Snap

Evan Spiegel pitched the concept of disappearing photo messages as a class project at Stanford in 2011. His classmates Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown helped build the first version. The app launched as Picaboo in July 2011, renamed Snapchat in September 2011. Brown was pushed out of the company shortly after launch; he later sued Spiegel and Murphy, claiming they had stolen the original concept. The lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed amount. Brown's name was not included when Snap went public.

Mark Zuckerberg flew to Los Angeles in November 2013 to meet Evan Spiegel in person and offer $3 billion in cash to acquire Snapchat. Spiegel, then 23 years old, turned him down. The decision was widely criticised — $3 billion for a company less than two years old with no revenue seemed extraordinary. Spiegel believed Snapchat would be worth far more. Within a year, Snapchat was raising money at a $10 billion valuation.

Snapchat launched Stories in 2013 — a format allowing users to post photos and videos visible for 24 hours before disappearing. The format was so successful that Facebook copied it directly into Instagram in 2016, then WhatsApp, then Facebook itself. Zuckerberg acknowledged the copying openly. Instagram Stories rapidly overtook Snapchat's Stories in daily users. The company that had rejected Facebook's $3 billion acquisition watched Facebook replicate its most innovative feature and deploy it across platforms with a combined user base ten times larger than Snapchat's.

Snap went public in March 2017 at $17 per share, valuing the company at $24 billion — making Spiegel one of the youngest self-made billionaires in history. The IPO gave Spiegel and Murphy shares with ten times the voting rights of public shareholders, giving them permanent control regardless of investor sentiment. Snap's user growth subsequently slowed dramatically as Instagram Stories captured the casual user market.

Snap reported revenues of $5.3 billion for 2024 — up 16% — with 443 million daily active users. The company had successfully built a large, profitable-ish advertising business. But the stock had never recovered to its $17 IPO price since falling 80% in the 18 months following the IPO, reflecting investor skepticism about Snap's ability to grow beyond its core teenage demographic and compete with TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts for creator content. The founder who had rejected $3 billion at 23 had built a $12 billion market cap company — real, but a fraction of what the rejection had been expected to yield.