For my second book report, I chose to do How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher which goes into the improbable story of the creation of snapchat. The book is centered around how in 2013 Snapchat's CEO Evan Speigel and co-founder Bobby Murphy turned down a three-billion-dollar offer from Facebook. The book was written by Billy Gallagher who is a writer for TechCrunch, and attended Stanford University with the founders of Snapchat. The story starts from when the application was created to when the company went public
Snapchat was created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown when they were students at Stanford University with the idea being able to send photos to people that will eventually disappear. This was at a time when the biggest social media apps, Facebook and Instagram, biggest draw was looking at pictures that would stay up forever. What was posted on other social media apps would stay up forever, and Snapchat did the opposite of this. Snapchat slowly grew at the college of Stanford and in the state of California, primarily because it was a more fun way to message their friends as opposed to texting. Evan Spiegel once described Snapchat's mission as "Snapchat isn’t about capturing the traditional Kodak moment. It’s about communicating with the full range of human emotion — not just what appears to be pretty or perfect."
When Snapchat was first introduced to the world it was thought of nothing more than a "sexting" app, due to the main function of snapchat was timed photos that would disappear. CEO Evan Spiegel had the vision, creativity, and relentlessness to take the app to a higher level. The author at one point compares it to another start-up that was coming to be at Stanford at the same time Snapchat was, called Clinkle. Clinkle was a mobile payment company, similar to apps today like Venmo or CashApp, that eventually festered out because the of the CEO's inability to view market trends, trying to maintain secrecy of the application,
and poor decision-making skills all led to the start-ups eventual downfall.
The main takeaway and overall ultimate message of the book is that a good idea isn't enough to succeed. You need creativity and vision to help push an idea further to have success. You also have to believe in yourself and your vision. Believe so much that you're willing to turndown billions of dollars to take your idea where you want it to go.
In my opinion, How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars is worth a read with the fun journey of snapchat it takes you on. There are some funny moments, especially towards the beginning when talking about CEO Evan Spiegel's life of partying in high school and college. At times it feels like information is being listed to you, but that's okay with me. It made it an easier/lighter read than I expected (reading more than half the book in one day).
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