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 mil day-after-day pages 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 filed for the 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.
Just like the inventive since Snap might have been, it recently indicated that it isn’t excused of answering a comparable matter while the other social media business: How can i company sit related when various other business is vying to own users’ interest?.
From the their best and most absolute, Snapchat means playfulness, and emailing members of the family without any worry out-of creating an electronic label. But may they provide those people founding ideals of the future when you’re reading from its problematic minutes in earlier times?
High: Turning social media to your its head by inventing a vanishing photo application
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 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 will fratty business people
Now, Snapchat’s corporate objective report states the app “allows individuals express themselves, reside in as soon as, learn about the world, and have fun with her,” that is the better and a good. By contrast, in , the initial big date which have a Wayback Machine snapshot for Snapchat, Snapchat showed the newest app because, better, essentially what the very early reputation could have had you think about this: laden up with photos from most teenagers when you look at the not much (if any) clothing.
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 Snap bros for not giving him credit for his intellectual property. Snap settled the suit in 2014 and acknowledged Brown’s role as the originator of the “deleting photos app” idea. The company’s 2017 IPO revealed Brown got nearly $158 million.
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 Nyc Times, Gawker wrote 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!