Evan Spiegel explains why he didn’t sell Snapchat to Mark Zuckerberg for $3 billion

“A lot of people in the early days told us we should sell it,” Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel recalls of the time. He tells story from the early days of the company:

“I remember joining a conference call with some of our lawyers and they were saying, ‘This thing is basically going to zero,’ ‘It’s just a fad.’… And I’m like, ‘Oh hey guys.’… They didn’t know I was there because I joined a minute or two early.”

But it wasn’t just their lawyers. Everyone at the time thought that the big players in social media were going to put Snapchat out of business. Yet Evan and his co-founder Bobby Murphy ignored them. They even had so much faith in his vision for the company that they turned down a reported $3 billion dollar acquisition offer from Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.

The founders were only 23 years old when Facebook reached out over email. Facebook told the young founders that they were working on a competitor called Poke and asked if they’d want to join Facebook’s growing social media portfolio after their acquisition of Instagram.

But Evan and Bobby said no:

“I wish I could say it was wisdom but I think Bobby and I just loved what we were doing. We loved what we were working on, and we believed in the future of it. Ultimately we were able to convince our investors too that our opportunity was much bigger over time.”

Evan explains that him and his founder each taking $10 million of secondaries also played a big role:

“[Our investors] did something very smart early on in a prior financing round. Bobby and I were each able to sell $10 million of stock… And that allowed us to just swing for the fences… There wasn’t that feeling of, ‘Oh no, I’m not going to be able to buy a house or have a family.’ We were like, ‘We each got $10 million bucks. Let’s go for it.’”

Today Snap is valued at $13 billion.

Full video: The Diary Of A CEO “How I Built a $130B Business From Scratch!“ (Mar 2025)