Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

> they need to recognize the role that luck played into their original product and design.

That's a strong lesson I've learned in life. Successful people _rarely_ know the precise reasons that they are successful, almost exactly for this reason.

You may be aware of many of the components of your success, but you won't be aware of all of them and it will be impossible for you to rank their importance correctly.

Keep this in mind when successful people talk about their success and offer suggestions on how to replicate it.

It was a terrible change. People (most heavily: kids) like to consider celebrities their friends. People loved the close, barely filtered connection Snapchat gave them.

You can call it a fad, but the truth is that they had and still have the opportunity to build a real business.

The reality is that despite how seemingly old the internet is, we're still in the relatively early stages. There aren't that many companies globally building content systems at scale and working through the challenges of what that means - at scale. Those skills in an organization are extraordinary valuable as old media starts to crumble and information infrastructure on the internet becomes the new fundamental fabric of society - moreso than even today.

I know that sounds a bit grandoise but that's the thinking behind the big bets behind companies like this. If Snap can just get some experienced, less impulsive leadership in place - they can still build an extremely valuable global media property. 180mm daily actives is no joke.

As you can tell, I'm skeptical of Snap in it's current state of management but I'm bullish on social media overall.

Give credit where credit is due. Spiegel is digging deep, showing humility, and asking the right questions after Snap has been flailing for a long time. The crux of the issue is that they haven't launched anything fundamentally innovative and game-changing since the original Snapchat, which went insanely viral in the teen demographic.

In this sense they are following a similar path as Bebo, where I worked before they were acquired by AOL. Launch viral product to teens, blow up huge, score huge business deals, and then growth stagnates because it turns out the original vision only encompassed a product, not an entire platform. Bebo ended up selling to AOL right before it became clear the entire business model was failing thanks to Facebook. I saw a comment below about 2019 being the year that Snap is acquired. I could very much see that happening.

The only thing that would turn things around is if Spiegel can pull another rabbit out of his hat and launch a category-defining product somewhere. Augmented Reality could be where they do it. They did fail miserably with Spectacles, their first take on smartglasses, but again, give credit to them for having the balls to invest in hardware and ship a product. That said, the fact that they shipped a v2 of Spectacles that didn't fix any of the core problems with the original isn't a good sign.

Still, augmented reality is going to be the future of computing when it merges with consumer wearables. It's early days in this market. Every Big Tech company is racing to launch the iPhone of smartglasses. Snap has managed to be the first to launch consumer glasses with a camera. If they can pull their sh*t together and ship something that is actually useful and doesn't look ridiculous, they could still emerge as a dominant player.