Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:57:52 · Lenny Rachitsky, Evan Spiegel
[00:57:52] S0: Speaking of middle child, you have a number of children and I'm curious, there's a whole going in a whole different direction. What's your just policy on screens and devices? Having built Snapchat and then also specs, just how do you think about devices and your kids? [00:58:09] S1: Well, we've got a real range. We've got four boys, two, six, seven, and 15. So we approach it very differently for all the kids at different ages. For the two-year-old, it's like zero screen time. We really just want to essentially read with him and play, explore outside and those sorts of things, but not really focus on screens unless he is getting a haircut because he really struggles with getting his haircut. So when he gets a haircut, he really loves Bobcat tractors, those four-wheel sort of Bobcat tractors, and he loves to watch YouTube videos of people driving Bobcat tractors around. So when he gets his haircut, he can watch people drive Bobcat tractors. But other than that, no screen time. For the six and seven-year-olds, they are, I would say, infrequent movie watchers. But other than that, again, we don't give them phones or anything like that. In fact, it was really fun over the holidays for Christmas, I gave them that new ... I think Palmer Luckey has a startup where they are sort of remaking Gameboys. [00:59:15] S0: Yeah, I have one of those. [00:59:17] S1: Yeah, it's really fun. Yeah. [00:59:19] S0: Mod retro.