The rise of Snapchat from a sexting app by Stanford frat bros to a $3 billion IPO

Snapchat

Snapchat's beginning sounds a lot like Facebook's from "The Social Network."

In Snapchat's case, it wasn't two ousted cofounders (the Winklevoss twins) against Mark Zuckerberg. But still, it featured the backdrop of an elite university — Stanford versus Harvard — and ended up in litigation, with Snapchat cofounders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy against Reggie Brown.

At stake was the founding story of a social network to make photos disappear. Snapchat's founders ended up paying $157.5 million.

Snapchat survived its rocky starts to now be on the verge of a $20 billion IPO. Here's how Snapchat went from a million-dollar idea about disappearing photos to the giant social media company called Snap today:

Like many other startups, ground zero for Snapchat's story is Stanford University, where a young Evan Spiegel from Los Angeles befriended Reginald (Reggie) Brown. The pair decided to join Kappa Sigma fraternity — where they would meet Snapchat cofounder Bobby Murphy — although it would be a few years before they turned the idea of disappearing photos into a business.

Snapchat wasn't Spiegel's first startup. Murphy had recruited Spiegel, a Kappa Sig brother one year younger than him, to help with an idea he had about a social network. In 2010, they then launched FutureFreshman, a site meant to make applying to college easier. It never really took off, but Spiegel had caught the entrepreneurial bug.

It wasn't until Spiegel's junior year that the idea for Snapchat was born. "I wish these photos I am sending this girl would disappear," Brown told Spiegel in April 2011. His friend immediately got excited about the concept of disappearing photos and told Brown that this was a million-dollar idea. Five years later, that idea would now be worth billions.