Snap CEO says breaking into ‘startup squads,’ Snapchat+ generating $700M in ARR

In an annual company letter, Snap (SNAP) CEO Evan Spiegel announced the company is restructuring around small “startup squads” of 10 to 15 people to better compete against larger competitors. ” Five to seven teams-squads of 10 to 15 people-will run like startups inside Snap, with single-threaded leaders accountable for outcomes. Weekly demo days, 90-day mission cycles, and a culture of fast failure will keep us moving. Our platform teams will be enablers, handing squads the toolkits and guardrails to ship safely at speed,” Spiegel said, adding that “We’ve already seen what this looks like. Snapchat+ started as a small, cross-functional squad that moved with urgency and launched fast. In under three years, it scaled from zero to ~15 million paying subscribers and nearly $700M in ARR, now driving more than half of our incremental revenue growth.” Meanwhile, Spiegel said that Specs are “an enormous business opportunity. One pair of Specs can substitute for many screens. Our operating system, personalized with context and memory, compounds in value over time. A marketplace of digital goods, from spatial Lenses to virtual tools, has near-zero marginal cost and global reach. Specs are how we move beyond the limits of smartphones, beyond red-ocean competition, and into a once-in-a-generation transformation towards human-centered computing.”