Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why?
He's your typical unfiltered founder, which inevitably gets on people's nerves: http://i.imgur.com/4h2Y1Uv.png http://i.imgur.com/LPtAqDW.png
Those seem like normal things to say. He's obviously being facetious.
Snap Inc. S-1
281–290 of 337 posts
Re: Snap Inc. S-1
#282My 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.
I'd imagine they have:
- A significant number of engineers to build/run/maintain their application.
- A large(r?) number of sales/business folks to sell filters/advertising/promotion.
- A smaller number of accountants to handle the money.
- A large number of managers to manage the engineers, accountants and business folks.
- A moderate number of HR/recruiters to find more staff.
- A few people to handle various operations stuff (legal teams, people to deal with law enforcement requests and subpoenas etc.)
When you start to get big there's a surprising number of things you need to do.
Re: Snap Inc. S-1
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Why would you write your own Tensorflow and Dart and Go when you can use them free of charge?
Re: Snap Inc. S-1
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
By "cloud computing expert", do you mean Amazon sales shill? It's weird enough that someone on HN would just use that vague credential of "expert" in the first place, but this thread is ridiculous ('round here, usually we recognize experts when they say something along the lines of "Hi, I'm the guy discussed in the article...", or "Hi, I actually wrote that software 15 years ago...").
You know that Snap can hire more than 3 people, right? They can have people working on the infrastructure at the same time that someone else works on "the product" they want to build. That's what happened at Google, and as a side effect, they now have a cloud platform they can rent out.
There are some benefits to using cloud services in some cases. It's rare that 100% cloud is a wise deployment move, especially for companies that operate at Snap-scale.
Re: Snap Inc. S-1
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Why would you write your own Tensorflow and Dart and Go when you can use them free of charge?
That was his/her point.
Re: Snap Inc. S-1
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sort of, but not exactly. https://cloud.google.com/ml/pricing
Re: Snap Inc. S-1
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That's the point I'm trying to make. Snap has, say, 100 employees + $2b. The 100 employees are working on features. The $2b can now go to Google, or to purchase "focus" for in-house infrastructure, there is no slow down in developing features. Now if they can't technologically duplicate what they need using $2b is a different story which I have no opinion on.
Re: Snap Inc. S-1
#288Earlier 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…
Why don't you? Otherwise shut up.
Re: Snap Inc. S-1
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things scale differently in different markets and products... It might be trivial to spin up extra cloud capacity within Google's system and benefit from all the robustness and redundancy they've already designed out. Meanwhile, Amazon is building their own UPS competitor because their infrastructure needs in the real world are specialized enough to be able to benefit. Each case is different and the details drive the…
I think Amazon is building their own UPS because UPS hasn't scaled for them.
TLDR (for my comment) : Amazon are building their own UPS because they can. Any othe arguments in favor of it be it efficiency or costs are secondary.
Longer version: Not sure how Amazon deliveries by UPS are in the US but in the U.K. there are carriers which offered far better delivery service than what is known as Amazon Logistics here in the U.K. Once Amazon started using Amazon Logistics, the level of service dropped significantly. False deivery attempts were common and Prime Next Day were not happening next day 3 out of 5 times. I cancelled my Prime membership.
After about a couple of years I have resubscribed to Prime since it is now much better value AND Amazon Logistics have noticably improved. Next day and even Same day deliveries are indeed happening.
They didn't need to setup Amazon Logistics and suffer poor service quality. There were near perfect couriers (for e.g. DPD they even offer tracking your courier driver on a map in near real time).
Re: Snap Inc. S-1
#290Is anyone else seeing these numbers? How are they pushing for such a high valuation with those kind of losses? I suspect that Snap is merely capitalizing on traditional advertising metrics (engagement, CTR) which don't translate over on their app, and the advertisers just haven't caught on yet. People play with filters because they're funny/amusing, but those impressions don't convert into purchases in the same way o…
> 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…
When it comes to movies, what Rotten Tomatoes has to say is usually more persuasive than a Snapchat lens