Lenny Rachitsky

People post over 8 billion AR lens photos a day on Snapchat.

And over the years, Evan and his team have invented the concept of stories.

They had the first AR glasses product in the market.

They invented swipe-based navigation, the camera being primary.

And also back in the day, face swapping, making people look older, and so many of the things that are just copied throughout the entire industry.

If this is truly the golden age of consumer products, like many people say AI is going to enable, there's a lot that we can learn about how Evan and his team think and operate and are able to continue innovating.

This is a rare podcast interview with Evan, and we cover a lot of ground.

Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lenny'sproductpass.com for a year free of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers.

With that, I bring you Evan Spiegel.

Evan, thank you so much for being here.

Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

I'm looking forward to it.

I want to start with just trying to understand and help people understand why is it so freaking hard to build a durable, lasting consumer product, and in particular, a social consumer product.

And just to give people this context, I don't think people realize this, but

Since you launched 15 years ago, there's basically TikTok, which is not really social.

It's more of like a media platform, I'd say.

And then maybe Threads, which I think is cheating because it just sits on top of Instagram.

Basically, nothing else has worked other than Snapchat 15 years ago.