Thank you for calling me, Mr Hamburger. I don't get that a whole lot. So I think how did I get where I am today? I think it was a long journey. I studied English at the University of Michigan because I didn't really know what else to study. I had always loved writing telling stories, and it just seemed like a natural fit for what I could do until I figured out what I wanted to do. And during that time, I was interning, at Merrill Lynch, assisting a financial advisor and, you know, actually really was interested in, like, markets stocks investing during that time. But it didn't feel like it was my calling or my passion, but I didn't really know what else to do. And it seemed like it would be a good job that would help me, you know, have a secure, source of income and, you know, a pretty predictable career path. And then when I was at Michigan, I discovered this program called the New England Literature Projects, and a lot of English majors had going in the past. And essentially, it's a program where you go to Maine, and live in log cabins for seven weeks like a Children's summer camp that you just take over 40 kids, 13 teachers. So the teacher to student ratio was pretty unbelievable. And, during that time, you know, we had no electricity, no phones, no computers, just like, you know, the only I think the only electricity we had was for, like, lighting in the main mess hall. And you just really learned to, like, live off the land. And every day we would do classes read, you know, the transcendentalist writers like the row and Emerson. And really a lot of that writing is about listening to yourself than listening to your environment, trusting yourself, being self-reliant. And I think we were judged not on any papers but on our journals and our self-discovery, which really, like, changed my entire life. And I got back from that. And I'm like, I'm not gonna be a financial advisor. You know I'm lucky enough the way that I was raised. I have a lot of opportunities. I feel very, very privileged and lucky to have those opportunities to take risks, which not everybody has. And, I got back and I was like, I like technology more than anything. I've been reading Tech blog's my whole life like Engadget, Gizmodo, and even the Wall Street Journal's Tech journalist. And, I was like, I'm just gonna start a tech blogger Michigan. And so I think probably the biggest experience that's shaped my career path, is the experience of reaching out to people and asking them questions not just for help, but asking them questions. And you never know who you're gonna meet. And what I did was I emailed Ah, the technology editor of The Wall Street Journal. And I was like, How did how did you do this? And I wrote him a really sincere email about what I appreciated about his work, which I think is always important when you cold email someone and keeping it short, not asking for anything right off the bat. And he responded in immediately, and, you know, he got on the phone with me a week later. I was so nervous. Nicole actually didn't go that well. I think my questions were a little too I don't know, to formulated they were. He was like, are you doing this for the school paper? Like, what is this? And I think that was my first clue that maybe I could be a reporter. I've always loved asking questions, and I've always been curious. And so I took some of his advice and just started writing. I reached out to a women's leadership magazine. Michigan called lead, and I was like, You know, maybe I can help you expand your male audience and they let me start writing tech stuff and really today you know, a lot of it is just showing your work. And I applied to business Insider into Gizmodo and in New York for tech writing, and all I needed was just to show them my work. And I'm like, Look, I can do what you're doing every day and I got an internship and really, my journey within reporting. I was a business insider for a year. Then, as I was saying on theme, I reached out to the founder of the Verge, who was one of my idols on. I was at the Verge launch party and I approached him personally, and I was like, I love everything you're doing. Let me know if I can be a part of it. And he ended up reaching out to me a month later and I worked on the verge for a few years and long story short. That's how I got to meet Evan, the CEO Snapchat who, you know, another big theme for me is just keep gravitating towards the people who seemed the smartest and the nicest and the most passionate and thoughtful. And Evan, it was the most thoughtful founder I'd ever interviewed. I'm like, I want to work with this guy. And I eventually told him I was thinking of getting out of reporting and he invited me to join, so I think that's kind of the story of how I got to Snapchat. And, you know, here I've worn a lot of hats from copyrighting to more recently running the Strategy team, which is trying to ironically similar to reporting, you know, here old story, find the most interesting part and then share it with your audience in a really compelling way. And so a lot of it still comes back to writing. But more importantly, the ideas at the center of it all. So start with the long-winded answer. It's taken a lot of twists and turns, but I think you know, the way that I've been able to make it this far, I think, is just by continuing to talk to as many people as I can and just keep gravitating towards the people on and things I like the most, which I know. Not everybody has the ability to do given the types of jobs you have a choice to take. But I think I've been really lucky in that regard.

Yeah. I think my responsibilities. I think the simplest way to summarize it is that you know, Snapchat has 1,000,001 products coming out. You know, it's like we have a camera that has augmented reality. We have a messaging app on one side. We have a news app on the other side. We have a maps app. You can see where your friends and family are hanging out. And, we always have a lot of products launching all the time, like literally one or two every week. And so typically somebody will come to me and say, Hey, we'd like to promote the launch of, Let's say, a new product that allows you to take snaps with your friends. But in three-D, and I say okay, like while we could just make a video of someone using the product. But how are they going to use it? What's gonna make our audience want to use it the most? And I think my instinct, you know, given my experience in reporting and just being a tech consumer myself, is that three-d isn't very cool, you know, the last thing people saw in three-D that they really enjoyed was probably Avatar and 3D TVs never took off, 3-D phones never took off. Nobody wants to sit on the couch with their friends with glasses on. And I think the answer to me was that if we want to promote this, what we should focus on, it's not 3-D but in how it makes you feel just a little closer to your friend. Given that, that's one of the goals of Snapchat, just like this video chat right now, you know, is to make you feel like you're in the same room with someone, and 3-D can add just a little bit more to that. And so the strategy I wrote was essentially a story saying why we should use this strategy, including what I just said about 3Ds history and say, it should be about making feelings bigger, not a flower more beautiful in 3D. That isn't something that you'd want to use it for every day. And typically I'll have a couple of those types of requests per week, and it's fun for me because I love learning. I get to, look at what others are doing and landscape. What's Instagram doing? What's Apple doing? What's Google doing? Look at our audience and what they like. Some, for example. Our audience doesn't like to look beautiful all the time. They just want to be themselves like like you were talking about that you had seen personally. You know, people just wanna have fun. And 3D for fun is a lot more of a high-frequency use case than 3D for beauty photography. And so it's trying to come up with right positioning, as they say, for each of these new products that come out And, this as far as my workload in ours. Typically, I'm here from 9 to 6 or seven. Were lucky enough in Snap to have free meals cafeteria. So I often take advantage of that. Which starts it, 6 30 So typically I'll stay Until then at least, and, have done a little bit of work travel in the past. You know, I think if you're a storyteller, sometimes you get called upon to tell the story of various audiences or hear the stories of others and translated into insights. So I think this past year, you know, I briefed some reporters on what Snapchat is all about in Europe. That was a week or two, and more recently I've done some focus groups which are essentially just talking to users about what they think in Chicago in L. A. Over the last, a few weeks. Not much working from home, I think, at this company, at least collaboration in person, getting your hands dirty is really important. And I think the jobs, at least on the marketing team are things that are a lot harder to do when you're isolated. So I almost never worked from home unless I really, really, really need to get a ton of work done ironically. Because you know the office can be so distracting.

Yeah, this is a good question because I think being adept at modern tools is absolutely crucial because if you can't actually express your ideas in a deck, in a word document a story, as a video as, as a meme, even I think being able to express yourself visually is increasingly important. And so the tools that I use mostly is the Google suite. So I spend most of my time telling stories, in Google slides, which is nowhere near as good as KeyNote, but from Apple. But, it is collaborative. Everybody could be in it at the same time and making changes, leaving comments on. And I think, you know, the future of work is very much about more seamless collaboration. So, for example, I sent a deck I worked on to the CMO, and he's able to comment on specific words or slides in my deck, which you can't really do on keynote. And so he doesn't have to send me a whole email of like, on slide six on slide five on slide 10 and I think you know the age of emailing attachments over email. For you know, pdf, sir, word documents or whatever I think is that age is coming to an end because you don't know if what you have is most up to date and you can't collaborate in real-time and see what the most recent changes are. So, for example, I could see that the CMO had opened the document on That's like an important context. You know, that you have a lot of in-person that hadn't really been reproduced online before. So Google slides, Gmail, Google calendar, Google docs, which is like the worried equivalent. I also, you know, I still have a little bit of experience, that photoshop and even Google slides. You know, it doesn't work that well with videos, which is kind of interesting because they own YouTube. But, the easier way to actually show videos. If you don't need the audio, let's say I want to show how a new feature works on Snapchat. I'll actually do a screen recording in quick time, which is something a lot of people don't know. You could do! And then I'll import that screen recording into an app I use called Gift Brewery, and I'll make a GIF, you know, which is like a little looping video that's very lightweight, and I'll just insert it right. It's the slide. And so I think the main theme here is tools that are flexible, collaborative, always up to date automatically. And I think that means a lot of this stuff is in the Web browser. It's ironic, given that so much of what we do on our phones is in the Snaps. But I think you know another tool I use for work. A lot of Snapchat, it opens right to the camera. So you open it, you take a picture, and then you can circle something like you take a picture of a whiteboard and you'll circle something and add a caption being like, I really like this. Ah, it's really a way to be able to take what you see and send it with your thoughts as quickly as possible to somebody else, which still isn't always that easy on computers. You know, a lot of people don't know the keyboard shortcut for even taking a screenshot so and then, you know you have to open it. You have to use apple editing tools to edit it with your mouse instead of your finger. And, I think a lot of it is just finding the right ways to express yourself visually so people can understand exactly what you mean.