Snapchat

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story

by Billy Gallagher  · 13 Feb 2018  · 359pp  · 96,019 words

their true north. Steve Jobs famously left Silicon Valley to travel in India. And soon, Evan Spiegel would very purposefully leave Silicon Valley to create Snapchat. CHAPTER FIVE LAWSUIT POSSIBLE SUMMER 2011 THE STARTUP HAU5 PACIFIC PALISADES, CA John Spiegel’s house sits in a picturesque neighborhood in Pacific Palisades,

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but wait.” But Evan had no intention of waiting. Evan and Bobby changed the passwords and locked Reggie out. Picaboo was theirs. CHAPTER SEVEN SNAPCHAT SEPTEMBER 2011 STANFORD, CA In 1839, an American photography pioneer named Robert Cornelius1 took a photograph of himself; because the process at the time—using

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their computers in utter fascination. Thefacebook.com craze has swept through campus.” In 2012, classes were not being skipped in favor of Snapchat—students were simply Snapchatting from class rather than paying attention. Students would sit around during free periods at Crossroads talking about the newest apps they were using

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him about his sexting research. Evan quickly realized it could be much more and worked hard to change the narrative early, focusing on communicating that Snapchat was about lighthearted, impermanent communication between friends rather than sexting between lovers. In my initial interview with Evan for TechCrunch, he pushed back against

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a normal American in normal America. That is what is preventing as much insight and therefore innovation happening here.” Just as venture capitalists had watched Snapchat’s ascent with great interest, so did another group of wealthy, bright technologists in Menlo Park. On November 28, Mark Zuckerberg, having purchased Instagram

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backers like General Catalyst Partners, Greylock Partners, Charles River Ventures, and Institutional Venture Partners trying to get in the round. Evan took advantage of Snapchat’s strong negotiating position to extract favorable terms from investors. When he met with Institutional Venture Partners’ Dennis Philips, Evan told Philips he would not

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team had been debating for almost a year. CHAPTER FOURTEEN STORIES SEPTEMBER 2013 VENICE, CA Whenever Evan, Bobby, David, Daniel, or anyone else at Snapchat asked users what additional features they wanted, the response was universal. From Oslo to Santa Monica, users wanted group messaging. Tired of combing through their

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Lupita Nyong’o, Jared Leto, and Jennifer Lawrence joined the picture, which millions of people retweeted. While the picture itself wasn’t taken on Snapchat, the influence of the selfie can certainly be directed back to the ephemeral messaging app. Mobile photography was already enormous thanks to smartphones, Facebook, Twitter

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He argued that this should be called “the more personal computer” era, rather than “post-personal computer” era. Then he unveiled his framework for Snapchat through which everything—acquisitions, new features, and revenue—was developed: Internet Everywhere means that our old conception of the world separated into an online and

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He believes data, focus groups, and market research cannot successfully deliver an innovative leap large enough to meet his goals for Snapchat. Snapchat exec Sriram Krishnan later wrote about this Snapchat core belief after leaving the company, explaining how most companies measure a proxy metric for actual human behavior, since the latter

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through partners like Amazon. In March 2014, Evan rolled the dice on a company that had a chance to be a true game-changer for Snapchat. Snapchat paid $15 million to acquire a small hardware startup called Vergence Labs. Vergence made a Google Glass–like product they called Epiphany Eyewear that

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filled it with the ex-Vergence team and engineers with experience working on computer vision, gaze tracking, and speech recognition. Over the next year, Snapchat recruited a dozen wearable technology experts, industrial designers, and people with experience in the fashion industry. Members of the Snap Lab team took frequent trips

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to Shenzhen, China, to prepare a potential supply chain for a Snapchat hardware product. Snapchat never announces its acquisitions. One day the startup is fully functioning independently; the next, employees are telling their friends that they are moving

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, addictive way. The college stories became a twenty-four-hour billboard on campus, showing everything funny, interesting, and dramatic happening on certain college campuses. Snapchat communicated with students through geofilters, encouraging them to post to the campus story and telling them when the stories would stop running as classes ended

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background in film production and narrative storytelling, including stints in movie studios, book publishing houses, and liberal arts colleges’ English and film studies departments. Snapchat engineers built the content team a custom backend to manage submissions for Live Stories. Content analysts flagged interesting content first, then came back and rearranged

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and still others were updated to show real-time information like sports scores and election results. Analysts favored content that was “Snapchatty.” Posts that utilized Snapchat’s features, like drawing, captions, and geofilters, were favored. Photos and videos that were descriptive and moved the story along or showed a unique

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More eyeballs meant more content to potentially pair ads against; and growing user engagement and daily active users meant the advertisements were not deterring Snapchatters. Snapchat signed deals with sports leagues like the National Football League, Major League Baseball, and the NCAA. They worked with Vanity Fair to cover the

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to cut and reformat existing video to vertical, but really they hoped that publishers would start shooting content in a vertical format specifically for Discover. Snapchat rebelled against the data-driven, scalability-focused approach that Silicon Valley loved, such as Facebook’s algorithmic attention to its News Feed and Trending

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a payments platform in Snapcash (though adoption of Snapcash was slow to nonexistent). These were the building blocks for an app platform, if Snapchat wanted it. Snapchat could have created a robust API (short for Application Programming Interface, a fancy Silicon Valley term for a clearly defined method for software to

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and Y Combinator funded three startups from over four hundred applicants. * * * Venture capital money isn’t just headed to companies pitching on Snapchat. Investors are funding Snapchat-content companies, too. On an unusually windy afternoon in March 2016, I grabbed a coffee from Groundwork Coffee Co. in Venice, a couple blocks

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t really know how. Advertisers and marketers became very comfortable with Twitter and Instagram after cutting their teeth with Facebook in the 2000s. But Snapchat is very different from other social media networks. Comedy brands like FuckJerry and TheFatJewish and parody accounts became very popular on Twitter and Instagram posting

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or furnishing a home for homeless families, to typical team-bonding activities like boxing classes, volleyball, karaoke, painting, and happy hours. When employees join Snapchat, they become part of three core teams: their starting class, their actual work team, and their Council group, which is randomly assigned. Council has

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discussed potential investment and partnership opportunities with Prince Alwaleed bin Talal in Saudi Arabia. And Khan was key to Alibaba investing $200 million in Snapchat, even though Snapchat is blocked in China (more on this later). “The reason I joined here was Evan,” Khan later told The Wall Street Journal. “Because

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several times so they can give advertisers more targeted offerings. The result has been a thousand paper cuts into the privacy and antitracking stance Snapchat once held. Snapchat now lets advertisers segment people by location, gender, age, device, operating system, and wireless carrier, although some of these require users to volunteer

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offered. But it had a unique media format that was extremely compelling to users and advertisers alike. Lenses became an increasingly lucrative advertising source as Snapchat worked with brands to create a new interactive advertising format. In December 2015, Imran Khan traveled to Chicago to meet with Gatorade executives. He

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. If users don’t want to get their political coverage from Hamby’s Good Luck America, maybe they would from The Washington Post’s Snapchat story. Snapchat still wants Stories to be intimate, so discovery of news organizations is still very difficult, hampering their growth. Most of them are still experimenting

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to check in on them. The letter to the editor became an email, then a Facebook comment or tweet, and now it was a Snapchat. Snapchat’s first in-house content began with Live Stories at the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas. It progressed to capturing interviews with candidates vying

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MTV’s Total Request Live?” WMG’s Discover channel was neither able to capture the nostalgic feelings Evan had for MTV nor draw in Snapchat viewers. Few Snapchat users even knew what WMG was, forcing the company to add “Warner Music” to the stylized W icon it had used since the

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teenagers prefer using an impermanent messaging app. Then the entrant gets better (adding more features like video sharing and geofilters) and moves upmarket (adding Snapchat Stories and moving into the social network space), attracting a bigger share of the market (passing Twitter in daily active users) and better customers (older

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country in the Olympics. They could also add geofilter lookalikes on top of their photos that said “Team Canada” and “Team Brazil.” Facebook copied Snapchat throughout 2016, testing the Stories features wherever it could—in its Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram apps—and adding impermanent messaging options to Instagram and

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sponsored stickers (which are free to users, with Line raking in revenue from advertisers). You could easily claim that sponsored geofilters are already Snapchat’s sponsored stickers. When Snapchat rolled out geofilters, it included cultural icons like Soul Cycle and Disneyland. While those geofilters were not paid advertisements, it’s not

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stumble across an advertising model that good.   4. The price employees must pay to exercise their stock options and buy the underlying common stock in Snapchat.   5. Snapchat’s current number of employees.   6. Institutional Venture Partners, another venture capital firm.   7. Jeremy Liew, the Lightspeed partner in the seed round,

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“Design Yourself” Conference, Stanford Women in Business, April 7, 2013. https://download.docslide.net/documents/design-yourself-conference-opening-keynote-by-evan-spiegel-ceo-of-snapchat.html Chapter Four: The Other Startup Alden, William, and David Gelles. “In WhatsApp Deal, Sequoia Capital May Make 50 Times Its Money.” New York

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in Legal Battle as Alleged Co-Founder Files to Disqualify Their Lawyers.” TechCrunch, July 1, 2013. http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/01/ephemeral-representation/ ________. “Snapchat’s Spiegel Admits Brown ‘Came up with the Idea for Disappearing Picture Messages’ in New Court Documents.” TechCrunch, July 1, 2013. http://techcrunch.com/2013

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Benner, Katie. “Snap’s Chief Taps into the ‘Right Now.’” New York Times, February 1, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/01/technology/snapchat-snap-ceo-evan-spiegel.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology&action=click&contentCollection=technology&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront Bezos

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the Froth.” Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2013. https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-valuations-stir-memories-of-the-dotcom-bust-1382916515 Chapter Nineteen: Snapchat Everywhere Constine, Josh. “Snapchat Plans Music Feature, Acquired QR Scan.me for $50M and Vergence Eyeglass Cam for $15M.” TechCrunch, December 16, 2014. https://techcrunch.com/

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The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Brighton, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 1997. Constine, Josh. “Instagram CEO on Stories: Snapchat Deserves All the Credit.” TechCrunch, August 2, 2016. https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/02/silicon-copy/ Efrati, Amir, and Cory Weinberg. “Facebook and Twitter Pressure

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, Niko boyd, danah brand advertising Breaking Bad (television series) BroBible (website) Brown, Reggie “Blue Suit” nickname at Duke and Kappa Sigma lawsuit origins of Snapchat personality and temperament and Picaboo at Stanford Browning, Phillippe BuzzFeed Byron, Katy Cameron, David Caraeff, Rio Carter, Clarence Chang, Chi-Chao Charles River Ventures Cheever

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Goddard, Julieanna. See YesJulz (Julieanna Goddard) Goldroom Goldwyn, Emily Good Luck America (election show) Google app revenue Googleplex IPO Los Angeles office privacy and Snapchat compared with user activity and See also Schmidt, Eric Google AdWords Google Circles Google Glass Google Maps Google Ventures Grande, Greg Green, Diane Greylock Partners

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, Sarah Hyperloop Technologies IBM Innovator’s Dilemma, The (Christensen) Instagram Arsenic and demographics of users Facebook purchase of Instagram Stories investors and funding launch of Snapchat compared with Snapcodes and Institutional Venture Partners Intel Interview, The (film) Intuit iOS James, Nicole Jenner, Kylie Jobs, Steve Jordan, David Starr Joss, Bob

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) Disrupt conference Tencent Teo, Jon Tesla ThankYouX (Ryan Wilson) That White Bitch (blog) therealdrmiami. See Dr. Miami (Michael Salzhauer) Thiel, Peter third-party content (Snapchat Discover) Thompson, Nicholas Thorning-Schmidt, Helle TigerText (app) Tinder Trainor, Meghan Trump, Donald Turley, Ben Turner, Elizabeth Turner, Sarah Twitter demographics of users innovation and

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Snapchat account at Snapchat compared with txtWeb Uber Valleywag (Gawker blog) Van Natta, Owen Vanity Fair Venice, California Venmo Vergence Labs Vine (app) virtual private network (VPN) Viterbi

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Names: Gallagher, Billy, 1992– author. Title: How to turn down a billion dollars: the Snapchat story / Billy Gallagher. Description: First edition.|New York: St. Martin’s Press, [2018] Identifiers: LCCN 2017037545|ISBN 9781250108616 (hardcover)|ISBN 9781250108623 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH:

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Snap Inc.|Snapchat (Electronic resource)|Internet industry—United States.|Businesspeople—United States.|Entrepreneurship—United States. Classification: LCC HD9696.8.U64 S6343 2018|DDC 384.3/8—dc23 LC

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier  · 13 Apr 2020  · 484pp  · 114,613 words

He also had elite schooling and a charmed upbringing, at least financially. His competitive philosophy? That everyone else was doing it wrong. Evan Spiegel’s Snapchat app started out as a Stanford party tool in 2011, as a rejection of the world Facebook and especially Instagram had created. When everything people

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personal brands were becoming more important to cultivate in society, and therefore more anxiety-inducing. Picaboo made few waves. But when the founders rebranded as Snapchat and added video, plus the ability to draw and write on photo and video messages with digital markers, they made something less stressful and more

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list of names below an Instagram post into a number—a space-conserving design that had turned into a popularity tipping point for young people. Snapchat was a different world. Young people were sending each other random selfies and unedited videos. The app was confusing for adults because it wasn’t

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rented for the occasion. Once they were together in person, Zuckerberg abandoned the flattery and went straight to threats. He spent the meeting insinuating that Snapchat would be crushed by Facebook unless they found a way to work together. He was about to launch Poke, an app that would allow people

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their product, putting all of the power of Facebook behind making it a success. It was flattering that Zuckerberg, the king of the Internet, considered Snapchat a threat. Spiegel was onto something. * * * The day Poke launched in December 2012, it at first showed the power of Facebook’s endorsement. Suddenly

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job. Luckily, Facebook had another tool in its arsenal: money, and Zuckerberg’s unilateral power to make decisions with that money. He offered to acquire Snapchat for more than $3 billion. It was even more shocking than the Instagram price for about the same number of users, and was also heavily

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less than two years and without any revenue, and with just 17 employees. Zuckerberg, frustrated that so far he could neither build nor buy what Snapchat had, resolved to get a lot better at understanding teens, why they had fled Facebook, and how he could recruit them back. * * * The ordeal

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or AOL. He wanted to be nothing like them. He banned employees from using words like “share” and “post” that reminded him of Facebook, since Snapchat was about being more personal, and preferred using a term like “send” instead. He was determined to keep releasing ideas that Zuckerberg would never think

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of. What if Snapchat had an option to “send to all,” where content would still disappear, perhaps after 24 hours? Spiegel had come up with the idea while still

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way to push a little further. The company had Instagram reduce visibility for the #vine hashtag on Instagram, and discouraged prominent users from displaying their Snapchat usernames. And even when they couldn’t control the competition like they could Instagram, they could still study it—in detail. Facebook in 2013 acquired

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first attempt to try a tool that was about sending posts to one person versus broadcasting to an entire feed. When White resigned for the Snapchat COO job, it rattled Systrom’s confidence. He had spent so many days brainstorming with her, traveling with her, planning the business model with

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running things and keep their CEO title, with no financial risk and all of the network and infrastructure Facebook could provide. After the failure with Snapchat, Zuckerberg asked Systrom to help acquire the app he wanted to pursue next: WhatsApp, the messaging app that had 450 million monthly users all over

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in its own offices in a nearby town called Mountain View, with about fifty employees who were all now tremendously wealthy. Between that and the Snapchat pursuit, there were suddenly no more doubts about whether Instagram was worth $1 billion to Facebook. Instead, Systrom was getting constant questions—from the

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the next six months. If Twitter rejected the deal, they would instead start posting Vines to tell followers to find them on Instagram, YouTube, or Snapchat instead. Twitter refused, the stars abandoned the app, and eventually, Vine shut down entirely. * * * Back in 2014, three months after the Vogue cover, Instagram announced

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suggested teen lifestyle influencer Aidan Alexander, @aidanalexander, be a guest at Arianna Huffington’s table at the White House Correspondents’ dinner, where he sat alongside Snapchat star DJ Khaled. She let Jordan Doww, @jordandoww, who shared a management company with Alexander, come out as gay on the @instagram account; the public

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pressure to demonstrate a perfect life on Instagram was actually bad for the product’s growth. And it was great for a now-formidable competitor: Snapchat. THE SNAPCHAT PROBLEM “What people are experiencing on Instagram is, they don’t feel good about themselves. It feels terrible. They have to compete for popularity

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.” —EVAN SPIEGEL, SNAPCHAT CEO Facebook’s headquarters are optimized for productivity in engineering. The food is free, gourmet, and plentiful, served in themed cafeterias less than a five

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the disruptor was Facebook. Paranoia over obsolescence festered at Facebook’s very core, and was the reason they’d bought Instagram and attempted to buy Snapchat in the first place. The anecdotal evidence from Third Thursday Teens was backed up by the data. When Nayak first heard about finstas, she asked

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that Instagram had to do something bigger and bolder. They absolutely had to introduce some kind of way to post things that disappeared, à la Snapchat Stories, to reduce the pressure to be perfect on Instagram. Nobody wanted to hear about it, least of all Systrom. * * * As far as Systrom

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reasons to avoid taking the plunge into Stories-like tools. All of Facebook’s copycat attempts had failed, starting with Poke, the blatant remake of Snapchat that had failed so badly it convinced Zuckerberg to make his $3 billion acquisition offer in 2013. Afterward, when Facebook spun up their internal Creative

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all were short-lived. There was the Slingshot app for photo responses to ephemeral messages. There was also an app called Riff, a take on Snapchat Stories, which was barely significant enough to be mentioned in the media. None of them garnered more than a few thousand users. Mark Zuckerberg himself

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where to play; then they had to decide how to win in that market, without worrying about everything else. Incidentally, Lafley had just started mentoring Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel. And Spiegel had decided where he wanted to play: Instagram’s turf. * * * Systrom might have been the only Silicon Valley executive with

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product decisions to reverse Twitter’s slowing growth. Weil needed to get out of there. He interviewed for several different kinds of jobs, including at Snapchat, where Spiegel was so confident he’d join that he introduced Weil to his most trusted employees, on the secretive design team. The news that

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versions on whiteboards. They were mostly trying to decide what the simplest solution was. For example, Instagram didn’t need to launch with the tools Snapchat had, like face masks that used image technology to let people digitally wear cartoon puppy ears or barf rainbows. They reasoned they could add that

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meeting, when she excused herself. Then it was just Khan and Rose. “There actually is a way we could help,” Rose said. “We could buy Snapchat.” He explained that the company would end up just like Instagram—totally independent, but applying everything Facebook had learned to help the business scale more

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investment?” he asked. “We don’t do that,” Rose said. “We buy, or we compete.” * * * Meanwhile Instagram, oblivious to these conversations, was intent on striking Snapchat hard and ending it quickly. Facebook usually launched something to a tiny percentage of its user base, around 1 or 2 percent, to see how

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acquisition, who had been instrumental in getting WhatsApp to sell, was totally in the dark about Zuckerberg’s conversations with his biggest competitor. So was Snapchat’s board. Spiegel never told them about the call, because, just like at Facebook, Spiegel and his cofounder held the majority of the voting control

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to follow you again right now.” * * * Systrom had told his communications team that he would acknowledge to the press that the Stories format was a Snapchat invention that Instagram had copied, and that was why they had the same name. (“You’re going to do WHAT?” Facebook PR head Caryn Marooney

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momentum out of the criticism. He explained that it was just a new form of communication, like email or text messaging, and that just because Snapchat invented it didn’t mean that other companies should avoid using the same opportunity. He held an all-hands meeting for the Instagram staff, explaining

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important users to start posting video on Instagram, focusing on action-packed events like the X Games. He kept getting rebuffed; everyone wanted to use Snapchat instead. But when Instagram Stories launched, he was in Rio de Janeiro with Justin Timberlake, who was performing at the Summer Olympics. Backstage, Timberlake was

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get famous people to use Instagram Stories. As Systrom had seen at the Oscars, many had gotten used to sharing behind-the-scenes content on Snapchat. And the celebrities too were worried about growth and relevance, just like the Catholic Church. The Formula One owners were trying to get young people

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simple product, but already very popular. Systrom saw opportunities to add more features to it, like face masks and stickers similar to those offered by Snapchat. Michael Schroepfer, his manager and Facebook’s chief technology officer, denied the request. “You should just pivot the team you have to work on

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ever paranoid, wondered if that was enough. He looked at Instagram’s growth, which was actually accelerating, even as the rate that Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat added users was slowing. The discovery didn’t bode well for his prized acquisition. Zuckerberg reasoned that Facebook’s users only had a certain amount

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founders. Now the public had four different Facebook-owned but separately branded places to post disappearing video to their friends, just like they could on Snapchat. Zuckerberg was willing to try multiple things at once to quash competitors. But having all the options was confusing, not exciting, for the public.

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no exciting celebrity content to train them on what to do, like employees had made for @instagram. As The Verge wrote at the time, “borrowing Snapchat’s ideas is working out okay for Instagram, but for some reason Facebook’s direct attempts always feel a little off—and desperate.” Zuckerberg didn

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wasn’t just Instagram versus Facebook. It was all of these Facebook properties versus every other choice in the world, like watching television or using Snapchat or sleeping. Others in the room for those discussions were puzzled. Has Mark forgotten he owns Instagram? Zuckerberg had always preached the idea that Facebook

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-shopped, edited or staged photographs and videos and compare them to their seemingly mundane lives.” The RSPH looked at all the big social platforms, including Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and made recommendations. Ideally, they said, apps would let users know if they were spending an unhealthy amount of time glued

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took a selfie with the crowd. Internally at Facebook, he was talking about using Instagram to take on TikTok, the Chinese app that had replaced Snapchat as the top threat to Facebook’s dominance. The frequency of advertising on Instagram had increased. There were more notifications too, and more personalized recommendations

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a technology reporter for Bloomberg News. Her award-winning features and breaking stories have earned her a reputation as an expert on how Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter make business decisions that affect their futures and our society. Frier is a frequent contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg Television. She lives

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https://www.mto.com/lawyers/john-w-spiegel. Besides having a tendency for profanity: Sam Biddle, “ ‘Fuck Bitches Get Leid’: The Sleazy Frat Emails of Snapchat’s CEO,” Valleywag, May 28, 2014, http://valleywag.gawker.com/fuck-bitches-get-leid-the-sleazy-frat-emails-of-snap-1582604137. “People are living with

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www.businessinsider.com/evan-spiegel-and-mark-zuckerbergs-emails-2014-1?IR=T. He spent the meeting insinuating: J. J. Colao, “The Inside Story of Snapchat: The World’s Hottest App or a $3 Billion Disappearing Act?,” Forbes, January 20, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2014/01/06/the

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the #vine hashtag during our first few months,” Twitter, September 23, 2019, 4:14 p.m., https://twitter.com/dhof/status/1176137843720314880. discouraged prominent users… Snapchat usernames: Georgia Wells and Deepa Seetharaman, “Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier,” Wall Street Journal, last modified September 24, 2019, https

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Life, November 27, 2015, https://www.thisamericanlife.org/573/status-update. Used with permission. As they explained to Glass: Glass, “Status Update.” “While we adored… Snapchat.”: Kendall Fisher, “What You Didn’t See at the 2016 Oscars: Kate Hudson, Nick Jonas, Lady Gaga and More Take Us Behind the Scenes on

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, 215, 251, 260 WhatsApp acquired by, 125, 202, 255 Yahoo! in attempted purchase of, 57 youth team at, 202 and Zuckerberg’s attempts to buy Snapchat, 114–15, 116, 117, 122, 125, 183, 191, 200–202 Zuckerberg’s unilateral power at, 63, 116, 202 Facebook, Instagram acquired by, xvii, xx,

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(reality TV show), 136 simplicity, Systrom and Krieger’s philosophy based on, 18, 20, 21–22, 24, 119, 255 Skinny Confidential, 237 Smalls, Joan, 156 Snapchat, 122, 123, 124, 157, 171, 187, 198, 199–200, 217, 218, 223, 248, 277 celebrities’ use of, 192, 204 cool factor of, 116 ephemeral

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photo filter, 23 Spiegel, Evan, 112–14, 115–16, 123, 179, 191, 194, 195, 199–200 Zuckerberg and, 116–17, 200, 201–2 see also Snapchat; Snapchat Stories Spotify, 45 Square, 15, 46, 65 Squires, Jim, 120 Stanford Mayfield Fellows Program, 5, 12, 46 Stanford University, 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 20

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Stories and, 203 as key to the future of IG, 154, 171, 184 and pressure to post the best, 114, 170, 172, 188–90, 248 Snapchat and, 115 technology use by, 114 unspoken social rules among, 182, 184 Zuckerberg’s resolve to better understand, 116 Teigen, Chrissy, 243 Telegram, 246 terrorism

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s acquisition of, 125, 202, 217, 255 WhatsApp Status, 216, 256 White, Emily, 100–101, 104, 105, 118, 120, 122–23, 165 in move to Snapchat, 123, 200 White House Correspondents’ dinner, 171 Whole Foods, 64 Wikipedia, 11 will.i.am (William Adams), 128 Williams, Evan, 5–6, 82 Dorsey and

Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence—and How You Can, Too

by Gary Vaynerchuk  · 30 Jan 2018

Only Thing You Need to Give Yourself to Crush It II: Create Your Pillar 6: First, Do This 7: Get Discovered 8: Musical.ly 9: Snapchat 10: Twitter 11: YouTube 12: Facebook 13: Instagram 14: Podcasts 15: Voice-First Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes About the Author Also by Gary Vaynerchuk Copyright About

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an elementary school Career Day staple yet, but kids today know that making videos on YouTube, posting on Instagram, tweeting 280 characters, and snapping on Snapchat is a valid career path and that for some it can even bring fame and fortune. They dream of creating a popular online presence the

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run a massive digital media company with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chattanooga, and London. I’m still engaging people on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and any other platform that catches people’s attention. I’m still invited to speak all over the world, but I also reach millions of

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apps and services.2 Every minute, 65,900 videos and photos are posted on Instagram.3 Over 3 billion snaps are created each day on Snapchat, where over 60 percent of ads are watched with the audio on.4 Consequently, since 2009, brands have tripled the amount of money they spend

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’s all changed. The Internet became the ultimate middleman, allowing every industry to go direct-to-consumer, from music and publishing to taxis and hotels. Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook are the NBC, ABC, and CBS of our day. Your audience is waiting for you. What you need to do is figure

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. What’s imperative is that you are passionate about giving. That’s what Shaun “Shonduras” McBride discovered. Before developing his massively successful personal brand on Snapchat, he sold jewelry online. The guy was a skater and snowboarder; he had little interest in jewelry per se. But after reading Crush It! in

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to quit. His schedule didn’t ease up, though. He just filled those hours with more work, more engagement, and more content creation. He uses Snapchat Stories and Instagram Stories to share behind-the-scenes peeks at projects, and now that he has a showroom, he can easily introduce new products

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Facebook, then jumped onto Twitter. They got away from Facebook, then jumped onto Instagram. They got away from Twitter, then jumped back into Facebook. And Snapchat, too.” Where the attention goes, so goes Andrew Nguyen. Andrew may follow the eyeballs, but he has always marched to his own beat. At seventeen

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could spark a valuable piece of content for my followers. Documenting has liberated me from the pressure of having to create all the time. Use Snapchat, Instagram Stories, YouTube videos, and Facebook Live three, four, five times per day to share the world through your eyes. Let your audience meet your

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a lot of people who ceded ground on Instagram because they were putting all their energy into Twitter and Facebook. The people who laughed at Snapchat should feel pretty foolish now. Every platform is worth some investment. Of course not every one will feel like a good fit, and not every

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a small percentage of musers are refugees from Vine, the defunct Twitter-owned six-second-video platform that was quickly overshadowed by Instagram video and Snapchat, thanks to their slightly longer formats and fun editing tools. The natural question is, of course, how will Musical.ly avoid Vine’s fate? One

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show their friends. And their friends say, “Mom, look at this video. I want to go to this dentist.” Chithra gets a similar response from Snapchat, where she creates content tailored for a slightly older crowd. There she has a weekly series called The Office, modeled after the hit television show

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whitening procedures per day coming in via DM. Not only that, Lew Leone, vice president and general manager of WNYW-FOX 5, saw her on Snapchat and invited her to come to Good Day New York to talk about flossing after an Associated Press report published that it may be unnecessary

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out there using it and other platforms to build her business. That’s awesome! Education and execution are the keys to this new world. 9 Snapchat Despite its 173 million daily active users (DAU), its 10 billion daily video views, its 2.5 billion daily snaps, and the approximately 18 visits

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it enjoys from its DAU per day,1 Snapchat remains another massively underestimated platform. Let me clue you in to an important tell: when the “normals,” that is, the nontech, nonbusiness crowd, are the

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-face. Its founders, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, conceived it as the anti-Facebook, a photo-sharing app for spontaneous, imperfect, and impermanent content. When Snapchat first came on the scene in 2011, the messaging app’s vertical video and left-right swiping had people totally confused. It took most users

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was just the media jumping on a select few cases and running with the attention-grabbing headlines). Today people don’t talk about sexting and Snapchat in the same breath anymore, just as people stopped sneering at Twitter for being the place where attention hogs posted what they ate for lunch

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, and at Facebook for being a place where college students shared their beer-pong pics. Today the Snapchat app allows you to post video as well as photos and has added all kinds of extras, like filters, Geofilters, lenses, emojis, and video-editing

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always hack by taking screenshots of images to save them, but with the addition of Memories, which stores your content on the app’s servers, Snapchat essentially caved in to the human desire to save and revisit the important moments of our lives. The game-changing introduction, however, and the one

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influencers, was Stories, a function that allows you to link a series of videos and photos to tell a longer narrative, visible to the whole Snapchat community for twenty-four hours. It arrived in 2013, and I very publicly pronounced it a dud. You can watch me make my blunder emphatically

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to hit the milestone. Suddenly Twitter, which had seemed like a joke to most people, was mainstream. DJ Khaled created the Ashton Kutcher moment for Snapchat. For over two decades, he built a name for himself in the music industry as a Miami-based DJ, producer, and radio host. Khaled joined

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-up become famous on a platform that serves as a communication tool among tweens and teens? By not overthinking anything. Unpolished content is native to Snapchat, and Khaled just was who he was. Some people might call such banal, spontaneous content dumb and worthless, but that would be like saying that

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dumb behavior. We accept people in their natural habitats, and we understand that every word people utter is not going to be movie script–worthy. Snapchat is simply a channel that captures that unvarnished reality. The only reason some people think what gets shared there is dumb is because it’s

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or politically astute and insightful. Facebook is where we show off our families and vacations. On Instagram we build relationships through images and short videos. Snapchat, though, is where we put our throwaway content. It’s a relief to many because it demands little of either its content creators or users

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unleash their creativity and discover and develop new skills. More than one person has left a corporate job or fledgling startup because playing around on Snapchat led them to create a new art medium or become an influencer, which attracted brands eager to pay them tens of thousands of dollars to

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promote their products in Snapchat Stories. It is staggering how many families are filming their days and building actual fame. It’s especially easy if you’re willing to include

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your children. That’s an extremely personal choice, but babies and cute animals always win, hands down. Kerry Robinson learned that when she used Snapchat to film herself engaging in #salontalk with her baby girl, Jayde, while Jayde took to her mom’s hair with a brush. Her Stories on

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brand is starting to scale. Much of your competition has surely become too reliant and focused on Instagram, which means those potential eyeballs still on Snapchat are looking for more content to feed them. Make sure you’re the one to deliver it. It is so easy for influencers to become

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. As a feature within your Instagram ecosystem, Instagram Stories are almost required to stay within the lines and support the narrative you’ve created there. Snapchat, on the other hand, is an entity unto its own. You can use it to break away from the familiar narrative and show sides of

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simply don’t exist anywhere else. It gives you differentiated content. Whereas all your other channels intertwine with each other to support your pillar content, Snapchat stands alone. That’s an excellent reason in and of itself to take it seriously, even when its DNA makes it a natural draw for

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, often in the most ordinary, banal ways. (This is advice I should take to heart, too; I could do an even better job there myself!) Snapchat 101 Back to the original question: how should grown-ups build their brands and dreams on a communication tool for tweens and teens? Some people

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.” Every single snap needs to leave them with something or else it’s narcissistic. With Instagram Stories, you’re competing with a lot of people. Snapchat has white noise, and whenever I see white noise, I’m intrigued, because that’s the way to stand out. Some of these influencers have

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just been taking pictures for the last five years. Snapchat forces you to show your personality. Are you intelligent, are you funny? What are you bringing to the table other than what you’re wearing

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tricky unless you reach out to people on their other platforms—their e-mail, their Instagram, whatever—and either suggest doing something special together on Snapchat or offer something valuable in return for a shout-out or endorsement on their channel. If you need other influencers to help you grow your

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the Jurasnap Park project that helped launch the career of Shonduras. Pay for a Google Ad that asks something like “Who Should I Follow on Snapchat?” and offers a list of names, with yours at the top. One more suggestion: you could visit The11thsecond.com, a website founded by Cyrene Quiamco

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, also known as CyreneQ, snapchat artist and influencer extraordinaire. She created the website in response to the app’s lack of discovery. There you can submit and check out Snapchatter

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was tremendous. “It felt like one-to-one communication. On a lot of social media, you make a beautiful image, and then people comment below. Snapchat felt more collaborative. We built the stories up together.” Most people would naturally assume that it was Shaun’s artistic abilities that drew him to

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, Michael Platco, who was getting a lot of engagement, and with the aim of mutually growing each one’s fan base, they created the first Snapchat collaboration: a boxing match. Each invited his fans to send his opponent “punches” in the form of snaps doodled with a colorful Kapow! or two

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shoot the images and push them onto Twitter and Instagram. The other way, it occurred to Shaun, was to get someone to write about him. Snapchat didn’t even have a website, so the only way someone could learn more about the platform was through Google. Shonduras intended to be the

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. Concerned that journalists wouldn’t pay attention to a self-promoter, he decided to use his mom’s e-mail address to pitch stories about Snapchat. Every night, he’d ask his assistant in the Philippines to draft personalized e-mails to contacts at the tech trades—Mashable, BuzzFeed, and Business

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a Captain Hook wig.) From there, the branding work took off. Besides reprising his role as brand ambassador several times for Disney, Shaun has created Snapchat content for Red Bull, Xfinity Mobile, Taco Bell, and many other companies. He even got to help promote the 2015 release of Star Wars: The

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the personalities and story lines just as they once did with shows like Seinfeld. Though his YouTube brand deals today outnumber those he does for Snapchat, his Snapchat following remains robust. In addition, he continues to accept speaking engagements, including a TED Talk. He is also working as a consultant helping brands

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your video to dramatic virality, the kind that even the biggest influencers notice. This kind of word of mouth does not exist on Instagram or Snapchat and is enormously beneficial to content creators. Not only that, you can try to spark that word of mouth many, many more times on Twitter

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’t posted anything to Instagram in the six days before the interview because “none of the moments seemed special enough.”1 Meanwhile, the success of Snapchat Stories had proven that people were extremely interested in sharing the raw footage of their lives so long as they knew it wouldn’t stick

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art or put up a piece of throwaway content that would be scrapped like the first draft of your last sales presentation. It scaled fast. Snapchat had already laid all the groundwork in getting people comfortable with the idea of ephemeral content, so there was no learning curve to contend with

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just podcasting. But since I’ve launched my podcast, there have been people that have become the king of Periscope, and then the king of Snapchat, and the king of Instagram. Things that didn’t even exist when I launched my podcast. And while people were saying, “John, I just

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fast and early. Its platforms are the equivalent of yet-to-be-discovered Malibu beachfront property, much like Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010, and Snapchat in 2012. I day-trade attention, and lately I am particularly interested by what people pay attention to during the transitions of their day, especially

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cram everything he wanted to say into 140 characters, so though @1stPhorm has a healthy following, you won’t find Andy himself there. He calls Snapchat an “edifying” tool because it allows the world to see the real-life, behind-the-scenes work of entrepreneurship, though he admits he uses Instagram

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/youtube-1-billion-hours-television. 2. One in every five minutes: Facebook Audience Insights. 3. Every minute: Facebook Audience Insights. 4. Over 3 billion snaps: Snapchat, October 17, 2017. 5. Consequently, since 2009: “CMO Survey: Social Media Spending Falls Short of Expectations,” Duke University Fuqua School of Business, news release, Aug

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still runs VaynerMedia, one of the world’s hottest digital agencies. Gary is also a prolific angel investor and venture capitalist, investing in companies including Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Uber, and Venmo, and cofounding the Vayner/RSE fund, among many other enterprises. He lives in New York City. Discover great authors, exclusive

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

by Nancy Jo Sales  · 23 Feb 2016  · 487pp  · 147,238 words

to it. “ ’Cuse is lit!’ and ‘Wish we went to ’Cuse!’ were among some of the captions featured,” said The Tab. “Everyone add @Syracusesnap on Snapchat. You’re welcome,” someone tweeted. What was causing the excitement? Syracusesnap featured pictures of kids in college dorm rooms drinking and doing drugs, but what

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recoil. “To the guy that put his hands on that girl on Syracusesnap, I hope you get your ass beat,” someone posted. And yet when Snapchat shut the Story down and banned it, sometime the following day, there was a scramble to find out where it had gone—where could it

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“Yeti,” Yakkers posted on threads. “What’s Yeti?” people asked. Yeti - Campus Stories is a mobile app launched in 2015, a sort of hybrid of Snapchat and Yik Yak, seemingly inspired by the trend of salacious Campus Stories. Its page on the Apple iTunes store warns that users must be seventeen

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Violence” and “Frequent / Intense Mature / Suggestive Themes,” as well as drug use. When Yeti was launched, The Daily Dot website called it “an X-Rated Snapchat clone” and predicted it would “[set] the stage for inter-college competition. Which frat rages hardest? Whose spring break is bawdiest? And whose coeds are

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suggested to me, it didn’t seem impossible. The final image on Syracusesnap displayed the Yeti logo—vertical multicolored bars like a television test pattern. “Snapchat is banning our account,” the message over the logo said. “We are moving the story over to YETI CAMPUS STORIES, Available in the Apple/Google

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’s rather tame content with its warnings of sex and violence, Kaplan became emphatic. “Yeti was in no way designed to be an ‘X-Rated Snapchat,’ ” he said. “Yeti is a live feed of EVERYTHING happening on campus.” So who made Syracusesnap? When I talked to Hannah Malach, a Syracuse

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basis run high regardless of race, education, and household income, or whether they are living in urban, rural, or suburban areas. In 2015, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and online pinboards such as Pinterest were the most popular sites for girls. Girls in 2015 were exchanging anywhere from 30 to more than

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gender, looks, and technical expertise.” “It’s a community in which the porn-inspired, ‘drading,’ ” or drunken, “college tweets of Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, go public,” Burleigh wrote, “where a CEO’s history of domestic violence has no repercussions but female executives get fired for tweeting about sexist jokes

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, and employ the “liking” feature, with which users can judge their appearance and, in effect, rate them. When girls post their pictures on Instagram or Snapchat or Facebook, they know they will be judged for their “hotness,” and in a quantifiable way, with numbers of likes. Social media, which gave us

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social media the same way,” said Katie, a student at Barnard. “They think, Oh, how can there be anything wrong here if it’s just Snapchat or Instagram, it’s just a game.” But if this is a game, it’s unlike any other we’ve ever played. And the stakes

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of the middle school at the end of the day. They were staring at Riley’s phone, on which there was a screenshot of a Snapchat from a boy named Zack, asking her for nudes. “I can’t believe him,” fumed Sophia. Kids streamed past them, coming down the steps

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appeared in the Snaps with the girl who’d told him Riley was flirting with other guys. “I was like, Can you stop sending me Snapchats?” Riley said. “And he was like, When you stop being a slut. I got really upset. I didn’t come to school for like

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that sexting is part of the culture of social media; whether or not a girl is sexting, she’s most likely aware of the practice. Snapchat and Kik Messenger, an anonymous instant-messaging service, are two of the apps where kids say they’re most likely to share nudes, as well

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, and now they were stuffed, so they sat down on some couches to check their phones. As they visited their social media accounts, opening their Snapchats and liking and commenting on the Instagram posts of their friends, a procession of mothers and daughters drifted past, all dressed almost identically in Boca

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names like ‘Savage Young Boy.’ ” “They try and be gangster,” Maggie said. “So many thirteen-year-old boys are smoking weed. They’ll go on Snapchat and Instagram and post pictures of them smoking.” “They have house parties and they post like, ‘Bring the alcohol, bring the weed, don’t come

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, Why am I spending my time on this? And yet I keep doing it,” said Melinda. “If I go on my phone to look at Snapchat,” Riley said, “I go on it for like an hour, like a really long time, I lose track.” “The minute I start my homework

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that you’re dating,” said Sophia. “People post about it all the time. Like kissing photos.” “People put pictures of themselves with their boyfriend on Snapchat,” Riley said. “Pictures of, like, a couple kissing, hugging, posing with each other on Instagram,” said Sophia. “And other people will comment, like, ‘relationships goals

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reported an increase in plastic surgery requests from teenagers resulting from patients becoming more focused on their appearance on social media. “Social platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and the iPhone app Selfie.im, which are solely image-based, force patients to hold a microscope up to their own image and often look

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this place where you share pictures and stuff, you make funny captions for pictures; they opened up a chat room and started to chat and Snapchat. It’s creepy to me to think, Well, what if he’s a rapist?” Concerns about kids being approached by predators online have existed

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she’s just not being brought up well. Everybody deserves a second chance.” “Yeah,” said Hannah. They decided they were going to send Alex a Snapchat. They took a picture of themselves making funny faces—“Oh my God, good one!”—and sent it to her phone. They giggled, waiting for a

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this early in my reporting, in 2013, when I was on a New York City bus and started talking to a teenage boy I saw Snapchatting. A girl had sent him a provocative picture of herself (not a nude, just a sultry shot of her face). “Gotta wheel the bitches

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. The other girls listened with slightly strained expressions. I asked them what social media accounts they were on. “I have Facebook, a YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat,” Melissa said, “Vine…” “Path, Skype,” Zoe added. “Tumblr,” said Padma. “I have a Twitter, but I don’t use it except for stalking other people

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respond to you or doesn’t stalk you back, then you’re gonna feel rejected and upset,” Melissa said. “And rejection hurts,” said Padma. “On Snapchat,” Melissa went on, “I hate it when you send a picture of your face to a guy, and you say like, Hey, and they obviously

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kinda scary,” Gabby said, “it’ll be like, Oh, did you see what she posted? Did you see this person’s Snapchat Story?” “If you bring up any person’s Snapchat Story, most likely someone will know what you’re talking about,” said Zoe. “Everything just revolves around these Internet people we

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on the lives of teens, especially girls. Soon after she got her phone, Billie said, she saw her first dick pic. “It was on a Snapchat Story. There are dick pics everywhere.” “I didn’t even know what a dick looked like at that age,” Debby said. “Boys think it’s

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day he wrote, “What are you doing?” “I have to volunteer later at a home for adults with disabilities,” Billie said. “Do you have a Snapchat then?” the boy asked, possibly looking for an exchange of nudes. Billie said, “I blocked him.” “This is my opinion,” Debby said. “We didn’

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was mad. I was being really angry at him. And he starts saying really sexual things to me and he sends me a picture on Snapchat of his dick and he says, Did you miss it? And he says, Do you want to hook up with me? So I asked

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to me. And I’m like, Oh my God. So me and Billie, we imitated the picture and we sent it back to him on Snapchat.” This was the picture they had showed me. The girls giggled. Billie made the same bro-ish duckface from the picture. “So he texts me

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took him back. He’s being so nice to her—he took her on all these crazy dates and everything. He added me back on Snapchat just so I could see all these pictures of them together. There’s pictures of them at the beach and he’s like hugging her

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not just faulting boys—girls do it, too. But think about it. You can have a live chat going on FaceTime and be texting and Snapchatting someone else.” And how did this affect how girls and boys viewed each other? I asked. Billie said, “It reduces respect. ’Cause it’s

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Sally said, “He is a good guy.” She smiled. She had liked him since freshman year, she said. In the spring, she added him on Snapchat—“I was scared, but I did it. But then,” she said, “he didn’t add me back,” so she was scared that he wasn’t

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he’s shy. So I’ll probably have to ask him out. I think I might text him, What are you doing this weekend? Or Snapchat him. I’ll just put it out there, you know? Social media is definitely a good way to ask someone something like that, ’cause you

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day and he opened it up but he didn’t respond. And my thirteen-year-old sister said, Oh, that’s bad, you can’t Snapchat him for the rest of the week unless he does it first! And I’m like, Oh my God, that’s crazy. She said, You

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Blog,” according to the Daily Mail, which noted, “Mr. Michael has more than one million followers on Instagram and is popular on both Facebook and Snapchat.” Michael and O’Neill had apparently dated for a few weeks. O’Neill had perhaps opened herself up to this kind of scrutiny when she

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Ms. O’Neill’s declarations, view her turn against Instagram as just another means of self-promotion.” The Times interviewed an expert, a “researcher at Snapchat” named Nathan Jurgenson, who argued that “intentional construction of our identities is not an activity unique to the online world.” Jurgenson said, “All of identity

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a defense of social media by someone who had an interest in protecting it, as the employee of a social media company (and a company, Snapchat, which was being widely used for the exchanging of nudes among teenagers). It ignored the reams of studies that have been done supporting much of

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from a place of threat.” Kazemi is a twenty-one-year-old Vancouver-based writer and filmmaker, Internet famous for his short film Snapchat: Mudditchgirl91 (first released as a Snapchat Story), about a teenage girl who acts out sexually online and ponders self-mutilation. “Social media is like Scientology,” Kazemi said. “

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If you leave it, you are shunned or disconnected, but if you stay on it, you are normalized and not posing as a threat. Snapchat feels insulted, because she left them. Those girls,” the Nelson twins, “feel catty because it’s like, What makes you any better than us?” And

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placed on the self and the promotion of self, self as a brand. Kazemi experienced a real-life cautionary tale along these lines with his Snapchat film; what he conceived as a sort of exposé of social media, fame culture, and porn was soon absorbed into all those things and,

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he believes, transformed into an example of the very thing he meant to condemn. “Snapchat: Mudditchgirl91 was a social experiment,” Kazemi says. “It was meant to hold up a mirror to a culture obsessed with the way things look. At

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like ‘barely legal’ is considered normal, and they think it’s artistic. It was perfect that a site like Playboy”—which called it “The Weirdest Snapchat Story of All Time”—“exposed the video to millions of viewers, because them sexualizing the situation just proved my point on the huge problem with

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to the hard-core, post–heavy metal music style popularized by Marilyn Manson—“if I got her to pretend to make a Snapchat account and perform a real-time fictional Snapchat Story for her followers, would they be able to tell that something was off? That she was in character? Or would

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are the audience for the meltdowns of female celebrities like Amanda Bynes? “Vice,” the news outlet, “ended up posting about the film on their official Snapchat channel,” Kazemi says, “and the account gained over fifty thousand followers.” Marilyn Manson tweeted, “I have no idea why, but I know I like it

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elephant in the room, but nobody talks about it. I think to sit on your bed for five hours checking your Instagram and Twitter and Snapchat and making sure that you have updated your profile picture—it can make you sick. To always be texting and posting and tweeting twenty-four

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be pictures.” They’d arrived at the hotel and checked in and come straight out to the beach. And now they wanted to send a Snapchat to their friends to announce their arrival. They wanted to Instagram the moment. They posed together, smiling their “we’re having the time of

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over the sand with a roaring belch. “Ewwwwww!” said the boys. “Oh my God!” “Nice one!” “Oh, I’m putting this on the spring break Snapchat Story,” the boy with the camera said. “No, you guys, don’t,” said Taylor. “Seriously,” said Hayley. “That is seriously fucked.” “She’s the

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and her mother didn’t wear hijab. “I wear short sleeves. I can dress however I want.” She said she was on social media—Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram—“but I’m not constantly updating pictures. It’s not like an hourly thing. And actually I hate it. “My school is very

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, but what I’m seeing of the kids of this generation after me, it really saddens me because they are all constantly on their phones, Snapchatting, Instagramming, and some of these are kids less than fourteen years old. “I went to a family dinner two nights ago,” she said, “and

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mom and I have discussed this multiple times. We agree it’s incredibly disrespectful—you’re in the house of God and you’re on Snapchat? What’s worse is that at my mosque, our imam, he has multiple times asked people to put their phones away, and they don’

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now. She was tall and rangy with shoulder-length dark hair and the jaunty air of a female comedian. “He wants to know my Snapchat.” “Tell him your Snapchat,” Ashley said, unimpressed. “Ugh, this other dude won’t leave me alone. I need to find a dude I can say is my

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were all sorority girls, except for Rebecca, though they lived together off-campus rather than in a sorority house. They snapped selfies together, Instagramming and Snapchatting themselves in their “hot” looks. They consulted one another on what they should write as captions. “Glam squad?” “Oh no, that’s so overused.” There

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over and was telling loud stories about her night; the rest of them barely listened. They were all on their phones, checking their texts and Snapchat, Instagram, to see what all their friends had been doing. A box of Insomnia Cookies was passed around. Someone had posted something on Yik Yak

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Weekly. Last modified July 28, 2015. http://www.ew.com/article/2015/07/28/cara-delevingne-awkward-interview. Song, Sandra. “Updated: Inside the Deeply Bizarre Snapchat Movie That Has Even Marilyn Manson Freaked Out.” Paper. Last modified July 22, 2015. http://www.papermag.com/updated-inside-the-deeply-bizarre

The Happiness Effect: How Social Media Is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost

by Donna Freitas  · 13 Jan 2017  · 428pp  · 136,945 words

of a “Girl Thing” 5.Performing for God: Religion On (and Off) Social Media 6.Virtual Playgrounds: The Rise of Yik Yak, the Joys of Snapchat, and Why Anonymity Is Just So Liberating 7.An Acceptable Level of Meanness: The Bullies, the Bullied, and the Problem of Vulnerability 8.So You

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sorority is not willing to take any chances when it comes to its very esteemed, yet very precarious, reputation. “It’s very much the whole Snapchat thing; it doesn’t disappear, there’s a record of it. Yes, after twenty-four hours, [Yaks are] no longer at the bottom of

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for anonymous posts, things get really dark. In the best of circumstances, apps that come with the promise of anonymity and impermanence—like Yik Yak, Snapchat, and the anonymous Twitter feeds and Facebook groups students create for venting, confessing, and other types of honesty not found elsewhere—serve as cathartic forums

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approval and getting “likes” can become a constructive and positive part of one’s self-understanding. Matthew tells me about “My Story,” a feature on Snapchat that compiles photos from a single day, and the Timeline feature on Facebook. Matthew’s reflections intrigue me. “I feel like everybody wants to have

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’m pretty sure there’s a picture or post about almost every big event in my life on Facebook or on Twitter somewhere,” he says. “Snapchat is more of a day-to-day experience [because snaps disappear], but Facebook and Twitter definitely, on some level, become your autobiography.” The Facebook

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“liked” it, shows you that everyone can relate to whatever you’ve just posted. He gave me an example. He once sent a photo via Snapchat that tons of people took screenshots of because they loved it so much and it made them laugh. He told me how much he loved

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students take selfies in class. Another thing I learn from selfie-lovers is that there is a difference between selfies for Facebook and selfies for Snapchat. The difference is permanence, and it is huge. A “disappearing post” can be so much more fun than the ones that stick around and

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like a mirror, he tells me. But when he does take a selfie, he has to decide where it goes: Snapchat? Instagram? Facebook? “I really don’t care what I put on Snapchat,” Jackson says. I could wake up one morning, upload that selfie, and I wouldn’t put that on Instagram

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[the morning selfie] is really more personal.” The same goes for “sleek photos,” which go up on Jackson’s Instagram but not Snapchat. On Facebook or Instagram, Jackson also posts selfies of him doing positive things. Jackson works as a tutor, and this is something he wants to

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type of tutoring,” he explains. If you got to Jackson’s Facebook, you’ll see that he’s involved in community service. “But on my Snapchat,” Jackson tells me, “you wouldn’t even notice that I’m actually involved in community service because I’ll be doing something funny.” The students

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interviewed and surveyed constantly differentiated between permanent platforms and more temporary ones. Many self-proclaimed selfie-haters would later tell me how much they love Snapchat, using it to send seven or eight photos a day of themselves doing silly things. They didn’t count these photos as selfies—maybe because

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tool, it’s those kinds of things. So there’s that facet of it. In terms of a personal account, whether it be Facebook or Snapchat or Instagram, I think it’s, like, someone’s ideal self sometimes. They put too much weight into the way they view themselves, the whole

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same Christian university, I meet Jae. A tall, lanky junior, Jae is quick to laugh and spends a lot of his time on Instagram and Snapchat—like everyone else at his college, he says—but he also likes to go on a Korean social media platform. Jae is in ROTC, which

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they often turn to anonymous platforms, which come with their own set of problems. 6 VIRTUAL PLAYGROUNDS THE RISE OF YIK YAK, THE JOYS OF SNAPCHAT, AND WHY ANONYMITY IS JUST SO LIBERATING I do follow Yik Yak, kind of like a bad soap opera. Gina, junior, private-secular university It

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Instagram, which is infinitely more appealing to students than Facebook, can be stressful because it’s generally attached to your name. Snapchat is a very different story. College students love Snapchat. They love it because their “snaps,” or posts, disappear within seconds. You take a photo, give it a caption, and

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to, you can feel pretty safe that it’s really going to go away just as the app promises. Students express nearly universal adoration of Snapchat. As people explained why they love this app so much, it became clear that college students are longing for a space where they can be

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the future, when potential employers start looking at their online activity. They can rest easy knowing that their Snapchat photos, selfies, and comments will fade away. The very fact that snaps disappear has led Snapchat to become known as the “sexting app.”2 And, yes, people use it for that. But for

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the college students I spoke with, this is an impoverished and limited understanding of Snapchat’s true delights. College students can be silly on Snapchat. They can be ridiculous. They can say dumb things. They can take goofy, ugly, unbecoming photographs and show them to

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Facebook or any other platform that is more “permanent” and attached to their names. Matthew tried to explain the difference between Facebook and Snapchat to me, and why Snapchat is much more fun. Like many students, Matthew goes onto Facebook a lot, but not to post—posting is too time-consuming and

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has become so high-stakes. Mostly, Matthew just scrolls through the feed and lurks, checking out other people’s updates and photos. But Matthew loves Snapchat and goes on it all the time, and unlike with Facebook, on Matthew actually participates. “When I’m bored,” Matthew says, “I’ll snap

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a picture of something random, send it to, like, five people and wait for somebody to respond. [Snapchat] is really simple and fast, and it’s a way I can see what all my friends are up to, especially all my friends back

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It’s almost like I’m there, so it’s a way to share experiences from far away, and it’s so quick and simple.” Snapchat offers its users a way to connect without judgment, a possibility that college students, who feel they are constantly being watched and evaluated, long for

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people can look and see what you’ve been doing the last day or so.” That lack of effort Matthew mentions is another part of Snapchat’s appeal—especially when “crafting” just the right post these days sometimes takes forever. People have to worry about so many things when getting

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posting. Updating social media—the kind that sticks around—can be exhausting and feel like a job. With Snapchat you can just relax and play around. Another thing that’s nice about Snapchat is that it’s one of the only platforms where you don’t have to worry about cultivating an

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much. He explains, “My image on Facebook and Twitter is a lot better than it is to my friends on Snapchat.” By “better,” Matthew means more airbrushed and less himself. Snapchat brings Matthew so much joy because he can just be who he is, however he is at the moment, even if

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becoming. It’s a platform for being “real.” So many students I interviewed told me more or less the same things as Matthew did about Snapchat. After hearing one student after another talk about the importance of always appearing happy and positive, and the concern about possible repercussions if they do

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professionalization of Facebook and the “branding” of one’s name on certain social media platforms and the rise in popularity of apps like Snapchat and Yik Yak. That Snapchat promises a kind of “no repercussions” experience is absolutely beguiling to everyone who feels burdened by the pressure to appear perfect everywhere else

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. Snapchat, I think, provides a kind of catharsis. It’s the place where everyone lets off steam and celebrates imperfection. Of course, the speed with app

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rises and fall in popularity today is so meteoric, by the time this book comes out Snapchat may have already faded into oblivion. But I have no doubt that the “professionalization” of social media is only going to get more intense as

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keep looking for places that allow them to be silly, to be ridiculous, and to have a little fun on social media, whether it’s Snapchat or some other app that allows disappearing posts or anonymity. Only by ditching their real names, it seems, can young people truly be themselves online

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can express their emotions without fear of dire consequences. It’s no wonder they crave anonymity and freedom from responsibility. Apps like Yik Yak and Snapchat are offering college students a much-needed playground. They may be imperfect vehicles for this desire, but at the moment it’s all students have

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. Today there is the physical college campus, and there is the virtual one. In the virtual one, extremes and intolerance seem to reign. And whereas Snapchat is certainly the kinder, gentler (and funnier) option for young adults today, the rise of Yik Yak should concern everyone. Students certainly worry about it

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Mae explains to me that about six months earlier she had shut down all her social media accounts. She uses Snapchat occasionally to send pictures to friends, but she doesn’t put Snapchat in the same category as public platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Mae feels that she has more control on

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her boyfriend troubles on me. I tell her not to worry, and we begin discussing her online life. At the moment she’s on Facebook, Snapchat, and Yik Yak. Like so many other students, Hailey talks about the importance of posting only happy, funny things. “I want to show people that

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one essay question in the online survey, many more students chose to comment generally about all online dating apps, which include Tinder, Grindr, and even Snapchat (in some students’ opinions), without naming Tinder specifically. In fact, this optional essay question was one of the most popular in the entire survey. What

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far, but it’s definitely something that’s a lot more common now than I feel like it was, especially with smartphones, especially things like Snapchat, where for ten seconds, you can see a photo, you know? And I know people do that… . But it’s definitely a lot more

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have, like front-facing cameras and FaceTime.” The idea that “sexting happens” just because we have the “tools” for it—front-facing cameras, apps like Snapchat, FaceTime—is the same argument a number of students made when talking about selfies. Technology makes sexting easy, so of course everyone does it. One

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incredibly fun person to interview—lively, hilarious at times, very intelligent and thoughtful. He’s on just about every social media platform imaginable—Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat, Vine, Tinder, Instagram, Facebook. He has a girlfriend back home, and when I ask him what sorts of things make him happy, he replies, “Too

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which he might get judged unfairly. He sees social media a just another outlet to express himself. Jeremy enjoys selfies, he tells me, especially on Snapchat. But he prefers texting most of all because it’s so private. Then I ask Jeremy what he thinks of sexting. “I don’t really

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he begins. “Social media is way different now than it was, than it would be if it was presented a couple years ago. I think Snapchat and things like Tinder for sexting are more common in my generation, and I think we know how to use it. I mean, obviously not

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my generation knows how to sext in a responsible way, and they don’t just send things out to random people. It’s kinda like Snapchat is—Snapchat is connected to your contacts, so I know the people I’m sending it to. And Tinder, Tinder’s kind of more of, like

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can end up feeling isolated and alone as a result. Katie has quit her various social media accounts in the past. She got rid of Snapchat at one point, though then she felt left out because her friends were constantly “snapping” each other, and she wouldn’t know what was

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too—or at least filter what they post to the point that it reflects only one sliver of who they really are. The popularity of Snapchat and Yik Yak embodies students’ desire for honesty and authenticity on social media, yet they are learning that true authenticity requires anonymity, or at least

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becoming job-ready, often by doing a whole host of activities that prove they are superachieving. That young adults are finding outlets for play in Snapchat and Yik Yak is helpful, even though both platforms feature their share of problematic and risky behavior. But the fact that these are fast becoming

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relationships in the process. Take the update that now tells Facebook users whether and exactly when someone has read a message. Or the one on Snapchat that suddenly ranked your friends in order of importance based on how often you “snapped” them. These “slight” changes had huge emotional and personal consequences

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(or whether) they opened messages or communicated with their friends and significant others. They felt toyed with and betrayed by the people behind Facebook and Snapchat. Right now, we are still operating in a place where social media and our devices are dominating us and our behaviors, far more so they

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from Each Other (Turkle), 305n2 anonymity, 124–42. See also specific social media sites authenticity/inauthenticity, 124–31, 136–7, 321n5 disappearance of posts on Snapchat, 131–5 discarding of identities, 127–8 discrimination and, 128, 139 honesty and, 7–8 illegal activity and suspension of, 135–6, 139 negativity and

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, 25–8, 38–9 Facebook official status, 189–91, 324n3 happiness effect and, xiii–xvii, 3–9 religious expression and, 112 selfie generation and, 90 Snapchat and, 132–4, 258 Yik Yak and, 258 being liked. See comparison trap, and likes/retweets bikini pictures, 55–6 Bonds-Raacke, Jennifer, 304n10 boyd

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trap, and likes/retweets cathartic forums on, 12 as CNN of envy, 39 comparison to Instagram, 109, 131, 178 comparison to LiveJournal, 127 comparison to Snapchat, 132–4 deactivation vs. deletion of accounts, 179 message update feature, 280–1 100 likes benchmark, 34 ranking of photos/posts, 36 reaction buttons, 306n5

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of business jargon, 90–1 use of differing platforms for selfies, 85, 86 Sex and the Soul (Freitas), 277, 280 sexting, 192–208. See also Snapchat age-appropriateness of, 204–5 attachment style and, 325n3 ethics of, 193–5 by minors, 11, 303n5, 325n3 negative views on, 207–8 nude photos

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as necessity, 9 remembering life before, 221–5 summary conclusion, 228–30 unplugging forever, 226–8 use of relational language for, 223 Smith, Christian, 277 Snapchat, 8 authenticity/inauthenticity, 132–4, 258 as catharsis, 134 comparison to Facebook, 132–4 disappearing posts on, 131–5 My Story feature, 35, 133 as

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time

by George Berkowski  · 3 Sep 2014  · 468pp  · 124,573 words

-photography app), Waze (the mapping and social-traffic app), Clash of Clans (the ridiculously popular game from Supercell), Candy Crush (the ‘sweet’ game from King), Snapchat (the messaging app where your messages disappear after seconds), Flipboard (the app-based social magazine) and Tango (yet another messaging app). This list is growing

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created an app whereby you could share annotated photos with your friends – but, once read, the messages would disappear for ever. The app is called Snapchat. A lot of people dismissed the idea – but then something happened. Teenagers found the idea brilliant. Suddenly they could be themselves, share whatever photos they

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just a couple of years the app attracted millions of users sending hundreds of millions of snaps every day. It’s become so popular that Snapchat turned down acquisition offers of $3 billion from Facebook and Google, according to the Wall Street Journal.3 We’ll talk more about

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propositions here. Asian apps – such as Line and WeChat – have created massive multi-hundred-million user bases here. And in just a couple of years Snapchat turned messaging on its head – and turned down billion-dollar buyout offers – by making messages more interactive (you can scribble and comment on your photos

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offers an experience that hits a nerve – a latent psychological or behavioural need (I want to be anonymous with my messages) – then it explodes. If Snapchat can disrupt the market, then clearly so can others. VOICE-CALL-RELATED, 22 TIMES PER DAY: Mobile carriers still carry the vast majority of calls

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class: an app ‘where friends could share photos that would disappear – forever – in a matter of seconds’. That app, as we saw earlier, was called Snapchat. It was launched in September 2011 in Evan’s dad’s living room.23 ‘Everyone said, “That is a terrible idea,”’ Spiegel remembers. ‘Not only

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said, but the only people who do will use it for sexting.’ By 28 November 2012, users had shared more than a billion photos on Snapchat. By December 2012 it was being used 30 million times a day, with users sending more than 20 million photos per day. In late 2013

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of managing a digital version of themselves,’ says Spiegel. ‘It’s taken all of the fun out of communicating. The main reason that people use Snapchat is that the content is so much better. It’s funny to see your friend when they just woke up in the morning.’ And that

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is how Snapchat disrupted communications. It has made an entire generation – a much younger one – feel liberated again. While the mainstream media continue to struggle with this concept

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, the app attracts masses of users – and keeps driving eye-popping numbers month after month. You could argue that Snapchat is just a feature. But, goddamn, it’s a great feature! It’s amusing that by June 2013 this company was valued at over $800

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uploaded to Facebook.28 In the true spirit of a lean startup, at the end of 2013 the team was still only around 40 people. Snapchat is still a story in progress. But the lessons are clear: it focused on a universal need, messaging, mixed it up with a true innovation

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were very much beholden to our investors. Trust me when I say it’s no fun being in that position. ‘But what about Instagram and Snapchat?’ I hear you cry! While it is indeed possible to build an app with bucketloads of users and no revenue to speak of, it’s

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– though very tough – strategy. Players using this model are all about getting big, fast – and then being as sticky as possible. Our friends Instagram and Snapchat fall into this group. Flipboard represents the flipside that actively targeted big-ticket advertising from the get-go – and has been able to deliver. These

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’s first iOS engineer, building the first Square iPhone and iPad apps.8 So the team brought together business, software and hardware from Day One. SNAPCHAT. You meet great friends in university, and that’s where Evan Spiegel met Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown. All three were Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers

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university they worked together on an app called Picaboo. Later, Evan and Bobby incorporated a new company, and created a new app under the name Snapchat. Reggie was not part of the new venture. The story sounds rather reminiscent of the Winklevoss twins, who launched ConnectU9 – a social networking site for

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Facebook without the twins’ involvement. In any case, Bobby Murphy brought a strong engineering background to the table, and now serves as the CTO of Snapchat. Evan, on the other hand, possessed more product-development and business skills and is the CEO. FLIPBOARD. The founders of Flipboard, Evan Doll and Mike

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factors that you need to consider when coming up with a name: • Is your name short, catchy and memorable? Hailo is about hailing a taxi. Snapchat is about chatting, rapidly. Waze is about finding the best ways through traffic. • Is your name distinctive? Uber meant little until it became your on

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with just an iOS version of its app (though the successful launch of its Android app did help seal with the deal with Facebook). Similarly, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Hailo and Angry Birds all launched on iOS first. They then focused maniacally on making one platform successful – before undertaking the additional effort and

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millions of dollars through them. A large part of their ongoing success is because of their design. So download all the current billion-dollar apps – Snapchat, Flipboard, Angry Birds, Puzzle and Dragons, Uber, Candy Crush Saga, Instagram, Square, Waze, WhatsApp, Viber, Tango, Pandora and, of course, Hailo. Make sure you’re

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-one priority. WhatsApp is arguably a rather spartan app, and not super-pretty, but it’s damn intuitive, has great performance and always works. Similarly, Snapchat has a simple and uncluttered interface, and, despite requiring you to learn a new behaviour to view a snap (press and hold to view the

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at some examples, and see what some apps have been able to achieve. At this seed stage Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, the founders of Snapchat, were still living at home. They were a team of two. They were straight out of college with zero experience. They hacked together their app

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they would love it. And it actively didn’t care about the rest (the company is worth more than $7 billion). Snapchat has been able to do something similar. Snapchat is a simple concept – messages that disappear after ten seconds. You either get it or you don’t. People who get it

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, and rant about teens using it for sexting. Both groups of people generate massive interest and PR, and that has led to huge adoption. If Snapchat were to placate the naysayers, and change the app to make it more attractive to everyone, it would lose a huge chunk of its organic

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used as user-acquisition channels for other apps, but, as they keep increasing their reach, this will be a monetisation for the likes of WhatsApp, Snapchat, WeChat (China), Line and even Skype. In terms of local advertising, it’s also worth exploring what you can do with players such as Groupon

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stats under the noses of companies with ready-to-plug-in monetisation engines (specifically advertising platforms), such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo!. Our friends Waze, Snapchat and Instagram all went down this route. It’s not the most reliable strategy, but, if your app happens to be in the right spot

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start seeing bigger and bigger benefits, so you have an incentive to share it. Inherent virality is super-strong with communications-type products such as Snapchat and WhatsApp. Getting the very first users on board is tricky, because without users the network does not yet have value, so it needs to

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you’re actually very close to K = 1 and that a few product improvements will push you over the edge and ignite explosive user growth. Snapchat is one app that cracked the formula. With no advertising, just very heavy user engagement, it was able to grow from zero users to tens

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just a couple of years. If you look at its level of growth in terms of photos shared in June 2013, you’ll see that Snapchat users were sharing 200 million snaps per day,5 that’s up from 150 million per day in April 2013,6 and up from 50

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about things they care about. People don’t mind – in fact they can even get excited – when you alert them to something relevant and interesting. Snapchat alerts me when a friend joins the app; Facebook tells me when I get a friend request or a good friend posts something interesting. Remember

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like crazy, and may well set its sights on the West. Tencent – the company that owns QZone and QQ – is rumoured to have invested in Snapchat.12 So it’s worth remembering: the sun rises in the East. Chapter 26 Growth is a Bitch So far this section has been all

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to be in the 3–20 per cent range (think Hailo, Uber or Square). And, if you’re in an ‘audience-building’ game (such as Snapchat or Instagram), you won’t have any revenues at all. So in most cases – to keep the momentum and grow bigger, faster – it’s now

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times or more. Let’s have a look at what our friendly Billion-Dollar App Club members were doing when they were at this stage. SNAPCHAT. These guys are the exact opposite of the self-sufficient WhatsApp. At this stage their app had no revenue stream and their massive growth was

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in the gaming and messaging sectors – are still small at this stage. WhatsApp, for example, hit a $1 billion valuation with 35–40 employees and Snapchat reached $3 billion with a team of just 35 people.2 Other more operationally heavy apps such as Square and Uber are already going to

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led to their business increasing more than tenfold in valuation from 2012 to 2013. Fresh off the back of a major funding round in 2013, Snapchat picked up a pretty seasoned COO, Emily White.3 Previously she was the executive who was leading Facebook’s Instagram advertising programme and before that

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. They make development teams happier. • Invest in people, not infrastructure. Hold out for exceptional engineers, the 10x employees, the ones who deliver above and beyond. Snapchat managed to build a platform that sends 400 million snaps per day1 with a team of 35 people; WhatsApp handled 18 billion messages on New

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in history has grown faster. Given the app’s momentum it could become a massive threat for Facebook, which is already seeing other apps (like Snapchat) stealing users’ attention. So at an acquisition price that represented almost 10 per cent of Facebook’s market capitalisation, perhaps it was a small price

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another app or website. And that means that someone’s precious advertising dollars are going to decrease. I’ve talked about the explosive growth of Snapchat before – Facebook tried to acquire the app for $1 billion,14 but was flatly turned down. Facebook tried again in November 2013, this time offering

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reported $3 billion.15 It was flatly rejected again. Facebook’s business is monetising our attention via advertising – and increasingly that’s mobile advertising. With Snapchat usage of 150 million16 snaps (shared photos or messages) per day eclipsing that of Instagram at 40 million photos daily, and approaching the 300 million

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photos shared on Facebook daily, Facebook could be in big trouble. It’s only a matter of time before Snapchat traffic eclipses that of Facebook. And that’s going to be a huge issue. Yahoo! is following precisely the same strategy as Facebook, and in

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on TechCrunch.com, 28 June 2013, TechCrunch.com/2013/06/28/ foundation-evan-williams-on-hatching-big-ideas/. 3 Evelyn M. Rusli and Douglas MacMillan, ‘Snapchat Spurned $3 Billion Acquisitions Offer from Facebook’, blog post on WSJ.com, 13 November 2013, blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/11/13

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2013/04/29/chat-apps-have-overtaken-sms-by-message-volume/. 22 Interview with Jan Koum, 20 January 2014, op. cit. 23 J. J. Colao, ‘Snapchat: The Biggest No-Revenue Mobile App Since Instagram’, article on Forbes.com, 27 November 2012, www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/11/27

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million-round-led-by-ivp-now-at-200-million-daily-snaps/. 26 ‘Recent Additions to Team Snapchat’, blog post on Snapchat.com, 24 June 2013, blog.snapchat.com/post/53763657196/recent-additions-to-team-snapchat. 27 Mike Isaac, ‘Snapchat Now Boasts More Than 150 Million Photos Taken Daily’, article on AllThingsD.com, 16 April 2013

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for Pirates’, presented to Wildfire Interactive, May 2012, slide 73, www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-4-pirates-wildfire-interactive-may-2012. 5 Mike Isaac, ‘Snapchat Closes $60 Million Round Led by IVP, Now at 200 Million Daily Snaps’, article on AllThingsD.com, 24 June 2013, allthingsd.com/20130624

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v=mZsvJUa9FpI. 10 Ibid. 11 Data retrieved from www.cnnic.net.cn/hlwfzyj/hlwxzbg/hlwtjbg/201401/P020140116395418429515.pdf. 12 Evelyn M. Rusli and Douglas MacMillan, ‘Snapchat Spurned $3 Billion Acquisitions Offer from Facebook’, blog post on WSJ.com, 13 November 2013, blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/11/13

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Times Between Venture Capital rounds’, SiSense.com, www.crunchbase.sisense.com/#!latest-tech-trends/cy9t. 2 http://pitchbook.com/1Q_2014.html. 3 Alexia Tsotsis, ‘Snapchat Snaps Up a $80M Series B Led by IVP at an $800 Million Valuation’, article on TechCrunch.com, 22 June 2013, TechCrunch.com/2013/06

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/22/source-snapchat-snaps-up-80m-from-ivpat-a-800m-valuation/. 4 Alexia Tsotsis, ‘Uber Hires European Kees Koolen at COO, To Help It Scale Globally’, article on

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on CNN.com, 1 June 2011, finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/01/but-does-it-scale/. 2 J. J. Colao, ‘The Inside Story of Snapchat: The World’s Hottest App or A $3 Billion Disappearing Act?’, article for Forbes, 20 January 2014, www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2014/01/06

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April 2013, www.rovio.com/en/mobile-news/284/rovio-entertainment-reports-2012-financial-results. Chapter 32: Scaling Product Development and Engineering 1 Billy Gallagher, ‘Snapchat Now Sees 350M Photos Shared Daily, Up From 200M in June’, article on TechCrunch.com, 9 September 2013, TechCrunch.com/2013/09/09

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, 51, 76–80, 90, 117 name 110 ‘No-Meeting Wednesday’ 376 product development 187 profit per employee 403 revenue per employee 401 scaling 336 and Snapchat 57 staff 339, 362, 363, 398, 401, 403 and virality 281 WhatsApp purchase 42, 54–6, 416–17, 417 zero-user-acquisition cost 278 and

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meetings 381–2 mission 404, 408–9 and the OKR framework 310 profit per employee 403, 405 revenue per employee 401, 405 scaling 332 and Snapchat 57 and source attribution 228–9 staff 339, 340, 361–2, 366, 401, 403, 404–5, 412 Thank God It’s Friday (TGIF) meetings 311

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Skype app 7, 46, 111, 200–1, 226, 357, 419 Sleep Cycle app 48 Smartling 297 smartwatches 7, 38–9 SMS see Short Message Service Snapchat app 6, 43, 46, 56–7, 88, 89, 223, 226, 416, 418 cofounders 104–5 design 131 funding 152–3, 307, 320 name 107

Facebook: The Inside Story

by Steven Levy  · 25 Feb 2020  · 706pp  · 202,591 words

in decades to come. This and a few other features—like a nonintuitive interface that anyone over twenty-one had difficulty understanding—made the app, Snapchat, a love object for young people. Its co-founder CEO looked to be a rising star. Evan Spiegel grew up privileged, his father a successful

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’s suit against Facebook, with a similar outcome—a lucrative settlement for the permanently exiled co-founder.) But by early 2012, the app, now called Snapchat, was beginning to take off. Its refreshing ephemerality made it addictive and intimate: without the weight of knowing you were establishing a permanent record, you

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could be silly, or unload a secret. (You could also send a nude selfie, but that aspect was always overestimated.) Snapchat’s success drew attention. “When Snapchat started out, I thought it seemed trivial—I was wrong,” Chamath Palihapitiya, now a venture capitalist, gushed to BusinessWeek. “At worst they

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are the next-generation MTV. At best they are the next-generation Viacom.” So it was probably inevitable that Mark Zuckerberg would want to own Snapchat. On November 28, 2012, he emailed Spiegel with a baited hook. “Hey, Evan,” he wrote, “I’m a big fan of what you’re doing

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with Snapchat. I’d love to meet you and hear your vision about what you’re thinking about it sometime. If you’re up for it, let

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HQ one afternoon.” The casual tone masked the seriousness and careful planning that had gone into the overture. Just as Zuckerberg had concluded with Instagram, Snapchat was a threat that would best be neutralized if he owned it. Then he could leverage Facebook’s assets to make it grow more quickly

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Facebook’s product sense. At the meeting, Zuckerberg touted the benefits that would come from a merger. It would allow Spiegel and Murphy to grow Snapchat much more quickly with the rocket fuel of Facebook’s infrastructure and expertise at global scaling. Facebook would take care of the annoying stuff, allowing

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bonuses that vested over time. That was the carrot. Zuckerberg also had a stick. He shared that Facebook was working on a project the two Snapchat founders might be interested in seeing—a chat feature with disappearing messages! He said he was thinking of calling it Poke. The

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Snapchat founders turned him down. On December 21, Zuckerberg sent a message to Spiegel. “I hope you enjoy Poke,” he wrote. That was the entire email.

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was a failure. So in 2011, Facebook bought Foursquare’s main independent competitor, Gowalla. Spiegel and Murphy felt that Poke was a pale imitation of Snapchat, and laughed it off. Perhaps they felt a little queasy when immediately after launch, Poke reached number one in Apple’s App Store. But they

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. Not only was Poke a failure for Facebook, but it was a boon for Snapchat. It had legitimized Snapchat’s product vision. Snapchat kept growing, making it even more attractive to Zuckerberg. In 2013, he resumed his hunt, visiting Snapchat’s Venice Beach headquarters with his chief dealmaker, Amid Zoufonoun, in tow. He was

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Spiegel’s mind. But Zuckerberg kept pushing. In May 2013, Zuckerberg wrote an email outlining all the great things that would happen if Snapchat joined the Facebook family. If Snapchat sold to Facebook, he said, Facebook had a playbook to raise the user base to a billion people. There were private APIs

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that Facebook didn’t share with developers. What’s more, Zuckerberg wooed Spiegel personally with promises that the younger entrepreneur not only would run Snapchat with some degree of autonomy but would have an opportunity to make an impact on Facebook itself. So even though you’ll spend your time

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on Snapchat it would be fun to work together closely to figure out how Facebook should evolve as well. I have no doubt you could play a

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broader leadership role over time in addition to your leadership on Snapchat. On top of all this, I think it would just be personally fun to work together and build a deeper relationship. I’ve enjoyed the

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less to their investors. The offer was so large that Spiegel and Murphy had to give it serious consideration. Ultimately Spiegel didn’t feel that Snapchat would thrive in Facebook’s culture. Though Facebook had impressively emerged a survivor in its move to mobile, in Spiegel’s view the company still

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wasn’t losing sleep over Facebook copying him anymore: Zuckerberg’s Poke debacle had convinced him that Facebook was lame when it tried to emulate Snapchat. Spiegel was underestimating Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe he never heard Zuckerberg explain he never makes the same mistake twice. In the case of Poke, the mistake

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activity of thousands of users. The Growth team would study the data carefully, and post results in their regular meetings. Onavo paid special attention to Snapchat. Evan Spiegel’s company had security features to block intruders, but according to one Facebook executive, Onavo used a “man-in-the-middle” attack to

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get past the wall and gather data. Snapchat discovered this and put in protections to thwart the intrusions. With Onavo, a Facebook executive confirmed to me, the company was “able to inject code

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into Snap and could see how people were actually using the product internally.” (According to The Wall Street Journal, Snapchat would add this episode to a file it kept of Facebook’s actions, calling it “Project Voldemort,” after the Harry Potter villain whose name cannot

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the company. A couple of days after that, Zuckerberg sent his pitch email, with unmistakable similarities to the ones he had sent to Instagram and Snapchat, and had just sent to WhatsApp. Sure, you will do well on your own, it essentially said, but we will fuel your rapid growth, recruit

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a peacetime CEO. (This was a debatable self-definition for the Cicero-quoting leader who went into lockdown mode to thwart perceived challenges from Google, Snapchat, and Twitter.) He told the group to hereafter consider him a wartime CEO. He emphasized one shift in particular. Horowitz put it this way: “Peacetime

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successful feature that year, one that would change Facebook forever. It would come from, of all places, Snapchat. A few months after turning down Zuckerberg for good in 2013, Evan Spiegel realized that Snapchat had a piece missing. Sometimes people would snap a picture or a video and want to send it

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to a bunch of their friends. To do that on Snapchat’s one-to-one service, they’d have to do it

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serially, starting over again for each friend. How could Snapchat let people tell their daily stories to all their friends while maintaining the ephemeral spirit of the app? “We really felt like that needed to

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’s answer was a feature that allowed its users to pictographically share the fun stories of their day, beginning to end. The defining feature of Snapchat—its impermanence—was even more valuable when users were sharing something to a group of friends as opposed to just one buddy. “There’s something

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used it. “Like, literally no one had any idea what it was for,” he says. “What is this Stories thing?” Spiegel did not panic. When Snapchat itself first launched, it had been a flop. “That’s always the challenge with new ideas,” he says. “It takes time for people to change

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take the satisfying trajectory of an S-curve. Facebook noticed. But this time it was not Mark Zuckerberg who would be trying to copy a Snapchat product. It would be Kevin Systrom. And that would be very bad news for Evan Spiegel. Systrom has never denied that his Instagram Stories feature

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is essentially the same idea as the original Snapchat product. But he resists the idea that his team simply swiped someone else’s concept and slapped it onto Instagram. “You can view it one

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, goofy things with their closest friends where they are not going to be judged,” says Systrom, sounding a lot like Evan Spiegel. Systrom concedes that Snapchat filled that gap first, but now Instagram needed to fill it, too. “It was part of our ecosystem that we just left open,” says Systrom

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] share the silly moments throughout their day, people would embrace that.” Instagram treated the project with the highest priority, and soon had its version of Snapchat’s idea. Then there was the question of what to call the feature. Everyone thought of it as just “stories.” Which was what

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Snapchat already was calling its product. “We started realizing that there’s no reason to call it anything different,” says Kevin Weil, Instagram’s head of

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engineering at the time. “Let’s just embrace it. This is going to be a common format for lots of apps and services, not just Snapchat and Instagram. So we’ll call it a story. The same way they have.” Instagram was so confident—or perhaps needed the product to work

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were cheeseburgers dropped onto a desert island. “I didn’t realize how much we had created this vacuum to be filled,” says Systrom. (Or maybe Snapchat had trained them.) In a way, Instagram had been failing users by evolving into a showcase for celebrities and influencers. The world of Instagram had

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’t want to show people forever,” Systrom told me in 2017. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel refused to comment on the blatant appropriation of his idea. (Snapchat had shortened its name in 2016.) His subordinates, though, were apoplectic. “It was like a bombshell going off,” says a Snap executive at the time

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, Daniels left as well. Zuckerberg replaced him with another executive who’d been in the birthday photo, Will Cathcart. * * * • • • STORIES, WHICH INSTAGRAM had taken from Snapchat, were such a success that Zuckerberg initiated a heist of his own—Zuckerberg announced internally that Facebook, the Blue app, was going to add its

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15, 2011. a review from the FTC: Josh Kosman, “Facebook Boasted of Buying Instagram to Kill the Competition: Sources,” New York Post, February 26, 2019. Snapchat: In addition to interviews, I drew on Billy Gallagher’s definitive book, How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars (St. Martin’s Press, 2018). Also

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valuable was Sarah Frier and Max Chafkin, “How Snapchat Built a Business by Confusing Olds,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, March 17, 2016; J. J. Coloa, “The Inside Story of Snapchat: World’s Hottest App or a $3 Billion Disappearing Act?” Forbes, January 6, 2014; and Sarah

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Frier, “Nobody Trusts Facebook, Twitter Is a Hot Mess, What Is Snapchat Doing?” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, August 22, 2018. “When Snapchat started out”: Brad Stone and Sarah Frier, “Evan

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Spiegel Reveals Plan to Turn Snapchat into a Real Business,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, May 16, 2015. he emailed Spiegel: Alyson Shontell, “How

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Snapchat’s CEO Got Mark Zuckerberg to Fly to LA for a Private Meeting,” Business Insider, January 6, 2014. “I hope you enjoy Poke”: Gallagher, How

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by Billy Gallagher, How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars (St. Martin’s Press, 2018). “I cannot stand Facebook”: “Miranda Kerr ‘Appalled’ by Facebook ‘Stealing Snapchat’s Ideas,’” Telegraph, February 7, 2017. “Respect for your privacy”: “Setting the Record Straight,” WhatsApp blog, March 17, 2004. “I think everyone was gambling”: Parmy

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, 271, 409, 412 and Like button, 206, 402–4, 416 in mobile Facebook via Onavo, 315–17, 323, 483–84 and Six4Three lawsuit, 465 on Snapchat use, 316–17 sources of data, 223–24 and Synapse, 40 and trust of users in FB, 464–65 and WhatsApp, 502–3 Data Science

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move to Facebook, 210–11 and People You May Know (PYMK), 225, 226 and privacy defaults, 267 role of, in FB, 194, 211, 212 on Snapchat, 308 and values initiative, 239 and Zuckerberg, 209–10 Pandemic. See advertising Parakey, 276 Parakilas, Sandy, 242, 270 Parker, Sean background of, 79 and business

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–41 Slee, Mark, 217, 259–60, 261 Slide, 152, 159–61, 164 slogans used at Facebook, 241–43 smartphone, Facebook, 284–87 Smith, Ben, 390 Snapchat, 307–9, 316–17, 496–99 Snowden, Edward, 501 social advertising, 180–81, 183, 185 social graph, 156–57. See also Open Graph Social Network

Collaborative Society

by Dariusz Jemielniak and Aleksandra Przegalinska  · 18 Feb 2020  · 187pp  · 50,083 words

turn our discussion to how users reposition online platforms for media sharing or dating according to the needs of collaborative society, looking specifically at Instagram, Snapchat, and Tinder tools for cooperation. Thus, we show that collaboration is a default human orientation, further enabled and amplified by online platforms. In our ninth

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from adult supervision and get things done: exchange ideas, prepare homework, and organize other projects.5 Other studies reveal that young people use Facebook and Snapchat not only to stay up to date with peers and to participate in peer culture, but also to engage in political activism.6,7,8

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without them. It has also become an inspiration for many other MMORPG-based building games (MMORPG stands for “massively multiplayer online role-playing game). Instagram, Snapchat, and Tinder through the Lens of Collaboration Let’s leave our virtual-world exploration behind and focus on the current social media landscape.27 Today

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. Whereas Instagram recommends to its users a number of other users that they might want to follow, Snapchat was and still is primarily designed for interacting with a smaller group of friends. Nonetheless, Snapchat gradually started to add more collaborative tools to allow users to post their photos and videos to custom

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story threads. With Custom Stories, as Snapchat calls them, users can add friends to a chosen story by selecting people

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from their contacts or by inviting users in a specified radius via Snapchat’s geofencing feature. In the press release announcing the new story options

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, Snapchat claimed that they were “perfect for a trip, a birthday party, or a new baby story just for the

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; if a story has not been updated or added to within a 24-hour period, it disappears in typical Snapchat manner. Teams working remotely from different locales and time zones have discovered Snapchat as an internal communications tool in addition to their existing software stack. Today, when we think about professional collaborative

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management apps and tools), or Hackpad (real-time collaborative text editing), to mention just a few. Although professional software stacks for internal communications are impressive, Snapchat attempts to compete by introducing a welcome, genuine human connection to relationships with other team members that surpasses an email exchange or a Skype call

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of its content, no one expects a high production value, which additionally fosters collaboration and inclusivity. Communication on Snapchat is instant and personal, even when used as a recruiting tool.33,34 Although Snapchat is highly popular and boasts 100 million daily users who spend about 25 to 30 minutes on the

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site, it has so far avoided the kind of saturation that we see on Facebook and Twitter. Snapchat has thus created a less public medium, yet one that allows users to seamlessly maintain multiple relationships. It claims to have the personal aspect of

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reach of Facebook, the visual aspect of Instagram, and the real-time aspect of the live-streaming app Periscope. While tackling a project in teams, Snapchat allows for a gamified experience of working and sending feedback in real time. In the words of one satisfied remote team member: “You can go

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from ‘fix it’ to ‘fixed’ in a matter of seconds. Boom.”35 Users also use Snapchat for documenting customer visits. When a co-founder of a company is away from headquarters or the team is geographically dispersed, founder “walks” can keep

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go for a walk to go through what’s on the other person’s mind and snap back their replies.” Apparently, many teams also use Snapchat to keep fit, which takes us back to the ideas in our chapter on collaborative gadgets. As yet another pro

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boasts, “Spearheaded by Alberto “Muscles” Nodale, Close.io has turned into a team that gets excited about sweating. Through Snapchat, we send each other pep talks and gym guilt.”36 Nevertheless, Snapchat was not meant to be an internal communications tool. The platform does not guarantee that employees will adopt it: not

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everyone wants to be a part of the Snapchat community, and not everyone knows how to become one. Despite some collaboration

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-friendly features, Snapchat mainly orients itself to reporting what has been done and does not fuel collaborative tasks, and the structural

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limitations of its information sharing inhibit its future potential as a communications tool. More significantly, the financial future of Snapchat and the faith in its business model remain shaky; lack of innovation, poor advertising, and competition from Instagram (owned by Facebook since 2012) contributed to

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plunging stock prices in fall 2018.37,38 Given those factors, it is hard to foresee if Snapchat will become a more mainstream collaborative platform. As we write, it seems like Snapchat is struggling to find itself a viable future. On the other hand though, some of its features and

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and Social Media (AAII Press, 2014), 595–598. 31. J. Phua, S. V, Jin, and J. J. Kim, “Gratifications of Using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat to Follow Brands: The Moderating Effect of Social Comparison, Trust, Tie Strength, and Network Homophily on Brand Identification, Brand Engagement, Brand Commitment, and Membership Intention

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34 (2017): 412–424. 32. https://perma.cc/AJR8-MTT2 33. R. K. Logan, “Social Media Including Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat,” in Understanding New Media (Peter Lang, 2016). 34. R. Basler, Snapchat im Recruiting: Was Wir von Social Media fuers HR lernen koennen (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016). 35. https://perma.cc

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, 53–54 Freedom, in online communities, 55 Freedom, in software development, 53 Free/open-source initiatives, 52, 207n2 Gamification, in self-tracking, 140–141 on Snapchat, 169 in sports, 141–142 Geo-bombing, 89 Gift culture, 38 Gig economy, 28–29 GNU Manifesto, 18 Google, 20 Gresham’s law, 65, 111

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Shaping of self, 147–148 Sharing, 7, 22–24 Sharing economy, 7, 21–22, 27, 207–208n9. See also Economy of sharing Slacktivism, 98–99 Snapchat, 167–170 Custom Stories, 167–168 future of, 170 gamification on the platform, 169 usage as internal communication tool, 168–170 Social activism, 75 Social

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power

by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie  · 6 May 2019  · 328pp  · 84,682 words

distribute complementary products and services, as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce have done with their app stores. And transaction platforms such as at Amazon, Facebook, Snapchat, Uber, and Airbnb can add innovation platform functions to help them add new features and services from third-party firms, with minimal in-house investment

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relatively low advertising revenue. Part of Twitter’s problem was that many tweeters multi-homed. Twitter users spent time (usually more time) on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or WhatsApp to communicate about personal or detailed matters, such as vacation plans and tastes in music or movies. Consequently, the time and attention as

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purchases. Furthermore, as users contribute their own data in the form of content or ratings (as they do with Google, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, Expedia, TripAdvisor, Uber, Airbnb, and many other platforms), data and analytics can also help improve the product or service. The big and the wealthy

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example, Mark Zuckerberg may have created the world’s largest social network. However, it is easy for Facebook users to spend time on Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, and other platforms, even if they may not take the trouble to adopt another social network for most of their activities. To control some

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one reason why Zuckerberg acquired Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion (considered a large sum at the time) and later used it to compete with Snapchat.31 Zuckerberg’s much more costly purchase of WhatsApp in 2014 for what amounted to $19 billion plus another $3 billion in Facebook stock was

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used their technological expertise to differentiate themselves or pursue markets. A few cases illustrate what is possible. One well-known example is Snapchat, the widely used messaging app for millennials. Snapchat’s cofounder, Evan Spiegel, had a simple idea: Young smartphone users hated the idea that their messages lasted forever. Whether it

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in a crowded space with features that allowed messages to disappear after a specified time. As Spiegel wrote in his first company blog in 2012, “Snapchat isn’t about capturing the traditional Kodak moment.”33 He wanted to let millennials avoid the stresses caused by the longevity of personal information on

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degree of differentiation from Facebook, Twitter, and other messaging platforms, and a viral explosion of users. By 2018, there were roughly 190 million daily active Snapchat users. As for facilitating niche competition, we only need to look at the wide range of specialized online shopping sites to see how digital technology

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digital technology accelerating opportunities for differentiation and niche competition was that it could be equally easy for incumbents to copy. Mark Zuckerberg almost immediately recognized Snapchat as a potential threat to Facebook. Given Facebook’s size and scale, he logically tried to buy Snap for $3 billion in cash before the

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went public. When Spiegel turned him down, Zuckerberg ordered Instagram to copy Snapchat’s most compelling features and turn Instagram into a Snapchat killer.35 Especially after introducing Instagram Stories, Instagram zoomed past Snapchat, with over 700 million users. Although Snapchat was hardly dead (its market value had fallen dramatically but was still close

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to $6 billion in late 2018), Facebook’s attack had taken a serious toll. By mid-2018, Snapchat’s user base had begun shrinking for the first time in its history.36 Both new entrants and established firms can also utilize their expertise

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AdWords technology with the very users who were searching a topic close to the object of their ads. Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram, and Tinder provide another set of examples. Like Google Search, we consider them transaction platforms because they facilitate exchanges of information among users who

…

can access the external supply of creativity and software engineering skills available worldwide. But sometimes adding the second platform is more an act of desperation. Snapchat, for example, has struggled with competition from Facebook’s Instagram. In 2018 it opened up its APIs to encourage third parties to build complementary innovations

…

in the hope that some new apps would make Snapchat a more compelling experience for users and a better draw for advertisers.35 Besides Facebook and Snapchat, a less obvious transaction-to-innovation hybrid example was Expedia, the travel services platform. When Expedia established

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it was first released, while the music streaming service Spotify was a little over two years behind the other platforms. The popular mobile messaging app Snapchat, which first launched in mid-2011, did not make an authorized version available for Windows Phone until early 2016.73 And the list went on

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AWS and Alexa, and the decisions of Uber and Airbnb to allow developers to build services on top of their transaction platforms. Another example is Snapchat, which allowed users to post messages or photos that quickly disappeared. It struggled to make a profit as a pure transaction platform, especially after Facebook

…

’s Instagram copied many of its most popular features. To inspire more innovation and user activity, Snapchat decided in June 2018 to open its platform and user database to application developers.1 The underlying driver was digital competition. Unlike in the traditional

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Competition from Start-ups,” Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2017. 36.Kurt Wagner and Rani Molla, “Why Snapchat Is Shrinking,” Recode, August 7, 2018, https://www.recode.net/2018/8/7/17661756/snap-earnings-snapchat-q2-instagram-user-growth (accessed August 13, 2018). 37.Lina Khan, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” Yale Law

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6, 2018. 34.Kevin Roose, “Facebook Emails Show Its Real Mission: Making Money and Crushing Competition,” New York Times, December 5, 2018. 35.Georgia Wells, “Snapchat Zigs Where Facebook Zags,” Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2018. 36.Expedia Affiliate Network, “eps rapid,” http://developer.ean.com/ (accessed July 5, 2017); and

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Out Its App Store,” New York Times, April 5, 2012. 71.Ibid. 72.Alexandra Chang, “Review: Microsoft Windows Phone 8,” Wired, October 29, 2012. 73.“Snapchat,” Windows Central, May 3, 2016. 74.Ewan Spence, “Ruthless Microsoft’s Smart Decision to Kill Windows Phone,” Forbes, January 30, 2016. 75.Andrew S. Grove

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the Rules: How Intel Avoids Antitrust Litigation,” Harvard Business Review, June 2001, 119–22. CHAPTER 7: LOOKING FORWARD: PLATFORMS AND THE FUTURE 1.Georgia Wells, “Snapchat Zigs Where Facebook Zags,” Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2018. 2.Khari Johnson, “Everything Amazon’s Alexa Learned to Do in 2017,” Venture Beat, December

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APIs, 99–100, 259n38 Microsoft giveaway of SDKs for DOS and Windows, 4 opening up to multiple complementary products and services, 68–69, 96–97 Snapchat’s, 97 stimulating innovation by third parties, 96–98 Twitter’s, 88–89 applications for quantum computing, 228 running on multiple platforms, 52 virtual reality

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, 107–8 and Cambridge Analytica, 7–8, 15–16, 97, 178, 190–91 challenge of maintaining trust, 186–91 choosing market sides, 70–71 combating Snapchat competition, 55–56 Instagram and WhatsApp purchases, 53 multiple sides of a market, 15 network effects-related growth, 50–51 as one of “the Frightful

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, and Choudary), 111 Skype, 37 smartphone market, 130–35 smartphones, value of platforms associated with, 21–22, 23t, 24–25, 251nn23–24 smart platforms, 51 Snapchat, 55–56, 70–71, 97, 218 social networks and social networking, 6–7, 70–71, 110. See also specific social networks Sony, 43–44 specialized

App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream

by Michael Sayman  · 20 Sep 2021  · 285pp  · 91,144 words

for a team that was working on the problem I’d been noticing since my internship: the Snapchat threat. In 2014, Snapchat was just becoming really popular, and everyone I knew loved it. But while Snapchat had every teenager in America in its thrall, Facebook was a non-player in most kids’ social

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capture and appeal to younger users. The prevailing attitude I saw from some people at the company was: Nothing to worry about. We’re unstoppable. Snapchat is just some random app that some teenagers use. Deflecting pleas from Jack, my boot camp mentor, to “just pick a team, any team!” I

…

devoted all my time to dreaming up my own project, an app that Facebook could use to compete against Snapchat’s massive teen market. Jack loved the concept. He put me in contact with his manager, and I did the same presentation for him. That

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them. Like: we posted on Instagram once a month, we almost didn’t post on Facebook at all, we used Twitter occasionally, and we loved Snapchat and used it all day long. The communication tools we use in our formative years will shape how we communicate and view the world for

…

reminded them that my generation, who grew up with iPhones, communicated differently than theirs—who’d grown up using phones strictly for talking—did. Using Snapchat to say hello to a friend who was standing in the same room as us felt natural. Spending a year chatting on the Internet with

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of their phone home screens to prove that the Facebook app was placed farther away from their reach on their devices than other social apps. (Snapchat, of course, was at the front and center of everybody’s.) After I posted about that, Chris Cox asked to use my screenshots for his

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. Using the new momentum I had, I started pushing VPs and executives to pay attention to the Snapchat threat. At the time, the culture and mindset of many was to be dismissive of Snapchat. But I knew in my gut it was a bad idea to discount the social media giant. Chapter

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TeenZone bulletin, which thousands of the company’s product leads and engineers subscribed to. Separately, I helped the executive team at Facebook strategize over the Snapchat problem, joining in on meetings where everyone but me was a VP or chief officer of the company. And to top it all off, I

…

was helping Zuckerberg learn how to use Snapchat by snapping back and forth on the weekends. My computer screen was a mess: filled with screenshot designs I planned to use in my talks

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product my team was building, and all kinds of unanswered meeting invites from product leads across the company. I also spent hours trying to predict Snapchat’s next moves. Many of the predictions I presented at various product strategy meetings ended up proving to be accurate, and my credibility within the

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with me. * * * — Lifestage wasn’t the only project I was working on. At long last, Facebook had decided to get serious about competing with Snapchat—particularly Snapchat Stories, collections of snaps that lived for twenty-four hours. So I was now helping to implement our own version of Stories for WhatsApp, Instagram

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, Facebook, and Messenger. I’d been yelling about the Snapchat threat ever since I’d given my first Teen Talk in 2014, and the executives had finally started to listen, including me in meetings and

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cc’ing me on memos about anything Snapchat related. I was brought in to review designs and meet with engineers and executive leadership to strategize about the company’s overall goals for the

…

I’d been in touch with Mariana, but that was a long time for us. When I’d moved to California, we’d gotten closer, Snapchatting back and forth throughout the day about every little dumb thought that popped into our heads. In our last exchange, she’d sent a screen

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still seared in my brain: “After trying the app I was left puzzled by why anyone would want to use it. Other social networks (particularly Snapchat) already do what Lifestage does along with so much more.” On the bright side, we all knew that the chances were slim that Lifestage would

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, Stories ended up succeeding beyond even my own expectations. In eight months, our launch of Instagram Stories surpassed Snapchat’s number of users. By 2018, Instagram Stories had more than twice as many users as Snapchat. Today, over half a billion people use Instagram Stories every single day. IG Stories launched before

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Snapchat went public, but by the time it did, in March 2017, Snapchat had lost 56 percent of its value. It was widely reported in tech media that this was a direct result of Instagram Stories. A

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lot of Facebookers felt pretty cocky about that. But I thought we should be grateful for what Snapchat had taught us—which was that we weren’t the source of all creativity and innovation, nor did we have to be. Instead of letting

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pride cloud my vision, I remember reminding myself to respect Snapchat for what they’d built and the lessons they’d given us. The lesson I took away from it all was that it never hurts

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. Left, left, left, left, left, left…I swiped them all away without even pausing to read their profiles. Meanwhile, my sister was blowing up my Snapchat. Michael, what the??? You look like Adam Levine! When did you do it? Why???????? All my friends are asking me if you are gay and

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the offer. And maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, I told myself. This job was still fun, sometimes. For example, there was Snapchatting with Mark Zuckerberg. How many people could say they did that? Zuckerberg’s snaps always cracked me up, and I enjoyed explaining to him how

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use the product versus how he’d used it. There were less cool things than giving one of the most powerful men in the world Snapchat and feedback on product strategy of the multibillion dollar company. Scared to death of change, I was grasping for any reason at all to stay

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little murmuring sounds, like she was praying. “Ah, I love it! We’re in Times Square!” said Mariana. She pulled out her phone and opened Snapchat, then took a bunch of selfies to post. “Can you imagine if it snowed? A white Christmas? Oh my gosh.” She pulled out her phone

…

in the daytime, when my brain was fresh and working at full capacity, instead of after hours in my bedroom. If I envisioned the next Snapchat, Area 120 would own it, but I would at least get to keep a piece of the valuation, plus what I thought of as a

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