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Snap Inc. S-1

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Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#31

Post by carlisle_ »

leothekim wrote: post #18
stuckagain wrote: post #8

"We have committed to spend $2 billion with Google Cloud over the next five years and have built our software and computer systems to use computing, storage capabilities, bandwidth, and other services provided by Google, some of which do not have an alternative in the market." There's some numbers for you that Google wouldn't have provided (as far as I have seen).

Is it not possible to build your own "alternative in the market" for $2 billion?

It is absolutely possible to build a stellar internal alternative to Google's offerings in 5 years with 2 billion dollars.

edit: I should point out that this doesn't account for ramp-up. It would obviously take awhile before things would be to a point where it would be even comparable.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#32

Post by pbh101 »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #12
stuckagain wrote: post #8

"We have committed to spend $2 billion with Google Cloud over the next five years and have built our software and computer systems to use computing, storage capabilities, bandwidth, and other services provided by Google, some of which do not have an alternative in the market." There's some numbers for you that Google wouldn't have provided (as far as I have seen).

I find the "do not have an alternative in the market" comment interesting - is there really anything which AWS does not have the GCE does?

There isn't an alternative inasmuch as there isn't a drop-in replacement. Thus, there are switching costs, which thus represent financial (and counterparty!) risks.

Compare this situation to Dell v. Lenovo v. HP commodity x86 servers: if one goes out of business, you can go to the others (and proactively use this as leverage when negotiating). EDIT: Or more realistically, you don't need to do much/any work to run your service on a Dell v. an IBM.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#34

Post by 6stringmerc »

nlittlepoole wrote: post #20

"We have incurred operating losses in the past, expect to incur operating losses in the future, and may never achieve or maintain profitability." haha

"There's a sucker born every minute" didn't enter the American lexicon by accident, mind you.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#35

Post by pixelmonkey »

"We are required to purchase at least $400M of cloud services from Google each year beginning on January 30, 2017..."

Wow, quite a snag for Google Cloud Platform to land that contract!

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#36

Post by d4l3k »

abalone wrote: post #26
d4l3k wrote: post #5

> Although other U.S.-based companies have publicly traded classes of non-voting stock, to our knowledge, no other company has completed an initial public offering of non-voting stock on a U.S. stock exchange. We cannot predict whether this structure and the concentrated control it affords Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy will result in a lower trading price or greater fluctuations in the trading price of our Class A commo…

How does this differ from what Facebook and Google did? Did they offer stock that technically had voting power but in practice was massively outweighed by the founders' voting power? Whereas Snapchat is dispensing with such technicalities and just outright stating the founders control it?

When Facebook IPOed it had two classes of voting stock. Normal and super voting. They only offered the normal voting stock.

Facebook and Google both later offered non-voting stock, but not when they IPOed. Not sure if it really makes a difference overall, but unlike Facebook and Google there is no public Snap Inc. voting stock.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#38

Post by Etheryte »

nlittlepoole wrote: post #20

"We have incurred operating losses in the past, expect to incur operating losses in the future, and may never achieve or maintain profitability." haha

It's not like they could claim anything else. No company can guarantee that it will remain profitable.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#39

Post by 6stringmerc »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

Interesting DAU-growth plateau around the 150M user mark mid-2016. Maybe there is truth to the theories that Instagram is successfully slowing the drain of users to Snapchat?

Could be equilibrium reached - market saturation. All those who will use it are now on it, and the only way to go is down as the Primary Users, err, grow up and their time and interests are spent elsewhere. I mean, it might sound terribly reductive but I kind of figure there's only so many teenagers at any one given moment, and growing rapidly into a dominant market share is wonderful until it isn't.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#40

Post by rwmj »

trendia wrote: post #28
vineetch wrote: post #19

They spent $890,339 on security for Evan Spiegel in 2016? Why does he need that much security? Who is trying to hurt him?

According to Wikipedia, he has $2b in wealth [0]. I have no idea whether $900,000 / year is high or low for someone of that net worth. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Spiegel#Personal_life

Johnny Depp spends "Over $150,000/month on full-time security for his children" according to current revelations. So $900K/year for someone who's not very famous isn't unreasonable I suppose.
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