Can Snap Seize The Moment?
Bloomberg Businessweek|August 27, 2018

Nobody trusts Facebook. Twitter is a hot mess. Can Evan Spiegel keep Snapchat from disappearing?

Sarah Frier
Can Snap Seize The Moment?

On the second floor of the new headquarters of Snap Inc. in Santa Monica, Calif., is a room dedicated to helping employees open up. It’s round and lined with potted plants. “Speak from the heart,” reads a framed sign on the wall. “Listen from the heart.” Employees show up in groups of about a dozen, sit cross-legged on black cushions, and take turns with the “talking piece,” a heart-shaped purple geode that gives the bearer the right to confidentially share deep thoughts.

This is the inner sanctum for what Snap calls “Council,” a sort of New Age corporate retreat that uses a technique Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel learned in childhood. It was also where I found myself on a Friday morning in July. Council meetings, I’d been told by the company’s communications chief, are “sacred.” They’re also a real-life example of what Spiegel wants people to do with his smartphone app, Snapchat: share intimately, without fear of judgment from the outside world.

As an app, at least, it’s a compelling idea. Snapchat’s disappearing posts, Stories, as they’re known, are wildly popular with teenagers, especially in the U.S.—so popular that Facebook Inc. has made the concept a core part of its own services, most notably Instagram. Unfortunately, Snap is having trouble capitalizing on the opportunity.

This should be Spiegel’s moment. Facebook is in the middle of a series of privacy-related scandals. Twitter and YouTube, Snapchat’s other big competitors, have seemed overrun by some combination of Russian bots, ISIS recruiters, and/or conspiracy theorists. In this context, Snapchat would appear to be well-positioned as an alternative. There’s no fake news, and the company’s emphasis on disappearing content means it stores much less data than its competitors do.

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