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Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

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Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#291
post #220

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Hey Peter. What's the point of stories? Seems like a more limited version of Twitter - you can post photos and videos on twitter too... and there you have 21k followers. Surely a better place to post stuff if you want to reach an audience?

It's mostly about the user experience of the follower, I think (more than the fact that the stories go away after 24 hours). Snapchat allows a follower to consume all of the stories that they follow in a single stream. You only have to tap quickly to go to the next media item. One can also skip one story and move on to the next with a single swipe. The fact that everything has to be a direct photo or video from a pho…

Interesting. So the key point is that you're encouraged to talk about yourself and not other people or things?

It's the opposite of a link blog, which is what I mostly do; I don't consider my own life to be nearly as interesting to the audience (presumed to be mostly people I don't know) as interesting stuff I can find on the Internet.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#292

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Are you honestly suggesting that a company with fewer than 200 employees is worth more than: * GM * Ford * Honda Combined. That is ridiculous and just highlights how big a bubble is brewing in SV. We value a couple hundred million fickle users more than hundreds of thousands of actual employees, physical factories, and entire supply chain industries.

This is a misunderstanding of where shareholder value comes from. The valuation (market cap) of a company is a reflection of the value of the assets that the company owns . That includes IP, trademarks, brand assets (somewhat perversely, this also includes user habits), business relationships & contracts, any resellable physical goods or cash that the company owns, and all future cash flows that will accrue to the co…

don't you as a shareholder get much more volatility with 'hot shot' companies that can explode on a whim and are easily replaced by a competitive product due to a very low barrier to entry? I'm actually surprised the inctomis and lycos' of the dot com bubble aren't weighing in heavier on the investor decisions these days.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$200B valuation with only $50MM in revenue... You must like bubbles, 'cause that's how you get bubbles.

I thought Facebook was way overvalued at $15B when they had zero in revenue. Now they've got about $20B in annual revenue and are worth $340B.

When facebook was valued at 15B, they had 150M in revenue:

http://www.wired.com/2007/10/facebook-future/

So if facebook is the benchmark, it doesn't support your valuation of $200B for snapchat with 50M in revenue.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#294
post #173

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Perhaps it doesn't scale well, but their sponsored face filters seem to be getting a good reception. It's rare for people to find ads fun.

Fucking pissed me off to the max, actually. This week, they did X-Men lenses and REMOVED the face swap and picture swap features for the entire day. If I wanted to use lenses, it had to be X-Men for the whole day. What PM green-lit that shitty decision? I closed Snapchat and didn't use it for the entire day. I'm boycotting the X-Men movie out of protest.

Going a whole day without face/picture swap "pissed you off to the max"?

Seems you have a pretty good life.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That math holds if they are planning to only spend money on hiring those people for 1 year only. More realistically, the money is probably for tech overhead. Server space, software licensing, money for keeping all their servers working for a while (support, replacement servers/drives) etc.

Not being adversarial: What kind of software licensing is Snapchat paying? Dev tools, ok. Some BI/reporting stuff? I'd imagine everything else would be open source, right?

They run fully on Google App Engine and obviously they have to store all of that heavy video data somewhere so bandwidth costs will be crazy.

So a combination of them not having their own infra like FB does, and just the nature of the data they are responsible for is very heavy.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#297
post #289

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> the way anyone at the scale is on-premise or on AWS/Azure Can you expand on this? How/why would anyone developing a potentially high-traffic app have to worry if they are e.g. leveraging AWS fully? How does that compare to google cloud?

Snapchat runs almost entirely on Google AppEngine. They deploy code and leverage APIs. Their millions of QPS and vast CPU, RAM, etc usage is managed fully by Google Cloud. You can certainly replicate their scale on AWS/Azure.. or Google Compute Engine for that matter.. but you'd need to do a whole lot of non-trivial work around scalability, durability, etc etc. Snapchat runs light on this front, allowing them to focu…

> and that luxury is afforded largely by Google AppEngine.

Let's be very clear here. It's afforded largely by Google AppEngine and lots of cash.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#298

People need to stop focusing their criticism on how stupid the app is or how they're going to lose all their users. It's almost a meme by now of how people say this every time Snapchat is brought up. By now it's a foregone conclusion, and requires active ignorance and not really caring to keep an open mind, to continue to hold onto that belief in the face of tremendous evidence that 1) Snapchat is very popular, 2) Sn…

I don't think anyone is debating the popularity of Snapchat. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said "I think there is legitimate reason to be doubtful about the appeal of these products because they have nothing to do with chatting with friends". In my opinion, when Snapchat is truly forced to monetize (such as twitter/fb after ipo) it will dillute the core product to the point that people will search for…

I think it's more probable that their value will come down from bubbling heights and someone will buy them. To me chat models aren't sustainable without it working in line with your other verticals. It's too hard to monetize. IMO no chat platform can survive without being attached to another product or service; or just a vertical that is similar. Not in the mobile age it's not. There are too many chat apps as it is. FB Messenger, SnapChat, WeChat, Slack, Skype, iMessenger, WhatsApp, Viber, Hangouts, GChat and that's not even all of them. There's no way there is enough market room for all of those. The sector will consolidate and imo will come back to the mean of there being maybe 4 big companies behind them. Really, if I'm Twitter and want to stop my stock from tanking, I get a line of credit and buy SnapChat. It actually makes sense with their model more than any other.

Though I have heard the SnapChat CEO is a bit of an egotistical assclown, so he might ride it out alone until the bitter end. He also despises Microsoft, so that rules out one buyer.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#299

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What problem is HBO solving, other than entertaining people? How is Snapchat any different? At a minimum, it's entertaining. At best it's "connecting people" and so on.

I love that you hand wave "connecting people". These people are already connected, they can communicate on Twitter, FB, SMS, email, phone, skype, gchat, facetime, whatsapp, line, vine, periscope etc etc. Snapchat is just the current prom queen. Everyone wants to be her date, but in 10 years she will be working at Dairy Queen.

It's clear from your comments throughout this thread that you're biased against Snapchat. Regardless of whether or not Snapchat's long-term prospects are strong, you're not debating this well.

First you compared Snapchat to a completely different industry (automotive) to imply it has an inflated valuation (as though tangible products and heavy manufacturing somehow make a company more legitimate). When a commenter replied with an excellent rebuttal in favor of Snapchat's market position, you instead made the argument that Snapchat does not contribute long-term value to society.

When the parent commenter criticized this viewpoint by drawing a connection to HBO and countering that not all businesses need to change the world, you claimed that people don't need to be any more connected than they were before Snapchat, since they had things like Facebook, Twitter and texting. Why build different things? Why not just be content with the communication platforms we have now? How about we just don't develop things people clearly desire because, "eh, fuck it, they've got general ways to talk to each other already."

Finally you circled back around to being incredulous that a company with only 200 people could be worth more than entire industries and "supply chains." Of all the market analyses available, like margin comparisons or growth potential, you chose to zero in on the number of literal employees as some sort of indication of impact.

How long are you going to move the goal posts? You're one of the most active commenters in this thread but your rhetoric, particularly the bit involving the automotive industry, reminds me very strongly of the way in which people who are too set in their worldview can't fathom the value of new and different technology.

Judging by the political valence of your "VC gold rush" comment, I assume this is where your bias comes from. That and the automotive comparisons lead me to believe you're deeply uncomfortable with the idea that a small number of relatively wealthy, skilled elite can completely dwarf industries built by the comparatively unskilled masses all the while enjoying cushier jobs, better social status and wild employability (to put it as starkly as I can).

Follow this thinking deeply enough and it could even be expressed as simply as, "It's not fair." But that's leverage for you.

If you want to really debate about the future value of Snapchat, why not add some real nuance to the discussion and talk about its advertising platform's advantages (or disadvantages) compared to Google and Facebook?

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#300
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fucking pissed me off to the max, actually. This week, they did X-Men lenses and REMOVED the face swap and picture swap features for the entire day. If I wanted to use lenses, it had to be X-Men for the whole day. What PM green-lit that shitty decision? I closed Snapchat and didn't use it for the entire day. I'm boycotting the X-Men movie out of protest.

Going a whole day without face/picture swap "pissed you off to the max"? Seems you have a pretty good life.

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