Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah. I mean, really all these UI paradigms are so foreign the first time you use the app and we’re having so many people now that they’re kind of breaking north of their stereotypical age group into more adult usage. People are saying, “I don’t know how to use Snapchat. I need my kids to teach me.” That’s always true with any new technology. But putting on my iOS developer hat, the easiest thing to do when creating an app is to create a table view with a navigation bar at the top and then a little drill down just like when iPhone OS launched in 2007. And what Snapchat has really done is say like “nope, you open it up and it’s in camera mode and then everything is just rolled from there.” Once you learn it, you get incredibly fast to that and it’s like its own language and grammar. Yup. One of the things, there was a great article – shoot, I can’t remember where, we’ll find it and link to it in the show notes – that just came out, another one of the many profiles of Evan and of the company. And one of the things it talks about, it’s notoriously been hard to work for Evan and there’s been a lot of employee turnover at Snapchat. But one of the things it says in there is that any discussion of well, we have problem X or we need to do thing Y, and so we should just look at what other people have done on that. Like what did Google do? What did Facebook do? What did Instagram do? That will get you fired right away. The culture they have and that Evan tries to cultivate there is like “I don’t care what other people have done in the past. We’re doing things our way here.” Which I think you really got to admire, it’s what’s gotten Snapchat to where it is.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.