Snap Inc.'s Evan Spiegel at Code 2022

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Scott Galloway: Scott Galloway, CEO of Snap. Thank you for coming. How's it going?

Evan Spiegel: Oh, it's going. All right. You've had a hard week, but thank you for the news. Talk a little bit about what's been going on this week and how you look at stuff. You and I, I saw you this morning. You were talking about the macroeconomic environment. Talk a little bit about what's happened and how you look at it.

Evan Spiegel: Oh, goodness. Well, there certainly have been a lot of changes very quickly in the macroeconomic environment. When we entered the year at the beginning of the year, prior to the invasion of Ukraine, we were growing revenue about 44% year over year. And we were really excited about how the year was going to unfold. And then of course, we had this terrible invasion of Ukraine. We actually had quite a sizable team there, which was really challenging to work through. And then, of course, after that, rippling through the economy has been shocks to energy prices, of course, food, et cetera. And inflation has run a lot higher and hotter than people expected. And so, of course, in response to that, the Fed and the ECB are responding with rate increases. And that's really changed the cost of capital, which has required businesses to focus a lot more on generating cash. And in order to generate cash, you have to obviously either grow your revenue a lot faster or reduce your cost structure. And because revenue is growing slower, actually, for a lot of businesses, they have to reduce their cost structure. And when they do that, one of the easiest and fastest ways to do that is actually to turn off digital advertising. That's one of the benefits of digital advertising. It's so flexible. You can turn it on and off. And so we saw that impact in our business. And that means that now, quarter to date, we've grown about 8% year over year down from 44%. And looking forward at the macro economy, we don't see a lot of things that make us optimistic. And so what we've had to do is really restructure our business, focus on our three strategic priorities of continuing to grow our community, which grew 18% to almost 350 million daily active users in the last quarter, re-accelerate our revenue growth, of course, and then really invest in this long-term future of augmented reality. So as part of that, we had to lay off about 20% of our team, which is obviously really difficult, shut down a lot of projects that we've been working on. Right, I brought one out, the Pixie right here, this one here, this was one of the things. I'm not gonna bust your chops about it, it's a very lovely book and draw, it's really well done, as most things you make are. So this was one of them that wasn't, it was beautiful, cool, not making money. It's a wonderful low margin product.

Scott Galloway: Okay, all right, which sounds great for a business that's struggling. So where do you see the company going forward then? You've done this cut, which is difficult for anyone. Again, you were going like gangbusters. Now you've had to pull in. And I remember Brian Chesky talking about having to do it during the pandemic. You guys did really well during the pandemic. What do you see the company going forward?

Evan Spiegel: Well, our community engagement is really strong. So in the immediate term, we're really focused on re-accelerating revenue growth. And the way that we think we can do that is really with a focus on low funnel, direct response advertising. So advertising that's really easy to measure, that helps people clearly drive business results, because those are the dollars that even in uncertain macroeconomic times, businesses will still spend because they're very important for generating incremental revenue. And so what we've done is actually reorganized our team. We promoted Jerry Hunter, a longtime leader at Snap, to chief operating officer. He's taking responsibility for really bringing together our product sales and engineering teams to help us do a much better job of solving the technical and operational challenges of running a large-scale direct response business.

Scott Galloway: But you're keeping augmented. It was that business, the other business. What was the second one? I'm sorry. We're definitely... Oh, our priorities, you mean. Yeah. Community growth, revenue growth, and then investing in augmented reality. So talk about augmented. Why keep that? You love them spectacles, don't you?

Evan Spiegel: Well, Spectacles is a part of the long-term future of augmented reality. But what's really cool about augmented reality is that over 250 million people are engaging with AR today, every day, on Snapchat through our camera. And even more than that, many people are now using our augmented reality tools in other people's applications. Because businesses embed something called Camera Kit, which is a suite of our AR tools into their own applications to drive business results. And so what we've been doing over time is slowly building this augmented reality platform on mobile that over time, of course, will transition to things like wearables. But that's kind of the long distant future. But you think it's critically important to continue to, because I've looked at lots of very cool things that you're making. VR is an enormous driver of our business today, of engagement today, of course, revenue, and will continue to be in the future because it's really at the core of what computing is going to look like over the long term.

Scott Galloway: Scott? So I don't know if you've been following the conference, but there's been two major themes so far. The first is tick and the second is talk. And we had a nice... Also, people running for president, but go ahead. By the way, I think this is the only dude who's not running for president who's been on this stage. Yeah, they're all just interested in tech. Anyways, a little cynical, a little cynical. We had a nice conversation. I have 12 and 15-year-old boys. Their primary platforms are Snap and TikTok. And the more I've gotten to know them, the more I like Snap. It strikes me as joyous in communication. And the less or the more I'm worried about TikTok. The business world or consumers are not listening to me. It feels like everyone but TikTok, their business is declining dramatically. And it just feels like they are kicking the shit out of everybody. So my question is, how do you plan to compete with TikTok? And two, and just as a follow-up, Do you think TikTok should be banned?

Evan Spiegel: Good. We're starting with the easy questions. So in terms of our strategy, I think one of the things that we've learned over time is that by focusing on visual messaging between friends and family, we're able to drive long-term retention and engagement. So when people start using Snapchat, you know, to send photos and videos to their friends, they love it and they keep coming back because it's a much better way to communicate than text message, right? My sons are still using it. That's all they use. And over time, we built a business around that messaging by, you know, of course, building out stories and Spotlight, which is our TikTok competitor, our map, you know, in the augmented reality platform. So we're going to stick to that strategy of really helping, you know, friends and family communicate with visual messaging because we've seen how effective that's been through lots of ups and downs and tons of competition and a botched redesign. You know, that for us has really been core to our success. So I think we'll compete by continuing to focus on the reason why our community gets value from Snap and just drive towards that North Star of over time delivering more and more value to the people who use our service. I think, you know, on your second question, that's probably best determined by CFIUS. I mean, TikTok is going through a CFIUS review process right now to determine whether or not it should stay in our country. I think a couple things probably inform that from my perspective. One is that we've had laws for a really long time about foreign ownership of radio or television or whatever. You have to get approval to do that. So that sort of, I think, is the context here. And then secondarily, over the last couple of years, obviously, there have been a lot of other products that have been created that are very similar to TikTok, like Shorts and Reels and Spotlight. And so I think a lot of the concerns maybe that the administration had in the past of like oh my gosh if TikTok goes away what are people going to do where are they going to watch short videos I think that sort of been answered by the competitive environment So I don't know how these trade are being made The interesting thing about the CFIUS process is that it involves so many different stakeholders, the Treasury and, of course, the national security folks. So I don't quite know how that process works, but we'll just kind of have to see what happens.

Scott Galloway: So let's say just the product itself, why do you think it's been doing so well and cleaning clocks all over the place? Because you had versions of that. everybody's had versions of what they managed to do. When you look at a competitor, and often people have copied you. Yeah, pretend you're Facebook. What would you rip off from TikTok? Let's role play. So I actually, I think the reason why this has been so challenging for companies to respond to in the United States, but also around the world is the scale of TikTok's investment. So I think what's so interesting, as you look at their business strategy over time, they started by buying a very, very small application that was so small that at the time, they bypass CFIUS review. And then they spend billions upon billions of dollars acquiring users, right? and buying content to subsidize both sides of that marketplace. And of course, with artificial intelligence, the more inputs you have, the more people you have watching more content, the better it gets and the more personalized it is for the people that use it. And I think what nobody had anticipated in the United States was the level of investment that ByteDance made into the US market and of course in Europe. Because it was just something that was unimaginable. I mean, no startup could afford to invest billions and billions and billions of dollars in user acquisition like that around the world. So it was a totally different strategy than any technology company had expected before because it wasn't an innovation-led strategy. It was really about subsidizing large-scale user acquisition around the world. And now people like it, though. They like to use it. What is the reason when you use it and look at it yourself? I think the reason is that it gets to know you over time because you invest a lot of time in it. And that investment means that the content is more personalized. And so I think what people find, of course, if they uninstall the app and come back and they haven't created an account or something like that, is that it doesn't reflect their interest anymore and they have to train it again. And that's kind of exhausting. And so TikTok got this great lead early on, of course, by really aggressively expanding, spending a huge amount of money to do that so that people could train the algorithm and ultimately end up with a much more personalized feed that's harder to get on a new service. Because when you start, you know, when you open up shorts or you open up reels, it hasn't been personalized for you yet until you start using it.

Scott Galloway: So what do you look at as you've been on the edge of innovation most of the time, as he was joking about Facebook stealing stuff, but they do, they have taken a lot of your ideas. What do you think is really important in the area that you're strongest in, in communications? You've morphed different things, you've tried different things. What are you thinking about right now? You did a really cool thing at Cannes on Vogue where you yourself put on a gown and you look lovely. All these filters and things like that you did with Vogue. What are you looking at that is most exciting in making things?

Evan Spiegel: Well, so much of communication is visual, which is why we focused on augmented reality, right? Because it empowers people to express themselves. And as we started doing that and people started building more lenses and we open sourced our tools, Lens Studio, I shouldn't say open source, made available our tools like Lens Studio so the creators could build more and more of these lenses. That's when we started to recognize the possibility of augmented reality beyond just self-expression. So what you mentioned is trying on clothing is a huge area of investment for us because it's a way that augmented reality provides a huge amount of utility and differentiation. Possible monetization. To merchants and monetization as well because what we find is when people can visualize themselves trying on clothing, of course they're more likely to buy that clothing and they're less likely to return it, especially if we can help them find the right size. And so that's really a way that augmented reality today can make the shopping experience much better from the comfort of your home without having to actually change your clothes. So a whole commerce business that you're thinking about, essentially. Not commerce on Snapchat per se, but powering commerce with augmented reality, you know, with all sorts of merchants. So we built out this AR enterprise team that's taking our AR shopping suite and helping merchants integrate our AR technology into their own applications and websites to help. And then what do you get, a part or a piece? Well, today, we're just working on growing that business and getting feedback from our beta clients. But over time, what we're planning on doing is more of an AR enterprise business model where there might be some small setup fee or something because it takes quite a lot of work to get it integrated and up and running. And then if we're really driving conversions for you because more people are trying things on and they like how they look and they want to buy, then we can take some small fee off of that transaction.

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Scott Galloway: I want to do a compliment before a hard question. I'm coming back as you in my next life. Just FYI, I've decided that. The stock's down 75% this year. But you're very handsome. Go ahead. Seriously. Tall drink of lemonade. All right. That's enough. Sorry. Growth has slowed. And this is a boomer question. I've served on a bunch of public company boards. I listened to your earnings call last night. You didn't say anything. How is your board not letting you speak on earnings calls? Why aren't you speaking? Isn't this exactly the time where CEOs should be speaking directly to investors?

Evan Spiegel: That was a huge mistake that I shouldn't have made. To be honest with you, I wasn't even thinking. I was obviously, I'm on the call. I'm waiting for a question. No one asked a question addressed to me. So it wasn't planned. You just felt like there were other people. I don't mean to put words in your mouth. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it wasn't planned. I was waiting. I actually kind of expected a question, kind of given everything going on. But But I'd also come in person in May to pre-announce that we were going to miss the bottom end of our guidance to a big investor conference, answered a bunch of investor questions there in person. So I wasn't thinking like, oh, I'm not engaged with investors because I spent quite a lot of time answering their questions and really helping them understand our business. And we thought we were doing the right thing by being really transparent and coming out and saying, hey, we're going to come in below the low end of our guidance. And obviously, plenty of other companies missed in that quarter too. but we thought it was important to pre-announce. And so then when we were on the call, generally on all these calls, we let folks answer the question. I don't think it was appropriate to step on top of Derek or Jeremy or something like that to answer it.

Scott Galloway: Can I follow up with a question? Sure, go ahead. You may. Thank you. Thank you, Tara. So you own 13% of the stock, but you have 51% of the voting stock, which means you control the company. That's the math I do. You control it. It feels like everyone but Facebook and Google in this space are sub-scale. And unless they break out and start growing again, they should be acquired. Or they should partner with another company in terms of if they were really shareholder driven. At least that's my view. If at some point you didn't start scaling again, and someone like Comcast or Google approached you at this conference and said, we'll pay 100% premium for your stock today. Would you entertain selling the company?

Evan Spiegel: Before he answers, let's play something from 2018. Okay. Do you regret not staying private then? Smoothing out things as you do this? I think this was the logical step forward in being an independent company. So when we raised a lot of money from venture capitalists, I guess our first investor invested at like a $4.25 million valuation. Right. right? The understanding from the venture capitalists was that we were going to provide an exit for them. And that was either going to be in the form of an acquisition, or that would be in the form of an IPO. Right. So you did it for the venture capitalists? Because they don't care. And you shouldn't care about them. But go ahead. To be honest with you we do care about them And we do care about our investors And I think for us this was a really great transition to take what is ultimately short capital Venture investors are short investors They invest for a couple of years, and then they rotate out of their investments. And so we were able to transition inherently short-term investors to long-term investors. And despite there being a little volatility that comes with that, ultimately, that's the right thing to do to build our business. By the way, I did not know that video was going to happen. See? There you go. Well done. That's right, because I'm the brains of the operation. So what answer is question? Well, gosh, so as you point out, you know, Bobby and I own 20-something percent of the business. We're very focused on its long-term success because we want to see— But you control—you make all the decisions at the end of the day. Everyone else is just an advisor. They're all influencers. You're the decision maker. At some point, would you personally be open to selling the company if it was fairly apparent it was the best thing for shareholders?

Evan Spiegel: Well, personally, from where I sit today, when I look at the long-term opportunity in our business, I really believe it's enormous. I believe we're far from reaching our full potential. And I believe over time, the stock price has gone up and down. we've tried to stay focused on delivering real value for shareholders. Since our IPO, we've, I think, grown revenue 10x or something, last 12 months revenue 10x. It's about 50 plus percent year over year on average for the last five years. We've doubled the size of our community. We believe those things are really important for building long-term value for shareholders. And of course, along the way, we've really tried to continue to innovate, to increase our long-term opportunity with things like our map, for example, our augmented reality platform. These are big innovations and big investments that we think really contribute to the long-term value of our business as we monetize those parts of our service over time. And so if you look at the engagement across Snapchat, 350 million daily active users growing really rapidly, and the level of monetization of our service on an average revenue per user basis, I think it's something's still today like half of Twitter's, certainly a small fraction of Facebook's. So when we look at our overall opportunity, we look at the engagement just on the core Snapchat platform today, we believe we have an enormous amount of opportunity ahead of us. So we've really got to focus on executing. It's going to be difficult because you're right, we are smaller than these other very, very large companies. But these other very large companies started as small companies too. They were asked many of the same questions about competition. They were asked many of the same questions about revenue growth. They faced a lot of volatility and many challenges themselves. That's the difficulty of building an independent business. But I think so far, Bobby and I believe that the best way to realize our long-term potential is by building an independent company. And I think while the stock price has gone up and down over time, we have slowly and steadily increased the long-term value of our business. We'll be back in a moment with more from Code. Support for Pivot comes from LinkedIn. From talking about sports, discussing the latest movies, everyone is looking for a real connection to the people around them. But it's not just person to person. It's the same connection that's needed in business. And it can be the hardest part about B2B marketing, finding the right people, making the right connections. But instead of spending hours and hours scavenging social media feeds, you can just tap LinkedIn ads to reach the right professionals. According to LinkedIn, they have grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals, making it stand apart from other ad buys. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company roles, seniority skills, and company revenue, giving you all the professionals you need to reach in one place. So you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience and start targeting the right professionals only on LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn will even give you $100 credit on your next campaign so you can try it for yourself. Just go to linkedin.com slash pivotpod. That's linkedin.com slash pivotpod. Terms and conditions apply. only on LinkedIn ads. Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless. And if you haven't made the switch yet, here are 15 reasons why you should. One, it's $15 a month. Two, seriously, it's $15 a month. Three, no big contracts. Four, I use it. Five, my mom uses it. Are you playing me off? That's what's happening, right? Okay. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. Welcome back. Here's more of our conversation with Evan Spiegel at Code. So let's talk about small companies. We have a lot of talk about tech regulation here. You've said in the past you would support thoughtful regulation. How do you look at the most of the people who have been on stage here do not support Amy Klobuchar's antitrust bill? There's lots of bills out there. There's some in Europe, everywhere else. How are you looking at the regulatory landscape as a smaller company compared to these larger, you wouldn't be subject to many of these things. How do you look at that?

Evan Spiegel: There are so many pieces of proposed legislation flying around all over the world right now that I think it's really hard to engage piece by piece. So I think for us, it's much more important to look at the big ideas that might influence the way that tech evolves in the future. And more more importantly, to build a strategy that does not rely on government intervention for our success. I think historically, these processes have taken a long time. The outcomes have been quite mixed. And what's been really important for small businesses is not to wait for the government to come to the rescue, but actually just to continue executing our strategy, to focus on our community, which is so important to the long-term growth of our business, and just to continue to delight them with great products. So while we're keeping an eye on that, I think there's just too much to track.

Scott Galloway: Specifically the antitrust bill, would that help you if it passes? Again, it's so hard to know because in its current form, I'm sure it would change a lot before it ever was considered to pass. So I don't know, and it's hard to respond to. And we could spend so much time chasing all this legislation around, but that would take us further away from our customer and really delivering value. So right now, what companies do you view as your core competition at this moment? I think today as it pertains to performance advertising, direct response advertising, which is a big focus of ours. Meta continues to be a very, very large and challenging competitor. Meta continues to be. How do you look at what's going on? They've made a big bet on the metaverse. How are you looking at that? You talk about AR, but not meta. We like to talk really specifically in terms of the value that we provide our community, which is why AR is so important to our strategy, because they know what it is. They use it every day and they love it because it brings value to their lives, right? It helps them express themselves or learn about things in new ways or even solve a math problem. I mean, you can point your Snapchat camera at a really complex, you know, quadratic equation and, you know, our camera will help you solve it. And so I think AR is really real in the lives of our community because of the utility that it provides. And so we try to talk really specifically about that and show our community, you know, our innovation rather than sort of talking about some future. Do you have any investments in doing metaverse stuff? Or are you just like, whatever, Mark? We've been trying to figure out what it means. It seems to mean virtual reality, putting on a headset and sort of escaping the real world and going somewhere else. And that's going in a totally different direction than our strategy, which is about integrating computing into the real world. We believe that that's the healthiest way to use computing. It's the most familiar because you can rely on all of these interactions that you're used to, of course. from just navigating the physical world. And so our focus in our business is we believe most people are going to spend most of the time in the real world. And how can we augment that and make that better through computing? And that's really different than this idea of virtual reality, which is about escaping the world. Spot, last question. So you're a, well, by most standards, by tech standards, you're a young dad. You're 34, is that right? 32. Jesus Christ. You have two young kids and an 11 year old. And do you have any, I mean, you're facing, you have a tremendous amount of business pressure and you're under a lot of spotlight and a lot of scrutiny as a public company CEO and you have three kids. Do you have any advice for young fathers in terms of trying to balance the push and the pull of having that kind of scrutiny and that kind of pressure and also trying to manage a household with three kids and be a good partner? So I struggle with it every day. I mean, just before going on stage, I'm thinking about, I'm hosting a dinner after this. I'm thinking about, do I have 30 minutes in between the time I get off stage? You know, 15 minutes to drive home, 15 minutes to read to Hart, who's our four and a half year old. before I have to go to this dinner so that I can have that precious time together. It's all-consuming. I think this is, as parents, what all of us struggle with all the time. And Miranda's actually out of town for these couple days, which is not ideal timing. So, yeah, it's difficult. It's always difficult. I haven't found a magic solution or answer because I also feel an enormous responsibility to our business, to our team, to our community, hundreds of millions of people that use our product. And so I feel pulled in a million directions all the time. So I wish it were easy. I think it's hard. I think it's hard for all dads to make those trade-offs. And it was much harder before the pandemic because I really rarely saw our kids. I'd get up and go to the office before they were awake. I'd get home, you know, obviously before or, you know, after they had fallen asleep. I was traveling, let's call it half the weekends, and it was eating at me. And the last couple of years profoundly changed my life because I got to be home with them during such a formative part of their lives. You know, now the two youngest are both off to preschool this year. And, you know, so I just feel so grateful to have had this little moment in time to be with our family like that because I know that that's not what it's going to be like going forward. All right, questions. All right. You weren't expecting a dad question, were you? Okay, right here. Hi. Okay, until today, I just searched you up on Google, and you're 32. That's kind of crazy, right? So that means I was one of the first Snapchat users probably back in like 2010, 2011, something like that. And I didn't know you were 22 or 21 at the time. So what was your biggest challenge finding partnerships for your startup? So in terms of finding partnerships, I think the bigger challenge for us early on as the service started growing was that most people hadn't used it. Many people, if they knew about it, knew about it through their kids. And so actually what we found very quickly is we talked with partners or spoke with investors. We could really quickly filter partners and investors by whether or not their kids had used Snapchat. and if partners had kids that use Snapchat and investors had kids that use Snapchat, they totally got it right away and were ready to have a really interesting conversation and they saw the role that it played in the lives of their kids and for investors and partners that didn't, it was so hard to overcome the misperceptions, the confusion about Snapchat that at that point, we just kind of flipped the conversation, tried to figure out how much can we learn from them because we know that it's really gonna be difficult to get any investment or partnership. So I think it was really just about the level of understanding of our partners or investors. Hey, Evan, Alex at The Verge. So the only thing you and Mark Zuckerberg agree on, I think, is that AR glasses are going to be big one day. The problem is that they're investing a lot, way more than you can. Apple is going to come into it as well. And so this conversation has revolved around companies being able to invest more at scale and how that impacts companies like yours. You implied in your annual letter yesterday to employees that the next version of Spectacles will be dev only as well so it's going to take a while for it to hit consumer scale. How do you do hardware in that environment when you've got these massive companies that also think what you think about Aeroglasses? Do you want to license SnapOS, the software in the glasses, to another company? Is that how you survive if that transition to wearables really happens like you think it will? A lot in there. Okay, so So first and foremost, I think one of the things that's so exciting about the technology industry over time is that capital is not always a predictor of success. That's, I think, one of the things that draws so many people to this industry and excites so many people about this industry. Because true innovation, especially long-term, complex, technical innovation, can create really breakout products, even when your competitors have way more money and are spending a lot more and hiring more people. because in fact, I think what happens is that many of those companies that are spending a lot more money aren't having to make hard choices. And design is all about those hard choices and trade-offs. And when you have lots of money and someone presents you with three options, you say, let's do all three, right? And that means that ultimately over time, you miss the opportunity to learn and to iterate and evolve the product as quickly as you could if you were really constrained by the amount you could invest. And so we're not constrained the way that we were a few years ago when we started investing in spectacles. I think we started working on our glasses products seven or eight years ago now. We took a very measured and step-by-step approach, you know, first integrating one camera, then two cameras, then really understanding, you know, how 3D could play a role with content. Then, of course, releasing glasses that have a display now. And we've learned along the way making those tough design tradeoffs so much about what people want from AR glasses. And so to your point, we have along the way also developed really amazing software. And now that people are understanding how difficult it is to build an AR platform, not only in terms of the SnapOS, but also in terms of the developer platform with Lens Studio, the engine itself that runs lenses. You're right. People are asking us, hey, can you help out with your software? We're working on our glasses, too. So I think that might be an option for us in the future. But when we started, nobody was working on glasses for consumers. That's why we had to start working on it ourselves, because we believed that breaking AR out of the confines of this phone, right, with this tiny touchscreen, was going to totally transform the experience for our community. Because it's immersive. You can walk around. You can engage, you know, with your hands in a totally different way. And that's why we started building it. So obviously, I can't predict what the future will hold. But what gives me a lot of hope is that historically in our industry, spending huge amounts of money is not always correlated with long-term success. You should be speaking on earnings calls. Trust me on that