Oh Snap! 👻

Boomers and even older Millennials won’t be the early adopters of a transformative new platform. Just as my Pop Pop wasn’t among the first people to adopt the internet, and my mom wasn’t one of the first people on social media, I won’t be one of the first people in mirrorworld. Snapchat owns the people who will be: young Americans.

Before watching the Summit, I thought of Snap as a social media company, a competitor to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and the rest. It’s not though. Snap isn’t just building a camera-first messaging app; it’s building the platform of the future. It’s building mirrorworld.

Snap has a big, engaged base of users who are the right age to pioneer a new technology platform. It’s in the sweet spot - it has been around long enough to have a large user base, which is necessary to create enough adoption for a new platform, while its users are young enough (and geographically dense enough) to adopt a new spatial platform.

Mirrorworld means being able to reproduce that Travis Scott Fortnite concert in a park instead of our basement, with real people, whenever we want, or looking at a restaurant from the street and being able to see the menu and pictures of the dishes. It means having a full suite of digital tools available to enhance our physical experience.