Why Does Snap Care So Much About AR?
Snap Inc. really cares about augmented reality, at least on the surface. They are investing billions into consumer-ready augmented reality in the form of their lenses, which have been largely successful among users, and are pioneering consumer-ready AR with their spectacles. It does beg the question, though, how did Snap’s 22-year-old founders Bobby Murphy and Evan Spiegel come to the point of making such a high-conviction bet on the future of computing just a few years out of college?
In contrast, take Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. He grew up reading Neil Stephenson, coding geeky personal projects, and dreaming of a world in which Moore’s law would eventually herald a new reality. After a few years running one of the most successful businesses of his time, and after being beaten to mobile by a competitor, he jumps on the opportunity to pursue his dream while edging out his competition. Mark’s betting on the metaverse makes a lot more sense than a frat-y Stanford product designer and his CTO.
In a sense, I’m pointing out a plot hole in Snapchat’s history. Apart from a vague belief in “the future of the camera”, there is really nothing to explain Snapchat’s founders choosing to invest hundreds of millions in artificial reality.
The meeting
That is until you consider one fateful moment shared between Zuck and the cofounders back in 2013. As Forbes describes it:
And so, armed with the premise of meeting with architect Frank Gehry about designs for Facebook's headquarters, Zuckerberg flew to Spiegel's hometown, Los Angeles, arranging for a private apartment to host the secret sit-down. When Spiegel showed up with his cofounder Bobby Murphy, who serves as Snapchat's chief technology officer, Zuckerberg had a specific agenda ready. He tried to draw out the partners' vision for Snapchat--and he described Facebook's new product, Poke, a mobile app for sharing photos and making them disappear. It would debut in a matter of days. And in case there was any nuance missed, Zuckerberg would soon change the large sign outside its Silicon Valley campus from its iconic thumbs-up "like" symbol to the Poke icon. Remembers Spiegel: “It was basically like, ‘We’re going to crush you.’”
Mark, the story goes, in a show of good sportsmanship, warned the Snapchat duo about Poke days in advance. We’re also meant to believe that Zuckerberg’s second goal was to reduce “nuance” about the fact that Snap was a competitor to Facebook.
We don’t know what really happened in this meeting, but this story of Mark pregaming his Snapchat competitor is ridiculous.
Accepting that Mark Zuckerberg met with the founders to establish their relationship, it’s more interesting to imagine what their exchange was actually like. Zuck, a weathered operator with a social media offering losing steam among younger generations, and the two cofounders, rising stars who had managed to explode among gen-z and mobile users, where Mark had famously failed to adapt. There must have been some sense of succession.
Meta jr
Meta offers a vision of a metaverse lived in your room, on the cloud, a vision wherein the power of computing brings limitless possibilities to anyone, no matter their background, upbringing, or physical ability.
Snap contends that virtual reality and social media can never beat the richness of close friendships and natural sensations. Our reality can be augmented, but only with the end goal of sharing in the creativity and education of those around us. Our lives will be better, but they will be ours. The downside of this vision, of course, is that your life may just suck, either from lack of mobility or lack of an existing friend graph.
So, in essence, Snap believes in a metaverse that is social, mobile, and explorative, while Meta believes in a metaverse that is stationary, expansive, and equitable. One way to frame this is that Snap’s vision is more optimistic, but perhaps a better framing is that Snap’s vision is more youthful.
It’s a perfect duopoly: the mobile, gen-z facing company harnesses new graphics capabilities to show young audiences their world in a new light, while the global, gen-y facing company brings a new world of connection to an aging user base whose worlds are better escaped from.
We’ll never know what was truly said in that fateful meeting, but I suspect that Mark was already starting to think a few years beyond Poke and that the meeting encouraged Snap’s founders to do the same.
I don’t think Evan Spiegel is actively collaborating with Mark Zuckerberg, rather passively collaborating. Mark, in my view, saw value in augmented reality not becoming a hypercompetitive gaming sector dominated by Chinese startups, and so helped Spiegel with some late-game strategy. Something like:
“Hey, Evan, I’m going to try to kill you. If you survive, you should probably work on augmented reality. Oh, and drop the Chat. It’s cleaner.”