From Yahoo!, where you can read plenty more on the story:
Two years ago, Evan Spiegel was just another beer-soaked frat boy obsessing over sex and dot.com riches. This week, the 23-year-old co-founder of Snapchat was offered big — big — money for the tiny smartphone app company he created.
Instead of dancing into the sunset, Spiegel did the unthinkable, turning down a $3 billion offer from Facebook (FB) and then a $4 billion bid from Google (GOOG). A college dropout running a company with almost no assets, no revenue and a mountain of legal problems, Spiegel is betting Snapchat can transcend the stigma of the “next big thing” and become an industry unto its own.
There’s no going back now. History will paint Evan Spiegel as either one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs ever, or a delusional fool.
With him there is no in between. The irony of the weird tale unfolding around this boyishly handsome child of privilege is that Snapchat is based on the idea of not leaving any history at all. Dreamed up as a way to send so-called “sext” messages that self destruct before falling into the wrong hands, Snapchat doesn’t actually posses the things that made Facebook and Google huge. Snapchat knows nothing about its users. Each of the millions of Snaps that will be sent this month will be erased from a third-party server within seconds of being received.
What Snapchat has is explosive growth with the teenagers that are already sick of Facebook. Snapchat is sexy and subversive. It’s cool. It’s everything Facebook isn’t. That may be precisely why Spiegel thinks Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google, or maybe even Twitter, will be coming back with even bigger offers soon.
