He is just 25 years old and he owns a company valued at 19.000 billion dollars, a money sum that few can actually dimension. This young successful business man is Evan Spiegel, the founder of the Snapchat mobile app, who today is considered one of the youngest billionaires according to the Forbes financial magazine. Spiegel is also considered to be Silicon Valley’s pretty boy because of his looks and his fashion sense.
With a simple but careful look, this former Stanford student has also become (without wanting it, maybe) a kind of fashion male icon, he appeared at the cover of the Italian version of Vogue, where they say that Evan has changed the rules of technology; same thing was mention by the Spanish magazine S.
His story has a lot of similarities with another Internet figure: Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook. Spiegel, like Zuckerberg dropped out of college (Stanford) to found his own company and coincidently was also sued by a friend and fellow student Frank Reginal Brown, one of the co-founders of the app along with Spiegel and Bobby Murphy.
Everything was going steady and smooth at the beginning, then Brown was dismissed from the team and he decided to take legal action against his former teammate. He was demanding about being granted 20% of the company. It did not go to court; the request was solved behind closed doors with a private agreement, whose terms are unknown.
Suffice to say, the idea to develop the app was born after Spiegel, Murphy and Brown were having a conversation about how great it would be to be able send erotic pictures that will self-destruct shortly after they were send so no one else could see them or share them. And just like that Snapchat was born. Although it was called “Picaboo” first.