Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, 34, has one piece of advice for anyone looking to be an entrepreneur: Don’t be afraid to be creative.
“I think one of the most important things today is really nurturing creativity,” Spiegel said in a recent episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett. “I think creativity is really the X factor, certainly in the age of AI.”
Spiegel said that the one trait he would advise any entrepreneur to develop is their creativity — and not by building apps like Snapchat either.
“We’re all born creative,” Spiegel said. “It’s only over time I think that we stop practicing that ability or we become fearful of expressing ourselves. And I think that can be overcome.”
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According to Spiegel, fostering creativity could take different forms, like pursuing art. He gave the example of his oldest son, 14-year-old Flynn, who loves to draw but doesn’t see a career in art as his future. Spiegel said that drawing was not a waste of time for Flynn but rather one path to creativity that allows him to exercise his creative muscles and visualize something other people don’t see.
Drawing is “one way, one tool, one skill, that he can use to express what’s in his brain,” Spiegel said.
Evan Spiegel. Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for Vanity Fair
Spiegel co-founded Snapchat in 2011 while studying product design at Stanford. He dropped out of the university in 2012 to focus on Snapchat full-time, building it into a multi-billion dollar business. In 2016, Snapchat changed its corporate name to Snap to reflect the expansion of its business into products like video-enabled sunglasses.
The company went public in March 2017 with a market cap of about $33 billion, about the same number as Marriott and Target, at the time. Snap had a market cap of about $16 billion at the time of writing, comparable to Best Buy and Domino’s.
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Though its market value may have declined, Snap has more users than ever. Last year, the company’s daily active users grew by 9% year-over-year to reach 453 million.
Other social media companies, like Meta, have much higher market values; Meta was valued at $1.5 trillion at the time of writing.