The son of successful lawyers, Spiegel grew up in a world of wealth,
power, and privilege. Now the 23-year-old entrepreneur will be
remembered for saying no to Mark Zuckerberg.
Snapchat CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September 2013.
(Credit:
Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
LOS ANGELES -- Like many a young man, Evan Thomas Spiegel is enamored
of expensive cars. Unlike many young men, he can afford them.
A
little more than two years after leaving Stanford University three
classes shy of graduation, Snapchat's co-founder sits atop a hastily
established empire that is already worth billions in the eyes of would-be acquirers -- including Facebook, which reportedly offered to buy Snapshot for $3 billion in cash.
Snapchat, which was valued at $800 million just a few months ago, makes
an app for sending pictures and videos, called "snaps," that disappear
after a few seconds. The service now processes more than 400 million
snaps per day, and is a big hit with tweens and teens, although the
company has yet to say how many people use it. Either way, it's
attracted the attention of sober-minded VCs eager to write big checks in
hopes of getting in early on the next Facebook. So for the moment,
Spiegel is under no pressure to make a choice, whether the future
involves a sale or raising more cash to build a company that he believes
has an even bigger future.
Whatever else he does in life, the
23-year-old entrepreneur will forever be remembered for saying no to
Mark Zuckerberg. Whether that decision turns out inspired or insane --
it was a bold statement of confidence from someone so young. Surprising?
Not to those who know him.
"He really believed in his ideas,"
said Leo Rofe, a classmate who was a grade below Spiegel at the
Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica, Calif. "He was
adamant about them."
Later in life, Spiegel would prove to be so unshakeable in his convictions that he would make the gamble of a lifetime
.
Born lucky Born June 4, 1990, to a couple of successful
lawyers, Spiegel grew up in a world of wealth, power, and privilege. His
mother, Melissa, the youngest woman ever to graduate from Harvard Law
School, resigned as a partner from Pillsbury, Madison, & Sutro to
work as a stay-at-home mom when he was a baby. Spiegel's father, John,
was (and still is) a partner at the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson,
a job that afforded the family a very comfortable lifestyle in a $4.6
million home in Huntington Palisades, an upper class neighborhood in
Pacific Palisades on the western fringes of Los Angeles.
"So if life isn't fair -- it's not about working harder, it's about working the system."
--Evan Spiegel
Along with his two sisters, Lauren and Caroline, Spiegel was
treated to the finer things in life, including spring breaks in Maui,
summers at La Jolla's Beach and Tennis Club, and vacations to Europe,
along with frequent shopping sprees and a personal chef. But there was
also plenty of extracurricular activity, and volunteer work. By most
accounts, Spiegel turned out to be a well-adjusted, ambitious, and
agreeable young man.
But that idyllic-sounding upbringing also
had its less than picture-perfect moments. As an older teenager, Spiegel
frequently overspent, a reality that led to many heated, money-related
arguments with his father.
"You may condemn my love of material objects (like
cars), but think about how you enjoy your Bose headphones," Spiegel wrote in a February 12, 2008, letter to his father. He was 17.
The note, accompanied by a plea for a new BMW 535i, came at the most
tumultuous point in Spiegel's life, as his parents divorced after nearly
20 years of marriage.
John Spiegel's home on Toyopa Drive in Pacific Palisades.
Spiegel initially chose to live with his father, who bought a
$4.25 million estate on Toyopa Drive, just four blocks away from his
childhood home where his mother still lives. The senior Spiegel gave his
son carte blanche to decorate the new home, a privilege that came with
the professional decorating services of Greg Grande, the set designer on
"Friends." Spiegel outfitted his new room with a white leather custom
king-size bed, Venetian plaster, floating bookshelves, a
state-of-the-art computer, two designer desk chairs, and custom closets.
He also installed a movie theater with an 8-foot screen in the basement
of the house, and was able to control the setup from his bedroom.
His father's exceptional generosity was put to the test after
17-year-old Spiegel repeatedly overdrafted his bank account and begged
for the BMW 535i, a $75,000 car. Spiegel, who was already driving a 2006
Cadillac Escalade, which his father bought new for $56,000, wanted the
smaller car because he was "doing a lot more driving in the city,"
according to court documents filed by his parents during their lengthy
and litigious divorce.
From 17-year-old Evan Spiegel, a suggested budget for monthly expenses
At the time, Spiegel Sr. was giving Spiegel Jr. an allowance of $250 a
week. Along with the new car, the younger Spiegel made a strong case
for why he should get $1,992 a month for car, food, entertainment, and
clothing expenses. He also wanted a $2,000 "emergency fund" because his
"life is full of unforeseen expenses," as he wrote in the note to his
father.
Spiegel declined repeated requests from CNET for an interview for this article.
As it turned out, Spiegel would not get what he wanted and moved back
to his mother's house full-time after one particular money discussion
escalated into a heated argument, which climaxed when Spiegel cut
himself out of family photos. A few days after the move, his mother
leased him the BMW he wanted.
But Spiegel didn't let the
squabbles affect his stellar performance when away from the volatile
home environment -- though he did get a speeding ticket for driving 62
miles per hour in a 35-mph zone a few weeks after getting the BMW. Mitch
Kohn, Spiegel's 10th grade English teacher and his journalism adviser
sophomore through senior years at Crossroads, remembers Spiegel as a
prized student, one who decided to write a feature about the school's
unconventional approach to teaching mathematics and interviewed the
department heads.
"He decided he wasn't sure he liked the way
Crossroads taught math from K through 12th grade," Kohn said. "I love
the fact that...His opinions changed as he wrote the article. He came to
understand the philosophy of it. He looked into whether kids were
successful learning math that way. It just became this unbelievably good
article...It was one of the best articles we had that year, by far."
His hard work paid off: He was admitted to Stanford. Spiegel got the news while vacationing in Prague.
The man and the myth "The rhetoric of the entrepreneur is
deeply embedded in Stanford's history. We've all heard the story --
young, white male drops out of college to follow a dream. His commitment
to this dream helps him through highs and lows. He refuses to be
another cog in the 'machine.' This romantic business fairytale pervades
Stanford culture -- it is uniquely Silicon Valley."
"It" is Evan
Spiegel, and these are his own words, as spoken to the audience at a
Stanford Women in Business "Design Yourself" Conference on April 7,
2013.
"This brings me back to our fascination with the mythology
of the entrepreneur," Spiegel told the audience. "An individual who is
able to combine -- gracefully and authentically -- their life and their
work. An individual who has identified a dream far greater than
accumulation of wealth, but a dream that is achieved through
participation in consumer society and the creation of a company."
The mythology of Evan Spiegel, the entrepreneur, started long before he
met his frat brothers Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy, and years before
he attended Stanford.
It started with a fascination with design
during his teenage years, possibly even earlier. In the summer of 2005,
when Spiegel was just 15, he took two continuing-education courses at
the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. One, on graphic
design, made a strong impression on him.
"Her graphic design
class took a hands-on approach to design thinking and was
transformational for me as a student," Spiegel later wrote in a LinkedIn
recommendation for his professor Milka Broukhim. "I will never forget
the typography experiments we completed during the course as well as the
time spent in the letterpress lab."
Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in
Santa Monica, an "elite, anti-prep mecca for entertainment-industry
offspring," as described by Vanity Fair. The high-priced progressive
institution, where students call teachers by their first names, cost the
Spiegels around $75,000 every year in tuition fees for the three kids.
When working for the Crossfire, the Crossroads newspaper, Spiegel
would walk around the neighborhood and ask local businesses to buy ads.
Though part of the grade for the journalism class was to sell a certain
amount of advertising, Kohn remembers Spiegel as a top earner who not
only exceeded his sales goals, but helped coach the other kids on how to
ask adults for money. And then, during his senior year,
Spiegel decided he wanted to work for Red Bull. "I loved the brand, I
loved the lifestyle, and I was obsessed with the beverage. I had to be a
part of it," he said during the April 2013 keynote. "So I found a
friend who knew a guy that worked there, and I begged him for a job. I
called him repeatedly, we met for coffee, and I agreed to do anything at
all for Red Bull."
The friend turned out to be Spiegel's priest, according to his mother,
who also said during the divorce proceedings that Spiegel spent the
unpaid internship "learning about marketing and assisting with various
computer and graphic design projects."
Spiegel's version of his time at Red Bull is a tad different: "I learned how to throw great parties, and I had a blast."
The summer before college, he also took a class at the Arts Center
College of Design in Pasadena. But once he got to Stanford, Spiegel had
conflicting interests. He took a paid internship with a biomedical
company. Later, convinced he wanted to be a teacher, he went to Cape
Town in South Africa to teach students on how to get jobs.
Spiegel's first real taste of tech and entrepreneurship came when he
crossed paths with Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, at a Stanford business
school class he was sitting in on, thanks to the reference of a family
friend. The story goes that Spiegel begged Cook for a job. The plea
worked. Spiegel got to work with Cook and an engineer on a project
called TxtWeb, which took information available online and made it
accessible via SMS to people in India who didn't have broadband Internet
access.
After the Intuit gig, Spiegel and his Kappa Sigma
fraternity brother Bobby Murphy started FutureFreshman.com, a site with a
guide for students, parents, and counselors on how to manage the
college application process. No one, save for their parents, used it,
Spiegel said.
Then, in the spring of 2011, Spiegel made the call
that changed his life. The call was to Murphy to discuss switching from
FutureFreshman to a new idea: disappearing picture messages.
Well, that's the myth anyhow.
Now you see him ... The real creation story behind Snapchat
is more complicated and involves Reggie Brown, a Kappa Sigma fraternity
brother who came up with the idea of deleting picture messages.
Reggie Brown (left), Bobby Murphy, and Evan Spiegel (right) pictured celebrating Snapchat's launch in July 2011.
Brown brought the idea to Spiegel, and Spiegel recruited his
FutureFreshman cohort Murphy to code the app. The threesome then worked
together, spending the summer of 2011 at the Toyopa Drive residence in
Pacific Palisades. Initially called Picaboo, the first version of
Snapchat launched in July 2011. Brown, an English major with no coding
skills, was assigned relatively menial marketing tasks and applied for a
patent.
A month later, Brown was forced out of the company he
helped bring to life, according to his version of events. Now he's suing
Spiegel, Murphy, and Snapchat's investors for a substantial stake in
the company. Brown claims to have designed the Snapchat logo and to have
named the mascot "Ghostface Chillah." [The ghost recently lost its
smiley face in a
design tweak and currently goes by the moniker "NoFace Chillah."]
But life, as Spiegel has said, isn't fair.
Two years after the app's launch, Spiegel and Murphy have moved
Snapchat, now a 28-person team, into a new office in Venice, Calif., and
have turned the maker of the disappearing-picture app into one of the
most talked-about Internet companies, one said to be valued in the
billions. Though the company does not disclose the size of its user
base, Pew Research Center's Internet Project recently estimated that 9 percent of
adult cell phone users in the US use Snapchat. It's an impressive
figure for a 2-year-old app, and one that doesn't account for Snapshot's
popularity with teenagers.
Long ago having mended the strained
relationship with his father, and obviously no longer burdened by
overdraft fees, Spiegel is also back residing at the Toyopa Drive estate
where just six years earlier he was pulling in $250 in weekly
allowances. Despite living with his father, Spiegel may be the most
envied guy around, if not for the billions he purportedly refused from
Facebook, then for the fact that his girlfriend, Lucinda Aragon, is a 24-year-old model who socializes with the likes of Chrissy Teigen and Kate Upton.
Snapchat may prove to be as fleeting as the attention span of the teens
who pass around disappearing picture and video messages, but if
Spiegel's first 23 years of existence are any indication, the
rich-kid-turned-celebrity-CEO has fortune on his side.
Evan Spiegel and his model girlfriend, Lucinda Aragon.
If not, odds are he'll be just fine.
"I am a young, white,
educated male. I got really, really lucky," Spiegel said in April. "And
life isn't fair. So if life isn't fair -- it's not about working harder,
it's about working the system."
