Evan Spiegel

really worth reading.

It's all about the innovation process.

And actually, when I read it, I was like, oh my gosh, that kind of explains a lot of how we think about innovation at Snap.

And I think to summarize the academic version, we can talk about like what we've developed and built at Snap, but like to summarize, you know, essentially his findings are that, you know,

Basically, if you want to deliver a product at scale, you usually need quite a large organization.

A large organization needs hierarchy and structure, a lot of operational rigor.

And as soon as you have an organization that's very large and very structured like that, people become very focused on getting a promotion, getting into the next step of the hierarchy.

And that means that all of a sudden, they become a lot more risk-averse.

They're not really as willing to try new things.

They're very focused on achieving the goals that have sort of been set for them in this operational hierarchy.

And that makes it very, very challenging to innovate.

Now, on the flip side, structures that are really healthy and constructive for innovation typically are very, very flat.

That's the same for our design team, for example, where there's no one that has a fancier title or a role.

There's a lot of flexibility in terms of the ability to try new things and fail quickly and put up crazy ideas.

And what he basically finds is that the companies that are very successful actually have both types of organizations inside their company.

And that the leaders of the organization are the ones who are responsible for creating a healthy functioning relationship between the two types of organizations.

Because what ends up happening in a lot of companies is that, you know, the small innovative team becomes critical of the large organization.

Oh, they're so bureaucratic and slow.

They don't innovate, you know, things like that.

And then the larger organization is like, oh, what are these jokers doing?