Evan Spiegel describes the personal bootstrap funding that kept Snapchat operational before server costs forced the founders to raise outside capital.
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“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 and forth. So we had to pretty quickly start looking for fundraising, because the server bills got to be about 10,000 dollars a month.”
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