While many twentysomethings are burning their money on travel and gadgets, Filipino-American entrepreneur Bobby Murphy is busy growing his billion-dollar empire that brought to us the mobile app Snapchat.
At 28, Murphy is currently the fourth youngest billionaire in the United States with estimated net worth of $4 billion, according to Forbes. The California-based entrepreneur co-founded Snap Inc. along with Evan Spiegel—second youngest billionaire in US—and Reggie Brown. Murphy sits as the company’s Chief Technology Officer.
He’s also ranked 11th in Forbes’s America’s Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40 in 2016, together with Spiegel and a star-studded lot, including Kobe Bryant, Floyd Mayweather, Beyonce Knowles, and Jessica Alba.
Robert Cornelius Murphy was born on July 19, 1988 to mother Rosie Go-Murphy, a Filipino state government employee who migrated to the United States in the early ‘80s, and Richard Cornelius Murphy Jr., also a government employee. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematical and Computational Science at Stanford University in 2010, where he met Spiegel.
After working on a now defunct startup called Future Freshman, a website that helped high school kids get advice and help when applying in colleges, the two worked together on creating a disappearing-image messaging app called Picaboo, which later became Snapchat in September 2011.
In an interview with Forbes in 2014, Murphy said, “We weren’t cool (in college), so we tried to build things to be cool.”
The idea of a temporary image messaging application was previously balked at when Spiegel introduced it in class. But with the help of Murphy, who wrote the source code for the application, Snapchat has become a popular app among millennials, with over 156 million users worldwide as of 2016.
Snapchat is primarily used for creating multimedia messages referred to as “snaps,” which vary from photos, videos, drawings and text messages. Users can send these snaps to selected recipients or post them as “Story,” and will only exist for a limited time depending on the sender.
“Evan and I got started (on) Snapchat in the summer of 2011. We wanted to create a way that would enable that to be a means of communication, rather than a piece of content around which communication actually happens,” Murphy explained during a Google Cloud Platform Live session in 2014.
Murphy and Spiegel are expected to earn more as they are planning a potential $25 billion IPO for Snap Inc., wherein they would own around 45 percent of the total stock, The Wall Street Journal reported. They have also recently launched the company’s first hardware product, Spectacles, which are wearable smart glasses that can capture videos and photos and be sent to the user’s Snapchat account.
Despite the success of their consumer technology business, Murphy continues to maintain a low profile. He’s currently residing in Venice, California, where he bought a $2.1-million two-bedroom house.