When Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy first went live with Snapchat in the App Store in , it was a disappearing photos app made by college kids that *definitely wasn’t* for sending nudes. As of its tenth birthday this month, it has over 280 billion day-after-day users plus a stable of Content from media brands and influencers. Its products have inspired ephemeral sharing copycats galore, and investors currently think parent company Snap, Inc. is worth over $100 billion. What a decade!
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, though, for the “Camera Company,” which was the puzzling way Snapchat branded itself when it submitted for its IPO in 2017. Early scandals, owing, in part, to the company’s founding by a literal frat boy, will always only lads be part of its history. Employees have continued to feel the aftershocks of those early tremors, and the consequences of operating in a white- and male-dominated tech industry, for years.
Because the inventive due to the fact Snap might have been, they recently showed that it is not exempt away from responding a comparable concern given that another social network business: You can providers stand relevant when almost every other business is competing for users’ focus?.
In the the best and most pure, Snapchat is approximately playfulness, and you will communicating with family unit members without the worry regarding constructing a digital name. But may they bring the individuals beginning ideals into the future if you find yourself reading from the difficult minutes previously?
High: Flipping social networking for the the head because of the inventing a disappearing pictures software
Snapchat’s first value proposition is still one of its strongest: Give people a way to send photos to their friends (and, later, messages and videos), that disappear. The latest lore goes that ousted co-founder Reggie Brown (more on him in a second) thought of an app that would let users send self-deleting photos during a conversation about sexting. The earliest version of the app was designed to minimize the ability of users to take screen grabs. It also added the whimsical (or, juvenile?) ability to draw and write on top of those photos.
Low: Fratty vibes and you can fratty corporate society
Now, Snapchat’s business mission report claims the newest software “allows individuals to go to town, are now living in whenever, understand the world, and enjoy yourself together,” that is all the better and you will a beneficial. By comparison, for the , the first day which have a great Wayback Server picture having Snapchat, Snapchat displayed the fresh new app as, well, literally exactly what its very early reputation will have got you would imagine about it: full of photo out-of really teenagers inside little (or no) attire.
And then there’s the story of Reggie Brown. Brown was one of Spiegel’s Kappa Sigma brothers at Stanford. After the purported sexting convo, Brown says he took the idea of a deleting photos app to Spiegel. The pair then brought in Bobby Murphy for his coding prowess. Soon after, Murphy and Spiegel left Brown in their dust as they moved to LA and officially launched Snapchat. In 2013, Brown sued the new Breeze bros for not giving him credit for his intellectual property. Snap settled the suit in 2014 and acknowledged Brown’s role as the originator of the “deleting photos app” idea. The company’s 2017 IPO revealed Brown got nearly $158 million.
The Ghost of Reggie Brown wasn’t the only relic of Spiegel’s Kappa Sig days that clung to Snapchat. Just as Snap was gaining momentum as a grown up company profiled by the likes of the New york Times, Gawker composed a bunch of Spiegel’s emails about parties and goings on at the fraternity, involving – most infamously – a stripper pole. He’s CEO, b*tch!
