During an interview at Business Insider’s IGNITION conference in New York Nick Bell, Snapchat’s VP of Content, explains how Evan Spiegel sold him on Snapchat. The following is a transcript of the video.
Alyson Shontell: You know him better than anyone in this room. Evan Spiegel has been compared to Steve Jobs, Picasso…people wonder if he is the next great creative CEO. Do you think that he’s the next Steve Jobs or is it overblown?
Nick Bell: The reason I joined Snapchat initially was because of Evan. I was really happy at News Corp, I had been there for 6 years. I was having a great time. I met Evan, he sold me the vision for Snap, if you like, and don’t forget this is at a point when they just turned down pretty significant offers from Google and Facebook and all of my colleagues and friends and family were telling me I was an idiot to join the small startup in Venice.
And Evan sold me the vision to Snap which was a 5,10,15 year vision and talked about the power of the camera, etc, and I was kind of blown away. And I feel very fortunate to be able to work with him on a daily basis and the one thing I will say is about Evan is not only is he able to have a long-term vision and think about the world and it in a very different way but he’s also amazing at the actual granular design aspect of that and that’s something is fairly rare and I just feel very fortunate to be a part of that team and a part of the journey.
