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Snap Inc. S-1

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Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#271

Post by corndoge »

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…

And yet college students make products like this in their spare time and Palmer Lucky created the Oculus Rift prototype in his garage.

My lord. Always the HN expert to wag the finger. It is really not that hard. Not anywhere near as easy as software, but far easier than you describe. It doesn't take 20 people to slap a camera and a microcontroller on the same board.

I could build Spectacles this weekend with 100x the resolution and 2000x the record time for 1/2 the cost.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#272

Post by stuckagain »

thinkloop wrote: post #268
obulpathi wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expert on Cloud Computing here. Short answer is "No". Here is why. Google Cloud has infrastructure that scales to petabytes of data and millions of users. Google primary uses this infrastructure for storing, processing and communicating the Internet. Add the services like Pub/Sub, Dataflow, BigQuery, TensorFlow & CloudML and things like security, communication backbone, ... its near impossible to build Google Cloud o…

> if they focus on building infrastructure, it might slow them down I always found this issue of "focus" a bit strange. Two billion can buy a lot of focus. For example, say there was a separate company smaller than Google that snap outsourced their infrastructure to, allowing them to focus, then they bought that company - it comes out to the same. The technical capabilities is a different story.

The amount of money on the table isn't 2 billion dollars. The amount at stake is the difference between 2 billion dollars over 5 years, and the theoretical best case operating costs of your own infrastructure, which very well might be higher than Google's because Google's scale is bigger. Snap might say to themselves that they don't want to be paying Google's margins, so they invest a billion dollars in development for infrastructure with identical performance costing only 350 million a year instead of 400 million. Is that worth it?

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#273

Post by boulos »

erichocean wrote: post #209
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?

GCE is incapable of doing the most recent cloud setup I've built on AWS, which uses g2 instances extensively (although Azure could). I need the actual GPU—graphics, OpenGL, etc.—part, not just CUDA, in addition to the hardware H.264 encoders that come with nVidia's GRID CPUs. GCE has no equivalent. We're also using Amazon's Elastic File System, and I don't think Google has an alternative—though that's something I cou…

We announced that we'll have AMD's 9300x2s and NVIDIA's P100s at Supercomputing: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/announcing-GPUs...

I'd be happy to get you early access, Erich ;).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#274

Post by dmnd »

milesward wrote: post #135
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?

I'll just leave this here... https://www.google.de/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es... Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud

Exactly. What's the closest thing to datastore from other providers? DynamoDB? Some kind of hosted Cassandra?

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#275

Post by [deleted] »

JBlue42 wrote: post #257
joycey wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To generate excitement for X-Men: Apocalypse, 20th Century Fox ran a Sponsored Lens campaign that let users turn themselves into the iconic characters in the upcoming movie. In one day, people spent a collective 56 years playing with the Sponsored Lenses, which also featured the mutants’ powers. They also incorporated the Sponsored Lens into Snaps they shared with their friends, which yielded over 298 million views…

>"drove a 25% lift in theater-watch intent" Intent is not action.

[deleted]

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#276

Post by mozumder »

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?

Most likely not. My understanding is that Google also has their own long-haul ocean fiber, and those things cost hundreds of millions of dollars by themselves.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#277

Post by nom »

corndoge wrote: post #271
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…

And yet college students make products like this in their spare time and Palmer Lucky created the Oculus Rift prototype in his garage. My lord. Always the HN expert to wag the finger. It is really not that hard. Not anywhere near as easy as software, but far easier than you describe. It doesn't take 20 people to slap a camera and a microcontroller on the same board. I could build Spectacles this weekend with 100x the…

Did you read what the parent said? That is not how hardware works.

Yes it's easy to build a single device... successfully scaling it to millions of devices is the hard part.

Also: "100x the resolution?" You obviously have no clue.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#278

Post by nom »

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.

Also: all the stuff we haven't seen yet... who knows what they are doing with the vast amount of video data piped to their servers every second.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#279

Post by obulpathi »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #262
obulpathi wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expert on Cloud Computing here. Short answer is "No". Here is why. Google Cloud has infrastructure that scales to petabytes of data and millions of users. Google primary uses this infrastructure for storing, processing and communicating the Internet. Add the services like Pub/Sub, Dataflow, BigQuery, TensorFlow & CloudML and things like security, communication backbone, ... its near impossible to build Google Cloud o…

Hmm. Cloud computing expert here, too. I partially disagree. I would simply say "it depends". For companies with specific use cases, e.g. Dropbox, it makes A LOT of sense to build at least 60-70% private, and the rest on AWS or GCP. Snapchat looks like a special case to me.

If you are doing just one or two things at a massive scale (Dropbox storing files), it makes sense. But, we are talking about Snap Inc, the infrastructure, and services it needs. A single high-speed intercontinental fiber cable costs 400 Million $ (https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/12/google-and-facebook-are-bu...). To build a service like CLoudML (Hosted TensorFlow), you need to write software (TensorFlow), build the ASIC Chips by manufacturing / by partnering with a chip manufacturing company like Intel / Samsung / Qualcomm, you need custom networking software and hardware to scale massively for data workloads (Andromeda), years of research to build these tools, you need to create your own programming language (Go and Dart) to be able to scale your development to these levels, you need to build data centers in multiple regions, you need to build DeeLearning models for cooling your data centers (https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-ce...), ...

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#280

Post by obulpathi »

thinkloop wrote: post #268
obulpathi wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expert on Cloud Computing here. Short answer is "No". Here is why. Google Cloud has infrastructure that scales to petabytes of data and millions of users. Google primary uses this infrastructure for storing, processing and communicating the Internet. Add the services like Pub/Sub, Dataflow, BigQuery, TensorFlow & CloudML and things like security, communication backbone, ... its near impossible to build Google Cloud o…

> if they focus on building infrastructure, it might slow them down I always found this issue of "focus" a bit strange. Two billion can buy a lot of focus. For example, say there was a separate company smaller than Google that snap outsourced their infrastructure to, allowing them to focus, then they bought that company - it comes out to the same. The technical capabilities is a different story.

By the time the other company builds infrastructure, some other company would have built the product that Snap wants to build.
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