fresh again the next day. And they maybe most importantly, were in chronological order, which is the way that people have told stories since the beginning of time. So I think that's an example where listening is incredibly valuable. All of those insights that we 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 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 a moment of just like, this is the way, the story concept, that you remember, or was it this very gradual evolution?

It was iterative because in a lot of ways, some of the early ideas started more around a status update, that was how could you know what your friends on Snapchat were up to, even if you weren't sending snaps back and forth. And so it started there. And then, again, through talking to people and iterating, understanding what folks were really looking for, we ended up with stories. And some of the gestures 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 y'all built that was interesting, and of how it came to be? These stories are so interesting and people don't know these histories.

One of my favorite stories was around screenshot detection actually in the early days, because when we first built Snapchat and we shared with people, oh, you could send photos to disappear. Everyone said, no, you can't. You can always take a screenshot. What do you mean? You can send things to disappear. That makes no sense. And so we thought a lot. I remember that summer after school, we went home, we were working out of my dad's house, and Bobby and I were just going back and forth. And we were having fun using the product. We were sending photos back and forth, but people would just keep saying, well, this, this just, it's not about disappearing photos because you can just save them. 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 an event on the phone, essentially, that made the phone 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, the recipient had taken a screenshot. And that, for us in the early days, really resonated with our community because they didn't mind if somebody saved one of their snaps, they just wanted to know. And I think that early invention was one of the first things that really got a lot of traction in the early days and I think helped Snapchat spread as a new way of communicating.

And 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 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, 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 was concerned about in the tech community, if you look at the traditional tech org or structure, designers really are producing visuals. They're not really producing the product direction or the strategy or the vision or 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've modeled a lot of the way that we develop products here at Snap on that early relationship between myself and Bobby, really this harmonious relationship between design and engineering and how important that dialogue is to building great things and great products.

And so 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 what we would say to our designers, which was, 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, at a company operating at our scale, if you look at the legal requirements, our approach to trust and safety, 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 as the organization grows and there becomes all of these different capabilities that the company didn't have in the early days, whether it's data science, you name it, product managers play a really important role in bringing all those folks to the table and making sure we deliver the right thing at the right time.

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There's this interesting question that everyone's asking right now. Mark Andreessen put it really well when he was on the pod. There's this 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 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 in time. The rate of change is extraordinary. Look, I do think designers feel vindicated in a lot of ways. A lot of designers had parents who were saying,

Andreessen put it really well when he was on the pod. There's this 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 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. A lot of designers had parents who were saying, why aren't you studying computer science? What are you going to do with this skill set, drawing things? This doesn't make any sense. And I think today, a lot of our designers are now shipping code, which is extraordinary. And that's a really big and really meaningful change in terms of the way the 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 impact at the scale of almost a billion people using Snapchat is really empowering and exciting for designers who feel like these tools maybe level the playing field to some extent for creative people.

Yeah, 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, 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 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, 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, some really innovative or cool new thing developed by 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 can see when an app has been built by teams who are responsible for different pages of the app or different parts of the experience, but there isn't really a cohesive through line. And I think for us at Snap, having design really be that bottleneck in terms of helping to manage what we're shipping and 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. Are you still in there looking at everything that's about to ship? And what's your philosophy on founders having to be involved in the, let's say, the pixels and the details of the product?

First and foremost, yeah, this is what I love to do. I love building things. I love making new products, services for our community. That is what drives me. I really, really enjoy that part of the process. So 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, in addition to all the great people I get to work with here at Snap, the thing that wakes me up with a smile on my face every morning, the reason why I'm skipping to work, is because 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 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 absolutely subscribe to the old school, 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 customers, stay close to their team.

Right. Do you feel like, especially for a consumer and consumer social product, this is extra important, to just be 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? Look, a lot of different companies have different points of strength and differentiation. But if you want to 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 the right hand to Evan? Is there anything in particular you look for when you're hiring these designers?

Yeah, there's a couple of really important things. First of all, we make all of our hiring decisions just based off portfolio. That's really all we want to see. 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, 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 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, the first thing I'm looking for is, are they building stuff that all looks the same, or are they building things that look really different, right, that 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 the other thing I want to understand, and typically 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, pick something in your portfolio, anything you feel strongly about. 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 pretty quickly you can understand someone's process in terms of building something or inventing something. How did 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 that's a real strength, to have folks who see the world differently and have 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

strongly about it and just tell me the story of why you made it and what you learned through that,

through that process. And I think pretty quickly you can understand someone's, someone's process in terms of building something or inventing something. How did 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 that's a real strength, to have folks who see the world differently and have 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 that you spent 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 to help them make lots of stuff and get a lot of feedback from whether it's our customers, their teammates, or myself directly. And so

one of the things that we do that's different at Snap is, your first day that you join the design team, you present work. And it's really, really important that 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 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 the ego melts away because 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 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 need to just create as many ideas as possible that will lead us to 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, 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. If you're a great designer and you're stuck designing the chat experience for three years, how boring is that? It's really exciting. I think it's really exciting. I think it's really exciting. I think it's really exciting. I think it's really for me to be able to work across all of these highly engaged product services. We have one of the largest maps in the world. We have this huge, the biggest augmented

reality platform. These are really exciting opportunities for designers. And it's important that we are rotating them across all of these different products so they're not getting stuck. I had Jenny on the podcast. She was head of design for Claude and coworker, and she was a director at Figma. And then she came to Anthropic and moved to IC design again. 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, or just so much criticism and constant feedback. And she'd forgotten about that part of it. So it's interesting. That's such a core part of the way you, the thing that people

have to learn essentially and get good at. Well, one of the things that's so important 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 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, sometimes people over-rely on this critique process and great ideas get filtered out. And so I think creating this culture on the team where you can bring anything to the design

meeting, there's no filtering process, 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 10 PRs a month or something like that, or a quarter, which is such a new world. I guess one is just, how do you think about designers shipping code? Is that just do it if you can, or is there a requirement thing? And broadly, I'm just curious how AI is changing the way your team operates. What are just 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. One of the things 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 were like, okay, let's just figure it out, right? So they took some online tutorials and boom, we were off to the races. So I think the design team has always been really flexible in terms of their curiosity, learning new things. And so I don't

think you have to push people or create a requirement or something like that for folks to want to adopt new tools and want to ship code. I think the big question now that everyone and anyone thinks they can submit a PR is how we don't break things at a billion, or 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 participate and submit code, but also reduce the likelihood that we're going to have some sort of bug. So we've got an automated code review now. We've, I think,

automatically detected close to 10,000 bugs at this point, probably. We've got a system at Snap where, on the internal version of the app, you can shake to report your problem, and agents now debug exactly what happened, what went wrong, and can actually suggest a fix. And I think in pretty short order, it'll be implementing the fix as well, which is pretty crazy. So I think, 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 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 straightforward on, okay, for Snapchatters, jobs to be done, it's as simple as get people to download the app, get them to add their close friends, get them to use lenses, something like that. On the advertiser front, it could be bringing people into the ad platform, configuring their campaign, etc. And so by listing out all these jobs to be done, really for the community journey and for advertisers

is changing how things get built and what gets done. We really wanted to bring some 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 straightforward on, okay, for Snapchatters, right, our jobs to be done, it's as simple as get people to download the app, right, get them to add their close friends, get them to, I don't know, use lenses, something like that. On the advertiser front, right, it could be bringing people into the ad platform, configuring their campaign, etc. And so by listing out all these jobs to be done, 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, for us, while I think in this moment of time, you certainly want to have 1,000 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 just reflect back. It's been 15 years since you've been working on Snap. You launched about 15 years ago. I'm curious, what are some of the 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?

Yeah, I think it's hard to comprehend how much the job changes over time. I mean, it's really quite extraordinary to go from my job in the early days with Bobby and me. I was helping design the product, but I was also answering customer support emails. I was trying to get our legal filing sorted out. I was trying to raise money, right. As the company grows and things evolve, so much more of the job is about leadership, 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, in some ways, creating a structure that can enforce that, to have a cohesive culture and a vision around the company. It becomes about strategy, right, managing through enormous change, like what we're seeing with artificial intelligence today, but also several years ago, managing through the pandemic, or managing through rebuilding our advertising platform as the landscape changed. So the job has just changed so dramatically. And I think that's part of what's so energizing about it, what I enjoy so much about it. But it's also something I never in a million years could have anticipated when we were first getting started.

How have you most changed and evolved over that course? What's a big area that you've improved in?

One of the big focus areas for me was learning how to communicate more effectively, both to our team, but also 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, it's very interesting, 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 to our shareholders, to the world, in ways that really make sense and can inspire folks and help us 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 unnecessarily dismissive of the really important role of communication.

Speaker 1 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 coaches? Is it people around you? Is it just doing it?

Speaker 2 You know, just doing it is really the only way. And I remember that was really the advice 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 in the early days of the company. I was like, what, I'll just send an email. And he's like, what are you doing? He's like, too bad, Evan. This is your job. And I think that was really, really good advice. And so literally, I was like, okay, fine. This is a core part of my job and what I need to learn how to do. I'm going to learn to love it. I want to love it. I want to get up there and get in front of our company and really enjoy answering all these really tough questions and digging into the business with our team. And now I really do. 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 Vora 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've 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. I think the CEO job has a lot of requirements that are not necessarily things that you love to do in the morning. There's a huge amount of responsibility that comes along with being a 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 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 computing in the future, 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 more focused on design. But I think the opportunity for a business like ours at the scale that we have, it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me. And 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 6 billion a year in revenue, something like that. One of the very few social networks that lasts, that is durable, with a very valuable, interesting audience. On the flip side, the stock hasn't been killing it. There's 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

for Snap. It's so interesting. You guys have a billion monthly active users. That's just absurd. I don't think people realize this. You're making 6 billion a year in revenue, something like that. One of the very few social networks that lasts, that is durable, with a very valuable, interesting audience. On the flip side, the stock hasn't been killing it. There's 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. 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 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 Pinterest or Reddit, for example, we're also way smaller than Meta and Google. And so we occupy this very interesting 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, in this crucible moment, 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, 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 policy on screens and devices, having built Snapchat and then also specs? 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 two-year-old, it's 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 his haircut, he really loves Bobcat tractors, those four-wheel 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 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 remaking Game Boys.

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 and your kids, maybe even the older one, AI education tools, ChatGPT?

Yeah, it's so funny. At the breakfast table the other morning, I was just asking them a lot about how their teachers are talking about AI at school, how they are 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 are incredibly imaginative. 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 feel like a superstar, create all these really crazy lenses and filters and all these things. And it's interesting, AI, vibe coding, just unleashes so much creativity. And kids are so imaginative already. Absolutely. So interesting. Okay, to close out our conversation, I've got a couple corners, recurring corners on the podcast. One is AI corner. So the question is, what's the way you use AI in your work that is 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 built 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 needed 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 the three things

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, I built, we have Glean that integrates all this data for me. And I built 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. For our leaders, they also send me every week 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 co-pilot to help me do that has been a big deal.

And that agent was, 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 Cloud. 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? It sounds like Glean, Cloud. 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, actually helping to do the risk analysis on the product 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. 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. What do you, where do you build this agent? What's the platform to 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 in the podcast, contrarian corner. What's something that you believe that a lot of other people don't believe? What's 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. 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. 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, 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 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? What do you do? What's the right thing for them to do? And because of all that doom and gloom, I'm sure you've seen these surveys, AI is below ice in terms of popularity and below Iran. This isn't going great. I don't know. I don't know what I would do if I were a lab. And I love, I guess that's a benefit of Snapchat, is it makes, 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've 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?

Okay, 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 are 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. The global economy is built on global shipping, and it sort of predicts a world where the US was 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? That sounds quite familiar these days. Quite relevant for the given moment.

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 what I mean? I was 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, gadget, anything?

Well, I think through our kids right now, I'm just rediscovering Pokemon, which is so fun. It's so great. And I think there's so much art to it and personality and character. What an amazing brand and franchise. And I think my general view is there's just so, so much they could do to grow that IP and franchises, at least if our kids are any indication. First mention of Pokemon 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 a favorite lens, 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 the old lens. I don't know, or face swap. Those are intense. Yeah. Wow. Flashback. And you guys were the first to do that, right?

Yeah. And that was all early days, real-time machine learning transformation on the device. That was pretty cutting edge at the time. I don't think people realize that Bobby created our Gen AI lab like 10 years ago, a decade Nice. Final question. You guys have created many lenses over the years. I'm curious if you have just a favorite lens, all-time favorite, and then all-time least favorite, the worst. 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 the old lens. I don't know, or face swap. Those are intense.

Yeah. Wow. Flashback. And you guys were the first to do that, right? Yeah. And that was all early days, real-time machine learning transformation on the device. That was pretty cutting edge at the time. I don't think people realize that Bobby created our Gen AI lab 10 years ago, a decade ago or something like that. What a time, the face swapping era. Yeah. The early use of generative AI. Wow. I forgot that was another innovation. And then there were businesses and apps that just set to build 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. Bye, everyone.

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast.com. See you in the next episode. of the org? Well, I think it's really important to acknowledge that like new ideas come from everywhere and we want that. But I think the design team in particular, it's really important. We call it the design team. Like, it's really important that they have a flat, non-hierarchical structure,

you know, where new ideas can, can come from anywhere. I mean, I think that that, that is absolutely critical. So in terms of how you operationalize this, is that the key to the innovation you've seen as this like 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 like Bobby, you know, has a computer science, you know, heavy duty computer science and stats background, you know, mathematical and computational science, but he really likes design

and likes thinking about, uh, you know, building things for customers and empathizing with them. I have a design background, right? I was in, you know, in the product design program at back at school, which actually was like part of the mechanical engineering department at the time. I took some computer science classes. Um, so I, you know, sort of kind of under, you know, uh, you know, knew what I was talking about when it came to computer science. So we both like had mutual respect for each other and our skill sets and our backgrounds and both enjoyed talking, uh, together about the types of products

we wanted to create and that dialogue created, you know, a lot of innovation. And so a lot of how we've thought about growing the company over time is like strengthening that dialogue between engineers and designers and creating, you know, an environment where, uh, you know, folks feel comfortable throwing out, uh, really crazy ideas. But I think, you know, 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, you know,

hundreds of ideas, I would guess, you know, on a, on a weekly basis that, you know, to me, you know, if I think about, um, where I learned how to design and build things, I have sort of an interesting combination because, you know, I, I went to, to Stanford for the product design program, which is really focused on empathy, right. And this iterative process of understanding what people want and building prototypes and iterating, but really centered on, 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, uh, in Los Angeles, both, you know, great art schools. And so I was used to this like grinding, you know, expectation that you're making new work all the time. And then just an absolutely brutal critique process, you know, on a regular basis. And so it was, you know, for me, as I thought about, you know, the, the parts of my education that I really liked, it was this combination of really developing empathy with people and what, you know, the types of products that they want in their lives. But at the same time, having this really high velocity, uh, you know,

work ethic where you're not just like thinking, you know, all the time about, uh, you know, new, new products, you're actually making stuff every week all the time. And then you're talking about it as a team, uh, because that critique process is where so much of the learning, uh, sort of happens. So, you know, I would say that the velocity of work, uh, you know, is really important because our favorite saying is, you know, if you want to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas. That's really, really important. I just had Keith Raboy on the podcast. I don't know if you know this about his, he has many contrarian takes. Uh, 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? Keith Raboy on the podcast. Wow. That that's really interesting. Um, I would say, uh, you have to talk to customers. You have to share your idea. You should share your ideas quickly as possible, as frequently as possible. Uh, it doesn't mean you need to take people's advice or feedback, but it's really important, I think, to listen. And, and I think for me,

you know, it's, you know, it's not like 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, you know, the products they're using? You can learn so much. And I think, you know, customers are an endless source of inspiration. Um, when it comes to building products. So pro pro talking to, 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, I trust me, it'll work

really well. What's that balance of just like, here's how, how, what I'll pay attention to. Here's what I want. Well, let's use stories as an example, right? So, you know, back then we were hearing from customers all the time. I want to send all button. I want to send all button. You know, it's so annoying to select everybody on my list of friends and Snapchat. If you just give me a send all button, then I can blast snaps to everybody all day long. And that'd 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. You know, it's got all these likes and comments, so there's all this judgment. So I only feel like I can put like pretty and perfect things up there. You know, 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, that sort of judgment and pressure. And so we thought that was really interesting. And so, you know, we dug deeper into the, you know, 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? Uh, like, you know, when people posted photos, you know, they would always find that like the end of the birthday party appeared first in the feed, right? And then the middle, and then the, you know, the beginning of the party. So everything was, it was sort of, you know, just like played in reverse in the feed, which was, was really strange, uh, 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, uh,

which were stories, right. That were responsive to the feedback, right. They didn't, you know, create a send 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, the next day. And they, you know, maybe most importantly, we're in chronological order, which is the way that people have told stories, uh, you know, since the, 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, 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, was there like a moment of just like, this is the way this, 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, 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, uh, 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, uh, content. Uh, those, those were all really new things at the time.

Is there another story of something that y'all built that, uh, 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, uh, screenshot detection actually in the early days, because when we first built, uh, Snapchat and we, you know, shared with people, oh, you could send photos to disappear. Everyone said, no, you can't. You can always take a screenshot. What do you mean? You can send things to disappear. That makes no sense. And so, you know, we, we thought a lot. I remember that summer, you know, after school,

we went home, we're working out of my dad's house and Bobby and I were just going back and forth. And we were like, you know, we, we were having fun using the product. We were sending, you know, photos back and forth, but people would just keep saying, well, this, like this just, it's not about disappearing photos. Cause you can just save them. Like, I don't get it. And, and one of the things we invented that 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, uh, 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, 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, uh, 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, had taken a screenshot. And that for us in the early days, uh, 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, that, uh, you know, that early invention, uh, was one of the first things that really got a lot of traction in the early days. And I think, you know, help Snapchat spread as a new way of communicating. And that is, that is really cool. I can't imagine Snapchat existing without you figuring that out. That feels like such a core mechanic. Um, 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, 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 or 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, uh, 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've 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, and how important that is, that dialogue is to, to building great things and great, 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, uh, you know, what we would say to our designers, which was like, you know, uh, Hey, if you need PM support, why don't you just do it yourself? What's the, what's the big deal? Uh, and I think that that really helped, uh, 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, the, our approach to trust and safety, um, you know, it, 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, uh, 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

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Learn more at Vanta.com slash Lenny. And as a listener of this podcast, you get $1,000 off Vanta. That's Vanta.com slash Lenny. There's this interesting question that everyone's asking right now. Mark 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. A lot of designers had parents who were saying, why aren't you studying computer science? What are you going to do with this skill set, drawing things? This doesn't make any sense. And I think today, a lot of our designers are now shipping

code, which is extraordinary. And that's a really big and really meaningful change in terms of the way the 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 impact at 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, 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 in 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 is 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 the, 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,

uh, our community. That, that being said, there are always, uh, smarter, better, more talented experts, uh, you know, uh, working on all the different, uh, things that we have going on, but I really do like staying close to, to what we're, what we're creating. I, 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'm, I, 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, uh, with your service, with your community, uh, with your team. And, and I think that's probably the most important job that any leader can do in any company is stay close to their customers, stay close to their team. Right. 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 design, your design team have to approve everything. 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? Look, a lot of different companies have different points of strength, right? And differentiation. But if you want to differentiate on the product experience, I think it's really important that leaders stay, 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 to when you're hiring these designers? Yeah, there's a couple of really important things. Uh, 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. Uh, 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's 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 will really resonates with them. And, and that means you need to have a, an extraordinary amount of range. You've got to be able to, 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? Uh, or are they building things that look really different, right? That, uh, you know, um, that have been responsive to different sets of, of needs. And that's how I know that they're a designer and not just an artist. And then, you know, the, the, the other thing I want to understand, and, you know, typically, uh, you know, I interview every designer that joins our, our team. And what I want to understand is why, and the story behind the work that they, they created. So typically what I'll do is just say, Hey, you know, pick something in your portfolio, anything you feel

strongly about it, 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, uh, through that, through that process. And I think, you know, pretty quickly you can understand, you know, someone's, uh, someone's process in terms of, you know, building something or inventing something, how did 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, uh, 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, I've integrated their ideas throughout already. Uh, but one that came up that I thought was interesting is I hear that you spent 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, uh,

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, uh, 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, on the design team, because really that's

what we're all about. Uh, 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, uh, 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, that's ridiculous.

We, we all, uh, 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 that establishing that velocity of, of ideation very early on, uh, is really, really important. And then the other thing we do that I think is different. I, although I don't know, I've never really worked anywhere else, uh, you know, is, is, um, we don't allow designers to get, 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, uh, 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 it's really exciting. I think it's really exciting. I think it's really exciting. I think it's really for me to be able 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 are rotating them across, you know, all, all of these different, uh, products. So they're not getting stuck. I had, uh, Jenny, when on the podcast, she's the, she was head of design for Claude and cowork, and she was, uh, like a director at Figma. And then she came to Anthropic and moved to just IC design again and 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, or just so much criticism and constant feedback. And it's, she forgotten 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, 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 over rely 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 you've, 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 were like, okay, let's just figure it out, right? So they took some online

tutorials and like, you know, boom, like we were 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, or 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. So, you know, we've got an automated code review now. We've, I think, automatically detected like close to 10,000 bugs at this point, probably, you know, we've got, 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, 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, and, 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, or jobs to be done, 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, getting 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 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 those jobs. So I think, you know, for us, trying to, you know, while I think in this moment of time, you certainly want to, like, you know, have 1000 flowers bloom, and people are building agents and experimenting, I think at the same time, making sure that 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? Yeah, 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 filing 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 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, change. 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, first getting started. How, how have you most changed and, and I guess evolved over that course? What's like a big area that you've improved in? You know, one of one of the big focus areas for me was learning how to communicate more effectively,

you know, both, both to our team, but also, you know, 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 and 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, is to explain things to our company and, and, you know, to our shareholders, to the world in ways that, that really makes sense and can inspire folks and help us to all move in the, 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. Speaker 1 For founders that are hearing this and are like, okay, I'm going to work on this. What most helped you level up in, in this space? Is it like coaches? Is it people around you? Is it just doing it?

Speaker 2 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 and 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, 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 learn to really enjoy that, that dialogue with our team. And I learned 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 Vora 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 gonna find a way to do the thing I really enjoy because that's gonna 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, that you love to do in the morning. There's a huge amount of responsibility that comes along with being a 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, 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, in the future, you know, both through

Snapchat, but also with, 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, it's a, you know, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity for me. And I, you know, I, 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 6 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, you know, 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, you know, with new products, whether it's, you know, topic chats or spotlight, or, you know, 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, you know, 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 on the company's history. So it's a real, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, being overshadowed in some cases by our older brothers. And maybe, you know, sometimes the younger, the younger kids are getting more attention. And so I think, again, as in this crucible moment, part of defining who we are as a company, and who we are as a business. And, you know, I think one of the things

that will play an important role in that is getting specs out and, you know, to consumers, because I think right now, we've talked so long about the role that specs will play in the world, we've, you know, worked on developing the platform for so long, but without something that you can really, you know, play with and hang on to and use yourself, it's hard to really understand, you know, the next chapter of Snap's journey. So I think, you know, 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, there's a whole going a whole different direction. What's your just policy on screens and devices, you know, 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 two year old, it's like zero screen time. We really just, you know, want to, you know, essentially read with him

and play, you know, 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 his haircut, he really loves Bobcat tractors, you know, the, 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, no screen time for the six and seven year olds. You know, they are, I would say infrequent movie watchers. But other

than that, again, you know, we don't give them phones or anything like that. In fact, it was really fun for, you know, over, over the holidays for Christmas, I gave them that new, I think Palmer Lucky has a startup where they are sort of remaking Game Boys. I have one of those. Yeah, it's really fun. Yeah. So I'm not retro. Yeah, mod retro. So the TBPN guys gave me two of them for our, for our kids for, for Christmas. And so they get to spend a little time on those in addition to watching movies every now and then. And then, you know, with the 15 year old, it's he, he, we,

he is all in on, on technology, whether he's using it for school or whether he's using it to talk with his friends or using Snapchat. So, you know, it really depends on, on kids and where they're at developmentally. But I think for us, like that, that's been our approach. Is there anything you're doing with AI and your kids, like maybe even the older one, just like AI education sort of tools, chat GPT? Yeah, it's so funny at the, at the breakfast table the other morning, actually, I was just asking them a lot about like, how are their teachers talking about AI at school? How are they

thinking about integrating in the curriculum? Are you guys, you know, using AI all the time? And, and I think the answer so far has been not really, you know, which I think is, is interesting, but certainly, you know, our kids play around with it at home. There's, they, you know, are beta testers for specs, which is really fun. I really love, you know, using the glasses together with them and some of the really cool experiences there. And, you know, Flynn, who's the eldest is probably most fluent in using AI tools. But what I think is so fun, you know, as a kid, I think all of us as, 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, you know, in an, in nearly an instant, you can take any idea you have and make something. And so I think that's so empowering for, for young people. It's certainly an experience I want our, our kids to have. And I think it's gonna be so important to deeply integrate into the way that, you know, education works today. Yeah, it's interesting. Snapchat has always been really good at allowing you to create and make, 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've got a couple, I'm going to take us to a couple corners, recurring corners on the podcast. One is AI corner. So the question is, what's, what's the way you use AI in your, let's say work that allow, 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, you know, in, at Snap, I've got access to all of our dashboards and documents and data. And so,

you know, I built, we have, we have Glean that integrates, you know, all this data for me. And I 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, I really catches something that I, you know, hadn't 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, you know, for our leaders, they also send me, you know, every week, kind of the three things from the week and three things looking ahead. And so I can like very, very easily get a sense for,

you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, very flat, you know, very fast moving. And I think, you know, having an AI co-pilot to help me do that has been a big deal. And that agent was, you built it in Glean? Is that where it lives?

Yeah, I mean, that I've done in Glean, which is great. Obviously, you can build all sorts of stuff in Cloud. 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, Cloud. 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, you know, taking a product idea, and with our go to market agent, taking that product idea, writing the spec, making, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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. What do you, where do you build this agent? What's the platform to use? We've been using Claude to do a lot of the work, you know, across Snap. Yeah. Sweet. Okay. I'll take us to another recurring corner in 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, like 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 like humanity is far more important, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, in addition to business goals. And, you know, I think in our industry, at least that that's a bit contrarian. Yeah, just so we don't need to go too 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, well, how do you what do you do? What's the right thing for them to do? And, and because of all that, of that doom and gloom, it's like, I'm sure you've seen these surveys, AI is like, below ice in terms of popularity and, and like, below like Iran. It's like, and this isn't going great. I don't know. I don't know what I would do if I were lab. And I love I guess that's like a benefit of Snapchat is it makes like you guys have been in AI from for a very long time. And it shows you the playfulness of

it all. And, you know, 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? Okay, 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, you know, 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,

I really enjoyed that. I think, 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 was 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? That sounds quite familiar these days. Quite relevant for the given moment.

Awesome. Is there a recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed? I mean, I feel like this is so typical, but like 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 what I mean? I could, 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. Do you have a, is there a product you recently discovered that you really love? Could be an app, could be clothing, gadget, anything?

Well, I think through our kids right now, I'm just rediscovering, uh, Pokemon, which is so fun. It's so great. And I think, uh, you know, there's so much art to it and personality and character and, uh, what an amazing brand and franchise. And I think like, I, you know, my general view is like, there's just so, so much they could do to grow, uh, you know, that, that IP and, and franchises, at least if our kids are any indication. First mention a Pokemon 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. Uh, 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. Uh, I mean, all time favorite is probably the vomiting rainbow. I think like that just brought so much joy, uh, to so many people, which is great. Least favorite, probably like the old lens. I don't know, or face swap. I just, just, those are intense. Yeah. Wow. Flashback. And you guys were the first to do that, right? Yeah. I mean, and that was all that, that was all early days, real time machine

learning transformation on the device. You know, like that was like pretty cutting edge at the time. I mean, I don't think people realize that Bobby created our Gen AI lab like 10 years ago, a decade ago or something like that. What a time, the face swapping, uh, era. Yeah. The early use of generative AI. Wow. I forgot that was another innovation. And then there's like businesses and apps that just set to build that as a whole business. And then all, all went away as far as I can tell. Wow. That was a good time. All right. Well, Evan, uh, is there anything else you wanted to share? Anything else you

want to leave listeners with before we, before I let you go? I think it's such an, 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. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple

podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast.com. See you in the next episode.