Business Person: Snapchat founder and CEO Evan Spiegel is the youngest billionaire in the world

The “Business Person” column tells the readers of Megamind about the stories and facts surrounding the most prominent IT entrepreneurs from around the world, the value of the companies under whose management exceeds any reasonable limits. We will not be limited only to the “new wave" of businessmen, and we will talk about those who are usually called the "old school."

Today, a close-up is the life and history of Evan Spiegel, the founder of Snapchat . Snapchat service is a photo messenger with self-destructing messages in the form of text messages, photos and videos that are stored on the server for up to ten seconds.

The entrepreneur began working on this project in his student years. Prior to this, Evan Spiegel did not have significant work experience. And the idea for a startup was prompted by his friend. Spiegel has become the youngest billionaire, and now his fortune is estimated at $ 2.1 billion.

Family, hobbies

Evan Spiegel grew up in the Pacific Palisades, an elite area of ​​Los Angeles. He was the eldest son of two lawyers - Spiegel's parents divorced when he was in school.

Spiegel can rightfully be called the "major boy": from childhood, he used to relax with his father, a successful lawyer, then in the Bahamas, then in the Canadian ski resorts, then in Europe.

The Spiegel family was a member of several private clubs, including the Jonathan Club in Santa Monica and La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club. They often traveled to Europe and even visited Canada, where they snowboarded with helicopters to the top.

Other luxury attributes that the young man has become accustomed to since childhood are luxury cars (according to Business Insider, Spiegel had five of them). According to LA Weekly, the first car Evan got behind the wheel, having just received a driver’s license, was the Cadillac Escalade (the cost of the new model is from $ 72 thousand).



Spiegel wanted a more economical car, and in 2008 he wrote his father a letter asking for a BMW 550i, which cost about $ 75,000. “Cars bring me real pleasure,” he wrote. “I would be very grateful if you would appreciate me and all my work by buying a BMW.” Inquiries of the teenager led to disagreements with his father, after which he moved to his mother, who gave him the long-awaited car.

Student years

Thanks to his father’s connections, Spiegel entered prestigious Stanford to study industrial design. At Stanford University, Spiegel met future Snapchat co-founders - Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy. According to TechCrunch, Brown's idea of ​​creating a mobile application that allows you to send self-destructing images.

Murphy later told Forbes: “We weren’t cool, so we tried to create something to become cool.” All three were members of the Kappa-Sigma fraternity — Spiegel was the second most important person in the organization.



Shortly before graduation, Spiegel dropped out of school to engage in Snapchat.

Business idea and business partners

In the spring of 2011 (Spiegel was in his penultimate year then), Brown said: "I want the photos I sent to this girl to disappear." The younger comrade was delighted at this thought and called it the "idea for a million." As it turned out recently, he underestimated it: the idea brought an order of magnitude more.

The application was commissioned by Bobby Murphy, a software student, with whom Spiegel first tried his hand as an entrepreneur. They founded the company Future Freshman, which helped applicants and their parents prepare documents for the university.

Throughout the summer, three young men worked on a project that was first called Pictaboo. Evan painted the logo, which still remains the hallmark of Snapchat, a fun ghost. He became the CEO of the company, Brown as the director of marketing, and Murphy as the technical director.

Pictaboo was released in July, a month later it had only 127 users. In August, the trio of project creators suddenly quarreled: TechCrunch writes because of the order in which their names appear in the patent. In addition, they could not divide the shares: Brown wanted to get 30%, the rest did not like it. As a result, Spiegel and Murphy actually kicked Brown out of the company by disabling all email addresses and passwords.

Snapchat

In the fall of 2011, the two remaining founders of the company changed their name to Snapchat. The number of users grew to a thousand people, and Spiegel and Murphy discovered an interesting pattern: the service was most popular from 9 to 15 hours, that is, at a time when students were in the classroom. For teenagers, the application has become a real find: you can exchange pictures without fear that the teacher will see them.

In April 2012, the number of Snapchat fans has grown to 10 thousand people. Here, however, young entrepreneurs faced financial difficulties: the fee for server capacities grew, and they had to look for investors. Jeremy Liu from Lightspeed Venture Partners came to the rescue: his partner’s daughter told him about the popularity of the application among teenagers. He invested $ 485 thousand in Snapchat and valued the company at $ 4.25 million.

Having received the money, Spiegel immediately expelled from Stanford, despite the fact that he had to finish his studies until the end of just a few weeks.

In 2012, the team created most of the application, at which time they were located in the house of Father Spiegel. Despite the fact that the company later moved to its own office, Spiegel lived with his father for a long time - in particular, because of “cheap rent”.

In February 2013, Snapchat fans were sending 60 million pictures a day, in May 150 million.

The popularity of the service also attracted investors: in the spring of 2013 the company received $ 13.5 million from Benchmark, in the summer of that year - $ 80 million from IPV and several other investors (SV Angel, General Catalyst Partners); while Snapchat was valued at $ 800 million. In December, Coatue Management hedge fund ($ 50 million) invested in Snapchat.

In total, the investments received by the application at the end of the year exceeded $ 120 million.

At the end of 2013, Mark Zuckerberg became interested in a startup. Unable to create successful ghost service clones, he offered the founders $ 3 billion for the company. Spiegel refused, saying that in the near future he did not intend to consider proposals for either purchase or investment (interest from other investors at that time was very high).

In 2014, Yuri Milner's DST Global fund invested in the “funny ghost” (the amount of funding was not disclosed), while the company's valuation reached $ 7 billion. In early October, it became known that Snapchat expects a new influx of investments, including from Yahoo! and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. According to The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo! can invest $ 20 million in the application.

In March 2015, Snapchat raised another $ 200 million investment, valued at $ 19 billion. In early 2016, the Fidelity Fund invested $ 175 million in Snapchat.

Personal life

The relationship between Miranda Kerr and the youngest billionaire in the world, Snapchat service founder Evan Spiegel, became known last July after paparazzi spotted lovers holding hands in one of the streets of Los Angeles. The following month, Miranda and Evan went on their first joint trip, and recently the model first spoke about the relationship with her chosen one.



“He's 25, but he's acting like he's 50,” Miranda laughed. - He doesn't go to parties. He goes to Venice Beach to work. He always returns home on time. In the evenings we rarely go out somewhere - we prefer to have dinner at home and go to bed early. ”

Disguised as a superhero

Jordan Crook, in his TechCrunch article, paints a Spiegel portrait in a completely different way:

In an interview with Forbes, Spiegel apparently lied when he told the story that Zuckerberg offered to meet with him and discuss the deal. His version of the story describes Mark's very friendly and slightly desperate invitation to come, to which Spiegel coldly hints to Zuckerberg: you need to - come and yourself.

Other founders in Los Angeles, whose businesses do not compete with Snapchat at all, can say nothing good about him. A friend of mine who does not consider Spiegel a friend, but often interacts with him, calls him “very uncertain” and “unbearably impudent”.

To be honest, I wanted to like Evan. I really tried. I attributed his impudence, even slightly deserved, to immaturity. In the end, he built a two-billion-dollar business at age 21. But in fact, when you learn more about someone you respect, the time comes when the part that you respected is separated from the person.