Snapchat at ten: A track record of scandal, innovation, and you can sexting
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 every single day users 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 recorded because of 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.
Because the inventive once the Breeze could have been, it recently revealed that it is really not excused out of answering the same question since the any other social media business: How can i organization stand related when other company is vying to have users’ notice?.
During the the best and more than absolute, Snapchat concerns playfulness, and you will communicating with loved ones without the fret away from creating an electronic digital label. But could they promote men and women beginning beliefs of the future if you are training from the challenging times in the past?
High: Flipping social networking into the the lead from the inventing a disappearing photos 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 new 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 can fratty corporate people
Today, Snapchat’s business goal declaration says the fresh app “allows individuals go to town, reside in the moment, learn about the nation, and enjoy yourself together with her,” that is all the better and you can an excellent. By contrast, in the , the earliest go out that have good Wayback Machine picture to possess Snapchat, Snapchat showed the software as the, well, almost exactly what its very early reputation would have had you imagine regarding it: laden up with photographs out-of extremely teenagers in little (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 fresh Breeze bros for not giving him credit for his intellectual 
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 Ny 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!
