This Day, That Year – June 4

This day in history we feature Evan Spiegel. An American businessman, co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc. was born on this day in 1990.

Trivia – Evan Spiegel

Spiegel was born in Los Angeles, California, to lawyers John W. Spiegel and Melissa Ann Thomas. He grew up in Pacific Palisades, California, where he was raised Episcopalian. He was educated at the Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica, and attended Stanford University. Spiegel took design classes at the Otis College of Art and Design while still in the high school and at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena the summer before entering Stanford. He also had an unpaid internship in sales at Red Bull. While a student, he worked as a paid intern for a biomedical company, as a careers instructor in Cape Town, South Africa, and at Intuit on the TxtWeb project. Spiegel is a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity.

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Spiegel was the youngest billionaire in the world in 2015. As of March 2023, he had a personal net worth of $2.7 billion according to Forbes. In April 2011, Spiegel proposed an app with ephemeral messaging as a product design class project. Later that year, Spiegel worked with fellow Stanford classmates Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown to launch a prototype of this concept called “Picaboo”, which they later renamed as Snapchat. The app’s popularity grew significantly and in 2012, Spiegel left Stanford to focus on Snapchat shortly before completing his degree. By the end of 2012, Spiegel’s Snapchat app had reached 1 million daily active users. He later completed his remaining credits and graduated in 2018. In February 2017, Spiegel and Murphy pledged to donate upwards of 13,000,000 shares of Class A common stock over the next 15–20 years to an arts, education and youth non-profit. They have created the Snap Foundation which is a non-profit organization targeted to help in these areas. Their mission is to “develop pathways to the creative economy for underrepresented youths in Los Angeles.” Recently they have donated $3 million to people affected by COVID-19. In January 2017 The Wall Street Journal reported that after the predicted March 2017 IPO for Snap Inc., Murphy and Evan Spiegel would hold over “70% of the voting power” in the company, and own around 45% of the total stock. In November 2022 he joined the board of directors for Gagosian Gallery. In the same year, he gave $20 million to Stockton Scholars, a scholarship program in Stockton, California. In 2022, at the Otis College of Art and Design commencement, Spiegel announced that he and Miranda Kerr would pay off the 2022 graduating class’s student debt.

Source – Wikipedia