Can you believe that those 15-second life updates you posted on Snapchat made two college graduates billionaires? Oh, it’s true. Filipino American Snapchat co-founder, Bobby Murphy, and business partner, Evan Spiegal, are now the youngest billionaires in the world. Snapchat that to your friends!
Both Murphy and Spiegal were students at Standford University where Murphy studied mathematics and computational science, and Spiegel was a student of the product-design program. Their paths would intersect through their involvement in Stanford’s Kappa Sigma fraternity, which would unsuspectingly lead up to their current success.
“We weren’t cool,” Murphy told Forbes as he reflected on their college experience. “So we tried to build things to be cool.”
Murphy and Spiegal understood that visual content was the most engaging and interesting form and centralized their app around communicating with visuals. What made this app different from its Instagram and Twitter counterparts was the idea that all shared media would disappear within a day. Back in 2011, the duo worked with a third member to create the first prototype, “Picaboo.” However, after some legal disputes, Murphy and Spiegal continued on to the rebranding and rebuilding of the application into what we now know as “Snapchat.”
Since the rebranding, Snapchat has been gaining 100 million users a month. In late 2013, Facebook tried to buyout the company with a $3 billion offer. Luckily, Spiegal turned that offer down because the app is currently valued at $10 billion. As a result, Murphy’s and Spiegal’s net worth is valued at $1.5 billion, and at the prime age of 26 and 24.
Feature image courtesy of speakerpedia.com.
