"You became the world's youngest billionaire at the age of 25. You've got Mark Zuckerberg offering you $3 billion. That was a a fateful day for sure, but we decided that we'd rather go it alone. Was th..."

"earliest years and you you try and make sense of the dots that connected in hindsight, I guess, as Steve Jobs once said, what are those dots? There were a couple fateful choices that my parents made t..."

"fitted in when you were a kid? No, not not at all. No. Um I I was more of an introvert um growing up. So, you know, I think sometimes that made it harder for me to, you know, feel like I fit in. And"

"when did computers come into the picture for you? Uh I guess I I was exposed to my first computer. Gosh probably kindergarten, first grade maybe around that uh period of time. I my godfather brought o..."

"what what does that feeling teach you I I think you know and I think this is much more the case now because you know if you go on YouTube you can learn how to do pretty much anything right but I think..."

"bullied in school, right? Was it sixth grade that you got bullied or was it sometime thereafter? Yeah, middle school was not the I think not the easiest easiest time for me. Why? Um, you know as I men..."

"as a kid? Were you confident? I don't I don't know if I was confident in myself per se, but I definitely was confident in my ideas. Like I was willing to take a stand for ideas that I thought were dif..."

"podcasts, do you? I don't do much public speaking at all. It's it's a 2025 New Year's resolution for me, though. So we'll see. You know, I'm I'm trying to trying to, you know, share a bit more. Why? U..."

"you went off to university um you went to Stanford University which is an incredible university and you went to ultimately try and pursue product design at Stanford. Why did you choose product design ..."

"through this time as well? Because I think in your sophomore year you took a a class on entrepreneurship and venture capital, right? Yeah, that was that was really a gamecher. So I that that uh class ..."

"anything you took away from those classes that ended up being really important for you in terms of an idea or a philosophy or anything? I think the biggest thing that I took away from my time at at St..."

"especially as it relates to business because the success rate of creating some of the world's sort of pre-minent entrepreneurs is really really high. So you're telling me one of the key ideas is big a..."

"of us especially in the UK we we often don't think about building businesses that have the potential to reach huge scale. um in part because we don't have as much of a robust I think technical track r..."

"failed? Oh my well there there were I mean I made an orange juicer at one point um but this but um but I think the biggest the biggest failure was future freshman Bobby and I I I was really fortunate ..."

"to quit? You've kind of assembled a couple of principles there but even it's I think it's difficult in business because you can be getting lots of negative feedback but that doesn't necessarily mean t..."

"mattering so much? That like love and passion for the thing that you're building? Because I think that's what you know, the love and passion for what you're building and the love and passion for the p..."

"the other thing you said was you felt that you should go after a business that didn't take like 18 months, like two years of your time to build before you got it to market. Why is that for entrepreneu..."

"interesting point that a lot of founders don't realize that even companies like yours, they start with an initial hypothesis which is nearly always wrong. But kind of when you hear these stories you h..."

"um future freshmen to your next business? What was the journey from there? So, you'd met your co-founder at that point, Bobby. And how did you then move over to the idea of Snapchat? I think one of th..."

"were using people around you your friends to give you feedback on what features you should add next you said people wanted to write on and they wanted to add captions. As a founder, that must be quite..."

"capital for the first time roughly. Yeah more or less. And talk me through that. So how much did you raise about raising the capital and what was the business like at that time in terms of users and d..."

"you got from investors at that early stage? I think this is important because all founders are going to get the email that tells them that they're not on to something. Yeah, I think the biggest piece ..."

"building a a social networking app are extremely low. It's we were saying before we started recording that you've got to be almost like delusional to think that you can. I think at that time too, you ..."

"raised that money, did you ever doubt that Snapchat was going to work? And I guess to understand the question a bit more, you almost have to add a goal or ambition to it. So, I'm presuming you wanted ..."

"university by that point, obviously. Yeah. Tell me about that decision because that's not I know the app's growing and everything, but to drop out of a prestigious university can't be a super easy dec..."

"kids. I was thinking earlier when we were talking about college university the world was different when you went to university and college and you've got these four boys now the oldest I think is 14 y..."

"because we think through job titles at that age, don't we? We think what's the job title that I should be aiming at. So doctor, lawyer, etc. versus we don't necessarily think as much about collecting ..."

"But hierarchy comes into place when things start to get big and we need to put processes and reporting lines in place. How do you defend against that? Well, I I think you're getting at like the fundam..."

"have a really small design team. I think it would surprise people. It's nine people really. It is totally flat, so there's no fancy titles. everyone is a product designer. Um the the way that the team..."

"in that photo that were part of the first sort of 20, how important in hindsight is hiring? I think it's everything. I think it's everything. And these were really really just wonderful people. I mean..."

"aspiring to be creative absolutely in everything that it's doing um on this point of hiring did you make any hiring mistakes in those early days oh absolutely and what were those mistakes not necessar..."

"you were to make a perfect Snapchat employee now, what would their personality be? Their their psychology their their attributes. We we have three values and three leadership behaviors. Three values a..."

"pause on that point of kind. Do you make a distinction between someone being nice and being kind? Because in your environment, you also mentioned that you do these critique sessions and you're giving ..."

"first one is is T-shaped leadership. So we talk a lot about T-shaped leadership. What we mean by that uh is that you have a real depth of experience, a depth of expertise in a given area and then a re..."

"second two, if this Evan could have gone back to the Evan that was running a team of 10 and he could have pulled him aside and said, "Listen, here's some advice that you're going to need to know about..."

"have said to that younger Evan in that in your dad's house advice? Um at at that point before we had scaled to a lot of you know thousands of people I think we could have been much more clear on the c..."

"would have been a pretty remarkable thing to do, but do you wish you had made like a culture bible in the early days and then like I'm thinking practically what should a founder do then if they're at ..."

"incentives of the organization because what you said is you basically introduced incentive structures said you're going to be exited or you're going to be promoted and and getting really real about th..."

"What was the worst advice you got in those early years? We talked about some of the good advice and the good advice you'd give now, but was there any like really bad advice that you got that seemed to..."

"offer, a very very famous offer when you're 23 years old from Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. Yeah, that was a a fateful fateful day for sure. How does how does that begin? How does that story begin? Is ..."

"there ever a day where you doubted that decision? No. Not even a moment. Not a moment. No. Was Were all of the board supportive? Yeah. All of our investors were supportive. I They would have made a lo..."

"2014, when you were 24 years old, 40% of US adults were using Snapchat every day. And by 2015, Snapchat was reaching 75 million users on a monthly basis. At that point, what's life like for you as a C..."

"that though? How do you manage a romantic relationship when you are piloting a rocket ship? I think one of the things that was really helpful is she's you know incredibly accomplished herself. She has..."

"you own a business or do you work in marketing? If that's you, listen up for a valuable opportunity from our show sponsor LinkedIn. I'm an investor in about 40 odd companies and while they operate in ..."

"page. I saw your bio. Do you know what I'm going to say? I think so. Yeah. In your LinkedIn bio, it says that you're the I think VP of product at Meta. Is it not my joke? We we uh we uh have appropria..."

"or like a message or a phone call when they first started copying some of your core features like the story feature? No. No, we we didn't do that. I think you know, one of the things that I really adm..."

"Do you think that the technology companies that exist now, those trillion dollar ones, those big social platforms are monopolies and should be broken up? Because there was a big call originally to bre..."

"there a hard day for you amongst all of this copying? Was there a hardist day that you can recall? Um there there was a lot of concern when Instagram stories first launched that Snapchat would essenti..."

"because people start leaking that there's this new feature coming. I I was running a social media business at the time and there were hackers that can kind of look into code bases and see what feature..."

"cases that emerged pretty much out of the blue, I think, for for Snapchat was and this is this is something I was only thinking about yesterday is you you at some point have to make a decision about l..."

"rolled back their moderation policies? I I'm not sure. I I think you know there there's a moment in time when they seem to have a lot of support to do it. I I think it'll be challenging for them in Eu..."

"optimistic about the next four years in America? I'm incredibly optimistic about our country. I I I love our country so much. I think uh that Americans across our country uh have an incredible spirit ..."

"where he's going to be getting increasing pressures to join social media. Are you going to let him join Instagram? He's on Snapchat. I I I He's on Snapchat. Um certainly on YouTube and Roblox, which h..."

"That that might be a bridge too far. We say cuz Tik Tok's like I don't even use Tik Tok myself um personally because it's from what I hear it's like crack cocaine for people that they're just on there..."

"goes public. Um, running a public company is difficult to say the least because the share price can go up and down really irrespective of what you're doing and what you're building and it's really a r..."

"or sitting in your seat I think about all the things you could do as a public company. I think you could do anything like you could go after any game and at some point as you kind of said there when y..."

"after? There's all these new technologies. There's these buzzwords. There's AI now. There's AR. There's VR. There's headsets. There's wearables. There's all these things. How how do you decide what be..."

"launched the Ray-B band ones which I've I've heard about I think I watched a video of it which seem to be again copying Snapchat Did that piss you off? The only thing that frustrated me was that the L..."

"mean, the most talked about technology over the last couple of years as it's in many respects, thanks to Chat GPT, how are you um thinking about the future of artificial intelligence in terms of how i..."

"that. I don't know if I'm getting better. I don't really know. It's really because because there's always a trade-off with new technology. And the problem as we saw with social media is we often don't..."

"computer, you'll probably want to hear this. Some recent brain imaging studies have found that handwriting fires up more parts of the brain associated with creativity and critical thinking. But in dig..."

"terms of its company's life? You know like you were in that startup phase you're in your dad's bedroom phase where you're scrappy and you're growing quickly. Then you went to the blue office, you know..."

"structure. Another thing that I admired when I was reading about the way you run Snapchat is this idea of having a council. Oh, amazing. Wow. Okay. Can you tell me about this because I might want to s..."

"how do you know in those situations whether to listen to your team or not to listen to your team? Because you know it sounds quite risky for a founder, I'm not saying this is what you do, but for a fo..."

"That is by policy and also what's happening. Okay. And did you ever move on that? Was there ever a moment in the pandemic where you thought during the pandemic I thought I would never go back to the o..."

"are out there now listening to our conversation and they're at the very beginning of their journey and they are um they're thinking about so many different things, so many different problems, their pr..."

"Anyways, you you wrote it. You don't even need to. No, but no, but it's it's a good point. Something I was going to ask you about is the stress of of being you and do you have techniques to manage tha..."

"a hardest day for you? A day when you were challenged the most as the CEO of Snapchat that comes to mind when I say that? I think some of the hardest days um the the painful days have been you know wh..."

"Do you ever have imposter syndrome because I think about the odds of you the odds of launching a social media communications application as we said earlier like a billion in one or something great I d..."

"Snapchat goes away today what does Evan end up doing? Starting a new company. I would probably continue a lot of the work that we've been doing as a family to to give back. I mean, I think that's been..."

"you'd get bored and then you'd start some some new new company. Who knows? And we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who the..."

"self-awareness. I was thinking about that as you were just saying that about the idea of self-awareness as a CEO and how you how you develop that because it's such an important thing when there's so m..."

"ever find yourself feeling a little bit impatient with your team? Cuz I get this a lot. I'm always trying to make things move faster. And I think maybe there's a point of privilege where as the leader..."

"like as a leader what do you think they'd say? Oh my goodness. Um I don't know. They might all have different perspectives because I really try to like bring out the best in our team members by showin..."

"If I asked them what you're good at what would they say? Um, I think I'm good at a at a couple things. I think I'm quite good at um really understanding human needs and and wants and figuring out how ..."

"Evan, what is the this is my last question. What is the most important question for entrepreneurs that are listening to this conversation now based on everything that you know and have done that will ..."