Evan Spiegel was never the archetypal coder-prodigy. Born in 1990 to two lawyers in Los Angeles, he grew up in a privileged environment. Unlike many of his contemporaries in social media, Spiegel was passionate about design, behaviour, and human psychology. His ambition was to let people share moments without fearing their online permanence.
The Pitch
Spiegel studied product design at Stanford, a program known for blending engineering, art, and psychology. This is where he got the design-driven mindset that shaped Snapchat.
His approach focused on how people feel when interacting with technology.
In 2011, during a product design class, he pitched an idea that would sound bizarre at the time: a messaging app where photos disappear. The class dismissed it. Why would anyone want to send photos that vanish?
The prototype: Picaboo
Spiegel understood something his classmates didn’t. Young people were already communicating this way: they didn’t want the pressure of perfect posts or the fear of leaving permanent digital footprints.
He gave a first stab at this idea with Picaboo, the first version of Snapchat, built with co-founders Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown.
Snapchat
After a brief naming dispute and early tensions among the founders, the app relaunched in 2011 as Snapchat. Its premise was simple: take a photo, send it to a friend, and let it disappear. No filters at the beginning. No stories. No ads.
Teenagers embraced it instantly. Parents didn’t understand it, which made it even more attractive. By 2013, Snapchat had millions of active users and a cultural identity that stood in contrast to Facebook’s permanent profiles.
The philosophy of ephemerality
Spiegel once explained the concept this way: “Deleting should be the default.” To him, permanence created anxiety and performance. Ephemerality created freedom. Snapchat’s design encouraged behaviour that felt more like offline life: you shared with intention, and then the moment faded.
This was a radical departure from the industry standard of data accumulation. While others built platforms to maximize memory, Spiegel built one to embrace forgetting.
The Facebook offer
In 2013, at just 23 years old, Spiegel received a takeover offer from Facebook, reportedly for $3 billion. He famously turned it down.
That refusal became one of the defining moments of modern social media, forcing Facebook to rethink its strategy and protect its dominance. Not long after, Instagram introduced Stories, a feature clearly inspired by Snapchat.
Stories, lenses, and the AR frontier
Spiegel responded with innovation. Under his leadership, Snapchat introduced:
- Stories, an ephemeral daily timeline
- Geofilters, which added personality to places
- Lenses, which pioneered consumer-grade augmented reality
- Bitmoji integration, personalising communication with avatars
- Snap Map, showing friends in real time
Lenses in particular reshaped the way users engaged with mobile cameras. Snapchat shifted the camera from a tool of documentation to a tool of communication. Spiegel believed the camera would become the next major computing interface, and he built the company with that vision in mind.
The wearables gamble
Snap’s hardware experiment, Spectacles, debuted in 2016. The colourful sunglasses recorded short circular videos and uploaded them to Snapchat. While Spectacles were not a mass-market success, they represented something important: Spiegel wanted Snap to be a camera company, not just a social network.
Even critics acknowledged the ambition. Few social media founders attempt to venture into consumer hardware. Fewer still attempt AR hardware years ahead of the market curve.
The leadership challenges
Spiegel’s leadership has not been without challenges. The app redesign in 2018 was widely criticized by users. The company faced slow growth compared to Instagram’s meteoric rise, and losses increased after Snap went public in 2017. At the same time, the internal culture evolved from a tight founder-centric group to a global organization.
Despite the turbulence, Spiegel maintained a consistent design philosophy. He refused to copy competitors, refused to chase the feed-based ad economy, and refused to sacrifice product identity for immediate gains.
This consistency, whether viewed as stubbornness or integrity, preserved Snapchat’s uniqueness in a crowded landscape.
An introverted leader
Unlike many tech founders who live publicly, Spiegel cultivates his privacy. He avoids controversy, dresses modestly, and rarely engages in online debates. He married Australian model Miranda Kerr in 2017, and together they maintain a lifestyle far calmer and more grounded than Silicon Valley stereotypes.
His introverted, design-driven personality directly shapes the platform he built. While Instagram became a global runway and TikTok became an entertainment machine, Snapchat remains the place where people talk, laugh, send imperfect moments, and disappear from the record.