The Visionary
The future, and what is barely possible, reads round the next corner.
Evan Spiegel emerges in this interview as a quintessential Visionary, consistently orienting his thinking toward futures others have not yet imagined. He frames Snapchat's entire design philosophy around a conviction that computing should conform to human life, not the reverse, a principle he pursued 12 years before the wearables market validated it.
“It wasn't clear at the time what the business model was going to be. And one of the things I learned from Stanford and being up in the Bay Area, which was different than how I learned about business growing up, was the real focus on getting to scale and investing to get to scale rather than focusing on profitability early on.”
“Not sure. I think there's a lot more to do here at SNAP. And there's a lot more work to fulfill our vision for augmented reality and for glasses. We've been working on that for a decade, but it's going to take quite a lot longer.”
“We had both experienced the college process that was super complicated. And one of the really challenging parts is all the different requirements of all of these different colleges when you're trying to apply. So it's a massive organizational project that could be better handled by software.”
“It depends. I think that that strategy is most effective when it comes to new platforms. So if you look at the advent of desktop internet, that was really the strategy very early on for players like an Amazon, for example, right, where they were like, we're just going to invest to grow, we'll worry about profitability.”
Tiger Sisters: “Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel: Creativity, Love, and the Future of Tech”
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