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Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

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Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#51

Post by abakker »

pavlov wrote: post #21

”Adults, not teens. Messaging, not Stories. Developing markets, not the U.S.” So... Snap basically wants to be Facebook? Adults, messaging, developing world — Facebook is already enormously entrenched in the overlap of those markets thanks to Messenger and WhatsApp. FB has also shown the ability to clone Snap’s product innovations. I have a feeling 2019 is the year when Snap is acquired. The market cap is already bel…

Who would be the buyer, though? Microsoft? Alibaba? I can't see many acquirers wanting to get into the competitions that snapchat has gotten themselves into.

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#52

Post by ljm »

ethbro wrote: post #25
iamleppert wrote: post #16

They had a working thing and then ruined it. I’m not sure how they managed to do that with a product change. Didn’t they have a way to release changes and measure impact before just forcing it on their entire user base? Once a company gets to this level, they need to recognize the role that luck played into their original product and design. They hit a resonance with people, and it was probably more luck and timing t…

I think it's unsurprising when founders of unicorns eschew A/B testing in favor of vision. Admitting part of their success was luck is tantamount to admitting "I went from nothing to a billionaire because the dice came up right." I don't know many people who would be comfortable truly accepting that. And even fewer who could do so AND be the type of driven person necessary. All while everyone around you is looking to…

Purely anecdotally, the one place I worked at that embraced A/B testing went to such an extreme that it stifled the vision. It became so risk averse that nothing was really happening, yet at the same time the business was not in the place to sustain growth or even profit that way.

This is because the introduction of such a data driven mentality meant the only people empowered to suggest decisions or experiments or approve the work were all in marketing. Because they were basically deciding what workload they wanted and of course you won’t put more on your plate if you don’t have to.

This isn’t to say it’s about data vs. vision. The original success is usually created in large part due to a healthy collaboration between the visionaries, the engineers, and whoever else is in the mix. Once you take one part of the team out of the equation and tend too heavily towards a particular bias then you might well have lost the secret to the initial success.

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#53

Post by _pmf_ »

iamleppert wrote: post #16

They had a working thing and then ruined it. I’m not sure how they managed to do that with a product change. Didn’t they have a way to release changes and measure impact before just forcing it on their entire user base? Once a company gets to this level, they need to recognize the role that luck played into their original product and design. They hit a resonance with people, and it was probably more luck and timing t…

> Once a company gets to this level, they need to recognize the role that luck played into their original product and design. They hit a resonance with people, and it was probably more luck and timing than anything else.

Perfectly stated. "Pivoting from something shiny to an actual business plan" should be SV CEO's prime skill.

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#54

Post by ReverseCold »

askafriend wrote: post #33
iamleppert wrote: post #16

They had a working thing and then ruined it. I’m not sure how they managed to do that with a product change. Didn’t they have a way to release changes and measure impact before just forcing it on their entire user base? Once a company gets to this level, they need to recognize the role that luck played into their original product and design. They hit a resonance with people, and it was probably more luck and timing t…

I think you hit the nail on the head here. There were reports that came out from several sources that Evan ignored all feedback from product and design including hard numbers from early tests. There were apparently several groups internally that tried to stop the massive changes from dropping without adequate testing and iteration. Those groups were overridden by Evan in favor of "vision" and that apparent lack of di…

> He also took a $500mm bonus for successfully executing the IPO at a time when the company lost over $700mm in 2017.

So part of that $700mm loss was his bonus? Meaning if he hadn't taken a bonus the loss would "only" be $200mm?

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#55

Post by DSingularity »

ReverseCold wrote: post #54
askafriend wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. There were reports that came out from several sources that Evan ignored all feedback from product and design including hard numbers from early tests. There were apparently several groups internally that tried to stop the massive changes from dropping without adequate testing and iteration. Those groups were overridden by Evan in favor of "vision" and that apparent lack of di…

> He also took a $500mm bonus for successfully executing the IPO at a time when the company lost over $700mm in 2017. So part of that $700mm loss was his bonus? Meaning if he hadn't taken a bonus the loss would "only" be $200mm?

No, wrong way to interpret that.

He just received a massive bonus in $ value. It was massive because it was lots of Snapchat stock back when it was expensive.

Although it’s quite normal to sell such stock award as soon as they vest, in this case it looks bad.

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#56

Post by askafriend »

ReverseCold wrote: post #54
askafriend wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. There were reports that came out from several sources that Evan ignored all feedback from product and design including hard numbers from early tests. There were apparently several groups internally that tried to stop the massive changes from dropping without adequate testing and iteration. Those groups were overridden by Evan in favor of "vision" and that apparent lack of di…

> He also took a $500mm bonus for successfully executing the IPO at a time when the company lost over $700mm in 2017. So part of that $700mm loss was his bonus? Meaning if he hadn't taken a bonus the loss would "only" be $200mm?

I was a little off on the numbers.

Snap posted a $2.2B loss in Q1 of 2017, it's first quarter as a public company. A lot of that was one-time stock payout to various employees, including a massive bonus to Spiegel which was 3% of Snap worth roughly ~$550mm at the time. If you take out all the one time stock compensation from that quarter, the loss comes out to $188mm.

Here's a Recode article with some sources: https://www.recode.net/2017/5/10/15617740/snapchat-two-billi...

The $700mm loss figure I initially stated for 2017 is likely the loss figure with the one-time stock expenses deducted: https://investor.snap.com/news-releases/2018/02-06-2018-2116...

This stock award made Evan Spiegel the highest paid CEO in America in 2017, that's the kicker.

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#57

Post by tajen »

georgespencer wrote: post #24
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has autoplaying video with sound instead... Brave new world indeed.

Ah apologies - I block that by default. I haven't yet found a way to block the stupid GDPR cookie pop ups.

In addition to the Do Not Track/DNT header, we’ll soon need a Do Not GDPR Me, Do Not Cookie-Warn Me, and No I Won’t Subscribe to Your Newsletter.

I’d love the European Commission to make it forbidden to show popups on a website, to complete the irony.

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#58

Post by tajen »

abakker wrote: post #51
pavlov wrote: post #21

”Adults, not teens. Messaging, not Stories. Developing markets, not the U.S.” So... Snap basically wants to be Facebook? Adults, messaging, developing world — Facebook is already enormously entrenched in the overlap of those markets thanks to Messenger and WhatsApp. FB has also shown the ability to clone Snap’s product innovations. I have a feeling 2019 is the year when Snap is acquired. The market cap is already bel…

Who would be the buyer, though? Microsoft? Alibaba? I can't see many acquirers wanting to get into the competitions that snapchat has gotten themselves into.

Amazon doesn’t have a foot in social networks yet. It could complete their home offer, between Alexa and Prime, what better termination of a supply chain than an entire platform for product placement.

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#59

Post by jsonne »

ljm wrote: post #52
ethbro wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's unsurprising when founders of unicorns eschew A/B testing in favor of vision. Admitting part of their success was luck is tantamount to admitting "I went from nothing to a billionaire because the dice came up right." I don't know many people who would be comfortable truly accepting that. And even fewer who could do so AND be the type of driven person necessary. All while everyone around you is looking to…

Purely anecdotally, the one place I worked at that embraced A/B testing went to such an extreme that it stifled the vision. It became so risk averse that nothing was really happening, yet at the same time the business was not in the place to sustain growth or even profit that way. This is because the introduction of such a data driven mentality meant the only people empowered to suggest decisions or experiments or ap…

Your experience is similar to mine. I'm a marketing consultant so I get to work with a lot of different teams. People that either over-rely on Founder vision AND people that overly rely on data tend to not do well. It's why I've stopped saying data-driven and now say data informed. The best teams have a solid vision, but let the data guide the specific implementation of said vision. You need a healthy mix of both.

Re: Snapchat CEO’s leaked memo on survival

#60

Post by lovich »

hef19898 wrote: post #49
throwaway901234 wrote: post #28

[flagged]

Honestly, how did the mention of soft OKR, spread positivity, lead to post about elections? That a throwaway account was used tells a lot. Not being American, this kind of discours is troubling.

Preface:I'm my opinion all groups in politics currently are capable and engaging in propaganda. What I have seen lately here appears to come from one group

Hacker news appears to have recently entered the targets of the same sort of posters who pioneered the propaganda techniques used in r/t_d during the election. I keep seeing throwaway accounts bring up altright talking points that are barely related to the topic at hand if related at all. Here we have someone equating getting people to vote with liberal partisanship. The other day I had someone tell me the Republican party was the party of tolerance because white men let other people vote and then a continuing stream of wild claims[1].

People espouseing their viewpoint from any given side isn't the problem here, when they give evidence and backed up reasons. This group appears to just be pushing statements they want to be true with no evidence and trying to pull a Gish gallop[2] frequently to derail the conversation into their topics. Luckily the community culture here seems to catch this sort of behavior and kill it quickly

You'll have to set your account to see dead as the comment was flagged to death

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18148520

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

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