• Evan Spiegel says Snap employees are asked to pitch an idea on day one — with zero prep.
• The Snap CEO says it helps people stop fearing failure and start innovating.
• Speigel said on a podcast that "99% of ideas are not good," but 1% are.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel says creativity starts with failure — and he makes sure new hires get there quickly.

Snap's new designers are asked to present an idea on their first day despite having little context or time to prepare, Spiegel said on a recent episode of "The Diary of a CEO" podcast.

"When you have no context for what the company is working on, no idea what's going on, how on earth are you supposed to come up with a great idea? I mean, it's almost impossible," Spiegel said.

"So your worst fear has come true — we're all sitting there, looking at an idea that's ultimately not that great."

First days can be nerve-racking enough without being asked to make an ill-prepared presentation to your new colleagues. But for Spiegel, that early failure is precisely the point.

By forcing new hires to showcase an idea with no preparation, context, or background, Spiegel believes the worst fears around failure evaporate early, leaving employees creatively liberated.

"Ninety-nine percent of ideas are not good — but 1% is," he said. "And the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas."

Ultimately, Spiegel said, "All feedback is good feedback. What you do with it is what matters."

Spiegel credits Snap's creativity to its culture of constant experimentation more than a decade after its launch.

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, famously introduced disappearing photos and videos and became known for introducing features like Stories, which were later copied by platforms including Instagram and Facebook.

Spiegel's LinkedIn profile recently poked fun at this, describing him as "VP Product @ Meta" — a gag an employee was behind, he told Bloomberg.

Spiegel founded Snapchat while studying at Stanford and became the world's youngest billionaire at 25.

Snap completed a 2017 IPO with a valuation of about $24 billion. Its market cap now stands at $15.65 billion. The company famously turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Mark Zuckerberg's Meta — then Facebook — in 2013.

Spiegel also pushed back on perfectionism in startup culture. "People who think the game is to have the perfect idea — those are people who've never built a business before," he added.

• Evan Spiegel is best known as the CEO of Snap.
• However, he was briefly listed as a VP of product at Meta on LinkedIn — as a gag by an employee.
• Meta's platforms have copied features from Snap over the years, such as Stories.

Evan Spiegel doesn't work at Meta, but if you're looking at his LinkedIn, you might have thought he did.

The Snap cofounder and CEO said in an interview with Bloomberg published Monday that one of his employees temporarily put on his profile that he was "VP Product @ Meta" as a gag. (His LinkedIn profile no longer shows that.)

The joke appears to be a dig at Meta, which has taken a few pages from Snapchat's book over the years when it comes to features.

For example, Snapchat was the first to introduce user Stories that disappear after a while, rolling out a feature in 2013 that let users post photos and videos that'd vanish after 24 hours.

Meta in 2016 unveiled its own Stories feature on Instagram, and Facebook got them the following year. WhatsApp debuted a similar feature called Status also in 2017.

Facebook offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion in 2013, but Spiegel's company declined. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reached out to Spiegel in 2016 to try again.

Zuckerberg has been asked about the striking similarities between some of the companies' offerings before.

In a 2017 earnings call, he talked about what was at the time called Facebook's Camera Effects Platform.

"I think we were a little bit late to the trend initially around making cameras the center of how sharing works," he said. "But I do think at this point we're pretty much ahead in terms of the technology that we're building, and making an open platform, I think, is a big step forward. A lot of people are using these products across our family of apps. And I would expect us to continue leading the way forward on this from this point on."

Snapchat had previously unveiled animated AR selfie masks and filters.

More recently, Snapchat showed off its newest AR glasses, called Spectacles, last year, days before Zuckerberg announced Meta's competing Orion glasses.

Meta and Snap did not immediately respond to requests for comment.