When Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy first went live with Snapchat in the App Store in , it was a disappearing photos app made by college kids that *definitely wasn’t* for sending nudes. As of its tenth birthday this month, it has over 280 billion each and every day profiles plus a stable of Content from media brands and influencers. Its products have inspired ephemeral sharing copycats galore, and investors currently think parent company Snap, Inc. is worth over $100 billion. What a decade!
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, though, for the “Camera Company,” which was the puzzling way Snapchat branded itself when it registered for its IPO in 2017. Early scandals, owing, in part, to the company’s founding by a literal frat boy, will always be part of its history. Employees have continued to feel the aftershocks of those early tremors, and the consequences of operating in a white- and male-dominated tech industry, for years.
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On their ideal and more than pure, Snapchat is mostly about playfulness, and you may chatting with members of the family without having any fret out-of constructing an electronic digital identity. But could they render those people beginning ideals of the future while reading from the challenging times in the past?
High: Flipping social network to your their direct because of the inventing a disappearing photographs software
Snapchat’s first value proposition is still one of its strongest: Give people a way to send photos to their friends (and, later, messages and videos), that disappear. The fresh lore goes that ousted co-founder Reggie Brown (more on him in a second) thought of an app that would let users send self-deleting photos during a conversation about sexting. The earliest version of the app was designed to minimize the ability of users to take screen grabs. It also added the whimsical (or, juvenile?) ability to draw and write on top of those photos.
Low: Fratty vibes and you may fratty corporate community
Now, Snapchat’s corporate mission report states this new software “allows individuals express themselves, are now living in the moment, find out about the world, and have a great time with her,” and that’s all really and you can a. In comparison, during the , the initial time that have a great Wayback Machine snapshot to own Snapchat, Snapchat demonstrated new app while the, well, literally exactly what its very early profile could have had you would imagine regarding it: laden with pictures of really young people during the not much (or no) attire.
And then there’s the story of Reggie Brown. Brown was one of Spiegel’s Kappa Sigma brothers at Stanford. After the purported sexting convo, Brown says he took the idea of a deleting photos app to Spiegel. The pair then brought in Bobby Murphy for his coding prowess. Soon after, Murphy and Spiegel left Brown in their dust as they moved to LA and officially launched Snapchat. In 2013, Brown prosecuted the brand new Snap bros for not giving him credit for his intellectual property. Snap settled the suit in 2014 and acknowledged Brown’s role as the originator of the “deleting photos app” idea. The company’s 2017 IPO revealed Brown got nearly $158 million.
The Ghost of Reggie Brown wasn’t the only relic of Spiegel’s Kappa Sig days that clung to Snapchat. Just as Snap was gaining momentum as a grown up company profiled by the likes of the Nyc Times, Gawker typed a bunch of Spiegel’s emails about parties and goings on at the fraternity, involving – most infamously – a stripper pole. He’s CEO, b*tch!
