Taking a Chance on the Chat with Chamal Samaranayake

In today’s episode, we’re sitting down with Chamal Samaranayake. Chamal 

Has a bachelor’s degree from Stanford where he majored in computer science, with a focus on human-computer interaction. After that he went to work at Microsoft in 2013, helping develop Xbox Live TV. Upon his departure, he became the product hire at Snapchat, when it was only composed of a mere 20 people. Chamal worked on the original version of Snapchat’s chat function, bitmoji integration, geofilters, and countless other fundamental features of the app. Chances are, if you’ve ever so much as opened Snapchat, you’ve utilized one of the many developments Chamal has directly worked on.

That being said, he has filed for many patents to secure all the creative initiatives. He has helped integrate the friend-level emojis, especially for streaks, helped incorporate the big caption style and filters. Not only that, but he has helped implement in-app voter registration, which resulted in over 400,000 people registering to vote in the United States. And we are so excited to hear about it from the product designer himself. Recorded by Cosmo Callaway and Eliana Stanford, with guest Chamal Samaranayake.