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Snap CEO Evan Spiegel explains why he doesn’t get upset when Facebook copies their features
Evan is asked if he ever reached out to Mark Zuckerberg when Facebook started copying some of Snapchat’s features. Evan replies:
“No, we didn’t do that. One of the things that I really admire about Kevin Systrom is that when they copied the Stories feature, they stopped pretending that they were doing anything different… With things like Poke, they tried to pass it off as their own creation — ‘Oh, we’re doing it a little bit differently.’ But with Stories, Kevin Systrom came out and just said, ‘We think this is a really great feature. We’re going to steal it and put it in Instagram, and we think you’re going to love it. I think the honesty was at least admirable.”
Evan continues:
“I’m sure you know the saying, ‘great artists steel.’ I think one of the things about our industry is that people are constantly being inspired by one another.”
Evan remembers being inspired by ByteDance’s app Toutiao, which was using machine learning to recommend content, and incorporating ML-recommendations into Snapchat.
“Drawing inspiration from other companies and other businesses is part of innovating.”
However, this did show Snapchat the importance of building things that are really hard to copy, and he offers founders the following advice:
“I think it’s really important to evolve very quickly from being just a product or just a feature to becoming a platform or an ecosystem.”
He gives Snapchat lenses as an example:
“It becomes very hard to copy the 4 million lenses that developers have created for our platform or to move the hundreds of millions of people who are enjoying augmented reality on Snapchat to a new platform. And so, especially in the technology business, the faster you can evolve from being a feature or product to a real platform, I think that’s where the value is created over the long term.”