Snap CEO Evan Spiegel is Betting on Smart Glasses

22:17And we had just a very different vision for what we were trying to accomplish. So we saw a big opportunity. We had a very different vision. And then Bobby and I were just having a lot of fun. You know, we really love working together and we didn't want to give that up. So, you know, we decided to stay independent. Google reportedly tried to buy you for$30 billion. Did that happen? I don't know about that one. Where do you get your conviction? What a great question. I grew up with two parents who were both lawyers. My mother was a tax lawyer. My dad does business litigation. So our dining table conversations were energetic, to say the least.

22:51And I think my parents always really instilled in me or helped me develop an ability to defend my point of view. And I've always really enjoyed debating that. That's the primary format, actually, of our design meetings. We spend three or four hours a week just looking at work and debating it and really developing that confidence in the underlying perspective or point of view. So I think conviction is something you build over time by really trying to understand an idea, by approaching it from different directions, by debating it. And so I think I ended up developing a bunch of tools that helped me build conviction and something over time.

23:23These are trillion-dollar companies, though, and Snap is a multibillion-dollar company. A baby company. A baby company. How crazy is that? Zuck recently said, I think if we would have bought them, we would have accelerated their growth. What's your response to that? I think that's probably true. I think that's certainly what they've done with other services like Instagram because they have so much distribution. They were always a much larger company. And Snap was a very late entrant. Facebook had come first. Instagram came first. Twitter came first. WhatsApp came first. All of these other services came first.

23:53And one of the big pieces of pushback we heard from investors was, you know, you have no chance of succeeding because network effects. Everybody believed in network effects at the time mean that there's just no way you're going to grow. And we actually developed a very different growth strategy to address that. So the traditional model that people had in their heads of social networks was that every incremental node or person you add to the service or add to the graph exponentially increases its value. So the more people you have, the more valuable the network has, and it becomes so valuable that no one can ever compete with it.

24:23What we had learned and what we saw was that even if you have a very, very large network, you only really talk to or care about a very small number of people in that network. So I would bet that certainly this is the case for me. I bet this is the case for you. You spend most of your time talking to a pretty small group of people. And I think what we learned very early on was that if you focus on building those strong relationships with the people you really care about, you actually don't need this huge graph to build a competitive business. If you just have one friend you really care about and talk to every day, that's enough.

24:53to compete. And so we ended up taking a very different path from a growth perspective that's proven very resilient and continue to allow us to grow. But it's true that just plugging into a giant dominant social network would have probably accelerated the growth of the company. But still no regrets? Like, do you ever think what if? No, I mean, I'd be more concerned, frankly, if Snapchat didn't exist, because all of these innovations that we've continued to create have really contributed to the industry. And I think we've helped shape the conversation around things like privacy. We've helped shape the conversation around things like moderation, trust and safety, these things that are really, really important to people's well-being that I think ultimately may have not ever been talked about if Snap hadn't been a proponent of a lot of these really important ideas.

25:34Yeah. Tencent still has a big stake in Snap. They're your biggest investor, I believe. I think one of the biggest. One of the biggest investors. Okay, they're one of the biggest investors. And I've always found that so fascinating because U.S. social media is banned in China. What's your relationship with them? They are an incredible investor. I think it's important to understand Tencent's business. So Tencent's fundamentally a messaging service. I think people today are familiar with WeChat or QQ. Back in the day, the way they were able to build their business, they had a desktop messaging client.

26:04They found that people were messaging each other, but then they would leave the messaging client. And they were like, gosh, why is everyone leaving our messaging client? They realized everyone was going to play games with their friends. So they figured out if we help through our messaging client, people go and play games together and then we monetize through those games, we could build a really big business around messaging. So they were one of the first people, maybe the first to figure out how to build a very big business around messaging, which people historically thought was not a very good business to be in.

26:31So they were also the first to really see the value in Snapchat. I remember they visited the blue house that we just saw this morning, the very early days of the company. And they were like, we're not sure you understand. You have the potential to build a huge business around messaging. And we'd love to show you how we did it. We'd love to show you how we built all these different services. So I got to learn from them how they built out a social networking service, how they built out a gaming business, how they built out an avatar business. And they really showed us how powerful messaging could be as a business at a time when in the United States, people thought of messaging services as actually not very valuable.

27:04You met President Xi in 2015. Do you get any inspiration from China and the broader social products that they're building? I think there are incredible entrepreneurs in China. I think that there's an amazing amount of entrepreneurial energy. I had the great fortune of meeting Yiming way back in the day. I think this was like, what was this, the Tohtiao days? This was before Doyin. So they had just a little newsreader app that was driven by AI. That helped inform some of our thinking about how we were doing AI-driven content distribution at the time because we were expanding our Discover product.

27:36In the beginning, we only had nine publishers on Discover, which was our media platform. And we had grown that to have a lot more publishers, but we needed to provide the right recommendations to our community. So we definitely learned a lot about content recommendation from them and so many other really talented entrepreneurs in China. Just how big a threat is TikTok? I mean, they seem to be setting the trends that you set in the early days. I think they've done an incredible job growing their business. They have some real advantages that make them a tough competitor. One, of course, is that they're allowed to operate in China and we're not.

28:07They have a very, very large and profitable business in China that they can use to fund their growth outside of China. And so especially as they've been competing with us in the early days, it's not like competing with a normal startup. It's like competing with a giant, really, conglomerate because they have so many different services that's able to spend tens of billions of dollars to grow. And so it's been an unbelievably formative journey for Snap to try to figure out how to compete with them in addition to the really big players here in the U.S. like Meta. But I think we have a lot of experience now competing with very, very large and powerful companies who can spend a nearly infinite amount of money.

28:40And we've just found that if we stay focused on our community, if we continue to innovate, that that's how we can drive value and grow. It's a race for creators. Why should they come to you? What we always hear from creators is they deeply value their relationship with their audience on Snapchat. And they feel like they're able to build a loyal relationship on Snapchat compared to other platforms. So now most creator platforms basically resemble TikTok. So whether it's Instagram or YouTube, TikTok, of course, they have short video distribution. And it's very hard to build a durable, loyal, and valuable relationship with your audience when your distribution is so varied.

29:15So you could have one video that gets 10 views or 1 ,000 and another that gets millions. It's very hard to create sustained success and then a business out of that as a creator when your distribution is so varied. So one of the reasons why creators love Snapchat is they get that distribution through Spotlight if they want to acquire a new audience. But ultimately, they deepen the relationship through stories. And we provide monetization through stories, through shared advertising revenue. We're actually experimenting right now with a lot of really cool monetization tools for creators because we've had a lot of success with direct revenue.

29:46We have a big subscription business now. So I think there's a lot of opportunity to help creators continue to deepen that relationship with their fans. Snap is currently sitting below its IPO price. Earnings can be notoriously brutal. How do you manage the pressure of running a public company? Does that get to you? I think what's so important is that we just continue to stay focused on our vision and that we clearly communicate that to our team. So one of the reasons why our earnings reports are challenged is because we're investing so much in the future of augmented reality in our glasses. And we've been doing that for a really long period of time.

30:19And because investors haven't seen a lot of revenue from that or a lot of unit sales from that, they're skeptical, right? And so until we're able to show that our glasses can become a really big business, that we can win this future of augmented reality and really reinvent computing, they're going to view that as a drag on our stock and there's going to be volatility. I mean, I had such an inspiring conversation with Jensen because for a very long time, he had a really strong CUDA business, right? And then they were trying to grow this GPU business. People didn't think they could win in GPUs. They were taking a lot of the revenue from the CUDA business, reinvesting it to grow the GPU business.

30:50And he mentioned to me, you know, it just felt like I never had a clean quarter, right? Because I was really trying to invest in this business where I saw so much opportunity. And it was really, really hard to do that. Here at Snapchat, we take the cash flows that we're generating from the Snapchat business. And we reinvest that in the future of AR and our glasses. And because we don't provide a lot of financial disclosure around that, it's hard for investors sometimes to understand what's the scale of that investment, what's the return profile going to look like. And for competitive reasons, it's not very smart for us to share that information because we have a track record of being right consistently and inventing these new products.

31:22And we don't want people to follow us quickly on this one. So I think over time, as people start seeing the value of our augmented reality platform as they see our advantages in that space and it turns into a real business, that that story will evolve. But until then, we have a business where we're really taking the strong financial performance of Snapchat and reinvesting it in the future. So what was Jensen's advice? Just knuckle down. You know, it's funny, too, because at the time he had young kids, you know, and he was joking around. He's like, you couldn't work from home back then. So I'd bring my kids to work in a basket and would be at the office seven days a week to try to win that future and stay focused on your vision, knuckle down.

31:57And I think ultimately the ability to invest so consistently over a long timeframe at this scale is such an advantage. It'd be very, very hard for a startup to follow that path. Certainly it's hard for bigger companies to do that with the amount of focus that we have. So we have such an incredible competitive advantage, but you know, sometimes it means we don't have a clean quarter. So what do you want the market to know? Like what are the new revenue streams of the future? I think there are a couple. So first of all, we continue to have a huge opportunity in our advertising business. And specifically, we spent a lot of time over the last couple of years building out our lower funnel business.

32:30So I think Snapchat's early growth in advertising was really around video. Very simple, right? People were spending a lot of money on television advertising. Young people don't watch television. They watch video on their phones. They watch vertical video on their phones. We've got a lot of that video inventory. And that's been meaningful for our business and meaningful for our advertising partners. Over the last couple of years, we built out a very advanced advertising platform that delivers lower funnel goals. So think download an app and make a purchase or complete a level, buy a new product that's dynamically served to you from a huge product catalog.

33:01Those are the sorts of things that we've been able to deliver with our advertising platform. And those sorts of goals are very valuable to small and medium-sized customers. So small and medium-sized customers are the majority of Google or Meta's revenue. They are the minority of our revenue. And so if we look at where our growth is going to come from on the advertising side in the future, it's going to be from continuing to grow our small, medium customer business while, of course, serving our large brand advertisers as well. Then we've had quite a bit of success with Snapchat Plus, which is our subscription service.

33:31I don't remember what we last disclosed at earnings, but I think it's run rating north of half a billion dollars now. I think it's about two years old. And we see a lot of opportunity in the direct revenue space, not just with subscriptions, but other forms of added value, like what we're doing with creators as well. And then I think longer term, if you look at our progress on the hardware side, it's not impossible to imagine a future where, let's say, you know, we were to sell 25 million units a year of glasses at$1 ,000 a unit with a 30 % gross margin. I think that's like seven-ish billion of gross profit.

34:01And that would be 10 % of iPhone volumes, 2 % of total smartphone volumes. And that doesn't include televisions and desktops and all the other screens people are spending their money on. So I think if we have even just a modest amount of success in the device business, and that's before advertising and digital services and this sort of thing, if we have some modest success on the hardware side as well, I think that can be a very large driver of our growth in the future. The Big Take podcast from Bloomberg News keeps you on top of the biggest stories of the day. My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day.

34:32Stories that move markets. Chair Powell opened the door to this first interest rate cut. Impact politics. Change businesses. This is a really stunning development for the AI world and how you think about your bottom line. Listen to the big take from Bloomberg News every weekday afternoon on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What are you doing to make sure Snap keeps winning younger users? Like, I can't read my kids' minds. So how do you do it? I think for us, it's really about just being responsive to how people feel when they're using our product and the needs that they have.

35:08So let's take, for example, the Snap Map. I think it's one of the largest maps on mobile now. The reason why we built that map is people were saying, gosh, I'm spending so much time asking my friends where they are, what they're doing, who they're with. I'm waiting for a response. I don't know when they're going to get here or when is my partner going to make it home from work. And gosh, it would be so great to just have an easy way to know that. And so I think just by listening, being responsive to our community, their desires and their needs, that prompts so much innovation and creativity from us.

35:36will allow us to continue to evolve the product. You do have, obviously, a lot of younger users, and they're using Snap at an incredibly formative time in life when they're more susceptible to pressure and anxiety and addiction. How do you look at the products and features you're designing in terms of encouraging good behavior and discouraging bad behavior? And how can design really play a role in that? I think for us, as we look at our role in young people's lives, but people's lives more broadly, one of the things that we find is so incredibly important is their relationships with their friends and their family.

36:08In fact, relationships with just one friend can dramatically improve mental health outcomes. And so if Snapchat can play a role in connecting people with their close friends and family, I think it can make an extraordinary difference in the world. So how do we do that that's different than what other services are doing today? Today, if your teen is using text messaging, anyone can text them that has their number, right? No screening, no vetting, anybody in the world. I don't know if you have this experience. I get a ton of spam messages too. It's super annoying. And one of the things I don't think people realize about Snapchat is both people have to opt in and add each other to communicate.

36:41And that's incredibly important for forming close friendships and for communicating in an environment that's safer. So I think the most important thing for young people is to make sure they're adding their real friends out in the world. And I think Snapchat can become an incredibly powerful vehicle to strengthen those relationships and to help reduce the barrier to that sort of communication. Things like, you know, using silly AR effects or lenses help reduce that pressure of communicating. It's not about taking a pretty or perfect photo. It's about, you know, silly, you know, dog ears or something and sending that to your friend.

37:09And I think those sort of points of connection are really valuable. And then we invest a huge amount of time, money, our engineering resources, talent into our trust and safety teams, because it's really important that, of course, in addition to building a platform that's built around your close friends and family, that there are options and ways for you to get help if you need it. And that's everything like our proactive detection to understand if people are misusing the platform so we can investigate, lock their account, remove them from the platform, but also tools allowing people to get help in-app if they're having a conversation that feels inappropriate or it's going sideway, they can just press and hold and report that message.

37:42Again, not a feature that's available on text messaging, but that's available on Snapchat. Maybe I'm just a geriatric millennial, but some of the things, you know, Snapstreaks, Snapcredits, Snapmaps, some of those things actually seem like they might not be good for kids and make you feel left out if you're not on the map with your friends or make you feel like you have to keep snapping to keep that streak going. How do you think about those things? We've thought a lot over the years about how to do things like reduce the pressure of streaks. A streak is only something that can increase once a day.

38:11So the idea that people would constantly be coming into our service or feel the pressure to communicate all day long with their friends, a streak only increases once a day with one snap back and forth from your friends. So it's a once-a-day behavior if you want to check in with your friends. And we've heard constantly and consistently from our community how meaningful it is to have that daily point of connection and that excuse to stay in touch. So we hear from families or, you know, I get these beautiful notes from people who say, I've been through so many life changes. I moved halfway around the world.

38:38I got divorced. I am dealing with working on managing the relationship with my kids. And through it all, every single day I snap with my best friend and it made such a difference in my life and created that connection point. So I think streaks can have a really positive impact in people's lives. That's certainly what we've heard from our community. As it pertains to the Snap Map, I would argue that it's very, very important at this moment in time to encourage people to be together with their friends in person. And I think the Snap Map actually creates a lot of those opportunities. So the Snap Map is not about driving more engagement in Snapchat.

39:06It's actually about encouraging people to hang out with their friends. And something that's incredibly encouraging to me, we perhaps foolishly hosted the eighth grade graduation party at our house this year with 150 eighth graders. And it was really inspiring to see because if you read the news, you would think that everyone would be sitting there on their phone the whole night. And that just wasn't the case at all. I mean, I saw maybe one teenager use their phone. Maybe someone else called their parents to get picked up. But everyone was hanging out, having a good time, dancing and having a cheeseburger.

39:33And I think it's just so important, especially for young people, and this is how we think about it in our house, to create all of the alternatives. Whether that's sports or art or other extracurriculars or just hanging out with your friends at the park. All of those things are things that our 14-year-old would vastly prefer to sitting there using his phone. But it's really important that those alternatives are available. There's major concerns about kids getting access to drugs on Snap. You apologized to parents before Congress. This has led to some really tragic situations. What specific improvements have you made since then to get better?

40:06Yeah, because Snapchat's a messaging service, very oftentimes we're on the forefront of some of these emerging challenges. In this particular case, I think you're referring to fentanyl-laced pills or counterfeit prescription pills. And these are very, very dangerous because young people might believe they're buying a Percocet or something for their friend, but actually it's laced with fentanyl or it was made with fentanyl and it can kill them. And unfortunately, far too many young people have died taking these fentanyl-laced pills. If you look at our response after we heard from families who had experienced this, we continue to aggressively ramp up our proactive detection to remove dealers from our platform.

40:42So understanding if people are trying to market drugs to a friend or sell drugs to a friend, we can proactively detect that and remove it from our platform, preserve all that information, and refer it to law enforcement. And I think we can be a really helpful partner to law enforcement in that regard in terms of actually getting these folks off the streets and stopping the distribution of illegal drugs. Another thing we've invested really, really heavily in is education because one of the first things we found, especially in those early days of the fentanyl crisis, was that people just didn't know that they could die from taking these counterfeit pills.

41:12There wasn't a level of awareness of fentanyl. And so we helped support the largest ever campaign, One Pill Can Kill, to educate young people because we're a platform with an enormous amount of reach. And I think that's another area that we think is so important. And we've worked together with nonprofits and other folks who are really committed to education so that people know just the tremendous risks that exist from fentanyl. And then lastly, we've really worked proactively with law enforcement. So long before the DEA issued their first ever warning about fentanyl, we've been collaborating with the DEA, with other law enforcement agencies, of course, you know, working on our proactive detection to help them respond as well and be a supportive partner to make sure we're responsive in a timely manner, to make sure that we can work on some of these really tough cases together to help protect our community.

41:57Would you say that safety and enforcement are treated with the same urgency inside the company as design and engineering and growth and product? And what would prove that to an outside viewer? I would say at many points in time, it's had more urgency because unless people can feel safe using our products, they're not going to feel comfortable expressing themselves or communicating with their friends. And I think fundamentally for Snapchat to be a successful service and to continue to grow, oh, we have to make sure our community feels safe when they're communicating using our products. So it's hard, obviously, outside of SNAP to understand the incredible amount of effort and work we put into this space.

42:35But I think whether it's some recent Senate hearings or some of the cases and the legal discovery that's ongoing to understand what has SNAP done right and wrong to respond to these crises, I think over time the public will build a lot of confidence in our response. And none of this is happening just on SNAP, of course, but this is something that I'm worried about. Kids are using Snap and other apps to send nude photos of themselves to other kids. AI is like gasoline on the fire. Where does this go? Well, I think it's really important for people to understand that's a crime. And I think there's been some really powerful legislation passed recently, the Take It Down Act, which helps protect people from being re-victimized by that sort of content.

43:12And there are tools available for young people. And if you are being victimized in that way, if you have had private images that have been exposed, there are tools you can use online to create a hash of that image, upload it, and take it down from all the various platforms, Snap included, who have integrated with that service. What if you sent it yourself? Because that's what kids are doing. You can take that image that you've sent yourself if you're being re-victimized or somebody's threatening you, upload that image to these services, and it will take it down from those platforms. And so sometimes folks reach out to get advice on these topics.

43:42They're just not aware that these tools exist today. So there are some really powerful tools to help young people if they have made a mistake in the heat of the moment or shared something they didn't want to, to pull that down from online platforms. And obviously, it's a serious crime. Do you think these things get better? Like, do kids learn? Do we get used to using all these tools? I think maybe the more optimistic view here would be younger generations are not engaging in risk-taking behaviors at the rate that their older generations were. In fact, overall, if you look at drug use, if you look at sexual behavior for teenagers and these sorts of things, they've declined dramatically.

44:15And I think there's reason to be optimistic that education people's awareness of the risks of these sorts of behaviors have changed the way they act out in the world. I know, but is that a good thing? Because aren't they just spending more time on screens than taking risks outside? I don't know. I don't know. You've got kids. My general view is that people are spending time on screens that could be spent in maybe different or more productive ways. That's certainly one of the reasons why we've invested so heavily in specs, because we believe instead of a classroom where everyone's sitting behind a laptop, what if you could all get together, look at the same thing, do simulated chemical reactions in your chemistry lab without making a mess, I think all of a sudden you have education that's interactive, that's shared in the real world, that's a lot more fun and doesn't involve just sitting behind, you know, hunched over a screen.

44:58What's the social media policy in the Spiegel household? Do you let your kids use Snap or TikTok or Instagram or are those forbidden? Those are absolutely forbidden. We cannot have competitive social services in our house. Flynn is absolutely allowed to use Snapchat. We have a great tool called Family Center that It allows you to link your account with your teen's account to see the people that they're communicating with, not the content of the messages, but who they're communicating with and other important information. So you can get confident with the way they're using the service. And we also find families really love it as a way to connect.

45:27Certainly our family does in our family group chat. Snap has done a lot to rock the vote with kids. Politics is a huge part of the platform. What is the next iteration? I think for us, we definitely find that our community is engaged in the political process. I'm so excited that millennials and Gen Z are now the largest generations. I think millennials are the largest adult generation. So I do think you are seeing a dramatic change in politics. Part of that's also, I think, being motivated by what people are experiencing in the economy. We have had an inflationary economy for quite some time. If you look at the political candidates that are resonating the most, they are talking directly about the cost of living crisis.

46:03That's something that young people are really feeling, right? The cost of housing is too high. The cost of groceries is too high. And I think what we're finding on Snapchat is that the creators or the politicians that are responding to that issue, discussing that issue and connecting on that, certainly are finding an opportunity to rally young people who want to see real change. What do you make of tech's right turn? How do you mean? All of those big tech CEOs sitting there at the inauguration. I wouldn't misinterpret that as a right turn. And I think if you look at the tech industry as a whole, across many different administrations, the technology industry continues to engage very heavily with whatever administration is currently serving the American people.

46:44I don't think that's different in this regard. I think these technology companies are hugely influential in the lives of the American people. I think they're dealing with a huge number of regulatory and other challenges. And no matter what administration it is, folks are going to engage as best they can because it's so important to American long-term success, but also important to their business. Other platforms, Meta notoriously, have rolled back some fact-checking and misinformation tools. How does Snap's policies compare? We think it's really important to make sure that our content is safe, especially because we serve young people, as you mentioned.

47:18And so we continue to moderate our content. We don't think things like extreme violence, for example, are appropriate on our service. There are other technology platforms that allow that sort of content. So we're going to continue to make sure that we have an environment where people feel comfortable expressing themselves. Because one of the things that we found over time and as we listened to how people experienced other technology platforms, they felt like if they were seeing lots of shocking or inappropriate content that they didn't feel comfortable participating. And we want our community to feel comfortable participating with one another.

47:46And that means, from our point of view, having a safer content environment because we don't allow some of that kind of content. I heard you still love reading physical newspapers. Physical newspapers, physical books, like you name it. It's kind of unexpected. Is it? I don't know. I don't know. I love paper. I also love writing on paper. That's definitely how I think. It probably goes back to some of my early days in graphic design and the way that I like to think is really writing things out and drawing. And it just helps me process information, I guess. Well, a lot of people are getting their news these days from social media and the lines there are becoming increasingly blurred.

48:20Does that keep happening? And is that a good thing? Snap has its own news shows. Yeah, I think that it's going to for sure continue to happen. I think part of that is because a lot of traditional media put up a lot of walls in terms of accessing their content. So it's harder for young people to access the media today. And instead, they're finding it on social media. So I do think that will continue. And I think it's going to be very important for some of the more traditional outlets to think about how to translate their stories into video and into ways that really resonate with young people. But as I mentioned, I think that's going to have to really come with a narrative framing that resonates with what young people are experiencing today.

48:57And then what's the point of a new subscription, I guess, if it's all going back on social? Well, I think the way to think about it over time is that people's ability and their willingness to pay increases as they get older. And I think the concern for traditional outlets is that they're not engaging young people early on and helping them get to know their platform, their service or the quality of their reporting. it can be very hard to build that relationship later. I guess I wonder, though, are we in a post-truth world? It feels like there is increasingly no shared understanding of reality. I would caution against thinking about the world that way, especially because we've lived through so many different periods of time with the news media, where I think people have shared vastly different perspectives and aren't always anchored in reality.

49:44And I think, in fact, today we have a lot more tools than we ever did, especially when you think about the advent of AI, for people to access information. So what has absolutely happened is that information access has become democratized. I think that's made it harder to control what people see and what they read. But I wouldn't interpret that as a collapse in terms of the truth. How have you evolved as a CEO? How are you different today than when you started? In nearly every single possible way. I mean, it's just been an extreme, extreme growth and learning journey. I've enjoyed almost every moment, I would say.

50:18I think I've gotten more comfortable in developing my own style. In the early days, especially because I didn't know anything about running a business, I spent a lot of time learning about what other CEOs did and what worked for them. And I think over the years, I've tried to figure out really what works for me, what brings out the best in our team and our business in terms of my own unique leadership style. And I think that's been a really important part of the journey and not something you can read about. It's something you got to, you know, trial and error. Tech CEOs sort of have become their own mythic class of celebrity.

50:46Are you really all that special or are you human just like the rest of us? I think thinking you're special is a pretty dangerous thing to do. One of the reasons why it's so dangerous in business is it can put a lot of distance between you and your customer. And so for us, we try to just stay grounded as the team and stay close to our customers, hear their feedback. Certainly with a 14-year-old and all his friends in our house, we get a lot of candid feedback, unfiltered feedback. And I think that's so important to building a service that people love. Because if you think you're special, you start putting distance between yourself and other people.

51:14It's hard to empathize. It's hard to connect. And then it's hard to innovate. Well, speaking of candid feedback and speaking of growing up, really, because this was a big story when I started covering you, your emails from Stanford were leaked. And my husband was a frat boy at Stanford. And when that happened, I remember sending them to him and being like, WTF? Is this what life was like at Stanford? And he said, not necessarily my finest hour, but look at me now. I turned out okay. How do you look back on those? It's obviously extremely embarrassing. I sent stupid emails, you know, as a college student.

51:45But I think people are also capable of extraordinary change. And I often think we sometimes forget that, you know, in the world or in our society. So hopefully at a bare minimum, some other fraternity kid somewhere can be inspired that they too can grow and change and evolve. And I've learned a lot over the years. And those emails obviously don't reflect how I feel today. They really didn't reflect how I felt then either. I was just trying to get our frat rallied up for some event. But nevertheless, unacceptable, inappropriate, and not an email I should have sent or would send today. So what's next for Snap?

52:17And what's next for you as a leader? I think for us, it's really about this transition from a screen-based way of interacting with computers to interacting with computers in the real world through augmented reality. That this is going to be one of the biggest and most profound shifts in computing. that we've gone through some shifts before from the mainframe to the desktop, to the laptop, to the smartphone. We've changed the size of the screens, but we haven't really meaningfully changed the way that we interact with computers. And we're now at a point where computing is so important to our lives, so important to everything we do, that if we don't radically change computers and the way that we interact with them, I think we run the risk of spending the rest of our lives hunched over, looking down instead of connecting with the world, connecting with our friends, and using computing in a healthier and more supportive way.

53:00So what's your advice to the next generation founding tech companies? Oh my gosh. You know, I think there's so many opportunities to apply technology to new frontiers in a way that wasn't necessarily available when I was just getting started. And I think a lot of the technology focus today is going to be oriented around helping the United States win the massive global competition that we are in. And so for founders today who are positioning their work they're doing, whether it's in the health sciences, whether it's a lot of the important work happening in defense, young people today and technologists today are going to play an incredibly important role in defining the next 100 years, certainly of American success, but also global success.

53:41And I think that's a huge responsibility, but incredibly inspiring. And I know they're up for it. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Circuit. Please check out the full episode to see our conversation in L.A. with Evan Spiegel. You'll get to see us playing around with smart glasses and so much more. I'm Emily Chang. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Emily Chang TV. You can watch new episodes of The Circuit on Bloomberg Television, on YouTube, or on demand by downloading the Bloomberg app to your smart TV. And check out other Bloomberg podcasts on Apple Podcasts, the iHeart Media app, or wherever you listen to your shows.

54:14And we love hearing your reviews, so please let us know what you think. I'm your host and executive producer. Our senior producer is Lauren Ellis. Our episode producer is Laura Hines. Our editor is Gramercy Post. Thanks so much for listening.

54:32The Big Take podcast from Bloomberg News keeps you on top of the biggest stories of the day. My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day. Stories that move markets. Chair Powell opened the door to this first interest rate cut. Impact politics. Change businesses. This is a really stunning development for the AI world. And how you think about your bottom line. Listen to The Big Take from Bloomberg News every weekday afternoon on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.