Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:13:10 · Evan Spiegel
[00:13:10] S1: Well, I think to take a huge step back, I love computers. I grew up using computers all the time. I built my own computer when I was in middle school. I fell in love with graphic design and would spend every lunch period in the computer lab. And I think one of the things that I noticed about computers and I think today with mobile phones is that in many ways they isolate us from one another. They actually take us out of our social interactions. They took me off the playground at recess and put me into the computer lab. Or if I look at our 15-year-old today and his friends, sometimes when they're hanging out, they're all looking down at their phones, even though they're all together. And so I think there's just such a big opportunity to build technology that actually brings us together, that keeps us grounded in the real world rather than removing us from it. And that's something that we realized early on with Snapchat. We were innovating, building lenses and augmented reality, but ultimately we saw that people were using AR on these tiny little phone screens that required you to use your thumbs to interact. And so it was almost like interacting with the world through a keyhole rather than actually staying grounded and being able to interact together with friends. So it just seems so obvious that as computers play a bigger and bigger role in our lives, I think today people spend seven or eight hours a day on average on screens that something has got to change to make this technology fit better into our lives. We get enormous value from computers, but at the same time, I think the cost is quite meaningful and I think they need to evolve. So with the early version of Spectacles, I guess that was back in 2014 or something like that, the initial idea was just to get the camera off the phone out of your pocket and allow you to more easily take snaps out in the world. But we've then sort of built a roadmap from there where we added a second camera to get depth. We added a display to be able to overlay digital objects into the world and help you interact with them. And then with the last generation in 2024, we released our operating system, which now allows developers to build full featured software inside of specs in preparation for the consumer launch. So I don't know, I think the time is right for a new type of computer.
00:15:28 · Evan Spiegel, Lenny Rachitsky
I think people are frustrated with the cost of using phones and computers today. They're kind of all hunched over like gremlins and we can build a new computer. We have built a new computer that brings people outside, that helps them connect together with their friends, that frees them up to actually use their hands to interact with the world. And that to me is really exciting. I think it's a whole new chapter. And gosh, I mean, what? It's been 20 years or something since the iPhone. So it's about time for something new, I think. [00:16:00] S0: So I got an early preview of the specs and it's extremely cool. I learned how to be an air bender. I put plants all over my house drawing all over the place and there's multiplayer features, which is very cool, which I think is part of the idea, is you're connecting with people versus sitting in a VR environment on your own. I worry about being connected all the time. So I imagine that's like a new thing we have to figure out. How do we not just get hooked on just watching things onto the side instead of looking at someone with? Do you have any thoughts there? Just is there a solution to that other than just like social norms?
00:16:33 · Evan Spiegel
[00:16:33] S1: I do think social norms will play a big role, but I also think one of the things people experience with AR, specs, unlike these heads up display glasses, they don't just put an annoying little screen that's stuck to your face on the glasses. They actually anchor content in the world, which is really different. They put that content directly in your field of view rather than requiring you to look down at some little screen or get some text alert or notification. So I think, frankly, I don't think those use cases are very compelling. I don't think receiving phone notifications on your face is a valuable proposition for most folks. So I don't think we necessarily have to worry about that because I think most people don't want that. I think what is going to be really important with specs is showing people all of the incredible new ways they can hang out and connect together with their friends wearing specs, but I don't think it'll be disruptive or notification based or something like that. One of the things that I really dislike about the heads-up display glasses is when you're looking at the little heads up display in the corner, you're actually looking at your friend's crotch while you're talking to them if you check the heads up display. So the position is just very strange. And I don't think that that's something that really is resonating with customers, nor do I think that's something that's going to become like a widespread behavior.
00:17:56 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:17:56] S0: I want to go back to this idea of how to innovate. I feel like Snap has always been punching above its weight in terms of just how much new stuff comes out of your team, how many inventions happen considering the size of the company and the history. What do you find needs to be true for innovation to happen? What do you do to allow for all these great ideas to emerge?
00:18:20 · Evan Spiegel
[00:18:20] S1: The best sort of academic overview or summary I think comes from a guy, Safi Bahcall, who wrote a book called Loonshots. It's really worth reading. It's all about the innovation process. And actually when I read it, I was like, "Oh my gosh, that kind of explains a lot of how we think about innovation at Snap." And I think to summarize the academic version, we can talk about what we've developed and built at Snap, but to summarize, essentially his findings are that basically if you want to deliver a product at scale, you usually need quite a large organization. A large organization needs hierarchy and structure, a lot of operational rigor. And as soon as you have an organization that's very large and very structured like that, people become very focused on getting a promotion, getting into the next step of the hierarchy. And that means that all of a sudden they become a lot more risk averse. They're not really as willing to try new things. They're very focused on achieving the goals that have sort of been set for them in this operational hierarchy, and that makes it very, very challenging to innovate. Now on the flip side, structures that are really healthy and constructive for innovation typically are very, very flat. That's the same for our design team, for example, where there's no one that has a fancier title or a role. There's a lot of flexibility in terms of the ability to try new things and fail quickly and put up crazy ideas. And what he basically finds is that the companies that are very successful actually have both types of organizations inside their company and that the leaders of the organization are the ones who are responsible for creating a healthy functioning relationship between the two types of organizations. Because what ends up happening in a lot of companies is that the small innovative team becomes critical of the large organization, oh, they're so bureaucratic and slow, they don't innovate, things like that. And then the larger organization is like, "Oh, what are these Jokers doing?" Just innovating, they're not really driving the business, they're not supporting our customers. And so a lot of tension actually arises from the different organizational structures.
00:20:24 · Evan Spiegel
And so the leadership responsibility, and I think Safi does a really good job looking throughout history, what leaders have cultivated really constructive and powerful relationships between the more innovative or flat parts of the organization and the more structured and hierarchical parts of the organization, how you create that mutual respect, how you create that dialogue between those parts of the organization is so important. And so when I read that, I was like, wow, that actually sounds quite similar to what we have at Snap. We have to run a large public company, serve almost a billion customers. That means our service needs to be really reliable and it means that we need to operate really, really effectively to serve our customers. And at the same time, we have a very, very small ... It sort of oscillates between like nine and 12 people design team that is constantly innovating and creating new things. And I think the beauty of what I love about Snap is that the dialogue between those two teams is where a lot of that innovation happens because a lot of our engineers working to serve our customers or working on reliability have a bunch of great ideas and so do our designers. And as long as they're in dialogue, really great things can happen.