I was thinking about how technology should work and found Evan Spiegel's perspective on it quite interesting. The guy is co-founder and CEO of Snapchat, and when you hear his story, you realize he thought differently from the beginning.

The thing is, Evan Spiegel studied product design at Stanford in 2011 and had this idea with Bobby Murphy to create an app focused on photos and videos that disappear. It seems simple now, but at the time everyone stored everything forever on social media. He rejected a $3 billion offer from Facebook in 2013 — yes, he really rejected it — and that validated when Snapchat went public in 2017 with a valuation of $24 billion.

But what really caught my attention is the philosophy behind it. Evan Spiegel wasn’t just thinking about making a cool app. He was reflecting on how computers have historically isolated us. You stop and think: computers have kept us apart, locked us in our homes in individual experiences. That’s kind of heavy when you put it that way.

That’s why Snapchat was designed differently. It wasn’t to replace real connections, it was to enhance them. The idea was to anchor the experience in what’s right in front of you now, in the present moment. Very different from other networks that focus on documenting everything forever.

Evan Spiegel also touches on something many people ignore: smartphones create dependency. He saw people in line waiting to pick up their kids, all looking at their phones. That bothered him because technology should connect people, not disconnect them from what’s around them.

The point about unintended consequences is also very important. Spiegel explains that things that seem obvious today have historical reasons. For example, everything being saved forever on social media wasn’t malicious — it was because hard drives were expensive to overwrite. But it created a culture of permanence that changed how people express themselves.

And then comes the change in communication styles. More selfies are taken on Snapchat than on all iPhones combined. That’s not just a random number; it shows that people are using images to communicate genuinely, not just to document memories. People tell stories in chronological order, without those likes and comments that turn social media into a popularity contest.

What Evan Spiegel advocates is that technology should enhance humanity, not replace it. Some think technology is meant to eliminate people, but he sees it differently. Personal technology, well integrated into daily life, can help people connect better.

A lesson he learned in practice: building a perfect product without thinking about distribution is a recipe for failure. They spent time building flawless software but didn’t think enough about how people would use it. That changes everything.

In the end, Evan Spiegel’s perspective is that technology should be anchored in how we really live, not how we should live according to algorithms. It’s a way of thinking that makes sense when you see how things have evolved.