Evan Spiegel on why Snap is betting on Spectacles

Last week, I spoke with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel about what the company announced at its annual Partner Summit on Tuesday.

In our chat, which you can read below, we start with Spectacles and why he’s so committed to the long-term bet of building AR glasses. We then discussed his view of competition before moving to the state of social media and the goal for Snapchat’s new redesign. And lastly, we touch on what he’s learned about Snap’s business struggles and running the company in recent years.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity:

I left my demo of the new Spectacles feeling like it’s still a blank canvas in terms of what you’re supposed to do with it. I’m wondering how intentional that is and if that’s because you are hoping the developers help you figure that out?

I’m thrilled that you said that because this really is an invitation and hopefully an inspiration to create. There are hundreds of thousands of developers building with Lens Studio who are super passionate about AR. This unlocks their creativity in some pretty astounding ways. We’re trying to be the most developer-friendly platform in the world, [by] creating a really powerful tool set, making it super easy to use, and then making the distribution really easy from Lens Studio all the way to Spectacles.

Why do you think developers will be super engaged here when there isn’t a market for Spectacles?

I think it’s the same reason why developers were really excited with the early desktop computer or the reason why developers were really excited by the early smartphones. I think this is a group of visionary technologists who are really excited about what the future holds, and I think this next step for Spectacles and the Snap OS is really the clearest glimpse of what technology can achieve in our lifetimes. I think that is something that’s really inspiring to folks.

So, you are waiting to have a robust enough ecosystem of developers, and that’s the gating factor for Spectacles to then be released widely? Walk me through how this gets to being a commercial product for non-developers.

We’re certainly focused on enabling more Lens experiences because I think that will just continue to increase the utility of Spectacles. But we, of course, have longer-term goals around wearability — on runtime, on capability overall. So, we’ll continue to make progress there.

When do you think selling Spectacles becomes a meaningful business for Snap? Are we talking toward the end of this decade? Early 2030s?

We think by the end of this decade.

Do you think there needs to be more fundamental breakthroughs in the technology? Or do you feel like that work is past you and it’s more about refining the tech you have now?

I don’t think there are more fundamental breakthroughs that need to happen to be able to provide glasses to a much larger community. But I do think we’re going to continue to break new ground here.

Is your vision that these Spectacles, when they are widely available, are an extension of Snapchat? Or are they more than that?

I think people are going to want many of the features Snapchat offers, including chatting with friends or seeing what’s happening on the map. The way that we’ve architected the Snap OS is around these Lens experiences, which allow people to share computing together in the real world. Ultimately, that’s really the value that the glasses provide, especially at a time when I think folks are feeling fatigued by their screens.

Is Snap OS something you will keep to yourself, or is that something you want to license?

It’s far too early to say. What we’ve thought for quite some time now is that, in order to build great software, you’ve got to build the hardware. And that tight relationship and integration between the two is what makes this sort of breakthrough technology possible. We’re certainly staying open-minded.

I was reading this Blue Ocean Strategy HBR article that you referenced in your 13-year company memo to support why you’re building Spectacles. There was a quote in the article about how it’s an applicable strategy for “unknown market space, untainted by competition.” I would posit that you do have competition. You have Meta, Apple, Samsung, Google, and others. Do you feel like you have competition?

Sorry, so who of those have AR glasses?

Well, fair. They have them in varying degrees of development. But I guess my point is that, yes, you’re ahead in terms of releasing hardware, but it’s not a space that is untainted by competition, and there’s a lot of money and resources being poured into this from other players. And I’m just wondering if I’m missing something about what you meant.

I think you fully understood what I meant. Time and again, capital does not equal innovation.

What are the right moves you are making that you don’t think others are making in this space?

Well, if you look at our long-term investment in this space, we’ve been really thoughtful about the architecture of Lens Studio and building easy-to-use and powerful developer tools. And we were inspired very early on to get Lens experiences running on very compute-constrained devices, like some of the Android devices where we offer Snapchat, which has translated to a lot of the benefits we’ve seen now with Spectacles where we can run these incredibly immersive experiences while offering a long runtime and leveraging our architecture to be able to split that compute workload and run very efficiently.

A lot of these long-term investments, and of course the technical innovation on the software side, have been combined with a lot of our long-term investments in hardware innovation, especially around the optical engine, for example, where we’ve driven enormous efficiency with our waveguides with an eye toward scaling. We made some breakthroughs with our LCoS projector, which is, as far as I’m aware, the smallest and most efficient LCoS projector currently in existence in this form factor.

This has been a 10-year-plus project for you. What has given you the determination to keep doing this, especially in recent years with the short-term pressure on the business?

I just believe so deeply in the opportunity for technology to make a positive impact. When I was growing up, I loved computers but I had to go to the computer lab during lunch time to be able to use them and learn to use the Internet. There’s such an opportunity for computers to evolve to support the ways that humans have long interacted socially by looking at each other eye to eye with much more natural interaction.

To me, this represents the next leap in computing. And frankly, it’s just so exciting to be a part of this evolution alongside team members who have been working in this space much longer than I have personally. We have team members who worked on augmented reality and glasses for more than 25 years.

Do you feel like we’ve reached the natural end point of what social media can be for the devices we have today? Or is there more?

I think there’s continued recognition of a lot of the early trends that we identified that led us to build Snapchat so differently: fatigue around people not liking the social pressure of social media and wanting to share with their friends and family without that pressure — the need to have more positive content experiences. I think people are becoming increasingly aware of how they feel when they use social media.

You have a history of controversial redesigns. I’m curious what the goal is for Simple Snapchat? Are you expecting any kind of strong response like you have from past redesigns?

So far, the feedback has been really positive, both in terms of the user research and the metrics so far. So we’re excited about what we’re seeing. It’s probably not surprising that we’re just taking the stuff that people really love about Snapchat, chatting with their friends, watching Stories, and making that all easier to use and more accessible.

Did you feel like the app had gotten too bloated? Why reduce it to just three tabs?

Yeah, over time, we’ve just pushed to innovate really quickly and create a number of new features and launch things like Spotlight, for example, which has been a big driver of growth for us. But there was an opportunity to simplify the content experience. I think tiles aren’t the best way to browse content. Full-screen discovery is a lot more powerful.

At the same time, we simplified the way that we’re distributing Stories by making them easier for people to find and more closely tied to communication, which is really how people think of using Stories on Snapchat. It’s about sharing something or communicating something to a bigger group of friends and then starting conversations from that.

So, it brings Stories closer to conversations, it simplifies content discovery, and then, as always, brings people straight into our camera to express themselves.

What do you think the immediate impacts will be for advertisers and creators?

You know, it’s hard to say. We’re going to obviously manage that very thoughtfully, of course. We’re starting with a slow rollout so we can really understand any changes in content dynamics.

One of the things that creators have done very effectively is use shortform video to grow their Stories audience and then monetize the Stories through our revenue share program. I think that will become even easier with this app layout where the Stories from your friends or from creators you’re following live on the chat page, and then you can discover new creators or new content full-screen on the third tab. So, I think a lot of the things that creators are taking advantage of today will be reinforced with the redesign.

You’ve gotten under the hood of the ads business in a much deeper way this year. Now that you’ve done that, can you diagnose why the business hasn’t grown like your peers, given the fact that Snapchat’s user base continues to grow? Is it really as simple as you all focused on big brand budgets for too long?

Yeah, I wish we had worked on our small / medium customer business earlier. That has been a real driver of growth for us and certainly a massive long-term opportunity. So, that’s definitely an area I wish we had focused on earlier.

Toward the end of your 13-year post, you wrote about wanting Snap employees to have more “fierce conversations” with each other. What was the meaning behind writing that?

I think it’s so important to encourage people to raise the most important issues facing our business. Sometimes that’s uncomfortable. We’re all human. It can be difficult sometimes to have tough conversations, but conversations are the ones that move us forward and move our business forward. And so encouraging people to do that and also trying to give folks a framework to do that is helpful.

Maybe this is me reading between the lines, but does that suggest you wish there would have been more conversations like those in recent years and that things would have gone differently with the business if so?

No, it’s actually more of a reflection of, as the business has operated in an increasingly lean way, the organization has to make harder tradeoffs and to prioritize very rigorously so that we can get the greatest return on our investment. And so I think encouraging people to have those prioritization conversations and really work well together is just very important.

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