Evan Spiegel: evaluation

Transcript context

…I want to go back to this idea of how to innovate. I feel like Snap has always been punching above its weight in terms of just how much new stuff comes out of your team, how many inventions happen considering the size of the company and the history. What do you find needs to be true for innovation to happen? What do you do to allow for all these great ideas to emerge? The best sort of academic overview or summary I think comes from a guy, Safi Bahcall, who wrote a book called Loon Shots. It's really worth reading. It's all about the innovation process. And actually when I read it, I was like, "Oh my gosh, that kind of explains a lot of how we think about innovation at Snap. " And I think to summarize the academic version, we can talk about what we've developed and built at Snap, but to summarize, essentially his findings are that basically if you want to deliver a product at scale, you usually need quite a large organization. A large organization needs hierarchy and structure, a lot of operational rigor. And as soon as you have an organization that's very large and very structured like that, people become very focused on getting a promotion, getting into the next step of the hierarchy. And that means that all of a sudden they become a lot more risk averse. They're not really as willing to try new things. They're very focused on achieving the goals that have sort of been set for them in this operational hierarchy, and that makes it very, very challenging to innovate. Now on the flip side, structures that are really healthy and constructive for innovation typically are very, very flat. That's the same for our design team, for example, where there's no one that has a fancier title or a role. There's a lot of flexibility in terms of the ability to try new things and fail quickly and put up crazy ideas. And what he basically finds is that the companies that are very successful actually have both types of organizations inside their company and that the leaders of the organization are the ones who are responsible for creating a healthy functioning relationship between the two types of organizations. Because what ends up happening in a lot of companies is that the small innovative team becomes critical of the large organization, oh, they're so bureaucratic and slow, they don't innovate, things like that. And then the larger organization is like, "Oh, what are these Jokers doing?" Just innovating, they're not really driving the business, they're not supporting our customers. And so a lot of tension actually arises from the different organizational structures. And so the leadership responsibility, and I think Safi does a really good job looking throughout history, what leaders have cultivated really constructive and powerful relationships between the more innovative or flat parts of the organization and the more structured and hierarchical parts of the organization, how you create that mutual respect, how you create that dialogue between those parts of the organization is so important. And so when I read that, I was like, wow, that actually sounds quite similar to what we have at Snap. We have to run a large public company, serve almost a billion customers. That means our service needs to be really reliable and it means that we need to operate really, really effectively to serve our customers. run a large public company, serve almost a billion customers. That means our service needs to be really reliable and it means that we need to operate really, really effectively to serve our customers. And at the same time, we have a very, very small ... It sort of oscillates between like nine and 12 people design team that is constantly innovating and creating new things. And I think the beauty of what I love about Snap is that the dialogue between those two teams is where a lot of that innovation happens because a lot of our engineers working to serve our customers or working on reliability have a bunch of great ideas and so do our designers. And as long as they're in dialogue, really great things can happen.…

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