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Summary
Summary
'A fast-paced, highly readable history of one of the defining companies of our time. If you're interested in Snapchat, or just plain mystified by it, you must read this book' -- Brad Stone
Would you turn down three billion dollars from Mark Zuckerberg?
When he was just twenty-three years old, Evan Spiegel, the brash CEO of the social network Snapchat, stunned the world when he and his co-founders walked away from a three-billion-dollar offer from Facebook- how could an app teenagers use to text dirty photos dream of a higher valuation? Was this hubris, or genius?
In How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars , Billy Gallagher takes us inside the rise of one of Silicon Valley's hottest start-ups. Snapchat began as a late-night dorm room revelation before Spiegel went on to make a name for himself as a visionary CEO worth billions, linked to celebrities like Taylor Swift and his fiancee, Miranda Kerr.
A fellow Stanford undergrad and fraternity brother of the company's founding trio, Billy Gallagher has covered Snapchat from the start. His inside account offers an entertaining trip through the excess and drama of the hazy early days with a professional insight into the challenges Snapchat faces as it transitions from a playful app to one of the tech industry's preeminent public companies. In the tradition of great business narratives, How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars offers the definitive account of a company whose goal is no less than to remake the future of entertainment.
Author Notes
BILLY GALLAGHER is an MBA candidate at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. He has worked in venture capital and as a writer at TechCrunch , which he joined as a Stanford sophomore, writing a profile of a popular startup on campus- Snapchat. Billy wrote over a dozen exclusive pieces on Snapchat. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times and Playboy .
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Snapchat's long march toward its IPO, which made founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy worth more than $6 billion and $5 billion, respectively, makes for a riveting story in journalist Gallagher's hands. He fluently relates the app's development, its early rise in popularity, the significance of corporations such as Taco Bell jumping on the bandwagon, and, perhaps most importantly, Spiegel and Murphy's reluctance to sell the company to Facebook, no matter the price. Gallagher has followed Snapchat since early on and was handpicked to tell the story by Spiegel, a fellow Stanford alum, because he "understood the product" better than many other journalists. As Gallagher reminds readers, the app's full potential was missed by the many reporters who initially sensationalized it as a platform for sexting. Gallagher also shows a keen understanding of and familiarity with Spiegel ("Evan hates... open-floor plans"), even if readers may not agree that the wildly successful entrepreneur is as brilliant as the author portrays him. Certainly, few will argue with Gallagher's declaration that the company "made a distinctive impact" and "marked a rebellion against the social network status quo" of the early 2010s. This is a do-not-miss book for avid followers of the tech world and its financial dealings. Agent: Amelia Atlas, ICM. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The photo-sharing app Snapchat is notorious for being understandable only to high-schoolers and college-age users, a reputation founder and CEO Evan Spiegel has done nothing to dispel. While a frat boy at Stanford, Spiegel's classmate Reggie Brown was bemoaning some unfortunate party pictures that ended up online. He, Spiegel, and programmer Bobby Murphy developed Snapchat as the anti-Facebook not a social network but a mechanism for sharing with friends without the pressure of accumulating likes and shares. Within two years, Snapchat was worth $800 million; that same year, Spiegel, Brown, and Murphy turned down a multibillion-dollar deal from Facebook. Arrogant, driven, and not even 30 years old, Spiegel is a benevolent tech dictator in the mode of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. In the grand tradition of Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires (2009), Gallagher spends as much time on the excesses, lawsuits, and high employee turnover at Snapchat as he does on the technology. Which is just as well, since we're probably all too old to get it. An engaging look into a fascinating subculture of millions.--Maguire, Susan Copyright 2018 Booklist