Uncovering the Secrets of Evan Spiegel’s Success

Evan is an American entrepreneur and businessman. He is the CEO and co-founder of the social media company Snap Inc. This app has millions of users all around the globe and he is one of the youngest billionaires in the world. Along with Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown, they created the disappearing photos and videos app which is being successfully used worldwide earning a lot of revenue. Almost 265 million users are found each day.

Evan Spiegel Early Life

On 4th June 1990, Melissa Ann Thomas and John W. Spiegel gave birth to Evan Thomas Spiegel who grew up in Los Angeles, California. His parents were lawyers. In Santa Monica, he used to go to the Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences and for graduation he was lucky to get admission to  Stanford University. There he joined Kappa Sigma Fraternity. He also attended design classes from Otis College of Art and Design and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena while in highschool. Since childhood he always had interests in photoshop and web designing and also did unpaid sales internship at Red Bull. Then he did a paid internship for a biomedical company. He had a good connection with his computer teacher and he had built his own personal computer just in class 6. He was considered a shy and nerdy kid and was also bullied. Anyways his parents got divorced in 2007 and he made tantrums to force his dad to buy him a new BMW before he could live with his mother. His mother agreed to lease the car. Later he tried to improve his negotiation skills. 

Evan Spiegel Personal Life

He is known to come from a rich family who had subscriptions in clubs and hotels. He enjoyed going on vacations and trips. He also went snowboarding by helicopter once. He also loves wearing fashionable clothes. Evan used to date Taylor Swift before. Then in 2015 he fell in love with a supermodel named Miranda Kerr whom he had met at a Louis Vuitton dinner. In 2017, they married in L.A. They now have 2 kids- Hart Kerr Spiegel and Myles Spiegel. They together bought a home near Brentwood worth $12 million. Kerr is a sheer supporter of Evan.

He has a good car collection of Lexus, Mustang, Cadillac Escalade and Ferrari. He also loves reading books. Few of his favourite books are The Art of War by Sun Tzu and Mortal Republic by Edward Watts. He became one of the youngest billionaires at the age of 25 and has been ranked at number 854 by Forbes having $4 billion net worth. In 2018 he also gave $20 million to a scholarship programme, Stockton Scholars. 

Evan Spiegel Professional Life

In 2011, Evan Spiegel had  co-founded the Snapchat app which is a photo-video sharing app, along with Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown whom he had met while being at Stanford. Murphy said that they were not cool before so decided to build something to become cool. Before this Murphy and Spiegel had worked together for some startup ideas like providing help to high school students for applying in college but their attempts had failed. Then later they developed this app which started reaching heights by 2012 having millions of users. Before they had kept the name Picaboo later changing it into snapchat. 

The speciality of this app is messages or pictures disappear soon leaving no evidence. Pictures can be filtered and the feature most widely used by users is maintaining snapstreak. Everyday sending snaps to continue the record is a new trend that is hyped by the users. The three founders divided the work among them. Evan was the app CEO and  designer, Bobby would do the coding and Reggie would look after marketing. For this Spiegel dropped out of his University later to focus on his app development. His app logo is a ghost which is inspired from Wu-Tang clan member Ghostface Killah. Then many new features were added like putting a story, video-calling, adding songs which made this app very successful and is one of the top downloaded apps. Later Reggie was forced to leave the company due to mismatch in opinions. He had filed a suit against Evan and Murphy that he didn’t get his share and the credits. On protest he got $157.5 million. Once it was said that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted to buy this app for $4 billion but Evan rejected the offer stating everyone does not get an opportunity to develop such an app. Everyone faces ups and downs in their life. Evan himself agreed he may not be a good manager but is trying to be a leader. In 2018 his new design was not welcomed by the audience much. But he does not regret his designs and learnt to evolve in a better way.

Evan likes keeping his business dealings secret and also due to his shy nature does not interact with employees much and paves his own way. Anyways he has earned a lot of revenue, name and fame at such an early age. Murphy and Evan own 30% of the Snapchat share and also took an oath to donate 13 million shares to Snap foundation. He has already donated $154 million to Snap stock. In 2013, Evan won Crunchies Award for Best Mobile Application and in 2015 he got Eddy Awards for recognising his leading role in the development of the LA country economy. No doubt Snapchat is one of the leading apps right now and more success is yet to be achieved.

Evan Spiegel Controversies

• In 2014, while being a member of Sigma Fraternity in Stanford University, his college emails were leaked which included awful and toxic comments on shooting lasers on fat girls, getting women drunk to have them get laid, peeing on them and disrespecting women. This was a heated controversy and he had to apologise for such bad content. He assured the public that now he is a changed man.
• In 2017, an ex Snapchat employee filed a complaint against Evan for his statement saying snapchat is only for the rich people and not for poor countries like India and Spain. This was not taken in a good way by Indians and they rose to uninstall snapchat and give low ratings to the app. Snapchat shares fell by 1.5%. Later this allegation was dismissed claiming it to be funny as snapchat is a free app which is available for everyone to get it downloaded.