There's a lot to be said about a charismatic, detail-oriented, and conventionally attractive leader who maintains an air of celebrity, mystery, and untouchability about themselves. Spiegel projects the image of someone who's 'made it', which compares favorably with the sort of founder who displays those traits but hasn't yet executed, or the sort of person who executed but lacks that aspirational relatability.

To me, this didn't seem like a hit piece -- one person's hit is another's hype, and I think Snap understands the power of hype (-> excitement).

For a while now, their Android product has been atrocious, while iOS is thriving. For a platform that famously shunned Windows Mobile as uncool, is this intentional, or just a byproduct of their haphazard management and either lack of skill or dreadful luck?

I feel Facebook's relentless copying of Snapchat will cause them to pivot more and more into being a media-like company. In this article today, I learned they were already staffed in a way to enable such a transition.

However, this article is absent about how this company culture affects morale of the staff, and we are left to speculate.