Snap co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel discusses the company's early 2012 seed financing round with Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Insight
Spiegel: Founders Can Only Optimize for Two of Investors, Terms, or Valuation
“You have three things you can optimize for when you're raising money. You can optimize for the people you're working with, like the venture capitalists, You can optimize for the terms, you can optimize for the valuation, but pick two.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Spiegel: Zuckerberg Disclosed Facebook's Poke Clone In Late 2012 Meeting
“He was telling us about working on a new poke app, which ultimately ended up being a copycat of Snapchat at the time.”
Insight
Spiegel: Network Size Matters Less Than Having A User's Closest Contacts
“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…”
Opinion
Spiegel: Instagram sold to Facebook way too early
“Well, I think, as you mentioned, we did have the benefit of learning from Instagram, and it was very clear that Instagram had sold way too early.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Spiegel: Snap did not anticipate Instagram directly carbon-copying Stories
“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…”
Assertion Supported
Spiegel: Reggie Brown conceived the idea of disappearing photos
“I mean, he came up with the idea of sending disappearing photos and share that with me”