Evan Spiegel, the raging tempest, who is also Snapchat CEO

Evan Thomas Spiegel had a privileged upbringing. He was the son of two Attorneys and spent his childhood in Los Angeles area. As a kid he worked on Photoshop and promoted Red Bull. He joined a product design course at Stanford, that he never finished. At Stanford, Spiegel teamed up with two other “bros” Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown to create Picaboo, an app that deleted photos after they were sent. The application did not take off, and Brown wanted to quit the team. Murphy and Spiegel used the same basic concept, called their app Snapchat, and they were in business. Snapchat did take off, and did attract investor attention. It bucked a whole bunch of trends in social networks. There was no feed. You did not experience something then catalog it, the interaction itself was the living experience. There is no monetisation based on intimate details collected about users and their social networks. In many ways Spiegel’s story is an Echo of Mark Zukerberg. Both had a luxurious childhood and went to well known colleges. Both started disruptive social applications in their college. Both were sued for that application by their former partners. Both rejected offers for buyouts, Spiegel refused Zukerberg’s offer to buy Snapchat.  Both went on to become billionaires when still in their twenties. But there were marked differences as well. Spiegel, unlike Zukerberg, was in no way an introvert. Spiegel was the king of cool in college, in charge of social activities of his fraternity. It was during this time that he would write a series of emails that would later leak, and give him the  reputation of an imbecile. He now runs Snapchat with an Iron Fist. An rapidly increasing number of people are using his ephemeral photos based social application. Companies are flocking to the service to connect with their customers, without getting so much as a link back to their web site. And Spiegel continues to go against the flow by making strange decisions that would not be considered at Google or Facebook.