Many executives have a hard time describing what their companies do. Especially in tech, where concepts are often novel or abstract.
Yahoo was once described by one of its executives as “a global series of Web experiences across a variety of devices that gives people what they want.” More recently, Twitter drew snickers when it pitched investors with a jargon-infested strategy statement that began: “Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products…”
So it’s refreshing when a tech executive uses plain language to describe what his or her company is making. And that’s exactly what Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel did yesterday (May 26) at the Code Conference in California.
Spiegel used Snapchat’s three-screen user interface to simply describe its three businesses:
- Camera
- Communication
- Content
Asked again later to describe what Snapchat was ultimately creating, Spiegel had a one-word answer: “Entertainment.”
There’s nuance baked into this, of course, and Spiegel went into some detail about how each of the three products has evolved and how the company is trying to build different, appropriate business models around them. (Video ads for editorial content, for example, but not private messaging.) But his clarity—and brevity—was impressive.