Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:51:41 · Evan Spiegel, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:51:41] S1: Just doing it is really the only way. And I remember that was really the advice one of our board members gave to me because I was so reluctant. I didn't want to do an all hands. I didn't want to do Q&A. In the early days of the company, I was like, "I'll just send an email." And he's like, "What are you doing?" He's like, "Too bad, Evan. This is your job." And I think that was really, really good advice. And so literally I was like, "Okay, fine. This is a core part of my job and what I need to learn how to do. I'm going to learn to love it. I want to love it. I want to get up there and get in front of our company and really enjoy answering all these really tough questions and digging into the business with our team." And now I really do. I've learned to really enjoy that dialogue with our team. And I learned so much from the questions that folks ask. And I love that openness. I think it's just such an important part of our company and who we are. [00:52:28] S0: I had Rahul Vohra on the podcast a while back, the founder of Superhuman. I don't know if this is what you went through, but he went through a transition where he loved what he was doing and then ended up being pushed by VCs and leaders to like, okay, you got to do these other things. And then like, okay, I really don't like this and I'm going to find a way to do the thing I really enjoy because that's going to reflect in so many ways across the business and help us succeed." Is that something you went through, where just like, okay, I just want to get back to the product and building?
00:52:57 · Evan Spiegel
[00:52:57] S1: I think that's only partly true if you want to stay in the CEO job. I think the CEO job has a lot of requirements that are not necessarily things that you love to do in the morning. There's a huge amount of responsibility that comes along with being CEO. There's a lot of operational rigor that I think needs to be developed. I think not every part of the CEO job is glamorous. So I think if I just wanted to work on product, I would pick a different job at Snap. But I think because I really like leading our company and leading the direction and strategy for the business, and because I see a huge opportunity in transforming the way that people use computing in the future, both through Snapchat, but also with specs, I think this is the right role for me right now. I mean, certainly I would spend more time with my family and probably have more fun on some days if I was in a different role or more focused on design. But I think the opportunity for a business like ours at the scale that we have, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity for me. And despite its challenges, I do like the CEO job.
00:54:09 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:54:09] S0: So kind of along those lines, you put out this letter, I think it was the end of last year where you described this coming year as the crucible moment for Snap. It's so interesting just like you guys have a billion monthly active users. That's just absurd. I don't think people realize this. You're making six billion a year in revenue, something like that. One of the very few social networks that lasts that is durable with a very valuable, interesting audience. On the flip side, the stock hasn't been killing it. There's like these investors coming at you trying to tell you to change all these things. I guess just thoughts, reflections, and what do you think people are missing about where this might go?
00:54:51 · Evan Spiegel
[00:54:51] S1: Well, that's really one of the reasons why I called this year a crucible moment. I mean, the company's almost at the scale of entering the Fortune 500, which is really exciting. It's almost at a billion monthly active users. It's about to launch specs after 12 years of investment in this future computing platform, but at the same time, it's still not net income profitable, for example, because we've been investing so heavily in the future and making the choice to do that. And so I think this is the year that we have to prove that Snapchat can be a really strong, profitable business, that it continues to grow both in terms of the reach of our audience and their engagement with new products, whether it's topic chats or spotlight, or I think we've got 200 million people playing games every month on Snapchat now. So gaming is becoming a big part of the engagement drivers on Snapchat. And the reason why that's so important is that it's going to be very hard for us to win long-term in specs without a really solid foundation. And so I think we need to demonstrate that after a couple years of rebuilding our ad platform, rebuilding our go to-market efforts, really accelerating the growth of the small medium customer part of our business, which has grown really rapidly for us that this year we have a really solid foundation to launch the next chapter in the company's history. So it's a real turning point for Snap that's really exciting, but it's definitely an all hands on deck moment for the company.
00:56:22 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:56:22] S0: You had a really interesting way of describing Snap in the market. You called Snap the middle child. Talk about just what that means.
00:56:29 · Evan Spiegel
[00:56:29] S1: Yeah. I think one of the things that's so funny about our service is that while we're very, very large in terms of the scale of our audience, in terms of the scale of our business, we're much larger than a Pinterest or Reddit, for example, we're also way smaller than Meta and Google. And so we occupy this very interesting sort of middle position in the market. And I think that comes with a lot of benefits because we're big enough. We have enough scale to do really interesting things, but it also comes with the challenges of being overshadowed in some cases by our older brothers and maybe sometimes the younger kids are getting more attention. And so I think again, as in this crucible moment, it's part of defining who we are as a company and who we are as a business. And I think one of the things that will play an important role in that is getting specs out to consumers because I think right now we've talked so long about the role that specs will play in the world. We've worked on developing the platform for so long, but without something that you can really play with and hang onto and use yourself, it's hard to really understand the next chapter of Snap's journey. So I think one of the biggest challenges that middle children face is defining themselves, standing out from their older siblings and younger siblings. And so I think this is a moment and a year when Snap is really going to define itself, and I'm really excited about that.