Founders
Episode 22 #22 How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story
Founders

Episode 22: #22 How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story

Founders

Episode 22

#22 How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story

David Senra is the host of Founders, where he studies history's greatest entrepreneurs. This is what he learned from reading How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher.

What I learned from reading How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher. 

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I'm not going to work for someone else (0:01)

Early design decisions of Snapchat (7:45)

Evan idolized Steve Jobs and Edwin Land (10:00)

How Snapchat convinced people to download the app (13:00)

How Facebook created the environment for Snapchat to grow (16:00)

The problem of standard (21:00)

Evan on conforming (23:00)

Mark Zuckerberg's first move on Snapchat (27:00)

A great quote from Jeff Bezos (34:30)

Digital Dualism (36:30)

Snapchat Stories (39:00)

Evan's framework for Snapchat and the Internet Everywhere (44:45)

Learning from messaging apps in Asia (50:00)

Brands are not social. People are. (55:00)

Evan's philosophy on the distinction between privacy and secrecy (59:00)

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#22 How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story

Introduction

Evan decided to study product design to learn how to look at the things he used in his daily life and see how he can make them better and cooler. David Kelley, the Head of Stanford's famed design school, took Evan on as his advisee. One thing was clear as he frequently put it. I'm not going to work for someone else, and this gave him freedom from the heavy grind of Stanford. Nobody would ever see his résumé or grades, so he took classes for what he actually wanted to learn.

So that's from one of the first chapters of the book that I want to talk to you a little bit about today. And it's called How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher. So this book might be a little different than the ones I've done in the past. I guess the podcast will be a little different, I should say. This -- I'm going to go in chronological order. But there's just a lot of -- when I went back and started preparing for this podcast, what I realized is that a lot of my highlights, a lot of my notes, they're very short. They're like just one paragraph I wanted to pull out and bring to your attention, stuff like that.

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