I noticed an interesting thing — when you listen to Evan Spiegel, you realize that his logic for designing technology is completely different. It’s not about likes and ratings, but about how people actually want to communicate.

Here’s the story. In 2011, a guy was studying at Stanford, working on product design, and it hit him — computers have always isolated us. Sounds strange? But think about it: in the past, people sat alone in front of monitors, cut off from the world. Evan Spiegel saw this and decided to do the opposite.

That’s how Snapchat was born. The idea was radical — photos and videos that disappear. While everyone else was storing content forever, he proposed living in the moment. The philosophy is simple: technology should help real relationships, not replace them.

Interestingly, Evan Spiegel mentioned in an interview about smartphone addiction. He saw parents waiting for their kids after school — all glued to their phones. And he realized: this is a problem. Technology can be poison if designed incorrectly.

It turned out that Snapchat became a platform for visual communication. It has more selfies than the iPhone overall — the statistics are wild. But it’s not because people are narcissistic. They just use pictures to communicate, not to document. A completely different approach.

This was a mistake at the start — Evan Spiegel and his team created a cool product, but didn’t think about distribution. Later, they realized that perfect software without a market capture strategy is nothing. They had to relearn everything.

When Facebook offered $3 billion for Snapchat in 2013, young Evan Spiegel refused. Now it looks like a genius move — four years later, the company went public with a valuation of $24 billion. But back then, it was just faith in his idea.

The most important thing in his approach is understanding that technology often influences people’s behavior unpredictably. For example, everything was stored forever simply because hard drives used to be expensive to rewrite. Nobody planned this intentionally. But it shaped the entire internet.

So the main thing is to think about how your technology changes people’s lives. Does it improve or destroy? Evan Spiegel chose the first. And it seems to have worked.