Evan Spiegel's Most Underrated Skill

Yesterday, Snap introduced a (fantastic) new feature called Snap Map. At first, people pointed fingers at its similarities to social location-sharing app, Zenly, until TechCrunch’s Josh Constine revealed that Evan acquired the company for $250M to $350M. PLOT TWIST! 😲

Zenly co-founder Antoine Martin laid out the company's mission in their Product Hunt launch last year:

“We’ve been on a mission to popularize constant location sharing for the past 5 years. Zenly is now the closest thing to a social network built on a map, with your friends and family.”

Unlike Snap’s acquisition of Vergence Labs (which turned into Spectacles), Zenly isn’t an obvious acquisition for the “camera company.” The deal, it appears, is just the latest in a series Snap Acquisitions that make up an essential part of the Snapchat core experience. More on that here.

Evan Spiegel, known for being one of the great product visionaries of our time, has an underrated skill: knowing when to acquire and when to build.

Snapchat's Core Acquisitions 💰

We asked 34 customers what Viktor does for them. Not one said chatbot.

They kept using words like colleague, coworker, team member. One CEO called it the glue holding their e-commerce business together, which is a lot, but also… you see why. It lives in Slack and plugs into 3,000+ tools, so instead of jumping between tabs, you just ask for the thing. Pull Stripe against HubSpot, check Sentry alerts, spin up a campaign brief, build a landing page, send a report upstairs. It all happens there.

It has already hit top 5 on Product Hunt with 130 comments, is SOC 2 certified, and your data does not train models.

One user said it was the first time AI felt like a real coworker, which is either exciting or slightly concerning depending on your week.