In 2018, my brother and I sat in a product review at Snap’s Santa Monica offices staring at a chart we’d grown too familiar with. Our daily active users had stalled. Instagram (which had launched a near-identical version of our core Stories feature two years earlier) was accelerating. Snap had built a genuinely better product. It had a loyal, passionate user base. It had once famously turned down $3 billion from Facebook when most people would have taken the money and left. None of it was enough.
Meta controlled the layer beneath Snap: the social graph, the feed, the audience. Once you own that layer, everything built on top bends toward you.
We’ve spent more than two decades in tech. We’ve learned to recognize when a pattern repeats.
