Evan Spiegel: belief

Transcript context

…That is so interesting. It's something that I've been thinking a lot about actually, this idea of distribution, because of AI. If you think about just where AI has come into the market, it started originally just like helping people auto complete code. There's something I've been talking about a lot on this podcast. So it's like, okay, auto-complete code. Okay, now it's writing all our code. Okay. Now it's reviewing our code and now it's testing itself and now it's going to help us come up with ideas. So it's like starting in the middle of the product development process and expanding out. And I feel like it will be very good at coming up with great ideas and developing strategy. It's going up, I don't know, the funnel or the timeline of building a product. And I feel like distribution is where it ends up being, what ends up being the new moat and the new biggest challenge because AI is not going to really help you there. So it's really interesting that that's even more so true for consumer products. No, I think that's absolutely the case. And the only thing I would say is the most exciting times in technology are when there are new platforms that get created. And that tends to be where a lot of the value comes from. You think about a lot of the big consumer technology companies today, they were really born out of mobile, whether it's Uber, Snapchat, some of those early generation companies that really got distribution and built themselves on mobile. And so I think as we look forward to these next generation form factors, things like glasses, there's going to be a whole new set of opportunities and a whole new surface for people to build generational consumer companies. And I'm really excited about that. Especially if they have distribution already. I'm just worried for startups. It's going to be very hard to get distribution just like there's so much launching every day, so much to pay attention to. And it just feels very hard for a startup to get any attention against existing incumbents. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, Skim, R-back, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. Work OS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS, and that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seat stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. Work OS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today. Something that has always been really interesting to me about Snapchat is it feels like you guys have just innovated so much over the years. You guys basically just invent all the things. People copy you, benefit greatly from it, and it's just kind of wild to watch. And just like a few examples that come to mind, stories you guys created. You were very early on AR glasses. You guys launched spectacles before Meta got into this stuff. Swipe-based navigation. I think you guys started the idea of holding to do a video versus a photo. There's probably a bunch. First of all, what's the next thing someone's going to steal, do you think?…

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