Snap CEO Evan Spiegel acquired Virgance Labs for $11 million in cash and $4 million in stock to quietly kickstart the social media company's hardware division. On Business Wars, host David Brown detailed how Spiegel insisted on keeping the deal completely secret, warning his team, "We're not doing a press release, not putting anything on the buyer's website or ours. The guy in charge is very private, okay?"
This cautious hardware strategy was a deliberate pivot from the flashy failures of competitor Google Glass. David Brown noted on Business Wars that Spiegel operated on a strict principle of "measure a thousand times, cut once," resulting in Spectacles that looked less like high-tech headwear and more like novelty shades you might pick up at a gas station.
Ultimately, the strategy hinges on a contrarian belief about consumer technology. David Brown explained that Spiegel wagers "the future of smart glasses is in looking boring instead of futuristic and doing less instead of more." By keeping the features simple and the design unassuming, Snapchat is betting it can win the wearable race simply by waiting for more complex devices to fail.