All right, so Bobby Murphy isn’t the sole omnipotent creator of the crazily popular mobile app, SnapChat: he is one of three co-founders and the company’s CTO (Chief Technology Officer), along with Evan Spiegel and Reggie Brown. At age 28, Bobby Murphy has already made it onto the billionaire’s list with a net worth of $1.8 billion.
If you have a teenager in your life, you know that Facebook is basically just for old farts now. The teens have flocked to SnapChat, a mobile app that their parents (and grandparents) haven’t gotten the hang of (yet?). Just a few months ago, SnapChat announced having 10 million daily active users just in the UK. The app logs more than 10 billion video views per day. So it’s no wonder that investors have taken an interest in the company and its founders have become billionaires before the age of 30.
Interestingly, SnapChat started as a class project when the three founders were classmates at Stanford (what is it about amazing tech entrepreneurs coming out of Stanford?). It was originally just a project by Brown and Spiegel for a product design class. As a math and computer science major, Murphy was eventually brought onto the SnapChat project (then called “Picaboo”) to write the app’s source code. The app was launched for iOS in 2011, at a time when Spiegel was still living in his father’s house (typical millennial, amirite?) Later on, there was a legal dispute regarding Brown’s creative involvement in the project, and he ended up being screwed out of any potential earnings from the app that was allegedly his idea in the first place. Yikes.
Murphy lives in Venice, CA, where SnapChat is headquartered. He grew up in Berkeley after emigrating at a very young age with his mother from the Philippines.
