Who Is Evan Spiegel.

Evan Spiegel is the co-founder of Snap Inc. and has been its chief executive, and a member of its board, since May 2012.

For anyone running Snapchat for a brand, his public letters are the most useful reading there is on where the app is heading, because for more than a decade he has made the same argument in different words: the camera, not the feed.

That argument explains why Snapchat pays creators, why it is shipping glasses, and which parts of the app a brand can plan around.

The role, in Snap’s own words

Snap’s newsroom and its investor relations site describe him identically: co-founder, chief executive officer and board member since May 2012. Both note a Stanford engineering degree in product design and a former seat on the board of KKR & Co. Inc.

That is the whole of the official biography, and it is all a social team needs. What matters is what he has chosen to build, and he has been unusually explicit about it in writing.

In September 2025 and again in September 2026 he sent a note to Snap’s staff on the company’s anniversary and published it on the newsroom. Those two notes, alongside Snap’s annual reports, are the record we draw on here. He also writes beyond Snap: in February the newsroom carried his Financial Times op-ed, published under the headline “Australia’s social media ban is a high-stakes experiment”.

The camera, not the feed

For years Snap’s annual reports to the US Securities and Exchange Commission opened with the same two sentences: “Snap Inc. is a camera company. We believe that reinventing the camera represents our greatest opportunity to improve the way that people live and communicate.” The wording appears in the filing for 2017 and again in the filing for 2021.

The September 2026 letter puts the same idea in product terms: “We open to the camera instead of a feed, focus on friends instead of followers, and bring people together through private communication.”

It is also specific about what drives the business: “Messaging is the strongest predictor of next-day retention and our primary focus for growing our community.”

That is the sentence brands should pin above the desk. On Snapchat, content that gets sent to a friend is doing the job the app was built for. Content made only to be scrolled past is working against it.

Spotlight: a feed on Snapchat’s terms

Snap launched Spotlight on 23 November 2020, describing it as a way “to shine a light on the most entertaining Snaps created by the Snapchat community”. At launch it promised creators a share of more than $1 million distributed every day.

Spotlight is Snapchat’s answer to the short-form feed, and the 2026 letter is candid about where it stands. One stated priority is “continuing to grow Spotlight and closing the gaps in monetisation rate between Spotlight and Stories.” Read plainly, Spotlight draws attention but does not yet earn the way Stories do.

The 2025 letter said Snap was “making significant investments to improve Spotlight”. A product named as a priority in consecutive annual letters is about the strongest signal a chief executive gives short of a launch. We have looked at what that has meant for payouts in how Spotlight reshapes creator monetisation.

Paying creators

The daily Spotlight fund was the start. In December 2024 Snap announced “a new, unified Monetisation Programme”, placing ads within creators’ Stories and longer Spotlight videos, with Spotlight videos over a minute eligible from 1 February 2025.

The bar is high. Creators need at least 50,000 followers, at least 25 posts a month to Saved Stories or Spotlight, posts on at least 10 of the last 28 days, and one of 10 million Snap views, 1 million Spotlight views or 12,000 hours of view time in that window.

The 2026 letter adds that more than 300,000 creators are now eligible to work with brands on Snapchat.

Why would a friends-first app pay creators at all? Our reading is that creators fill the space between conversations. The 2025 letter frames it as connecting creators with a broader audience to make Snapchat “feel more relevant, relatable, and rewarding”. Paying them is how a camera company keeps a steady supply of things worth sending. That logic is the core of how we approach Snapchat for publishers: publish what people forward, at a cadence the programme rewards.

SPECS: the longest bet

His longest-running bet is hardware. In the 2026 letter he calls it “a big deal that we are finally launching SPECS this year after twelve years of consistent focus and development”, and writes: “It’s clear that the future of personal computing is in a pair of glasses that understands you, and the world around you.”

In January Snap set up Specs Inc. as a wholly-owned subsidiary, saying the structure “provides greater operational focus and alignment”. In September it opened pre-orders at $2,195 with a $200 refundable deposit. Snap said shipping was “expected to begin later this fall in the United States, United Kingdom, and France”.

So the honest state is pre-orders open, shipping announced for later in the autumn, three markets named. Nobody outside Snap yet knows how many people will wear them.

For brands, SPECS is not a channel today. It is the clearest evidence of how he thinks: the camera bet, taken off the phone. If it lands, teams that already think in camera-first creative will adapt fastest. If it does not, nothing a brand does on Snapchat this year depends on it.

The business that pays for it

The 2026 letter gives the scale of the business behind all of this. “In Q2, 971 million people used Snapchat monthly and 493 million people used it every day.” It adds that small and medium customers “now represent more than 30% of our advertising revenue”. On the bottom line it says: “Analysts estimate that we will be full year GAAP net income profitable in 2027 for the first time.”

The 2025 letter pointed to a second engine, direct revenue, with “more than 15 million subscribers and more than $700 million in ARR”.

None of that is a reason for a brand to buy media, and we would not advise it. It is a reason to treat Snapchat as a business with the audience and the intent to keep investing in the organic surfaces it names.

What his priorities suggest about the next five years

This is our reading of his stated priorities, not a forecast Snap has made.

• The camera and private messaging are the most durable parts. The camera opened the annual reports we read, and the 2026 letter calls messaging the primary focus for growth.
• Spotlight and creator pay will persist, but the rules will move. A monetisation gap he has named publicly is a gap he intends to close, and thresholds and payout terms change when that happens.
• SPECS is a real bet with an unknown outcome. Worth watching closely, not worth planning a calendar around.
• Anything else on the app sits further from the centre of his argument, and that is where we would expect the most change.

How we would run Snapchat with this in mind

Taken together, the letters point to a particular operating rhythm. In practice that means:

1. Judge creative by whether people would send it, not only by views.
2. Treat Spotlight as discovery with changing pay rules, and review its performance monthly rather than assuming last quarter’s terms still hold.
3. Build cadence into the system. Snap’s own eligibility rules count posting days, which tells you consistency is what the platform measures.
4. Work with creators organically, in their own voice, rather than through sponsored placements.
5. Keep an eye on SPECS without moving budget or headcount towards it until it ships at scale.

For brands thinking about creator-led growth on the platform, the route into the programme is set out in how to become a Snap Star.

Next step

If your team is posting to Snapchat regularly but still feels stuck, NBK can help find the constraint in the system, starting with what your audience actually sends.