The Real Evan Almighty

I like to focus on people who deeply interest me and ignite my own imagination.  Here I find a co-founder of a major startup called Evan Spiegel, who is the genius who is contributing to this idea called Snapchat and the formation of a company preparing for IPO a.k.a. Snap Inc.

The movie version of Evan Almighty was a follow on from Bruce Almighty starring Jim Carrey, where Steve Carroll plays out a Noah's Ark tale   Of course I can do a spoiler for the movie but I would like to focus on the REAL EVAN ALMIGHTY - Evan Spiegel.

Evan was apologetic about his college emails but there is no way the Board of Snap Inc. is going to get rid of Evan Spiegel because it might affect the Snap brand and turn off corporate sponsors - instead it would be shame on them to make it an issue when this young lad is the one whose vision has got them to the promised land of IPO.

The first thing that people who don't know what Snapchat is - Spiegel provides a 3 min view :

Even in this Code Conference he was described as a "rock star" - and that does not change who Spiegel is, he keeps his feet on the ground and focused on what works.  He also showed me visionary kahuna's in how he dealt with Mark Zuckerberg's bid to buy Snapchat.  The fact that Evan Spiegel did not accept a $3 Billion dollar bid - which for most is a "take the money and run" mentality.  He did not run, and he isn't a phony or what his college emails portray him to be, he is making Snapchat's luck with a growth mindset and haters will always hate so it is of no relevance to me how offensive his private life was at college. 

Instead having reached this point in the first quarter of 2017, it is now laughable that Zuckerberg even offered $3 Billion, when Evan Spiegel is already focused on a market capitalization of 7x of that.  This at a time when Snapchat is making a half-billion loss [correction: thank you to Dean Owen for that correction and Telegraph link is also included below ], which is having traditional investors who engage value investing to cite that Snap is a market capitalization of absolutely nothing.  

How can Snapchat lose $515 million and be worth $25 billion? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/02/03/snap-ipo-can-snapchat-lose-515-million-worth-25-billion/

This reminds me of the attacks on a guy called Jeff Bezos who deliberately took losses for Amazon because he saw the beast Amazon was, but at the time not appearing on the bottom line.  Anyone who is not aware of just how powerful Amazon is today has severely underestimated the mind of Jeff Bezos.

People also forget that when Mark Zuckerberg started out, the app he was focused on was Hot or Not - the initial Facebook before it became Facebook was commenting on looks.  So Facebook had a different birthright than Snapchat - because Spiegel's focus was the meaning of camera.  This mentality was some time ago echoed by Guy Kawasaki long before Snap was born or conceived :