Snap raised its first round after running out of cash

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 22:11

   Evan, can I keep pulling on this thread of like the history of you from Stanford to today? The 485 you were building at home, you, your co-founder, who else was there? You were at your dad's house? At that point, it was- Home was a cheap rent. At that point, I'd gone back for my senior year of school. So I was still in school. Bobby was out of school. And at that point, I think our server bills were approaching like $10,000 a month.

2. 22:34

   And we had run out of cash. Like I had invested the $10,000 my grandfather had left me. Like we'd maxed out the credit cards. We were like out of money at that point. And we'd gotten some like random investor emails kind of from all over the world. But we got this reach out from Jeremy Liu at Lightspeed. on Facebook, actually. And his profile picture was with Obama. And this was before AI. So I was like, okay, like, you know, yeah, exactly. I'll respond. And so, you know, we met and at that point, you know, we didn't have a deck or investment materials or anything. We just shared the usage data. So they could see very easily that once folks started using Snapchat to communicate, they just kept kept on using it. And I think this was at the time when a lot of people were using like the Facebook graph and Facebook connect to get those like viral hit

3. 23:19

   sort of apps. And so there was a lot of skepticism, I think, about these social apps and this kind of thing. But because we had such retentive communication engagement, that's, I think, what gave Lightspeed the confidence to invest at that time. And you were home, your co-founder. I was at school. So you were still at school while the usage was going crazy? Yeah, I would sit in the back of class and we actually had something called like the snap counter, which would just show how many snaps had been sent. And it just kept going up. And at the started the school year, it'd be like, you know, one every hour or two or something. By the middle of the school year, you know, that snap counter, when you'd refresh it, it was like, it was really getting going. So we raised the money and then literally I was in the back of my machining.

4. 24:00

   class in the machine shop checking the wells fargo account we'd set up and as soon as i saw the 485 000 i went up to the teacher and i was like craig i'm so sorry no way yeah in class yeah i was like i'm so sorry i gotta drop out i gotta focus on this you were refreshing the app and as soon as you saw the money was wired and i had to go back and take that same class from craig you know five six years later to graduate because i went back in 2018 to finish my come on so that's incredible and did you raise the money to keep up with the server bills or was it to hire people Yeah, we had to keep up with the server bills. And then ultimately, off the back of that, we hired two of our friends from school. And then around that time, we all moved down to my dad's house in LA and started working out of this house.

5. 24:41

   I saw you a couple of weeks ago at the D School 20th anniversary and the David Kelley 50th celebration. What did you take out from design thinking? And that was early on in Stanford's repositioning around product.