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 million everyday pages 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 the IPO in 2017. Early scandals, owing, in part, to the company’s founding by a literal frat boy, will always 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.
Since inventive since the Snap has been, they recently revealed that it isn’t exempt from answering an identical question since all other social network business: You can organization stand related whenever every other company is vying to possess users’ notice?.
During the their most useful and most sheer, Snapchat concerns playfulness, and communicating with family relations without any be concerned away from creating a digital identity. But could they provide men and women founding beliefs into the future while you are training from the problematic minutes previously?
High: Turning social network on their lead by inventing a disappearing images application
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 newest 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 business society
Today, Snapchat’s corporate goal statement states the newest software “empowers men and women to go to town, live-in the moment, learn about the nation, and have a great time with her,” which is all the really and you may good. In comparison, in the , the earliest big date that have a Wayback Server snapshot to have Snapchat, Snapchat exhibited the fresh new app just like the, really, virtually exactly what the early profile would have got you would imagine about it: laden up with pictures out-of really young adults during the very little (if any) clothes.
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 this new Snap bros for not giving him credit for his escort services in Jersey City 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 Ny Times, Gawker authored 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!