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 and every 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 registered because of its 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.
While the creative as the Snap might have been, it recently indicated that it’s not excused away from reacting the same concern as any kind of social networking business: You can company stay related whenever some other business is vying to own users’ interest?.
At the their best and more than pure, Snapchat concerns playfulness, and chatting with family relations without any worry regarding constructing an electronic name. But may they give those individuals beginning beliefs for the future while you are learning from its difficult times in the past?
High: Flipping social network on its head by inventing a vanishing photo software
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 newest 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
Now, Snapchat’s corporate mission report says the fresh new software “allows men and women to express themselves, live in whenever, understand the country, and enjoy yourself together with her,” which is most of the better and you can good. In comparison, in the , the earliest date which have an effective Wayback Servers snapshot getting Snapchat, Snapchat demonstrated new app since the, well, essentially what its early reputation might have had you imagine regarding it: laden up with photos regarding really young people in little (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 sued brand new 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 Nyc Moments, Gawker had written 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!