"You and I are here, we're both paying attention to each other, and it feels good." »
At age 21, while studying product design at Stanford University, Spiegel came up with the idea of an auto-delete photo messaging app (originally called Picaboo) as a class project. Along with co-founders and classmates Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown, the trio released Snapchat in 2011. In five years, the popular app quickly grew in size and popularity, the latest being valued at nearly $20 billion. dollars. Spiegel focused on monetizing the app through advertiser-friendly enhancements like sponsored video stories and geolocation filters. With a recent upsurge in advertiser hooking features such as Discover, which allow media companies to share their content with millions of people, Spiegel plans to take his company public as early as March 2017. He hopes to garner enough support to bump Snap Inc. up to $35 billion.
Over 60% of smartphone users aged 13-34 are on the app
Over 150 million daily active users
Over 5 billion unique images sent through the app from his launch
According to Spiegel, the net worth of $2.1 billion would have made him the youngest billionaire in the world, according to Forbes
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This article originally appeared in the February 2017 issue of SUCCESS magazine.
