Spiegel’s career in business started whilst he was still a student at the Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica. He interned at Red Bull in the sales and marketing department where he broadened his knowledge of consumer culture. He also worked at the biomedical company Abraxis BioScience.
Spiegel later enrolled at Stanford University to study productdesign and was known to attend graduate-level classes on venture capital and entrepreneurship. Some of these classes were delivered by notable entrepreneurs such as YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Whilst at Stanford, Spiegel befriended Intuit cofounder Scott Cook after listening to one of his presentations. The up-and-comer reportedly begged Cook for a job and then undertook a paid internship working on the company’s TxtWeb project.
Snapchat
unfortunately in the last decade we saw the emergence of the “anything goes” intellectual movement, where pretty much anything could be claimed as long as wrapped around a credible story. That generated intellectuals like Harari, which fake their understanding of domains they don’t have any clue about. Just because anything goes…
Spiegel also met friends and eventual Snapchat co-founders Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown at Stanford. In April 2011, he proposed an ephemeral messaging app as part of a class project, and, a few months later, a prototype of the concept known as Picaboo was launched.
The main premise of Picaboo was that pictures, photos, and videos within messages would disappear after a short period of time.
Picaboo’s popularity took off in 2012 which prompted Spiegel to leave Stanford and focus on the app full-time. By the end of the year, the platform passed 1 million daily active users and there were 25 so-called “Snaps” sent every second.
In 2014, Spiegel turned down an offer from Mark Zuckerberg who wanted to purchase the business for $3 billion. Google came knocking soon after with a $4 billion offer and it too was declined.
IPO and billionaire status
Snap debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2017. The opening price of $24 per share equated to a market cap of $33 billion, or three times that of Twitter’s $11 billion valuation at the time.
The 26-year-old Spiegel became one of the youngest CEOs of a public company and was there to ring the opening bell himself.
Headwinds and recovery
After the successful IPO, Spiegel decided to expand his team into the thousands and made himself central to all technology development. But by 2018, the platform lost 5 million users and the company’s share price dropped by 90%.
The reasons for the decline were multifaceted. Snapchat faced security issues after accidentally leaking its own source code. The platform also introduced un-skippable ads in the face of stiff competition from WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram.
Spiegel’s leadership style was also subpar, once admitting in 2015 that “I’m not a great manager”. Employees described him as aloof and disconnected from operations, and some complained that they were frequently unaware of the products Snap was working on until they were released to the public.
A human-centered approach to technology
To his credit, Spiegel fixed his internal work style and repositioned Snapchat based on a human-centered approach to technology. He invested heavily in AR tools such as rabbit ears that while gimmicky, were adored by Snapchat’s younger user base.
The company also introduced a 5-minute content platform for teens and another app called Bitmoji where users can create Simpsons-like caricatures of themselves. Lastly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Spiegel introduced a mental health app for teens and also partnered with Headspace to create a min-meditation series.
Key takeaways:
Evan Thomas Spiegel is an American businessman and entrepreneur who is best known as the co-founder of Snap Inc. In 2015 at the tender age of 25, Spiegel became the youngest billionaire in the world.
Spiegel met friends and Snapchat co-founders Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown at Stanford. In April 2011, he proposed an ephemeral messaging app as part of a class project and later launched a prototype of the concept known as Picaboo.
After a successful IPO, Snapchat started to lose users and revenue. But Spiegel turned the company around with a human-centered approach to technology, among other things. He also reconsidered his aloof and sometimes disconnected leadership style.
Evan Spiegel and Robert Cornelius Murphy are the co-founders and, respectively, CEO and CTO of Snapchat. Evan Spiegel owns nearly 3% of Class A stocks, 26% of Class B stocks, and 53.4% of Class C stocks for a 53.2% voting power, whereas Robert Murphy owns 5.2% of Class A stocks, 26% of Class B stocks, and 46.6% of Class C stocks for a 46.4% voting power. Institutional investors comprise FMR (10.65% ownership), Tencent Holdings (16.7% ownership), and The Vanguard Group (6.4% ownership).
Evan Thomas Spiegel is the co-founder and CEO of Snapchat. He’s also the main shareholder. Indeed, he both owns and controls Snapchat, and his stake in the company is currently valued at around $3 billion.
unfortunately in the last decade we saw the emergence of the “anything goes” intellectual movement, where pretty much anything could be claimed as long as wrapped around a credible story. That generated intellectuals like Harari, which fake their understanding of domains they don’t have any clue about. Just because anything goes…
99% of Snapchat’s revenue comes from advertising. In 2023, Snapchat generated $4.6 billion in revenues, the same in 2022, compared to $4.12 billion in 2021 and $2.5 billion in 2020. By 2023, Snapchat recorded a net loss of over $1.3 billion.
In 2023, Snapchat recorded over $1.3 billion in net losses, with $4.6 billion in revenues, primarily from advertising. Snapchat has not yet found its way to profitability.
Snapchat measures its growth through a metric called Daily Active Users (DAUs), as a user on Snapchat usually interacts with it multiple times a day. Over the years, Snapchat DAUs grew from 229 million in early 2020 to 414 million by the end of 2023.
Facebook, the main product of Meta, is an attention merchant. As such, its algorithms condense the attention of over three billion monthly active users as of 2023. Meta generated nearly $135 billion in revenues in 2023, of which nearly $132 billion was from advertising (97.8% of the total revenues), $1.9 billion from Reality Labs (the augmented and virtual reality products arm), and over $1 billion in other revenue.
Instagram makes money via visual advertising. As part of Facebook products, the company generates revenues for Facebook Inc.’s overall businessmodel. Acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, today, Instagram is integrated into the overall Facebook business strategy.
TikTok is a creative Chinese social media platform driven by short-form video content enabling users to interact and generate content at scale. TikTok primarily makes money through advertising, generating $4.6 billion in advertising revenues in 2021, thus making it among the most popular attention-based business models or attention merchants.
By 2022, most of Tesla’s shares are still owned by Elon Musk, among the company’s co-founders and the CEO. Elon Musk is the top individual investor, with a 23.5% stake in the company. At current rates, this is valued at around $145-50 billion, making Elon Musk one of the wealthiest men on earth. In addition, Musk also holds a significant stake in Twitter and SpaceX, which makes him worth anywhere between $180-90 billion.
Warren Buffett is an American investor, business tycoon, and philanthropist. Known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” Buffett is best known for his strict adherence to value investing and frugality despite his immense wealth. Warren Buffet owns an investment firm, Berkshire Hathaway. He owns 238,624 Class A shares which gives him control over the company. His stake in the company is valued at over $100 billion.
Jeff Bezos’ net worth is primarily based on his ownership stake in Amazon. Indeed, as of 2023, Bezos owned a 12.7% stake in Amazon, worth over $120 billion.
Tim Cook’s net worth is primarily comprised of his Apple stocks. As of 2023, he owned 3,279,898 worth about $480 million at the current rate. However, Tim Cook has sold part of his Apple stocks over the years for hundreds of millions of dollars, making him a billionaire.
Bill Gates was the co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft until 2000, and he was on the board of Microsoft until 2020. However, over the years, Gates sold various stakes in Microsoft and diversified away from it. As of 2019, Gates had a 1.34% stake in Microsoft, which he might still own, valued at about $25 billion.
As of 2022, Satya Nadella had 763,518, valued at $190 million at Microsoft’s current market value. Nadella also got a $2.5 million base salary in 2022, plus $42.27 million in stock awards and over $10 million in non-stock incentives. Nadella sold hundreds of millions of dollars of Microsoft stocks in the last ten years, making him a centi-millionaire. In 2022, 96% of Nadella’s salary was performance-based, whereas only 4% comprised a base salary.
Larry Page co-founded Google (now Alphabet) and Sergey Brin. He controls the company tightly via a dual share ownership structure (made of Class A and B stocks). Alphabet is worth over a trillion dollars, valuing Larry Page’s stake in the company at around $70 billion.
Sergey Brin co-founded Google (now Alphabet) together with Larry Page. He controls the company tightly via a dual share ownership structure (made of Class A and B stocks). Alphabet is worth over a trillion dollars, valuing Sergey Brin’s stake at around $66 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg is the co-founder and principal shareholder of Facebook (now Meta), in which he owns a controlling stake worth over $68 billion. Thus Mark Zucberkerbs’ net worth is around $68 billion in 2023.
Eduardo Luiz Saverin is a billionaire entrepreneur and angel investor. He co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg; he was later ousted. Yet later on, Facebook settled a lawsuit with Saverin giving him a good chunk of the company’s stock, now worth over ten billion dollars. Thus, Eduardo Saverin’s net worth is around $10.45 billion in 2023.
While Larry Ellison is a shareholder in various tech companies (such as Tesla), his primary wealth comes from his ownership stake in the company he founded, Oracle. He owns almost 43% of the company’s stock, valued at over $100 billion, making him among the wealthiest people on earth.
Howard Schultz’s net worth is over $2.2 billion. Indeed, he is the founder of Starbucks and a major institutional shareholder, with 1.88% ownership of the company, valued at over $2.2 billion at the current market value, making him a billionaire.
Daniel Ek is one of the founders and one of the principal shareholders of Spotify. Indeed, in 2023 with 16.5% of Spotify’s shares, he’s worth around $3.7 billion.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
