Snapchat from the ten: A reputation scandal, creativity, and you will 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 each day profiles 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.
As inventive since Breeze has been, it recently revealed that it is not excused of reacting a comparable concern given that another social network startup: How can one company stand relevant when various other company is competing to possess users’ attract?.
From the the finest and more than pure, Snapchat is all about playfulness, and you can chatting with members of the family with no be concerned out of building a digital term. But can it promote people founding ideals into the future while learning from its tricky times in the past?
High: Flipping social media on 
the its direct by inventing a disappearing pictures 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 fresh 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 will fratty corporate community
Today, Snapchat’s corporate goal report claims the new app «empowers people to go to town, are now living in as soon as, find out about the world, and enjoy yourself together with her,» and is every well and you may a good. By contrast, in , the earliest go out that have an excellent Wayback Machine snapshot getting Snapchat, Snapchat showed the latest app since, better, essentially just what its early profile could have got you might think about it: laden with photos of very teenagers when you look at the not much (or no) dresses.
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 latest Breeze 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 Ny Times, Gawker composed 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!
