111–120 of 337 posts
Much greater losses than Twitter's S1. Snap's revenue is 27% higher but 548% greater net losses. Twitter s1: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312513...
I'm wondering where the loss is coming from. I'm skeptical that it's all coming out of the cost of infrastructure and workforce. I know they've had some company acquisitions in the past, so I wonder how that is coming into play.
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If Snap Inc. IPOs at their expected 25B value, Spiegel will be valued at nearly 5 billion (21% ownership), so ~1 million in security per year is not too far-fetched.
Why not just kidnapping insurance?
"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?
Keep in mind that Google's revenue in 2015 was $75 billion. Their hardware and software know-how is fundamental to their ability to make this kind of revenue, so you better believe they're investing more than a measly $400M per year (Snap's $2 billion over 5 years) back into their hardware. This Snap commitment is a drop in their revenue ocean, at 0.5%.
From a non-fiscal perspective, there's a lot of other great reasons to think so. For one, they've been building custom hardware for a decade at least to support the needs of running at the scale they do. Worth checking out this paper [1] and this video [2] if you're interested in some of what they've been doing purely on the networking side. In mid-2015 their newest data centers were pushing 1 petabit per second of cross-sectional bandwidth. [3] That's mind-blowing capacity.
So their internal data center networking is at or near top of class. In addition to this, they've also invested heavily in inter-DC and backbone capacity [4. Again, this is something that you presumably benefit from when, say, distributing your content across the world for faster access.
In addition to that, you get access to all their class-leading scheduling software and state management software that they've developed, refined, and redeveloped over the last 15 years. They know how to take a pool of compute and storage and turn it into solid distributed systems like only a few organizations do. I'm sure they get a good amount of advising from Google's experts somewhere in that $2B, not to mention services like BigTable, Kubernetes, etc. that you can find on their growing products page [5].
So though I can't back my prediction up with solid data, since I'm not a Google exec, I think it's pretty obvious that even $2B is not going to get you anywhere close to Google's existing infrastructure. Definitely not in 5 years.
[1] http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2015/pdf/papers/p183....
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4gOZrUwWmc
[3] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/06/18/custo...
[4] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/06/30/google-laun...
Interesting DAU-growth plateau around the 150M user mark mid-2016. Maybe there is truth to the theories that Instagram is successfully slowing the drain of users to Snapchat?
Anecdotally I have seen a lot of people AND brands/public figures stop using Snapchat in favour of Instagram stories. Stories on each platform don't cross-post well (Snapchat for example puts a massive white border around posts from the camera roll) so it makes sense to commit to one. Personally the thing that makes me use Snapchat less is the 'discover' stuff. 9/10 the stuff their promoting to me is top 10 type arti…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Snap Inc. IPOs at their expected 25B value, Spiegel will be valued at nearly 5 billion (21% ownership), so ~1 million in security per year is not too far-fetched.
Why not just kidnapping insurance?
I am merely pointing out that his security costs are negligible to him/Snap Inc based on their valuation.
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I would disagree about the value they are offering to advertisers. Offering a platform where targeted users actually engage with the ad is huge. I'm no advertiser, but that sounds kind of like the holy grail - the user is not only engaging with the ad, they are then sharing that ad + engagement with their friends.
Is it worth $25bn? Seems like a (massive) stretch, but maybe. Can it still realistically increase in value from this point? Probably not.
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This is boilerplate S1 language.
May I ask why? What would companies get out of doing that?
Companies have to be very conservative but thorough in the "Risk Factors" section, or get sued by investors claiming to have been misled later.
For example some of Google's Risk Factors from 2004:
> New technologies could block our ads, which would harm our business.
> We generate our revenue almost entirely from advertising, and the reduction in spending by or loss of advertisers could seriously harm our business.
> We are susceptible to index spammers who could harm the integrity of our web search results.
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According to Wikipedia, he has $2b in wealth [0]. I have no idea whether $900,000 / year is high or low for someone of that net worth. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Spiegel#Personal_life
Apple Spends $220K on Tim Cook http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/3444424458x0x921...
http://nypost.com/2016/04/28/facebook-has-spent-14-5m-on-zuc...