The rise of Snapchat from a sexting app by Stanford frat bros to a $31 billion public company

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 to settle the case.

Snapchat survived its rocky starts to make its debut on Wall Street, where it closed on Friday with a $31 billion market cap.

Here's how Snapchat went from a million-dollar idea about disappearing photos to the giant social media company called Snap today: