Snapchat

“Literally over a weekend, we get like 25,000, you know, downloads from one influencer at like a dollar CPI.”

“Now everybody does that. Now it's like obvious. It's the new best practice. It was a complete innovation at that time.”

“Because all this growth was happening through genuine word of mouth, these geographic hotspots, Were, like, evidence that this is real, not manufactured virality, not invitation driven virality, the virality driven by people, like, sharing it with the people t…”

“A lot of social media creates this performance anxiety, which means that you don't post. And so like you get this sort of more of a social media perspective with a small number of posters, large number of consumers. And he talked about how the, you know, the d…”

“Is that people weren't really using it to send photos that disappeared. They didn't care that much about that part. What they were really focused on was talking with pictures because it became a much more expressive way to show your friends what you were doing…”

“One of the early indicators for that is that it's primarily used by young women, because I think young women are culture carriers.”

“They had the software to be able to get rid of that animation so that loading up Snapchat's camera was faster than loading up the iPhone camera.”

“It's not even Evan, by the way, Evan Spiegel, he's the CEO. He's one of the founders of Snapchat. He didn't have the idea. It was his like frat bro. It was Reggie Brown.”

“In the beginning, the only way you could be added is for someone to give you their username.”

“In August, he has a 127 users. By December of that year, he has 2000 users. January, 20,000 users. And by April of 2012, he's up to a hundred”

“Neither Evan nor Reggie nor the other co-founder, the technical co-founder that comes in later, Bobby, they don't have a thesis about mobile. They haven't really thought through strategically what's happening now that the app stores out. Now that these mobile …”

“They do at some point end up launching a mobile app, but even still by August, September, we're talking like five months in, you know, five, six months in after the original idea happens, they have only a 127 users.”

“Facebook launches this copycat app called Poke, and it quickly, I mean, they have Billion users at this point. So it quickly goes to the top of the charts and it's a bit of a existential moment for Snapchat, but it turns out all that that did was actually make…”

“What I saw was 50% daily active user to monthly active user. Ratio. I saw 50% D-thirty retention. And I saw 50% month-on-month growth on a statistically significant number of users. I can't remember exactly what it was. It was 10 or 20,000 DAUs. And that had b…”

“And so Evan starts to think about fundraising and he talks to Sequoia. He goes after Chris Saka. He meets many different VCs, all of them pass. Some of them won't even like meet with him.”

“Jeremy Liu, who wrote the first check, walked in with Nicole Quinn, the partner that would join our board from Lightspeed. And you said, Hey, Steven, it's unanimous. You know, the Lightspeed partnership wants to help build Cameo. We're gonna offer you a term s…”

“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.”

“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.”