Evan Spiegel

Just innovating.

They're not really driving the business.

They're not supporting our customers.

And so a lot of tension actually arises from the different organizational structures.

And so the leadership responsibility, and I think Safi does a really good job looking throughout history, what leaders have cultivated really constructive and powerful relationships between the more innovative or flat parts of the organization and the more structured and

and hierarchical parts of the organization you know how you create that mutual respect how you create that dialogue between those parts the organization is so important and so you know when i read that i was like wow that actually sounds quite similar to what we have at snap you know we have to run a large public company serve almost a billion customers that means

You know, our service needs to be really reliable.

It means that we need to operate, you know, really, really effectively to serve our customers.

And at the same time, we have a very, very small, you know, it sort of oscillates between like nine and 12 people design team that is constantly innovating and creating new things.

And I think, you know, the beauty of what I love about Snap is that the dialogue between those two teams is where a lot of that innovation happens.

because a lot of our engineers, you know, working to serve our customers or working on reliability have a bunch of great ideas and so do our designers.

And as long as they're in dialogue, you know, really great things can happen.

Well, I think it's really important to acknowledge that, like, new ideas come from everywhere, and we want that.

But I think the design team in particular, it's really important, and we call it the design team.

Like, it's really important that they have a flat, non-hierarchical structure, you know, where new ideas can come from anywhere.

I mean, I think that that is absolutely critical.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's an important part of it, but a lot of how we built Snap was modeled actually on mine and Bobby's original relationship, right?

Where like Bobby, you know, has a computer science, you know, heavy duty computer science and stats background, mathematical and computational science.

But he really likes design and likes thinking about, you know, building things for customers and empathizing with them.

I have a design background.