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Grit · 2 min · Dec 15, 2025

Spiegel used walkarounds to speed up a revenue reset

During Snap’s shift toward small and midsize advertisers, Evan Spiegel visited teams instead of waiting for polished presentations. He asked to see work early, then used daily numbers, user response, and blockers to keep projects moving.

Evan Spiegel

Co-founder & CEO, Snap Inc.

Co-founded Snapchat at Stanford and has led Snap as CEO since 2011, building Stories and the Specs AR glasses.

  • Joubin Mirzadegan, Host · Partner, Kleiner Perkins

    Took Palo Alto Networks' cloud business from $2M to $50M+ ARR in a year.

About this segment

During Snap’s shift toward small and midsize advertisers, Evan Spiegel visited teams instead of waiting for polished presentations. He asked to see work early, then used daily numbers, user response, and blockers to keep projects moving.

From “How Snap Plans to Win the AR Race | Evan Spiegel on Spectacles”, Dec 15, 2025. Watch the full episode

“there's no better, faster way to understand what's going on than to just go walk around and talk to people.”
Evan Spiegelat 53:28 · Grit53:28

Takeaways

  1. He used informal walkarounds during a major advertising reset.
  2. Teams expected presentations to take weeks; he asked to see the work sooner.
  3. He wanted daily numbers, user response, and blockers on active projects.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 43:23Spiegel turned down the offer because Snap had a path alone3:00
  2. 22:05Snap raised its first round after running out of cash2:55
  3. 1:03:13AI leaders need to address public anxiety, not just opportunity3:51
  4. 2:14Snap sees utility and AI as the keys to AR glasses3:18
  5. 12:32Snap is building its ad business around smaller buyers3:16

  6. 52:21Spiegel used walkarounds to speed up a revenue reset2:17

  7. 48:05Snap keeps its core design team to about a dozen people2:51Up next
  8. 1:08:10Snap hires designers based on work, not credentials2:24

Transcript

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

  1. 52:27

    On the 5,000 person question thing, does it freak you out that like there's a lot of layers before things get to you and there's a lot of like editing to edit before evan sees something and i guarantee you that's like you're like you're probably up at night thinking i cannot believe people are doing that inside my company yet everybody is doing that inside your company and if you find it i bet you go crazy because you're like don't have a meeting to prepare for the meeting with me yet everybody has meetings to prepare for meetings with you. And as you think about like the sluggishness of organizations as they grow, that's generally what tends to happen. Does that drive you nuts?

  2. 53:04

    That dynamic's incredibly worrying to me. We have gotten rid of that in most parts of the company, I would say. But, you know, one of the things I observed, this was maybe two, three years ago, I mentioned we, you know, went through this huge transition to diversify our revenue into small and medium customers and to build a lot more features into our advertising platform that would allow them to optimize against lower funnel objectives and that sort of thing.

  3. 53:27

    One of my favorite things to do when going through a major reset moment like that is to just go and walk around and talk to the team. I mean, there's no better, faster way to understand what's going on than to just go walk around and talk to people. So I would spend a lot of time. I mean, usually like every night I would just go, you know, at the end of the day to our monetization building and just walk around and talk to people. And what are you working on? What are you building?

  4. 53:49

    And sure enough, you know, I'd talk to folks and they'd say, hey, I'm working on a presentation. You probably won't see this for six weeks, but, you know, and I'd be like, great, can I just see it now? You talk me through it. And, you know, you learn so much, so much faster by just getting in there with the team. And I think you can start to break some of those sort of patterns. But the culture there at the time was very oriented around very controlled flow of information and presenting information in that very structured way.

  5. 54:12

    With a company of our size, that's just too slow, right? Like, I think it's almost impossible to work that way and expect good results. So I think in most areas of our company, we're moving so quickly that there's just no time to like present the information in some fancy way. I mean, on some of the projects we're working on right now, I get a daily update. There's no time to make it fancy. I just want to see the numbers.

  6. 54:31

    I want to see what's going on. I want to see how our community is responding to it.