Evan Spiegel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is there another story of something that y'all built that just was interesting and of how it came to be? These stories are so interesting and people don't know these histories. One of my favorite stories was around screenshot detection actually in the early days because when we first built Snapchat and we shared with people, "Oh, you could send photos that disappear. " Everyone said, "No, you can't. You can always take a screenshot. What do you mean you can send things that disappear? That makes no sense." And so we thought a lot, I remember that summer after school, we went home, we were working out at my dad's house and Bobby and I were just going back and forth and we were like ... We were having fun using the product. We were sending photos back and forth, but people would just keep saying, "Well, it's not about disappearing photos because you can just save them. I don't get it." And one of the things we invented that at the time, we figured out a way, we realized that if you were pressing and holding to open a snap and left your finger on the screen and you took a screenshot, it would basically trigger an event on the phone essentially that made ... The phone would essentially report that your finger had lost contact with the screen.That's what the screenshot mechanism did. So even though Apple didn't provide an API at the time to let you know that a screenshot had been taken, there was a way for us to essentially detect this touch event to learn that a screenshot had happened. And then we would just send a notification back to the sender that, oh, the recipient had taken a screenshot. And that for us in the early days really resonated with our community because they didn't mind if somebody saved one of their Snaps, they just wanted to know. And I think that that early invention was one of the first things that really got a lot of traction in the early days and I think helped Snapchat spread as a new way of communicating. And that is really cool. I can't imagine Snapchat existing without you figuring that out. That feels like such a core mechanic. Something that is also really, I'd say famous in the PM community about Snap is you guys waited a long time to hire product managers. I've done all these research reports on just like how long it took the top companies to hire their PMs. And the number I saw is you had 200 employees before you hired your first PM. I'm curious if you think that was a mistake waiting that long and just your current thoughts on product managers, just like how they fit into Snap. A lot of people listening to this are PMs and so I'm just curious how you feel.…

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