You guys have a billion monthly active users. Why is it so freaking hard to build a durable, lasting, social consumer product? So much of consumer

technology focuses on do I have product market fit? People don't spend nearly enough time thinking about distribution and figuring out distribution.

I feel like Snap has always been punching above its weight in terms of just how much new stuff comes out of your team.

Stories, AR glasses, swipe based navigation. We have a very small design team that is constantly innovating and creating new things. Your first day

that you join the design team, you present work. You're making things. If you want to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas.

People copy you as a human. How does it feel just to see this consistently happen? >> 15 years ago, we essentially learned that software is not a

moat, which is something that everyone is discovering today with AI. >> You describe this coming year as the crucible moment. >> It's a real turning

point.

We're in an industry where so much of the conversation is focused on technology. Humanity is far more important because humanity dictates how

technology is adopted. Technology leaders think that folks will just blindly adopt new technology as it comes out. There's going to be a huge amount

of societal push back on a lot of the changes that are coming with AI. Today my guest is Evan Spiegel, CEO and co-founder of Snap.

Evan is one of the very few humans in the world who has successfully built and scaled a lasting consumer social app. In the 15 years since Snapchat

launched, there are essentially zero social consumer apps that have launched and stuck around. Snapchat has over 1 billion monthly active users, is

generating over 6 billion a year in revenue. People post over 8 billion AR lens photos a day on Snapchat. And over the years, Evan and his team have

invented the concept of stories.

They had the first AR glasses product in the market. They invented swipe face navigation, the camera being primary, and also back in the day, face

swapping, making people look older, and so many of the things that are just copied throughout the entire industry. If this is truly the golden age of

consumer products, like many people say, AI is going to enable, there's a lot that we can learn about how Evan and his team think and operate and are

able to continue innovating. This is a rare podcast interview with Evan, and we cover a lot of ground. Before we get into it, don't forget to check

out Lenny's product.

com for a year free of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that,

I bring you Evan Spiegel. Evan, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. >> Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it. >> I want to start with just trying to understand and help people understand why is it so freaking

hard to build a durable lasting consumer product and in particular a social consumer product. And just to give people this context, I don't think

people realize this, but since you launched 15 years ago, there's basically uh Tik Tok, which is not really social, it's more of like a media

platform, I'd say, and then maybe threads, which I think is cheating because it just sits on top of Instagram. Basically, nothing else has worked

other than Snapchat 15 years ago.

And in spite of everyone just like everyone innately just wants to build a consumer product, social app, it's just like where everyone first goes,

everybody fails. Nothing works. Why is it so hard? What do you think people don't get? Well, >> I think it's really interesting, you know, in terms of

the examples that you just shared, right, of Tik Tok and threads because you just shared two examples of people who figured out distribution.

And I think that's actually one of the hardest things to figure out in consumer technology today. We were so fortunate when we created Snapchat, the

mobile phone, you know, and the app store were just getting started. So, people were downloading lots of new apps all the time. They were really

excited about trying new uh services. is, you know, Instagram, I think, had started a year before Snapchat or something like that.

So, there was a real appetite to try new apps and new services and that's not the case today. It's a lot harder to get distribution for new ideas and

new services. People aren't downloading as many apps now as they used to. And both Tik Tok and threads figured out distribution, which is why I think

they're more recent examples of success. Tik Tok did it with money, uh, which I actually thought was really innovative.

uh they spent billions of dollars subsidizing both sides of their video marketplace, right? Acquiring customers to watch videos and then paying

creators to make videos. And so they were able to bootstrap uh you know their ecosystem. And I think with threads obviously they were able to leverage

the amazing distribution uh that Meta has across all their other products. So I I think so much of consumer technology focuses on you know am I

building the right product?

Do I have product market fit? have I, you know, built something that's really going to resonate uh with customers that they're really going to want to

use all the time. And I think people don't spend nearly enough time thinking about, you know, distribution and figuring out distribution. And that

seems to me uh to be a huge differentiator. So I, you know, as I reflect on the early days of building Snapchat, the thing that we figured out in

terms of distribution, especially when it comes to social, was that, you know, back then people believed that uh there was there were network effects

in social networks that meant that the more people you had using the service, the stickier that it is, right?

And so there was no way to beat the biggest networks because those were the most valuable. And what Snapchat figured out that was, I think, different

was that, you know, despite the fact that there were much bigger networks that connected more people, what really mattered was connecting you to the

right people. And so if you could just connect someone not to all their friends, but to their best friend, to their partner, to their spouse, the

people that they cared most about in the world, that that's where the majority of the value is in the network. And so that's what really allowed us to

grow in those early days. you know, we had the benefit of the app store and mobile distribution, but we also had a different way of growing our

service, which wasn't about having the most friends.

It was about having your close friends. >> That is so interesting. It's something that I've been thinking a lot about actually, this idea of

distribution because of AI. If you think about just where AI has come into the market, it's it started originally just like helping people

autocomplete code. That's something I've been talking about a lot on this podcast.

So, it's like, okay, autocomplete code, okay, now it's writing all our code. Okay, now it's reviewing our code and now it's testing itself and now

it's going to help us come up with ideas. So, it's like starting in the middle of the product development process and expanding out and I feel like it

will be very good at coming up with great ideas and developing strategy like it's going up the I don't know the funnel or the timeline of building a

product and I feel like distribution is where it ends up being what ends up being the new moat and the new biggest challenge uh because AI is not

going to really help you there. So, that's it's really interesting that's even more so true for consumer products. I I think that's absolutely the

case and the only thing I would say is, you know, the most exciting times in technology are when there are new platforms that get created and that

tends to be where a lot of the value comes from.

You think about, you know, a lot of t