It only takes about 30 seconds of waiting in line at Nando’s before somebody recognises Evan Spiegel. “You’re not from Snapchat, are you?” a young man asks. “You are! Oh! Good to see you.”
Spiegel has got better at dealing with these encounters. Though he described himself this year as shy, the 28-year-old stands out today with his sharp dark suit, white open-collar shirt and certain kind of LA sheen. He immediately introduces me, as if the guy would care at all who I am, and asks what he is up to.
Spiegel may not be quite as famous as Mark Zuckerberg — nobody has so far made a semi-fictionalised movie about him — or the founders of Google. But as America’s youngest billionaire and co-founder of Snapchat, the picture-messaging app used by 186m people every day, this is the kind of thing that tends to happen when you’re hanging around in a chicken-and-chips joint.