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Snap Inc. S-1

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Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#241

Post by dreamfactory2 »

beamatronic wrote: post #172
scarmig wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle is spending way more than 2 billion dollars on its cloud team in an attempt to catch up to AWS, GCP, and Azure. Would you consider Oracle's cloud endeavor a fair test of how able a company is to reproduce GCP's offering with a fistful of money?

What I can't figure out is why Oracle didn't start down this road 10-20 years ago. They more than anyone should have some ideas about scaling infrastructure for databases.

sales led, not strategic, and it would have cannibalised their existing money printing machine. imagine if they started offering their customers PAYG elastic accounts rather than multi year mega provisioning deals - their numbers would have been destroyed

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#242

Post by dreamfactory2 »

leothekim wrote: post #79
ChuckMcM wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is. But you need to operate the service while you're building the replacement. What that says to me is that there is an order of magnitude improvement in their operational costs available to them. Depending on how long it takes to build their own infrastructure, that could imply a big boost to margins 1, 2 or maybe 3 years down the road.

The cost of moving software that relies on app engine frameworks is probably the bigger unstated one. Unless you can port those frameworks to your shiny new datacenter with automated deploys, etc, you'd be running two versions of the same code for a while.

you could probably make microservices a requirement as a governance issue for this reason alone

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#243

Post by eanzenberg »

talklittle wrote: post #110
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?

Come on, HN. How can nobody be mentioning some of the much cooler stuff available on Google Cloud? https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/ It's a mistake to just compare Google with AWS, thinking in terms of basic storage and computing. That's boring and obviously there are tons of alternatives, including Snap Inc. building it themselves, for the amount of money cited. When it comes to cutting edge AI and…

Are they charging per single prediction like amazon? If so then it's almost a non-starter unless ML is the product.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#244

Post by dreamfactory2 »

com2kid wrote: post #228
corndoge wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is not how hardware works. At least 2 EEs, another couple EE techs to fix prototype up boards that come in and prepare development boards for the software work. You will have a couple people doing just regulatory work. Sign off on BT, USB, batteries, etc. At least 1 ME, at least 1 industrial designer as well. 1 person in charge of optics. 1 software person to do board bring up, another person who specializes in…

double at least for redundancy to cover holiday/sickness/bus factor

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#245

Post by com2kid »

dreamfactory2 wrote: post #244
com2kid wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not how hardware works. At least 2 EEs, another couple EE techs to fix prototype up boards that come in and prepare development boards for the software work. You will have a couple people doing just regulatory work. Sign off on BT, USB, batteries, etc. At least 1 ME, at least 1 industrial designer as well. 1 person in charge of optics. 1 software person to do board bring up, another person who specializes in…

double at least for redundancy to cover holiday/sickness/bus factor

Having worked on an agile HW team, I'll say that the bus factor was a solid 1 all throughout. In fact the bus factor was a whole lot of different 1s!

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#246

Post by moxious »

segmondy wrote: post #206
charlesdm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Predicting the future is hard. If they raise enough money, they might figure out how to make profit better than twitter did. Frankly, I can't predict anything anymore, if anything, I'll say they will do well. The opposite of my gut feelings. I've been 100% wrong in all the startups I tried to predict, the last 5 presidential elections, my favorite NFL team prospects for playoffs. I'm just bad. I agree with you, but I…

Question here is whether you'd buy them because they're a good company, or because you'd want to play the other chumps that believe they're a good company.

Twitter had a nice pop after IPO and while they're a fraction now of their IPO price, if you played the market well rather than the company, you could have come out well.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#247

Post by moxious »

bduerst wrote: post #194
charlesdm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

This is the reason to believe they'll stagnate:

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

Sooner or later, you run out of other people's money, and businesses which have no plan to be long-term profitable should not be.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#248

Post by moxious »

ejcx wrote: 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.

Insane is right. They lose that much money, and don't have a plan for profitability. If you lose money on each customer and scale the business...well, uh, losses scale too.

I guess I'm just old fashioned, here I thought the point of businesses was to make money, at least eventually.

This quote is a killer: "We have incurred operating losses in the past, expect to incur operating losses in the future, and may never achieve or maintain profitability." haha

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#249

Post by user5994461 »

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 doesn't matter the amount of money you have, it's basically impossible.

Everything at Google is an internal Google secret made by Google for Google. ALL the software and ALL the hardware that's running it.

Services rely on lower-level services. If you want to copy the high level service yourself and executes it at the same level Google does, you'd need to have everything it depends on. Too bad for you, each piece is a multi billion dollar projects itself, with its own dependencies...

Let's imagine for a minute that there was a service that is somewhat standalone-ish. You may consider poaching the handful of people who can make it, for $1M a head. But that won't work well because money is not everything and you can't help it. Whenever there are ONLY 50 people in the world who can deliver what you need and you need almost all of them, you're fucked.

In short, the castle is out of reach, even the building bricks are out of reach ;)

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#250

Post by mikeyouse »

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.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted.. they'll clearly have billions of dollars in revenue within the next 3ish years.
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