This past week has been one like no other for Snapshot CEO Evan Spiegel as irony rained down given the entrepreneur's innovative technology and the public humiliation he's been subject to since emails from his college fraternity days appeared out of the blue.
Snapshot, in case you didn't know, is a social media sharing tool that lets users take a quick picture, share it, and then supposedly erase it from the Internet to never been seen again. It's become a tech rage, especially with the pre-teen to young 20-year-old set who are the primary user base for such social sharing apps and tools.
Spiegel is the 23-year-old wunderkid who founded Snapshot, now reportedly worth $3 billion, during his days at Stanford. Apparently he was also very busy directing the social lives of his collegiate pals, organizing parties and helping them meet women and used email to congratulate his boys on everything from blacking out during parties to scoring with women.
Oh, and yes, his emails were full of literary descriptions of women, or as Spiegel wrote, "bitches," "sororisluts," bodies to "peed on," even the target of some new frat game apparently that involves "shooting lasers at fat chicks."
One can only surmise how proud Spiegel's parents must be of their son and the job they did in raising a young man.
Spiegel's learned the hard way, as job coaches and hiring managers have long warned, that what you write in email and what you post on the Internet, never goes away and can come back to haunt you.
In this case however, it's not a matter of someone finding something Spiegel posted online. In this particular case someone in his circle of fraternity pals decided to anonymously share Spiegel's emails with someone in the media by forwarding them to a journalist who obviously knew a hot story when it lands in their email box.
And the furor and media storm hit bigger and the hits keep coming. The leaked emails are spurring commentary all over the Internet. Here's what a NPR blog had to say:
"That the tech world continues to celebrate young men whose disposition toward women is, at best, sleazy, doesn't bode well for its well documented sexism problem."
As Time notes, while the emails apparently support some contentions that Spiegel is less than a stellar human being, the bigger interpretation of the email leaks raises a big question: "Are we all ready to be judged by our "private" conversations?" But then another Time post notes this: The "Spiegels et al are just the uglier edge of a broader, shrewder and much quieter culture of sexism in Silicon Valley."
So while the leaked emails obviously provide an insider's view to Spiegel as a wild partier and woman chaser, with a penchant for rallying college boy fun in a very "Animal House" way, they also reveal how understanding the Silicon Valley and the Internet industry are of such behavior -his actions are not embarrassing enough to force him to step down from Snapshot and haven't elicit many, if any, public comments from anyone of stature in the Valley, supportive or non-supportive.
The lesson Spiegel and all of us learned this week is that not everyone in your frat boy circle, especially the ones maybe you cut out of a lucrative tech company deal or whose girlfriends you may have slept with, are true friends and seem to have long memories and obviously very big banks of old emails sitting around.
One can hope that Spiegel moves ahead of his weak public apologies and puts some of his new money and fame toward something good, such as programs helping young girls learn about tech and STEM careers or social programs aimed at educating the misogynistic and the obvious young generation of males who missed those Ivy League courses about respecting women.
