What comes after smartphones, with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel

“And that maybe brings me to the last point, which is that specs are coming, to consumers for the for the first time, later this year. So after twelve years of investment, in glasses and the next generation of computing and trying to make computing more human, it's actually coming. So, it's it's a pretty extreme time, at Snap, and then we're doing all of that, while transforming the business with AI.”

“And I think the promise of glasses or or at least what I love about glasses is it actually brings computing into the world. I mean, I think this is some something that computing has suffered for a very, very long time is that it just by its nature has been isolating. Right? When I was growing up, you know, I loved computers. I built my own computer. But, like, to use a computer, you had to be in the computer lab at lunch when all your friends were on the school yard, you know.”

“Building a ground up operating system on Linux was really difficult to do, but it's way more performant than trying to repurpose Android. Right? We we learned that Actually, you don't use Android. It builds your own, OS for it. Yeah. Android is way too bloated to work effectively on a on a pair of glasses. I mean, I think that's why you see the the most recent, you know, Google experiment project, Aura, has a huge compute pack.”

“I mean, I I think it's extraordinary. Now more than two thirds of, you know, new code is written, you know, by AI at Snap. That's happened really, really quickly. I think, you know, the the rate at which these models are getting better is just extraordinary. So I think I think for us, we're really excited because we're so fortunate to be in a software business that has network effects.”

“I don't necessarily think we're gonna move beyond the smartphone. I think the smartphone's actually gonna play maybe the most important role of legacy. So beyond solely a smartphone. Yeah. So I I mean, I think it you know, if you look at the capability of of glasses, at least when it comes to specs. Right? What I actually would estimate is that a lot of the large screen use cases are the first to move.”

“What Snapchat proved was actually that it's not about the the size of your network or the number of people you can contact on your network. It's about who you actually talk to. Mhmm. And that tends to be a much smaller group than the total size of the potential network or even your total number of friends. Right? In fact, most of your conversations, I would guess, right, on a daily basis are like with your wife. Right? Maybe with some of your close friends.”

“Well, Norway was the first place that Snapchat got traction. I mean, we had no traction anywhere. Not The US. We had no traction anywhere except Norway. In fact, in the very early days I did not know this. Oh, it was it was a blast. In the in the early days, I think this was, like, after we had gotten venture maybe after we got an adventure funding. I think in the early days of of getting our first round, you know, we'd raised $400,000 or something like that. And we were really growing in Norway.”

“I think what parents need to know, what's so important for parents to know is they can already configure this on their teen's phone using the operating system. So Apple's got a ton of great settings. We use them at home for our fifteen year old Mhmm. Where we can decide exactly what apps he can use, how long he can use them. All of these settings are available to parents at the operating system level, which is a much more resilient way to implement this sort of of policy.”