A young Filipino-American, Robert “Bobby” Murphy, 26, is on Forbes list of world billionaires for 2015.
Co-founder of the popular social media app Snapchat with his fraternity brother Evan Spiegel, both Stanford students, Murphy has a net worth of $1.5 billion—making him the second youngest dollar billionaire in the club, Forbes reported. He has an estimated stake of at least 15 percent in the business.
The son of government employees, Murphy grew up in Berkeley, Calif., and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Science at Stanford. His mother emigrated from the Philippines.
Murphy was two years older than Spiegel when they met at the Kappa Sigma fraternity house at Stanford in 2010. Both computer science techies, Murphy and Spiegel worked on a number of unsuccessful web projects, such as a re-design of a social network inspired by Google Circles, and a new software for incoming freshmen. Their character differences meshed well—Murphy’s placid, calm demeanor with Spiegel’s brasher personality—and worked when together.
In 2011, the two collaborated with a third fraternity brother, Reggie Brown, to launch an app for iOS and Android, originally called “Picaboo.” The app was initially a project for one of Spiegel’s classes at the university, but got little traction.
Picaboo was later rebranded as Snapchat—the free mobile social media app that can send contacts a photo message (or collection of photo messages, collectively known as a “Story”) that disappears in 10 seconds or less.
Snapchat first started to take off in late 2011, and now boasts 100 million users per month. Investors have valued the app at $10 billion.
Murphy now serves as Snapchat’s chief technology officer, developing prototype and infrastructure for the app, which now includes features like photo caption capability, geofilters and video-function, and the “Discover” feature (which allows users to explore Channels from different multimedia companies, including ESPN, CNN, and Cosmopolitan).
Murphy and Spiegel turned down a $3-billion buyout offer from Facebook in late 2013, after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg—at 30, also one of the youngest billionaires to date—met with the Snapchat founders to try and work out a preposterous acquisition deal, which Spiegel immediately denied. The photo messaging app by itself now has a value of $19 billion as of this past February. Its headquarters are located in Venice Beach.
“We weren’t cool,” Murphy told Forbes about his and Spiegel’s experience in college. “So we tried to build things to be cool.”
Murphy is among 11 other Filipinos who made it to the Forbes exclusive billionaires list for this year, including mall tycoon Henry Sy Sr. (net worth – $14.2 billion), JG Summit Holdings Inc. entrepreneur John Gokongwei Jr. ($5.8 billion), and Jollibee CEO Tony Tan Caktiong ($2.7 billion).
“He is a gentle soul, almost like a moth,” said David Kravitz, Snapchat’s first employee. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him upset.”
(With reports from Forbes, Philippine Star, Inquirer)
(www.asianjournal.com)
(Las Vegas March 5-11, 2015 Sec. A pg.1)
