Alyson Shontell describes the smallest $4 billion company ever:

Snapchat is an incredibly lean team. There are fewer than 30 full-time employees at the company Google and Facebook are reportedly offering billions of dollars to acquire.

Instagram only had 13 employees when Facebook bought it for $1 billion.

Currently, more than 350 million photos are sent daily over the disappearing-messages application. That's more than 11 million photos per employee.

Rumor has it that a big new round of financing for Snapchat will be announced imminently, stamping a $3 – 4 billion valuation on the company.

Who are the early employees helping the app find so much success?

We were able to find 20 of them on LinkedIn. Seven of those 20 people are women. More than half attended Stanford, overlapping with co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy's time there. Unsurprisingly, many of them were in fraternities or sororities.