While CEO Evan Spiegel may be the ultimate decision-maker at Snap, he can't pull all the strings by himself.
Since he started Snapchat with cofounder Bobby Murphy in 2011, Spiegel has surrounded himself with a team of seasoned deputies who oversee everything from the company's fledgling ad business to swelling engineering ranks.
While Spiegel focuses on product innovation, key hires, and acquisitions, his top lieutenants are tasked with making sure the newly-public entity that is Snap Inc. outlives competitors and meets investor expectations.
Here are the most important people who help Spiegel run Snap:
SEE ALSO: The fabulous life of Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, one of the world's youngest billionaires
As cofounder and CEO, Evan Spiegel is Snap's chief visionary and product genius.
CEO Evan Spiegel started Snapchat with Bobby Murphy during their days as undergraduate students at Stanford.
A hands-on, polarizing leader who spends most of his time with Snapchat's tight-knit group of product designers, Spiegel is credited with implementing the app's most revolutionary ideas, like disappearing messages and Stories.
Along with Murphy, 27-year-old Spiegel wields majority voting rights at Snap and is the ultimate decider of the young "camera" company's future. His net worth of roughly $3 billion is heavily tied to Snap's volatile stock price.
Bobby Murphy cofounded Snapchat with Spiegel and is now CTO.
Unlike Spiegel, Bobby Murphy has maintained a decidedly low profile since Snapchat's early days.
As cofounder and Chief Technology Officer, Murphy leads Snap’s engineering and research teams. He's also involved with a top-secret team called Snap Labs that works on hardware projects like the Spectacles camera glasses.
Murphy and Spiegel each wield 44% of Snap's voting stock, giving them complete control over the company's future. While Murphy's base salary in 2016 was only $250,000, his large stake in Snap places his net worth at roughly $3 billion.
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.
Imran Khan is a former banker who now leads Snap's 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 quickly helped Snap land a $200 million investment from Alibaba — he was the lead banker for the Chinese retail company's IPO — and an additional $1.8 billion in funding in May 2016.
One of Spiegel's direct reports, Khan's main job at Snap is to lead its business strategy and help grow its fledgling ad business. He's one of the few executives besides Spiegel to represent the company publicly at events, and like Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, he's working on telling the story of Snapchat to make it more appealing to marketers.
Read our full profile of Khan for more on how he worked his way up to quarterbacking two of the largest tech IPOs in history.
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