Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

investor.snap.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 294 posts

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#171

Post by DeBraid »

chollida1 wrote: post #7

Some quick highlights as to why the stock is being punished. > Adjusted Ebitda Loss $188.2M, Est. Loss $176.9M > 1Q Daily Active Users 166M, Est. 168M > 1Q Rev. $149.6M, Est. $158.6M > 1Q Loss/Shr $2.31 I'm guessing the big issue is the miss on Daily active users. This is the same thing that caused the street ot hammer twitter. Rule of thumb for non profitable tech companies.... If you are a company that isn't making…

EBITDA Margin looks pretty thin. Any time made up earnings are barely higher than sales it's a bad sign.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#172

Post by Mr24601 »

exogeny wrote: post #26

So, let me get this straight: they expect to able to be a viable advertising outlet for brands, despite having no demographic targeting besides a rough guess at geolocation? Hey, cool. Good thing you're paying Google and Amazon about $200 million a year while your user growth plateaus!

Facebook could monetize snap so much better.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#173

Post by eldavido »

imdisappoint wrote: post #82
nikcub wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top 5 companies by market cap in 2007: Petro China, Exxon, GE, China Mobile, Industrian and Commercial Bank of China Top 5 companies by market cap in 2017: Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Berkshire That's a hell of an illusion

It's a good point. But I'm alluding more to budding companies, not established companies. Granted Facebook didn't IPO until 2012. But, as far as I can tell the software industry has contracted into those big 5 tech firms. The siren call of working at a startup and making it is sounding strident. Knowing what you know now, what startup, if any, would you have joined 5 years ago? Would you join any startup now?

I think it's getting harder and harder to justify. Especially given what mid-career devs at these companies are earning. $150-200k base plus 100k/yr or more in stock after a few years, that's far cry from 90k + 0.1% of some junky seed company with about a 1% chance of IPO.

If you look at my comment history you'll see I've been saying this for a while and I think it'll only get more true with further industry consolidation, which will make it both harder to displace incumbents product-wise, and harder to compete with them salary-wise.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#174

Post by Fricken »

aub3bhat wrote: post #108
Fricken wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spectacles aren't really comparable to Google Glass, they're more like an action camera, such as a GoPro, but dumbed down and really easy to use. What counts as high user engagement for such a product? It's the sort of thing you only take out for events and special outings.

If they are supposed to function as action camera, then they are probably the lousiest ones ever designed/made. While I am sure the weather is always perfect at the Venice beach with enough sunlight. For nearly all other scenarios, where you might want a camera, you might NOT want to wear sunglasses. This is the reason why Google Glass had detachable attachment for sunglasses. The fact that they are tied to sunglasse…

I'm not sure you understand what action camera's are for, they're not for late night events, that's what the camera on your phone is good for, and you already have one of those. I've taken them Rock climbing, I took them out on a trail ride, I took them to the zoo, Everybody in my town is hockey crazy, I got shots of fans going nuts after a game. I shot a little cooking video, and they were actually coolest for that (or any type of instructional video)- they're simple enough that your grandma could make a cooking video, edit it, and share it.

The downside is you can't really get the video up on youtube or somewhere where it can easily be shared with anyone other than your Snapchat friends. But whatever, there's probably a half dozen Shenzen startups cobbling together open source Spectacles knockoffs as we speak.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#175

Post by olegkikin »

us0r wrote: post #135
theprop wrote: post #59

This is one of the ugliest financial statements I've ever seen. The multi-billion dollar loss is due mostly to stock compensation, but still their COGS or cost of revenues sold was greater than their revenues. That's probably the first time that's been seen for a sizable software company in the history of the industry. They said their revenue per DAU is $.90 and their server costs per DAU were $.60...so that means se…

"server costs" (Google Cloud) is an affordable $450 million per year commitment. They apparently have 2,360 employees doing who knows what (not growing the user base). My favorite part: "Spiegel laughed out loud when asked if he was worried about Facebook copying his features. “Just because Yahoo has a search box doesn’t mean they’re Google."" We'll check back in a year to see if he feels the same way.

$450M/year to support 160M daily actives seems insane. That's $2.81 per user per year.

That's like paying $234/month in hosting alone for 1K daily actives. What is all that computing power used for?

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#176

Post by ChuckMcM »

cynicalkane wrote: post #157
ChuckMcM wrote: post #111

[Net Loss] primarily due to the recognition of expense related to RSUs with a performance condition satisfied on the effectiveness of the registration statement for our initial public offering. This reads like they gave out $2 BILLION in RSU's that vested if the company went public. That is a pretty sweet payday. EDIT: It is a sweet payday unless you can't sell the stock to pay the taxes owed right away. Then if SNAP…

Snapchat was known for its unusual RSUs--they would evaporate in a set amount of time unless a liquidity event happened. Apparently, if there's what the IRS considers a substantial risk of loss, they're considered unvested and you don't have to pay taxes on them. It looks to me like the situation worked the same on the accounting side of things.

Ok, so that would confirm the 'creative use of tax law' feature which was also part of the dot com world. Thanks for that.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#177

Post by theprop »

us0r wrote: post #135
theprop wrote: post #59

This is one of the ugliest financial statements I've ever seen. The multi-billion dollar loss is due mostly to stock compensation, but still their COGS or cost of revenues sold was greater than their revenues. That's probably the first time that's been seen for a sizable software company in the history of the industry. They said their revenue per DAU is $.90 and their server costs per DAU were $.60...so that means se…

"server costs" (Google Cloud) is an affordable $450 million per year commitment. They apparently have 2,360 employees doing who knows what (not growing the user base). My favorite part: "Spiegel laughed out loud when asked if he was worried about Facebook copying his features. “Just because Yahoo has a search box doesn’t mean they’re Google."" We'll check back in a year to see if he feels the same way.

How many people does it take to make a photograph disappear?

2360 if you're Snapchat!

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#178

Post by ithinkinstereo »

jensvdh wrote: post #168
exogeny wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet he does, because Uber subsidizes over 50% of the ride. If they didn't, no one would take Uber. It's not difficult to know how that particular story is going to end.

What about Airbnb?

I travel frequently, for both business and pleasure. Over 120K miles flown last year; 100+ nights away from home.

I've basically stopped using AirBnB entirely unless there is a 2x difference in price between a comparable hotel.

AirBnB is suffering the same product issues as Uber. Most of the listings now are from professional hosts with multiple properties. This is especially true in "hot" cities. As a result, quality of rentals have really declined from a few years ago, and anecdotally, the prices have also gone up - with all the various fees, it's really not that much cheaper than a hotel. And worse than a hotel, you have little to no recourse when something goes sideways.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#179

Post by jssmith »

EGreg wrote: post #137
thedarkginger wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sluggish user growth probably doesn't look much better when Facebook's overt effort to clone their product seems to be working. Instagram Stories alone already outpaces Snap 200M to 166M. Looks like an uphill battle from here. http://www.thefader.com/2017/04/14/instagram-stories-more-po...

Just out of curiosity, what kinds of things can a startup do to avoid being copied and killed out of the gate by Facebook? Poison pill? Patent?

You make "it's not Facebook" a key part of your value proposition. This was the case for Snap early on, and I believe it's a big part of the reason why they got so far. Their users needed a social network separate from their parents, and they had been trained to fear long-term memory upon which Facebook had built their product and their business model. WhatsApp was also successful in warding off FB Messenger's efforts to clone it, in large part because it offered independence and a very un-Facebooklike product experience.

Facebook has shown an impressive flexibility and willingness to pay the costs of making big changes when they need to, e.g., acquiring WhatsApp or shifting their product toward Stories. Still, a startup go a really long way by building a product that carries "not Facebook" as a key value proposition.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#180

Post by narrowrail »

Edmond wrote: post #37
zkirill wrote: post #9

Is there any public company that releases earnings in realtime rather than quarterly and/or annually? Has this ever been tried? Is there any rational behind earnings being reported quarterly/annually besides it being aligned with existing regulatory and accounting procedures?

You can google accounting and income statement, you'll see why it is done at least quarterly...as a business your operation occurs over a period of time, as such the impact on your books need to be updated accordingly...it is not just a matter of what makes sense but a matter of what is legal, there are accounting rules around how you do things like expensing (rent, depreciating assets..etc) and revenue recognition (…

Quarterly reports (Form 10-Q) are mandated:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_10-Q

Edit: This is only relevant to publicly traded companies.

Post reply on HN