Bobby Murphy Helped Build Snapchat Into a Tech Giant

As a co-founder and CTO of Snapchat, Bobby Murphy helped engineer some of the many features that have reshaped modern social media.

The technical architect behind one of the biggest social media platforms is an Irish-Filipino-American who remained one of Silicon Valley’s most private billionaires. Snapchat’s public image has often been associated with co-founder Evan Spiegel, but without Bobby Murphy, its influence wouldn’t have stretched beyond disappearing selfies.

Bobby Murphy was born in 1988 in Berkeley, California to his mother who emigrated from the Philippines and his father who was a government employee in California. He spent most of his childhood in Northern California, attending Stanford University to study mathematical and computational science.

At Stanford, Murphy met Evan Spiegel and Reggie Brown in 2011 and their friendship soon turned into a business partnership after developing the idea of Snapchat. Originally the app was called Picaboo. The app was later rebranded to Snapchat after the team received a cease-and-desist letter from a New Hampshire-based photobook company that already owned the trademark for the name “Picaboo.

Snapchat was centered around photo messaging that would send disappearing images. While most social media platforms were focused on public identity and permanence, Snapchat leaned into spontaneity and privacy. Murphy was in charge of the app’s technical development and later became Chief Technology Officer of Snap Inc. The app exploded amongst younger users throughout the early 2010s and by 2013, Facebook attempted to acquire Snapchat for $3 billion, but Murphy and his co-founders declined.

That decision would become one Silicon Valley’s most famous rejections because Snap Inc. went public in 2017 and was one of the largest tech IPOs in the last decade. Today Snap Inc. is worth roughly $9 to $10 billion as Snapchat has hundreds of millions of active daily users all over the world.

Bobby Murphy played a huge role in developing features that would change social media culture because many of his ideas including disappearing messages and photo filters are used across many other social media platforms. In 2015 Murphy was 27 when Forbes ranked him number #15 on their list of U.S. Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40 and #374 on the Forbes 400 in 2016.

Outside of tech, Murphy and his wife have established a $15 million scholarship fund at Stanford which supports students from underserved backgrounds. They have also donated millions towards environmental efforts in California.

Murphy’s legacy goes far beyond Snapchat and while Evan Spiegel became the company’s face, Bobby Murphy was the quiet engineer who made it all happen.