I recently started to read this book and wanted to share this part about the story of Snapchat founder:

I am a young, white, educated male … I got really, really lucky. And life isn’t fair.’

Those are the words of Evan Spiegel, the billionaire co-founder of photo-messaging app Snapchat. In our research into startup success, we found his story particularly interesting. According to Forbes, Spiegel was the world’s youngest self-made billionaire (before Kylie Jenner, that is – more on her later). Born in 1990, he reached $1,000,000,000 aged just 24.

‘I got really, really lucky. And life isn’t fair.’

This part of the quote really stood out to us. Was Evan implying that his success was simply luck? He’s led a privileged life, and he knows it. To give you an idea of how ‘lucky’ he was, let’s dive deeper into his background.

Evan Spiegel grew up in a multimillion-dollar household in Los Angeles, surrounded by countless fancy cars and ultra-exclusive country clubs, and taking luxury holidays all over the world at Four Seasons resorts.

His early years were spent at an expensive private school in LA, which curiously enough was also attended by Tinder co-founder Sean Rad, plus a host of Hollywood stars such as Kate Hudson, Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow. His parents also reportedly got him and his sisters elite private tutors at a cost of up to $250 an hour.

Evan’s parents were powerful lawyers, his father working on highprofile cases such as the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and actor Charlie Sheen’s infamous $100 million suit against Warner Brothers. His mother held the distinction of being Harvard Law’s youngest female graduate. When Evan finished high school, his father’s powerful connections and considerable clout as an alumnus and donor to Stanford University certainly didn’t hurt his son’s prospects of getting into the ultra-competitive and prestigious Silicon Valley dream school. Evan’s family connections also got him introduced to Peter Wendell, a big-time venture capitalist (VC) and one of Forbes’s 100 top venture investors in the United States, with investments in hundreds of successful startups and numerous IPOs.

Not a bad connection to have.

Through Wendell, Evan also met titans like Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, and Scott Cook, founder of financial software giant Intuit.

Eric Schmidt later said this about Evan: ‘He has superb manners, which he says he got from his mother. He credits his father’s long legal calls, which he overheard, as giving him perspective on business and structure as a very young man.’

Scott Cook decided to mentor Evan, gifting him with a wealth of business wisdom as he took his first steps into the tech startup world. Later, Cook put his money where his mentorship was and contributed to Snapchat’s first round of funding.

Although he started young, Evan had already received over a century’s worth of combined wisdom and business lessons by the time Snapchat began to grow. While many twenty-somethings might have been nervous in big meetings with powerful investors, Evan Spiegel famously stared down one VC who was unwilling to adjust his firm’s standard investing terms, telling him: ‘If you want standard terms, invest in a standard company.’ That VC firm went on to invest in Snapchat’s third financing round in 2013.

This is what we’re looking at when we talk about unfair advantages. These factors all stacked one on top of the other and contributed in powerful ways to Evan’s success with Snapchat and to him becoming Forbes’s youngest self-made billionaire. This connection to wealth, influence and power directly impacted his success. He was able to climb the ladder at such a young age because he had been largely set up to do so. In fact, he didn’t climb the ladder, he went up in a rocket ship.

That’s not to say we’re attributing all of Snapchat’s success to Evan’s privileged upbringing. Not at all. Plenty of privileged kids amount to absolutely nothing. As with all success stories, there are many factors that play a role. For example, Evan was very smart, and Snapchat had a brilliant insight at its core – that people want to communicate with photos that would ‘self-destruct’, i.e. disappear after a few seconds. This is something that none of the established social media giants Facebook, Twitter and Instagram had even thought of. Evan not only had access to the funding, the contacts and the mentors, he executed brilliantly on a very timely product. He was in the right place, at the right time, with the right idea. He, his cofounders and his employees worked really hard and really smart to make it a success.

The refreshing thing about Evan? He’s upfront in acknowledging how many breaks he’s enjoyed along the way. Contrary to the ‘buckle down’, ‘burn the midnight oil’ and ‘hustle your ass off’ advice thrown around all too often in the tech world, Evan says this:

‘It’s not about working harder. It’s about working the system.’

‘Working the system’ has unethical connotations, like ‘gaming the system’ or even ‘cheating the system’. We don’t mean it in that way; we simply mean that it’s not about working harder, it’s about working smarter to succeed.

Later in the book the author says:

In the case of Evan Spiegel, for example, we also need to think about the level of society he was born into, the world-class private education he received, the confidence instilled in him by his environment, the social graces he picked up from his accomplished parents, the connections his father gave him, and all the amazing self-made billionaire mentors he just happened to gain along the way. We haven’t even mentioned the unknown impact of genetics on intelligence, creativity, problem-solving and people skills that Evan inherited from his incredibly successful parents. Also, what role did good fortune play in his success? Is it reasonable to suggest he may have received the benefit of a touch of luck along the way? These all played a role in making Evan not only successful, but phenomenally successful.