CEO Diaries: The Brutal Mistake That Almost Crippled Snapchat!

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Speaker 2 Today's moment episode features Evan Spiegel, the CEO and co-founder of Snapchat, and he has a tremendous emphasis on hiring people and culture, which is one of the most important things in business.

Speaker 2 The reality of running a small business is that switching off is never really an option. Even when you try, the ideas, the excitement, and all the responsibility is always there.

Speaker 2 And because you're always switched on, it's only fair that your hiring partner should be too.

Speaker 2 LinkedIn Jobs, who are the sponsor of this moment's episode, has been that hiring partner for me and for years because it's always working away in the background.

Speaker 2 My team can post our jobs for free, share them with our networks and reach top talent all in the same place. So let's get into today's conversation.
Let's go back to the um those early days.

Speaker 2 You're in that office. When you think about the people in that photo that were part of the first order 20, how important in hindsight is hiring?

Speaker 3 I think it's everything. I think it's everything.
And these were really, really just wonderful people. I mean, still, you know, in many cases, close friends.

Speaker 3 And I think interesting, there was a moment I realized

Speaker 3 David, Daniel, Bobby, and a couple other of our original engineers, all of them, you know, original engineers were musicians as well.

Speaker 3 And it was really interesting this moment, you know, because the early folks who were working on the engineering side of Snap were. unbelievably creative and unbelievably talented.

Speaker 3 And it was an interesting like aha moment because I think oftentimes people think of the disciplines as separate. Like, oh, there's designers and then over there there's engineers.

Speaker 3 And I think so much of the magic actually is when those disciplines like combine or cross over or people who really love and appreciate both.

Speaker 2 Especially for a company that's aspiring to be creative

Speaker 2 in everything that it's doing.

Speaker 2 On this point of hiring,

Speaker 2 did you make any hiring mistakes in those early days?

Speaker 3 Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 2 And what were those mistakes? Not necessarily people, but the frameworks were off or the way way that you've hired these people or

Speaker 2 what caused the mistakes.

Speaker 3 I think occasionally in the early days,

Speaker 3 we almost like over-indexed on the wrong types of experience, if that makes sense.

Speaker 3 So one of the things we really wanted to do was bring in people who were very, very experienced leaders who had run much bigger teams.

Speaker 3 That was like, if we want to build a big company, we got to find people who have run big companies and big teams.

Speaker 3 And so one of the early engineering leaders who joined our team, I I think he, you know, he was coming from working on a team of 300 or something like that at Amazon, was coming to like a team of eight at Snapchat.

Speaker 3 But we were really thinking ahead about like, how can we hire people who can actually help us scale here and build something

Speaker 3 really big? And I think that that sort of focus on leadership experience and experience leading at scale was really valuable.

Speaker 3 I think what was oftentimes a bit less valuable in those early days was almost more people who

Speaker 3 had very specific domain expertise.

Speaker 3 So there were people who would, you know, come into our, come for an interview or something like that and be like, well, I think what you guys should do is add likes because every other platform has likes.

Speaker 3 So if you just add likes, then people will, you know, use your service more and not really coming with the same open-mindedness and curiosity about, well, why is Snapchat doing it differently?

Speaker 3 Like, why don't you have likes and comments? Like, what, how are you thinking about the service

Speaker 3 differently? And

Speaker 3 how can I change and grow and adapt to the way that you're thinking about it to help you grow faster?

Speaker 3 And so I I think now one of the things we're always looking for in the interview process is adaptability, right?

Speaker 3 It's amazing to have prior experience, but the question is, how do you apply that prior experience to a new context and change and adapt the way that you see things, change your perspective,

Speaker 3 you know, to be able to meet the needs of our business, which is different than other businesses?

Speaker 2 What are the other factors? If you were to make a perfect Snapchat employee now,

Speaker 2 what would their personality be, their psychology, their attributes?

Speaker 3 We have three values and three leadership behaviors. Three values are kind, smart, and creative.

Speaker 3 Those have been the values since the very beginning, really, because Bobby and I were just having a conversation, like, what kind of people do we want to work with? Kind, smart, creative, like great.

Speaker 3 But since then, and we can spend some more time talking about this, I think what was really fascinating over time was to learn, you know, and by the way, 10 years ago, people were not talking about kindness at work.

Speaker 3 I mean, people would be like, sorry, what? You know, no, no, kind, smart, creative. Like, why kindness? What we found was that that with the

Speaker 3 relationship between kindness and creativity is really, really important.

Speaker 3 Because unless people feel comfortable coming up with crazy ideas, unless they feel comfortable that if they say, you know, they have some new idea and it actually isn't that great, that they're not going to be laughed at, that they'll be supported, right?

Speaker 3 Unless you have that sort of supportive culture, it's very hard to be creative.

Speaker 3 And so we learned over time that actually, wow, kindness is kind of the essential ingredient if you want to have a creative, a creative culture.

Speaker 2 But anyways kind smart creative smart pretty self-explanatory um and then uh when it comes to leadership behaviors there's three leadership behaviors or attributes we look for i just want to pause on that point of kind do you make a distinction between someone being nice and being kind because in your environment you also mentioned that you do these critique sessions and you're giving people critical feedback and if a culture gets a little bit too kind then isn't that gonna inhibit innovation and feedback we always differentiate between kind and nice there's a couple examples that I think help with that.

Speaker 3 So, like, for one, um, I think it's really kind to tell somebody that they have something stuck in their teeth. Yeah.
You have something stuck in your teeth, you want to know about it, right?

Speaker 3 It might make you feel awkward. Certainly, as the person pointing it out, it's a little awkward, right?

Speaker 3 If you want to, if you just want to be nice, you pretend nothing's going going on and you just say, oh, you know, nice to meet you, whatever.

Speaker 3 But if you're really being kind and you want to help that person, you say, you know, you've got something stuck in your teeth. You got to take care of that.

Speaker 3 And I think that helps distinguish between, you know, niceties and being kind and really wanting to help help somebody.

Speaker 3 I think another great example is if somebody is really struggling

Speaker 3 at work or they're struggling to grow or they're struggling

Speaker 3 to perform

Speaker 3 their duties at SNAP,

Speaker 3 the nice thing to do is maybe just make them feel good about it. Oh, don't worry.

Speaker 3 I'm sure it'll be okay. The kind thing to do is really help them succeed.
Say, hey, this isn't working because you're doing X, Y, and Z. Here are some things to do to think about that differently.

Speaker 3 Provide that really direct feedback. That allows people to grow.
And that's the kind to do rather than just making them feel good about not meeting expectations.

Speaker 2 Leadership values. You said this.

Speaker 3 Leadership values. Okay, there's three of them.
The first one is T-shaped leadership. So we talk a lot about T-shaped leadership.

Speaker 3 What we mean by that is that you have a real depth of experience, a depth of expertise in a given area, and then a real breadth of understanding of the business overall and an ability to connect with lots of different types of people who think different ways.

Speaker 3 Because you need to be able to connect your expertise to all the different areas of our business to really drive impact as a leader.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think that's one of the almost the hallmarks of running a business today: it's basically impossible to do anything interesting without a team, right?

Speaker 3 The way that the world works today is very complicated, and it's really important that you have folks who have deep expertise, but then they have to apply it to all these other cross-functional areas.

Speaker 3 You know, so they have to have a familiarity with it and an ability to relate to people with different viewpoints or other

Speaker 3 areas of expertise.

Speaker 2 And as we proceed with these leadership principles, are you saying that in order to become a leader at Snapchat, you need these three things?

Speaker 2 Or are you saying everybody at Snapchat needs these three things?

Speaker 3 We think everyone is a leader. So we do apply it broadly.
But of course,

Speaker 3 I think it's really important as we're thinking about hiring or bringing in a new leader that this is something that we talk to folks about.

Speaker 2 So if someone's not quite T-shaped, if they're a little bit I-shaped, Is there something they can do to become a bit more T-shaped?

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's almost maybe the easier one, right?

Speaker 3 If you can build on a real depth of expertise by going engaging with folks maybe outside of your comfort zone or in different parts of the business and build that curiosity and understanding, that helps develop, I think, that breadth of understanding.

Speaker 3 I think what's harder is if you're a generalist and you don't have that deep skill set or that deep area of expertise, it's really, really hard to bring enough value to the team, right?

Speaker 3 And I think that's where people get frustrated with like the idea of middle management, right?

Speaker 3 Where it's like, oh, this is just a person who knows a little about a lot, but can't really help me solve this problem because they don't really know the details.

Speaker 3 They don't really understand, you know, how, how to help me, you know, grow as an individual or solve this tough technical problem.

Speaker 3 And so I think that's why that area of expertise is so important because it's so hard to inspire people that you're working with if you don't know a lot about, you know, the area that you're working in.

Speaker 2 And do you need to be a T-shaped leader at Snapchat now

Speaker 2 and when there was 10 of you in the bedroom? or in your dad's house? Has it always been important or is that a function of being bigger?

Speaker 3 That's a great question. I wish we had been more thoughtful about the leadership values and characteristics we were looking for back then.

Speaker 3 I think, you know, when you're working on a team of 10 or a team of 20, you're not thinking as much about what leadership characteristics are really important to us.

Speaker 3 It's more about like, how do we survive tomorrow?

Speaker 3 You know, but I think over time, as we learned what leaders were really successful at Snap, we were able to, you know, to...

Speaker 3 kind of look at those attributes and say, okay, you know, these are the leaders who can, who, who really succeed here and drive a lot of value for our business.

Speaker 2 Before we we move on to the second two, if this Evan could have gone back to the Evan that was running a team of 10 and he could have pulled him aside and said, listen, here's some advice that you're going to need to know about leadership in building this team.

Speaker 2 The most critical advice I could give you at this time,

Speaker 2 and this is for all the entrepreneurs out there that are building it, they're laying the foundations of a potentially very big company right now. What would you have whispered in his ear?

Speaker 3 I would have said, Everything's going to be okay. Really? Everything's going to be okay.

Speaker 3 You know, I think sometimes people are too focused

Speaker 3 on

Speaker 3 making the right decision and not as focused on fixing it if they're wrong.

Speaker 3 And I think what I would have put more emphasis on is just how quickly are you changing your mind when you receive new information?

Speaker 3 How quickly are you fixing a problem or a mistake if you didn't make the right decision in the first place?

Speaker 3 And that's the feedback loop that is so mission critical to building a business in the early days. It has very little to do.

Speaker 3 Obviously, there's existential decisions, you know, and those can, you know, create some big problems for your business, but most decisions are not existential decisions.

Speaker 3 And the more important thing is to make a decision. And then if you're wrong, fix it.
And I think it's the when you're wrong, fixing it part that deserves most of the attention.

Speaker 3 And also how you can identify, you know, who your great leaders are, who, you know, who really talented folks on the team are, because they're very quick to point out, you know, I don't think we did that right.

Speaker 3 I think we should take this path, you know, this other path that, you know, we maybe hadn't considered considered the first time.

Speaker 3 And I think it takes courage to say that in an organization rather than just say, oh, we're doing a great job.

Speaker 2 And when you're back there and you've made a mistake, there's something you've done wrong. In hindsight, did you know in your chat?

Speaker 2 Because one of the things that I think of when I was a first-time founder building a student notice board was I would get feedback and the feedback would be saying, you're wrong about this.

Speaker 2 You need to change.

Speaker 2 And I think that sometimes there was a part of me that knew, but I was like too scared to act upon it.

Speaker 2 so I kind of like gaslit myself to just keep going and I think a lot of founders do that I know this because they they come to me in my portfolio and they say oh Steve there's this guy we've hired and he's been there now for a year and he's just not cutting it I'm like why the fuck are you telling me and they're they're procrastinating avoiding the conversation but clearly they know clearly they know it's not right

Speaker 3 It's funny you say that because anytime someone comes to ask me about like that type of people advice, like, what do you think we should do?

Speaker 3 You know, do you think that I'm like, it sounds like you've already made up your mind.

Speaker 3 um so yeah i think it is i think it is really important to you know act on that feedback not be afraid to change direction quickly if you know you you realize that you made a mistake but as you point out it's it's hard to do and sometimes it is worth seeing if you know your your bet you know plays out you don't want to thrash the team and change your mind all the time so sometimes you know it is it is sometimes worth seeing things through a little bit before you change is there anything else you would have said to that younger evan in that in your dad's house advice um at that point before we had scaled to a lot of you know thousands of people i think we could have been much more clear on the culture the kind smart creative piece and really embedded that in the team prior to scaling because one of the biggest challenges that we confronted was you know as we went from 20 people to 2000 people we basically imported all of these different cultures from all sorts of different companies like we imported an amazon contingent right we you know who they really love their six-page documents.

Speaker 3 We, you know, imported a Google contingent, right? And they're very focused on consensus-based decision-making. We imported, you know, a contingent from Meta as well.

Speaker 3 And I think we were too slow to be really clear about what our values were and what that looked like in practice, what those behaviors looked like.

Speaker 3 And I think if we had earlier and faster, so when we're evaluating performance, we look at our values, kind, smart, creative, we have specific behaviors attached to that that are actually research-backed and whatever.

Speaker 3 We did a whole study to understand which of those behaviors are really tied to performance and those values.

Speaker 3 But that gives people a really clear framework for the expectations for how to behave at SNAP and our unique culture. And there was a

Speaker 3 moment in time where I felt like we were losing control of our culture. And I wasn't happy with our company and the team.
I remember I was complaining. to a friend of mine.

Speaker 3 This is probably like your story of folks coming to you and saying, oh, it's not working. I was complaining to a friend of mine and I was just like, man, I just don't, like, I don't like it.

Speaker 3 Like, I don't like my job. I don't like what our companies become.
And she just looks at me and she's like, then fix it.

Speaker 3 Great point.

Speaker 3 And, and I, you know, I think at that, it just, it had changed and grown so quickly that it was really hard to stay true to our values.

Speaker 3 But I think, you know, I really took that advice to heart and just started trying to fix it with our team, getting really clear about the values, getting really clear about the behaviors, holding a higher bar and saying, hey, you know, if you're not into the kind, smart creative thing, that's okay.

Speaker 3 There are other companies with different cultures, but that really matters to us here.

Speaker 2 I hope you found today's conversation helpful and insightful.

Speaker 2 If you're ready to join two and a half million other small businesses already using LinkedIn for hiring, head over to linkedin.com/slash D-O-A-C now.

Speaker 2 That's linkedin.com/slash D-O-A-C to find your next exceptional hire.

Speaker 1 It's time your hard-earned money works harder for you. With the WealthFront Cash account, your uninvested cash earns a 3.5% APY, which is higher than the average savings rate.

Speaker 1 No account fees, no minimums, and free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts any time. Join over a million people who trust WealthFront to build wealth at WealthFront.com.

Speaker 1 Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, member FINRA SIPC, and is not a bank. APY on deposits as of November 7th, 2025 is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum.

Speaker 1 Funds are swept to program banks where they earn the variable APY.