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Snap Inc. S-1

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191–200 of 337 posts

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#192

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

Lots of Venice Beach locals are not happy that Snap is buying up prime property / increasing rents / bringing in yuppies etc. I wouldn't be surprised if he's received threats and is most focused on security while in and around the office.

Could also be that he's married to Miranda Kerr, so they have to deal with paparazzi

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#193

My takeaway was that Snap has 1,859 employees... huh? Why does a company with a single product, which is a mobile app (so what is that these days, three platforms?) need almost two thousand employees - am I missing something? No wonder they lost $514mil in 2016, that's an absurd amount of overhead for a company with a single, not very cumbersome product.

For comparison, Facebook had 3500 employees at the time of their IPO, and it's "just a website." Snapchat is many products: video ad platform, augmented reality selfie app, broadcast platform via sunglasses, photo uploading app, and messaging app.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#194
post #15

Am I reading this right? I'm no banker... Their losses for 2016 were ~$500m? That's very steep, but it looks like revenue grew almost 700%. Wow. Insane numbers. I don't think anyone on the planet knows what's going to happen with them but I am sure interested in finding out.

$50 it'll tank like Twitter. (And to the people downvoting me, please explain why you think it won't tank like Twitter - thanks!)

Didn't downvote, but Twitter stagnated and there isn't any reason to believe Snap will too.

Social Media is about adapting to the changing trends, and for a while Twitter's strategy was to stay as close to it's core product as possible. Periscope is great but it came a little too late.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#195

My takeaway was that Snap has 1,859 employees... huh? Why does a company with a single product, which is a mobile app (so what is that these days, three platforms?) need almost two thousand employees - am I missing something? No wonder they lost $514mil in 2016, that's an absurd amount of overhead for a company with a single, not very cumbersome product.

What I'd like to see - is the employee breakdown. How many are working on the acutal product/engineering? I work for a startup (that was bootstrapped I believe) and our sales team is almost half the company (we are just under 100 people right now). Point being, at Snap's scale - I have a feeling they'll have a lot of Business Development Reps trying to bring in contracts for adverts.

Yeah, thats what Im interested in too. have to assume there is a significant sales force, especially with their expected sales growth

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#196

"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).

Interesting detail from the Google license exhibit:

Encryption Technologies. Google makes HTTPS encryption (also referred to as SSL or TLS connection) available. Google servers support ephemeral elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman cryptographic key exchange signed with RSA and ECDSA. These perfect forward secrecy (PFS) methods help protect traffic and minimize the impact of a compromised key, or a cryptographic breakthrough.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1564408/000119312517...

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#197
post #26
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?

Relevant Money Stuff on the subject: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-17/snap-vote...

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#198
post #190

> For the year ended December 31, 2016, we incurred a net loss of $514.6 million, as compared to a net loss of $372.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2015. Some serious progress there. Great. Let's IPO O_o

gotta strike while the iron is hot

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#199

Serious question: how does Snapchat spend so much money on infrastructure? How could the app run up a $2b Google Cloud tab? Would anyone care to break it down?

My guess would be the huge compute power needed to transcode that much video.

and storage, i'm guessing

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#200

My takeaway was that Snap has 1,859 employees... huh? Why does a company with a single product, which is a mobile app (so what is that these days, three platforms?) need almost two thousand employees - am I missing something? No wonder they lost $514mil in 2016, that's an absurd amount of overhead for a company with a single, not very cumbersome product.

This is also my gripe with Twitter. I just don't understand the necessity of having so many employees as software businesses allow you to build tools to reduce the number of employees you need in a way other businesses can't.

I know it's a very poor parallel, but WhatsApp's sub 50 employee group around the time of acquisition was just so impressive in comparison with the size of some of these businesses. It was just orders of magnitude different. That being said - I agree with ohstopitu - I'd love to see a breakdown of who goes where...

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