Snapchat

“I think when we created the brand in 2002 and three and four, our biggest obstacle was how are we going to get space in a retail environment controlled by four guys? I think today, now it's how are you going to own the most amount of attention from the consume…”

“We had two people that we hired from Apple and Snapchat, like very legit people. And they messed up the culture of the company. They would leave at 5:30 p.m. They like didn't live and breathe the company. And in the end, both of them quit after three months.”

“One, we try to run ads on Snap all the time. We never succeed.”

“I think they're overpaying creators, left, right, and center. And I just think that the lunch is completely eaten by meta at this point.”

“We're about to reach a billion monthly active users, which is a big deal for us.”

“I think our competitors are primarily messaging services. So I think that's, you know, the core of the service is messaging. When we launched Snapchat, it had no social features beyond messaging. I mean, that's always driven the growth of the service.”

“Over a trillion selfies have been captured on Snapchat, right? And so I think when you know, in, in the, over the same period, and so when you.”

“We just announced we had twenty-five million Snapchat plus subscribers, over a billion run rate on the direct revenue business.”

“What Snapchat proved was actually that it's not about the size of your network or the number of people you can contact on your network, it's about who you actually talk to. And that tends to be a much smaller group than the total size of the Potential network,…”

“And I think what's so fascinating, I think now there's been maybe three or more of them, one out of Australia, I think one out of the Netherlands or something, one in the U.S., that show that Snapchat actually has a positive impact on people's well-being and r…”

“Well, Norway was the first place that Snapchat got traction. I mean, we had no traction anywhere. Not the US. Not the US. We had no traction anywhere except Norway.”

“And what Snapchat figured out that was, I think, different was that, you know, despite the fact that there were much bigger networks that connected more people, what really mattered was connecting you to the right people. And so if you could just connect someo…”

“Even though Apple didn't provide an API at the time to let you know that a screenshot had been taken, ah, there was a way for us to essentially detect this touch event to learn that a screenshot, ah, had happened. And then we would just send a notification bac…”

“We've, I think we've got two hundred million people playing games every month on Snapchat now.”

“For the two-year-old it's like zero screen time. We really just, you know, wanna, you know, essentially read with him and play you know, explore outside and those sorts of things, but not really focus on, on screens unless he is getting a haircut because he re…”

“It's no longer about followers. So don't worry that you don't have followers because all of the content, thanks to TikTok and like its influence on Instagram and Snapchat, all of the content gets shown to 200 people. They then use that to figure out whether it…”

“Even basic things like opening into the camera, right? It opens into your experience of the world, right? Not, you know, a feed of content from other people, not a messaging feed alerting you to what other people are sending you. It literally opens into your e…”

“The, you know, I think there are more selfies taken on Snapchat than on iPhone in total, right? Which is a crazy stat.”

“Showing them that, like, the completion rate was nine times higher when they used vertical video instead of these little, like, postage stamp size horizontal videos.”

“I mean, with stories, right, like, you know, the first six months of stories, no one used it.”

“So actually, you know, what reflects the value of the network is, you know, are the people that you actually talk to and communicate with, especially the ones you communicate more frequently, are they a part of your network? And if they are, Then you can accru…”

“We're almost a billion folks using our service. If you look at like our daily active engagements, about like half a billion folks.”

“So I think Snap, Snapchat, the camera itself, it's probably the most used like Gen AI camera service, like in terms of like image, video generation, this kind of thing.”

“The hardware business at its core is just so different than the internet service business that we operate with Snapchat, and, you know, even requires a different execution style, you know, with hardware, like, you cannot make a mistake, right? Like, the things…”

“Inside of Snapchat today, and in our design team, we're thinking a lot about what types of new apps and services, internet services... A separate app from Snapchat. But we can use Snapchat as a launch pad for these new services because it reaches almost a bill…”

“I think one of the things that's really, I stole this from Walmart, which I thought was great. They have a Friday meeting called in it to win it. They have their leaders from across the company, not just like super senior leaders, but leaders from across the c…”

“What's fascinating is when Snapchat is studied separately from social media, there's study after study, independent studies that show that Snapchat makes a positive impact on people's friendships, on their wellbeing, that is fundamentally Different from social…”

“Snapchat's almost a seven billion dollar revenue. Business, right?”

“Our most successful deal is one that broke all of the rules, ah, that I just laid out, which was Snapchat. Where I think we led the series C in that, an evaluation of about a billion and a half.”

“Most people don't look at Snapchat, but we consistently hit 20,000 views and above from Snapchat. So I definitely would not sleep on Snapchat.”

“Raising money has never been easy for us, and I think for, unless you're Snapchat circa 2000 whatever, You know, it's hard to raise money for any kind of company and for all the reasons that you pointed out in the beginning, you know, what, how do you think th…”

“Look, if you actually look at the data, if you look at what kids are doing, it's so much more interactive and engaging for them to talk to their friends on Snap or to watch videos on TikTok. Those things are super engaging. Whereas doing research on an AI chat…”

“TikTok three years forward is the largest social media in the United States, and on average users spend 90 minutes in TikTok, while on Instagram, I think it's 47, and Snapchat around 29.”

“I simply believe that it will be difficult for smaller platforms to make own Gen AI video generation systems, and essentially companies like Pinterest, Snapchat, and many others, they really will have to have some AI-generate capabilities.”

“We were Series B investors in Twitter and Snapchat a little bit later in Discord, but all of which we did well below a billion dollars in venture price.”

“They should buy Snapchat and make Evan Spiegel CEO. I said it, and I said it. I want some product vision at the company again.”

“Snapchat at the time didn't allow you to upload photos. It was like, you have to use a snap camera.”

“2019, Snapchat spun us out, not because we were doing poorly, but because we were actually profitable, growing at, you know, 50% plus clip rate.”

“Search Feels like it'll be a winner take, take all market, and it's, they're not gonna, you know, two years from now, if they're sitting at thirty million monthly actives, or even a multiple of that, it's hard to see it, you know, being worth, ah, you know, si…”

“Ultimately, we want to back companies that become generational and become very, very large. And a lot of the origin story of companies can be questioned when looked back in from the history or from sort of current looking back, like Facebook started was hard o…”

“Obviously the OS is the place to do this enforcement. If you care about it, it's one of those things. I've always found it fascinating that Apple and the community was able to like, put the blank, put the finger on Facebook or Google or Snapchat or whatever, w…”

“They were running, like, a hundred million dollars a month of ads on Snapchat, right? Initially, right? When they were not, there was no presence.”

“Another part of it is I do believe that there's so much transactional communication from text to Kids on Snapchat that only communicate by emojis, and you have TikTok, and you have every other app that you and I never had, and coming up to see that, I've seen …”

“I mean, he came up with the idea of sending disappearing photos and share that with me”

“Yeah, and it was different than social media virality because social media virality is very network-based, right? You would want to have the largest graph possible, but the reason why Snapchat was able to grow is because you really wanted to use it with your, …”

“We got a cease and desist from a pick-a-boo company, and maybe one of the best things that ever happened to us.”

“You know, my grandparents had left me 10,000 dollars. Bobby had some money from one of his prior jobs, and so he chipped that in. My dad, I think, put in maybe five or 10,000 dollars, but he wasn't quite keen to put in any more to help people send photos back …”

“4.25 million.”

“Actually, my favorite part of that story is a school nearby invested 15,000 dollars and ended up making, I think they ended up building a new gymnasium or something.”

“We had invented this idea that you could just tap to take a photo or hold the button and start recording a video. And that at the time, based on the way the camera worked, was actually quite difficult to engineer.”

“The writer first refusal allowed Lightspeed to buy up to 50% of the next round and because of the way that a convertible note works, that meant that they would control that series of stock. So they would control the series A of stock, and that meant that other…”

“He was telling us about working on a new poke app, which ultimately ended up being a copycat of Snapchat at the time.”

“If you have a big network, but you're only talking to three or five or seven people in that network, that actually the size of the network doesn't matter that much. What matters is that those people, those, you know, that you talk to all the time are a part of…”

“In one of those early financing rounds, Bobby and I were both able to cash out like ten million dollars each.”

“The one thing that we didn't anticipate was that Instagram would actually perfectly copy stories, like carbon copy it, because in the past they had sort of tried different rifts on our products, like they would take the core idea, but then try to make it bette…”

“Snapchat opens to the camera. And that was actually the differentiator, right? That was actually that small decision was holding the entire company against all competition. Because when the moment passes where your friend is doing something funny, and you need…”

“That product market fit can be so strong sometimes that it can be hard to actually build something because you actually can't tell if what you're building is what's responsible for growing the thing or if it's actually hurting it and, you know, this is growing…”

“Dude, Evan Spiegel, super involved in the ad platform. I've had lunch and breakfast with him probably three or four different times. And he's just like, how can we get these ads to work? That's all he cares about.”

“He was an investor early on in like Grubhub, Snapchat, Stitch Fix, like Boom, like just like a bunch of companies that have done really well.”

“I think it's interesting because it's kind of uncontested right now. Like maybe Apple will get in the game. Maybe. If they still have, like, the juice to do it, Snapchat seems to have fallen out. The famous, like, I forgot what the thing was called. Magic leap…”