For more than a decade, Snapchat has been a fixture in the lives of young people. But the business side of the app has been much less stable. This week I flew down to LA to check in on the company — and while Snap still has plenty of big ideas, I was struck by how much the company’s ambitions seem to be limited at the moment by the recent downturn in the economy.

The occasion for my visit was the annual Snap Partner Summit. For the past three years, due to the pandemic, the event had been online-only. But this year the company gathered together its business partners and the press together in person again, in a giant airplane hangar in Santa Monica.

It was an inspired location for a tech event. Instead of bringing people together in some...

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