Snapchat CEO: Why distribution has become the most important moat | Evan Spiegel

“So much of consumer technology focuses on, you know, am I building the right product? Do I have product market fit? Have I, you know, built something that's really gonna resonate, with customers that they're really gonna wanna use all the time? And I think people don't spend nearly enough time thinking about, you know, distribution and figuring out distribution. And that seems to me, to be a huge differentiator.”

“What really mattered was connecting you to the right people. And so if you could just connect someone not to all their friends, but to their best friend, to their partner, to their spouse, the people that they cared most about in the world, that that that's where the majority of the value is in the network. And so that's what really allowed us to grow in those early days.”

“Fifteen years ago, we essentially learned that software is not a moat, right, which is something that everyone is discovering today with AI. But fifteen years ago, because all the software features, that we could create were so easily cloned by our competitors, we started to think about how to build a more durable business, how to build a business, you know, that had bigger and more effective modes.”

“For the design team in particular, the thing that is probably most important is the velocity of design work. So I typically meet with our designers for a couple hours every week, and we just look at work. I mean, new work every week, you know, hundreds of ideas, I would guess, you know, on a weekly basis.”

“I think, for example, right now, people are massively underestimating the role that human adoption and human comfort, you know, with advances in artificial intelligence will determine its deployment. I think technology leaders think that folks will just blindly adopt, new technology as it comes out, and I think we're gonna enter a period of time where there's gonna be a huge amount of societal pushback on a lot of the changes that are coming, with AI.”

“It also informed a lot of our thinking about investing in other places that are really hard to copy, including hardware, where it's really, really challenging, you know, to copy our our fully vertically integrated stack around augmented reality. So I'm certain certain there's a lot more to talk about, there. But I think, you know, we learned early on that software is easy to copy, and so it's really important to build more durable modes.”

“I do think designers feel vindicated in a lot of ways. Right? You know, a lot of designers had parents who were saying, why aren't you studying computer science? You know, what are you gonna do with this skill set, drawing things? You know, this doesn't make any sense. And I think today, you know, a lot of our designers are now shipping code, which is extraordinary.”