Man suing Snapchat for a third of the $800M company says he helped create the app until his friends betrayed him and has the evidence to prove it



Frank Reginald 'Reggie' Brown stands to win $26 7 million

Brown claims he first came up with the idea of disappearing photo messages but was cut out of the company



A nalysts value photo sharing app at $800 million



Suit mirrors Winklevoss twins who claimed Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea for Facebook that made him a multi-billionaire







Reggie Brown says newly released evidence proves why he's called ‘The Third Winkelvoss’ in the lawsuit worth $267 million against Snapchat, a photo sharing app he says he thought up before friends shut him out.

Now the company is worth $800 million and while Brown's former Stanford classmates and Snapchat founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy admit he first came up with the idea, they say he had no part in creating the massively popular company.

Photos of the trio together, emails, and text message exchanges are all proof, Brown claims, that he deserves hundreds of millions.

Stolen: Frank Reginald Brown IV, seen left, has filed a lawsuit against company Snapchat as well as its co-founders Bobby Murphy and Evan Spiegel, seen right, alleging they stole his idea for the program

Value: Analysts have valued the company that uses this ghost as its logo at $800 million

It began at a home in Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles in 2011, reports Business Insider .

Brown, an English major, decided to spend the summer there at the home of Spiegel, his friend from Stanford.

Earlier that spring, Snapchat now admits in the suit, Brown came up with the idea of a disappearing photo app.

But that's where the two parties' stories part ways.

'From spring of 2011 and into the summer,' reads Brown's filing, '[Brown] and Spiegel and Murphy lived, worked, developed and launched the Application together.'

Proof? Text messages between plaintiff Reggie Brown and Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel allegedly help prove Brown was an integral part of the formation of Snapchat

Tenacious: Brown has moved on from Stanford, but the English major has not let go of claims he helped found Snapchat

The setting: The creation of Snapchat and subsequent alleged betrayal all took place at Spiegel's Pacific Palisades home, pictured, in 2011

Some evidence seems back up this claim. A saved text message conversation between Brown and Spiegel suggests Brown helped secure the company's first patent.

Another makes the group look like the three-man startup Brown's suit claims they were.

'No chance we're celebrating wo you bro,' reads a message from Speigel to Brown.

But that's exactly what Spiegel and Murphy are now doing. Snapchat has become one of the world's fastest growing internet services of all time and estimates list its worth at a whopping $800 million.

Brown's lawyers have also presented evidence that the Stanford grad overheard a conversation between his two former friends about how they intended to excise him from the company.

Meanwhile, Snapchat contends--along with CEO Evan Spiegel and CTO Bobby Murphy, who each pocketed $10 million as part of the company's fundraising efforts--Brown had 'no equity' in the venture.

Friends? Brown says he deserves a third of the $800 million smash hit iPhone app, but the defense says the Stanford English major had no equity in their company

No one denies that, at some point in the summer of 2011, things went sour and Spiegel and Murphy changed the passwords to the servers and shut Brown out.

Brown was then horrified when he saw Snapchat become a huge hit with 60 million pictures now being shared every day via the service, more even than Facebook-owned Instagram.

Brown’s claims echo those of twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who say that Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them whilst they were all at Harvard.

They were given $65 million in a settlement but spent four years trying in vain to get more, with their story being dramatised in the film The Social Network which was about the birth of Facebook.



Snapchat lets users send photos to each other which will then be deleted after a certain period of time, typically 10 seconds.



It lets people send embarrassing pictures without the worry they will be saved forever.

Happier times: In September Snapchat celebrated their one-year anniversary and so had a new cake but Frank Reginald Brown was visibly not around to share it

New team: The Snapchat team posted a picture of themselves in Norway last fall, left, as well as one of the team members playing with their app, right, five months before the lawsuit was filed against them

Brown, 23, alleges that he came up with the concept before going to Spiegel, who called it a ‘million-dollar idea’.



They supposedly agreed to work together and looked for somebody to write the code, so chose Murphy.



The trio moved into Spiegel’s father’s house in Los Angeles where they worked on the app in the summer of 2011, the lawsuit states.



Brown claims he came up with the ghost logo and the original name, Picaboo, which the trio used in the launch of July that year.



The following month however they had a falling out and the lawsuit states that Brown was locked out and the other two refused to talk to him.



The falling out took place in August. In September, Snapchat was launched.

Twins? Twins Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, left, were given a $65million settlement after their claimed part in Facebook despite the denials of founder Mark Zuckerberg, right



As part of his claim Brown included a photo of all three men by a cake with the Snapchat logo on it, the Los Angeles Times reported.



Brown's lawyer Luan Tran told the paper: ‘He wants his share of what he is entitled to’.



The claims of start-up skulduggery will be all too familiar to the Winklevoss brothers, who were dubbed the ‘Wiklevii’ in The Social Network.



It was in 2003 that they claimed they asked Zuckerberg to write the code on their own social network, called Harvard Connection.

They alleged that he then started his own rival called thefacebook.com which went on to become the biggest website of its kind in the world with more than one billion users.



Whilst they were given their $65 million settlement Zuckerberg has gone on to become one of the richest men in the world.



According to the latest Forbes rankings, he is the 35th richest man on Earth with a fortune of $17.5billion, although he was far wealthier before Facebook’s bungled stock market floatation.



A representative for Snapchat said: ‘We are aware of the allegations, believe them to be utterly devoid of merit, and will vigorously defend ourselves against this frivolous suit.

