100 FASTCOMPANY.COM
Snap
(Continued from page 40)Miles to become both a personal mentor and a
coach to the executive team. Miles, like most
people I talked to within Snap, describes Spie-
gel as an open-minded tester and questioner.
“He’s very Socratic,” Miles says, describing the
first 90-minute walk that he and Spiegel took
together on the Santa Monica beach.
Spiegel also started consuming the kind
of management books people buy at the
airport, including Loonshots, by Safi Bahcall,
and The Power of Positive Leadership, by Jon
Gordon. Following a wave of user revolt over
Snapchat’s redesign, he rallied the troops in a
6,600-word memo in September 2018 that in-
cluded the passage, “And Jon Gordon writes,
‘We are not positive because life is easy. We
are positive because life can be hard.’ Positiv-
ity is what we use to overcome challenges
and negativity. Being positive requires hard
work. Being positive is a choice.”
Not everyone wanted to make that
choice—or Spiegel made it for them. Ten se-
nior leaders left over the next four months, in-
cluding two who were fired for their role in an
inappropriate relationship with a contractor.
The exodus looked bad, but it was necessary
to repair the company. For Snap’s next phase,
Spiegel assembled a new executive team with
more experience, including chief strategy
officer Jared Grusd (a Huffington Post and
Google veteran), CMO Kenny Mitchell (Gato-
rade and McDonald’s), CFO Derek Andersen
(Amazon), chief communications officer Julie
Henderson (21st Century Fox and Newscorp),
and chief product officer Lara Sweet (AOL).
Outside, the doubters crowed, but inside
Snap, the worst was over.
Gradually, Spiegel began to figure out where
he had gone wrong, deconstructing how he
had organized Snap from the beginning.
He had tried to model Snap on Apple’s early
days, where one or two men appeared to in-
vent everything. As a result, Spiegel had cre-
ated a hub-and-spoke model. He, of course,
was the hub; the spokes were the executives
and managers across the company, whom
he’d meet with individually and who weren’t
necessarily privy to what the others knew.
Was there a reason that Spiegel champi-
oned private, one-on-one meetings?
“Not a good reason,” he says, laughing.
The alternative, as Spiegel saw it, was
operating like a big, efficient corporation
such as Samsung or Foxconn. “These giant
organizations are incredibly good at execu-
tion,” he says. “They’re very hierarchical
typically; they have a lot of process. But
those types of organizations aren’t particu-
larly good at innovating.”
While Spiegel was working on himself,
he was also studying how he could main-
tain Snap’s innovation while applying the
appropriate amount of process. “I’ve been
super lucky to meet a ton of people who
have been unbelievably generous in shar-
ing how they think about the world or how
they structure their teams or just helping
us solve problems,” he says. Ultimately, he
concluded that the answer for Snap was to
combine the way he loved working with
Murphy with the effectiveness of a Foxconn.
The CEO now spends half his time with his
rapid innovation team, a group of 12 design-
ers who work on his floor. They act as a collec-
tion of peers focused on developing the future
of Snapchat. His rectangular desk sits at the
far end of a long room of workbenches; no
walls or soundproof glass separate him from
his design peers. Inspired by Spiegel’s experi-
ence taking classes at the acclaimed ArtCen-
ter College of Design in Pasadena (while still
in high school), the innovation team gathers
every Tuesday and everyone is required to
show work, Spiegel included, even if it’s their
second day on the job. “Because everyone is
in it together, making a bunch of stuff, it’s
okay to be really open and direct with each
other because you’re going to have a zillion
more ideas tomorrow,” Spiegel says. “That
combination of a super-high velocity of work,
art-school style, plus a deep understanding of
human beings is how the team works.”
Spiegel’s new executive corps then
helps implement these ideas throughout
the organization. “People talk about an in-
novation culture all the time, all day long,”
Spiegel says, “but actually what you need is
an innovation structure.”
Miles, who continues to work with Spie-
gel and his senior leadership team, says that
Spiegel “used to be a secret guy who nobody
saw or heard from, a master Evan. He’s really
evolved to a much more open, transparent,
distributed model of leadership.” Spiegel tells
me that most meetings are now team meet-
ings; one-on-ones are devoted to helping
people with their personal growth.
Change has been messy at Snap, but
it’s also been relatively swift. Spiegel has
executed this transformation in just three
years, while running a public company and
becoming a father to three children. When
we meet, he’s technically still on paternityleave after his wife, model-entrepreneur
Miranda Kerr, gave birth to their son Myles.
For all these reasons, Spiegel says, he’s “in-
finitely” happier at Snap than he was a few
years ago. “I’m the first one in the office ev-
ery day. I love it. I run here,” he says, before
qualifying his claim with a chuckle. “Some
days I do school drop-off, but other than
that, I’m the first one.”To understand both the near and long-term
future of Snap, it helps to rethink the entire
notion of “content.” Today, there are two
main types of content on Snapchat. The first:
videos to watch on the app’s Discover tab, the
closest thing the digital realm has built to
cable TV. Snap has turned its crowdsourced
videos into series, such as Oddly Satisfying,
which shows Snapchatters performing mes-
merizing tasks like popping bubble wrap.
The company has also developed its own
original series, which are notable for how
they speak to Snap’s predominantly 13-to-24-
year-old audience, how well they play with
Snapchat’s functionality, and how impecca-
bly they’re produced. A guilty pleasure called
Second Chance places two exes together. Only
one wants to get back together, and drama,
lies, laughs, and deep truths unfold in a mat-
ter of just a few minutes, a love story told for
a high school attention span. Each 10-second
clip ends with a cliff hanger.
The second form of content is a suite of
digital effects that enhance communica-
tion between friends, increasingly emerg-
ing from Snap’s investment in augmented
reality. Recent examples include being
able to transform yourself into a dancing
chicken meme (courtesy of a new product
called Cameos, powered by technology Snap
acquired late last year) and a game called
Snappables, which challenges players to
find eight objects within their actual world
via Snapchat’s camera function.
Moving forward, Snap will mix the two
together. Content “is the dominant use case
of AR today,” says Spiegel. “Most of AR is
content overlaid on the world, overlaid on
your face.”
Sean Mills, the company’s head of con-
tent, says that one of his big challenges this
year is bringing augmented reality into en-
tertainment programming as “a necessary
component.” In 2018, the aforementioned
teen series Endless Summer gave fans the
chance to open an AR portal within Snapchat
that made a beach appear wherever they
were standing, complete with the show’s cast
enjoying a bonfire. “When I make a show, I
control 100% of the pixels,” says Mills. “When