Snapchat Doesn’t Think It Needs an Adult Like Facebook Did

A billboard displays the Snapchat logo above Times Square in New York, on March 12, 2015. Lucas Jackson/Reuters/Corbis

Last week, Emily White left her role as chief operating officer of Snapchat. The unexpected departure came over a year after the high-profile executive was hired away from Facebook, where she had most recently been trying to figure out how to blend ads into users’ Instagram photo streams. At the time, White was expected to be the resident grownup at Snapchat, ready to aid the ephemeral messaging service’s youthful founder, Evan Spiegel, in the same way that Sheryl Sandberg helped Mark Zuckerberg turn Facebook into a $218 billion business.

As it turns out, that was a faulty comparison. For one, Facebook and Snapchat were not at the same stage of growth when their COOs joined. Though both social media services were developing at warp speed, they had a lot less in common culturally than you might imagine. That difference begins at the top: Spiegel and Zuckerberg have very different leadership styles.

Spiegel realized he wanted to take a more active role in making the big decisions about how Snapchat would structure the company and make money.

Zuckerberg hired Sandberg in 2008, four years after he launched the company. At that point, the company’s stock was trading on the private market at a price that valued the company at $2 to $4 billion. Most of Facebook’s 550 employees were crammed tightly into a series of office buildings in downtown Palo Alto. The number of visitors to the site had jumped 300 percent in the previous year, but there was no clear business model, nor was there the promise one would emerge. The company had already tried to launch an ad targeting system called Beacon, but users complained that it violated their privacy. Zuckerberg apologized to users and eventually shut Beacon down. At the same time, Facebook relaunched another ad service, but Zuckerberg knew early on that he wanted someone else to lead the business so he could focus his energy on product development.

Meanwhile, several senior executives had already joined and left Facebook. Most notably, Owen Van Natta—a seasoned exec at Amazon——had been hired on as COO in 2005, and after serving as both a chief revenue officer and a vice president of operations, left a month before Sandberg arrived.

By that point, Zuckerberg knew the traits he most needed from his COO. Before hiring Sandberg, Zuckerberg spent hours with her—in a 2008 story, she estimated well more than 100—discussing the role she could play. She was tasked with adding more corporate structure and figuring out new advertising models. Zuckerberg was content to leave the business to Sandberg.

Not Another Zuckerberg

Like Zuckerberg, Spiegel was 23 years old when he hired a COO. But that’s where the similarities stop. Spiegel was helming a much younger and even faster-growing company. Users had sent their first snaps just two years earlier. During the eight months before White joined, the number of photos users were sharing—the only metric Snapchat makes available—jumped 667 percent. The company had fewer than 50 employees, who had just moved from a bungalow on the beach in Venice Beach, California to nearby offices. And Spiegel had just turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook.

After a comparatively brief series of interviews, Spiegel hired White to take on large areas of management, including business operations, sales, and human resources. White was instrumental in helping the company’s initial ad products come to market. But during that time, Spiegel realized he wanted to take a more active role in making the big decisions about how Snapchat would structure the company and make money. This left White, who reportedly aspired to a larger leadership role or even a CEO position, little room to make her own mark at the company.

Unlike Facebook, Snapchat was thinking earlier on about how to woo advertisers and create a business, and it was introducing its product to advertisers who were primed to embrace social media opportunities. (Facebook had broken them in years earlier.) In October 2013, two months before White was hired, the company launched its Stories feature, which lets users make a string of photos and videos available to view during a 24-hour window. Psyched that the content didn’t disappear immediately, advertisers quickly began experimenting with it. A year later, Snapchat featured a 20-second movie trailer for the Universal Pictures horror film Ouija, its first paid advertising.

While Facebook’s initial attempt to accommodate advertising, Beacon, was met with skepticism and ultimately a class-action lawsuit, Snapchat received glowing write-ups in Ad Age. With demand high, the company has been able to charge some of the highest ad rates on the web. This has no doubt empowered Spiegel to feel confident in steering the company’s strategy.

And so, while Sandberg was able to make a name for herself at Facebook, that option was not open to White in the same way. And while Zuckerberg, by the time he’d hired his trusted deputy, had fumbled through enough mistakes to season him as chief executive, Spiegel likely has a few more to go before he can claim the same mantle of maturity.