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Snap Inc. S-1

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Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#211

Post by RileyKyeden »

urs2102 wrote: post #200
fastball wrote: post #180

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…

Expanding business without an actual person doing it (inbound marketing) is cheap, but very slow going. Twitter probably has people making deals, helping bigger accounts work on their presence, and things like that.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#212

Post by ar0 »

applecore wrote: post #204
fastball wrote: post #180

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.

That's $10 million per employee (at a $20B valuation). That's not a lot of when you consider they're building a product that will book billions of dollars in advertising revenue.

$400 million USD total revenue in 2016 (from the article) is not exactly "billions of dollars".

But, in general, yes, I think the sales force required to engage advertisers should not be discounted when the first thing going through the head is "but it's just an app!".

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#213

Post by devanti »

unoti wrote: post #105
richardwhiuk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Is there really anything which AWS does not have the GCE does? Firebase is the killer here. AWS and Azure don't have it or anything comparable for realtime data. If they do, please tell me about it because I'd love to know about it! I'm particularly interested in this because I'm building a product supported by Firebase and will have the same lock-in described in this filing.

DynamoDB?

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#214

Post by lavezzi »

fastball wrote: post #180

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.

Depends what is considered as employees. I believe a lot of people are hired as artists, etc. for small items such as geotags.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#215

Post by jcdavis »

fastball wrote: post #184
brentm wrote: post #55

Much greater losses than Twitter's S1. Snap's revenue is 27% higher but 548% greater net losses. Twitter s1: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312513...

I think their losses can be at least partly explained by their somewhat inexplicable number of employees, which happen to number 1859 at the end of 2016. Don't understand why a company with a mobile app as their sole product need that many employees. I was expecting that number to be more like 100.

I'm always a little surprised about how naive HNers are about corporate sales (and BD). We can bikeshed all day how many engineers they "really" need, but for $400m in annual revenue (plus that growth) they probably need a 400 person sales org minimum.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#216

Post by halite »

barce wrote: post #193
fastball wrote: post #180

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.

do we really want to get into this discussion?

whatsapp had what Facebook had ÷ 100.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#217

Post by harryh »

charlesdm wrote: post #100
urs2102 wrote: post #23

> We have incurred operating losses in the past, expect to incur operating losses in the future, and may never achieve or maintain profitability. Also having only 158 million daily active users up from 150 million in June is definitely interesting and a lot smaller growth jump than I had expected. Revenue up from $58MM in 2015 to $405MM despite a loss of $515MM last year. Wishing them best of luck, but I wonder how m…

158M DAU is not bad, but I would guess they are to some extent limited by the amount of iOS and Android devices in circulation? How are they going to get that number to 300M, or 500M? My best guess is they won't, ever.

Facebook has over a billion mobile DAUs.

There are a lot of reasons that Snapchat might not grow. Lack of people with smartphones isn't one of them. I don't think you have a good understanding of just how ubiquitous iOS and Android devices are.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#218

Post by omarchowdhury »

sjg007 wrote: post #176
johansch wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bandwidth is kinda cheap these days though, if you avoid GC and AWS. Anyone have recent numbers at this scale of commitment?

They will get a bulk discount so it will be cheap probably close to zero.

Close to zero but $400M in related expense.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#219

Post by corndoge »

Apocryphon wrote: post #189
fastball wrote: post #180

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.

They just built a hardware product.

Being generous, 5 employees for hw + 5 for manufacturing should be more than sufficient for a pair of sunglasses that takes 10 second videos.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#220

Post by discodave »

draw_down wrote: post #207
beamatronic wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great point, along the lines of, "When you borrow $100 the bank owns you; when you borrow $1,000,000 you own the bank"

I dunno, $2 billion over 5 years is not exactly a ton of money to big G.

It is to GCP. GCP revenue is currently much less than $4 billion run rate.

They are reporting ~4B run rate for all cloud but that includes SaaS, GCP run rate may be < 1B (but it's hard to know for sure).

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