As an idea for an app, it had the elegant simplicity that all but guaranteed success: You take a photo or short video, send it to a person or persons, and then, after the recipient briefly views it, it's gone – never to be seen again. We'll leave it to your imagination to guess what use people might find with an app like that, but suffice to say there was something of a built-in audience. Within months of the app launching in 2011, Snapchat had attracted a user base of 100,000 people, according to TechCrunch, and it quickly became the stuff of internet news everywhere. But the success didn't stop there. Flash forward to February 2013, and you had 60 million snaps being sent on a daily basis. Now, that number is more in the neighborhood of 400 million.
Like so many successful apps out there, Snapchat was founded by some kids. OK, maybe they were categorically adults, but as far as the mean age of a CEO goes, they might as well be infants. The most public face of Snapchat is Evan Spiegel, a now-24-year-old who dropped out of Stanford a few weeks shy of graduation when he realized that attending to the app was going to lead to bigger things than a cap and gown. Unsurprisingly, the relative youth of the app's founders – along with Spiegel, there's Bobby Murphy, and depending on whose side you're on, another guy named Reginald Brown – led to some issues, including the unearthing of rather juvenile texts sent by Spiegel in college and milked for all of their viral worth by TechCrunch. But far from holding the app back, those texts and other tensions have perhaps only contributed to the mystique of what is now the newest multi-billion dollar app.
New investment points to massive value of app
According to Forbes, a venture capital firm called Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has just funneled $20 million into the app. Industry analysts have used that funding news to estimate the app's total worth at somewhere in the range of $10 billion, which would make Spiegel and Bobby Murphy two of the newest billionaires to be strutting their stuff around Silicon Valley. However, it should be pointed out that the $10 billion figure is just a hypothetical value, since Spiegel and Murphy have been decidedly opposed to majorly monetizing their operation, as evidenced by their turning down a $3 billion offer from Mark Zuckerberg. At the time, many thought it was crazy that these two guys would say no to a cool few billion, but the most recent valuation of the app may help explain why that was actually a wise move.
For now, the exact fiscal future of Snapchat isn't necessarily clear, though what is clear is that the app is doing quite well for itself. There's perhaps no more compelling evidence for this than the fact that the app's headquarters are located in, of all places, a beach house. Like Facebook, Instagram and other successful social networking services before it, Snapchat's main selling point is its simplicity: the tremendously intuitive structure of it, and the way it lends itself to habitual use.
All of this is quite impressive considering that the app grew out of messages like this one, sent by Evan Spiegel to a woman named Nicole in July 2011: "I just built an app with two friends of mine (certified bros – our frat just got kicked off campus) … You just take a picture, set the timer … and then it's gone forever! Fun stuff."
