The untold story of Snapchat what make millionaires and a Ghost that Haunts Mark Zuckerberg part five
Snapchat: The Ghost That Haunts Zuckerberg. Part five
The offer of 3 Billion dollars to buy Snapchat.
Evan had studied
journalism and was obsessed with the idea of users being able to not just share
an individual photo or video, but create a narrative of their experiences. And
thus in 2013, Snapchat launched a new feature called Stories, which became
extremely popular. Up until now, Snapchat had primarily been focused on
one-to-one messages and communication, but now it was giving users a way to
broadcast to all their friends what they were doing - but because stories
disappeared after 24 hours, if you weren’t on Snapchat each day, you’d feel
you’d missed out.
As Snapchat rolled
out several other popular new features, and young users continued to use
Snapchat far more than Facebook or Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg decided to make
one final offer to Evan. But this time, he was going big. 3 billion dollars.
The offer to buy
Snapchat came in late 2013, and remember Snapchat only started in 2011. And
what’s even crazier is that Snapchat had virtually no revenue at this point. Yet
there were 3 billion dollars on the table if they sold Snapchat to Facebook.
And because Evan and Bobby owned roughly 25 percent of Snapchat each, if they
accepted Mark’s acquisition offer they’d both instantly have a personal net worth
of hundreds of millions of dollars.
So, even though
neither of them wanted to sell their company, this offer was too huge to not consider.
And they reportedly went back and forth multiple times about whether to accept.
Evan and Bobby were both still in their early twenties, and this money would
set them up for life. And yet, to the surprise of many people, Evan and Bobby turned
down Mark Zuckerberg’s offer once again.
They were going to
take a gamble and keep running Snapchat themselves. Evan knew this decision
meant Facebook was going to fight back, and so they had to keep innovating. Snapchat
began experimenting with a variety of new features, such as camera lenses that
could change someone’s appearance, public stories from specific events or
locations, and content from brands and networks - and Snapchat even dabbled with
producing their own original content.
Snapchat also set up a new division called Snap Lab to work on things like speech recognition, wearable
technology, and augmented reality. Evan believed Snapchat needed to think about
what people want next, and not rely on data or focus groups, because that won’t
lead to big leaps in innovation. In the alleged words of Henry Ford, “If I had
asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Evan was operating
on a similar principle of trying to think what users didn’t even know they
wanted yet, which meant a lot of decisions were based on his own gut instincts
rather than market research. Test quickly, and cut it if it doesn’t work.
Evan wanted Snapchat
to become one of the most important technology companies in the world. Unfortunately,
his plans to be taken seriously were about to come crashing down.
Comments
Post a Comment