Meet the secret power players who run Snapchat

Snap CTO Bobby Murphy

CEO Evan Spiegel may be the public face of the newly-rebranded Snap Inc., but it's taken more than his hard work to turn what started as a disappearing message app into a $20 billion media, entertainment, and now camera company.

Since he started Snapchat with co-founder Bobby Murphy in 2011, Spiegel has surrounded himself with a team of deputies who oversee everything from relationships with advertisers and media partners to the company's eventual IPO.

Here are the most important power players who helped Spiegel turn Snapchat into more than just a disappearing fad:

Bobby Murphy co-founded the company and is now CTO.

Unlike Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy has maintained a decidedly low profile since the beginning of the company.

As co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Murphy leads Snap’s engineering, product, and research teams. Sources say he's also involved with a team called Snap Labs that works on secret projects like the recently announced Spectacles glasses.

Murphy and Spiegel's friendship goes back to when they were both in the same fraternity at Stanford.

Spiegel, a product design student, needed someone to write the source code for the app that would become Snapchat. He recruited Murphy, a mathematics and computational science major, after the two had finished working on a failed startup called Future Freshman.

The quiet, 28-year-old engineer remains the author of much of the app's code to this day.

Imran Khan is a former banker who now leads business strategy.

Imran Khan jumped from the banking world to the tech world in January 2015 when he joined Snap as its Chief Strategy Officer. His connections have already helped Snap get a $200 million investment from Alibaba — he was the lead banker for the Chinese retail company's IPO — and Snap raised an additional $1.8 billion in May 2016.

One of Spiegel's direct reports, Khan's main job at Snap is to lead its strategy and help chart its path to IPO. He's one of the few executives besides Spiegel to represent the company publicly at events, and he's working on telling the story of Snapchat to make it more appealing to bankers.

Khan's background means he has the experience to do it. In his previous role as Head of Global Internet Investment Banking at Credit Suisse, he advised on more than $45 billion in M&A and financing transactions.

Nick Bell courts media companies like BuzzFeed and Vice to create exclusive content for Snapchat's Discover section.

Nick Bell is the golden ticket for any media company wanting to work with Snapchat. A former SVP at News Corps, Bell joined the company in 2014 to lead its content strategy, including Live and Discover. Whereas the app used to be all about sending messages to friends, Bell has been the one in charge of turning it into full-fledged media company.

Hailing from the UK originally, Bell first made money off the dot-com boom as a teen, selling his first company Teenfront.com at 16. He then tried to start a chain of spray tan and tanning beds in UK grocery stores and to start a few other companies before he joined News Corp in his twenties. Described as one of Evan Spiegel’s closest lieutenants, he’s been at Snapchat for the last two years as its VP of Content.

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