An early photo of Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy. 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 $3 billion IPO. Here's how Snapchat went from a million-dollar idea about disappearing photos to the giant social media company called Snap today: