Evan Spiegel

Snap says it will launch its first consumer version of its AR glasses “later this year,” the payoff of a 12-year glasses program that Spiegel says “no VC would ever in a million years support.” He frames the launch as a “crucible moment” and “seminal year”: Snapchat — almost a $7B revenue business, near Fortune 500 scale — is explicitly the cash-flowing vehicle funding the attempt to “reinvent the computer,” and there was never a world where Snap stayed software-only (“we started investing in hardware in 2014”).

AI is “probably the best thing that’s ever happened to Snapchat,” because it could ease the resource asymmetry of 15 years of “trench warfare with monopolies.” Snap has “lots of new ideas, but very limited resources” against rivals with “no new ideas but infinite resources”; now “we could basically have an infinite number of engineering resources.” Since the beginning of this year the job of a Snap software engineer is “profoundly and forever changed,” and the business was pre-positioned for a world where “almost instantly, you can copy nearly any piece of software” — network effects, the AR platform, and the content ecosystem are the hard-to-copy advantages.

Snapchat+ has reached 25M subscribers and a $1B run rate growing 60% year-over-year, roughly two or three years after launch. At $4/month it’s ESPN-scale in subscribers, with Lens+ tiering on top of what Spiegel calls “probably the most used gen AI camera service”; Spiegel says, “I really love the subscription business. I wish we had done it earlier.”

The advertising business is being inverted from big-brand upper-funnel to SMB lower-funnel — the stated swing factor for re-acceleration. Snap’s mix was “the inverse of a Google or a Meta” (hundreds of large US brand customers, immature lower funnel); the multi-year rebuild toward scalable, performance-optimized SMB demand is why Spiegel concedes “we do need to re-accelerate the advertising business” but sees “a path to a lot more revenue.”

His Meta Ray-Ban critique is a margin argument: “they took the most iconic, crazy high margin product and they destroyed the margin, and then they associated it with Meta.” Meta “needed to camouflage their brand”; volume at Ray-Ban prices moves units but may not build a durable business. Snap runs the Tesla-Roadster/early-iPhone playbook instead — premium positioning with enthusiasts, high gross margins reinvested in R&D — plus vertical integration where it differentiates: its own waveguide, its own micro-projector, and core components manufactured in its own US and UK facilities.

Scale check: almost a billion global users and about half a billion daily — one of “maybe seven to ten” services that size, depending on whether China is included — yet Spiegel calls Snap the “middle child.” Bigger than Reddit or Pinterest, smaller than the giants, and mid-transformation on three fronts at once: glasses, ads, and direct revenue.

He turned down multi-billion-dollar offers in his early 20s because every core choice was the opposite of consensus — and cites independent studies supporting the worldview. Ephemeral private messaging vs permanent feeds, AR while everyone bet on VR (“thinking that people were actually going to wear a TV on their face. It was insane”), privacy in 2012-13; Spiegel says studies show Snapchat improves friendships and well-being while “Instagram, TikTok, whatever, make people feel bad.” Early investors let Evan and Bobby each sell $10M of stock, making money less relevant: “$10 million is more than enough money to live a really great, comfortable life.”

🔗 Original source & video: Evan Spiegel, Snapchat: Building a Multi-Billion Dollar Company