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Snap falls to IPO price

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Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#171

Post by pcurve »

olegkikin wrote: post #158
Rjevski wrote: post #155

I can't understand what are they doing to not make any profits. They are selling ads. Server resources to exchange the pictures are a minor cost, so where is all that ad money going to? If they stopped wasting money on development time making their UX even worse, or stupid stuff like Spectacles, or this: https://www.recode.net/2017/6/17/15824222/snapchat-ferris-wh... - maybe they would actually be making profits righ…

They have 1-5K employees. Even if you take a median salary of $40K, that's $40-200M/year. That's just the salaries with no taxes/overhead and no consideration that IT salaries are generally much higher.

Snapchat has 2000 employees roughly. But why?

And why does twitter need 4000 employees?

What do they all do?

edit: n/m. Their job postings are quite telling.

https://www.snap.com/en-US/jobs/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEli06ID6t8

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#172

Post by dgudkov »

tristanj wrote: post #152
dgudkov wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to hear what revenue (yet alone profit) Messenger has on its own that can justify a $50Bn price tag.

None revenue, just users. Based off their MAUs, if Messenger was an independent chat app they would fetch such valuation. I peg them at $40/user, which isn't so crazy considering WhatsApp was purchased at $35/user and Instagram at $30/user. When Facebook Messenger gets around to copying WeChat (the whole payments and official accounts ecosystem) I expect them to rake in merchant fees for big profit. WhatsApp presentl…

Instagram and WhatsApp have been acquired to a great extent in order to eliminate competition. That more or less justified their acquisition price -- it was cheaper to buy them than to compete. Messenger is a different story.

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#173

Post by kcanini »

chimeracoder wrote: post #121
davidw wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was oversubscribed tho, so I got half the quantity I wanted and sold shortly after opening. This seems like a pretty good reason to auction the shares in order to maximize the amount of money the company takes in. That they very rarely do has always seemed kind of dirty to me.

> This seems like a pretty good reason to auction the shares in order to maximize the amount of money the company takes in. That they very rarely do has always seemed kind of dirty to me. There's nothing dirty about it. Public investors prefer to have a single price, because that's, well, how public markets generally operate after an IPO. They don't want to have to participate in an auction. The purpose of underwriti…

> There's nothing dirty about it. Public investors prefer to have a single price, because that's, well, how public markets generally operate after an IPO.

In what sense is there a single price in public markets? There is a constantly-shifting order book full of many different prices, and the price of the last trade changes by the second.

If IPOs were conducted as a multi-item second-price auction, then everyone could indeed pay the same, fair price, more in line with what you described than the public post-IPO market.

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#174

Post by JumpCrisscross »

gpolak wrote: post #145
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$250 million means I need to fundraise to build my spaceship. With $1.4 billion, I can get started on a Dyson sphere. Depends on your goals.

If you think you can completely encompass a star for quarter the price of an aircraft carrier, damn what's your secret? :)

Get started

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#175

Post by beager »

DrScump wrote: post #62
beager wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More to the point, this "killer feature" is easily cloned by a competitor and shows that the product creates no competitive barriers. Coupled with the fact that the cloner has a much better idea of their users and can target ads much more successfully, this creates a long road for $SNAP.

More to the point, this "killer feature" is easily cloned by a competitor ... which is why I was skeptical of Groupon's value from the outset.

And much has been written of that, and that's exactly the same way I feel about Uber.

(And every time I mention that about Uber on HN, people point out that they can get Uber in any city in the world, so why would anyone who never travels use anything else?)

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#176

Post by rb666 »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #151
nickrivadeneira wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal: I, and a large chunk of my friends and acquaintances use snapchat regularly. We're 30 year olds making good money. In the same way that some messages are best suited for a text message, some for an email, and some for a phone call, there are some messages where snapchat is the best medium.

For what kinds of messages is snapchat the best medium? I've tried using it but can't understand its purpose.

Yes, this ^. I don't understand it either, and I'm not even THAT old. Perhaps you need to be American to get Snap? No clue.

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#177

Post by rb666 »

gdilla wrote: post #154
daveFNbuck wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what kinds of messages is snapchat the best medium? I've tried using it but can't understand its purpose.

that's not the appeal. Snapchat is coveted by it's users because of ephemerality. It grew in reaction to your parents being on fb; in reaction to public, permanent social communication. The users love it because they think it's more authentic - that they're not rehearsing for a contrived selfie or food porn. It's cool cuz they're shooting the shit and not going for likes, and no one outside their sphere is gonna see…

So, like a WhatsApp group basically? Being able to send photos to a specific subset of your contacts?

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#178

Post by beager »

datamingle wrote: post #165
beager wrote: post #8

What does $SNAP need to do to deliver on the hype? Is there anything that can make $SNAP a good investment for anyone other than the parties involved in trading the IPO? I tend to be bearish on $SNAP in general, but I'm interested in the discussion. How do they right the ship and boost back up to that $25-30 range? What's their play?

They do AR & Marketing amazingly and hardware quite well. I am not sure a social network is their best business model though. Hopefully they can pivot to something else using what they are great at.

I like to think I'm not totally underneath a rock, but I don't think I've ever seen their hardware in person. And if I have, I didn't know that it was their hardware. So they either don't do hardware well, or they don't market well.

And even if they did all of that well, is that worth $25-30 per share?

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#179

Post by nickrivadeneira »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #151
nickrivadeneira wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal: I, and a large chunk of my friends and acquaintances use snapchat regularly. We're 30 year olds making good money. In the same way that some messages are best suited for a text message, some for an email, and some for a phone call, there are some messages where snapchat is the best medium.

For what kinds of messages is snapchat the best medium? I've tried using it but can't understand its purpose.

I described it in another comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14740274

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#180

Post by daveFNbuck »

gdilla wrote: post #154
daveFNbuck wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what kinds of messages is snapchat the best medium? I've tried using it but can't understand its purpose.

that's not the appeal. Snapchat is coveted by it's users because of ephemerality. It grew in reaction to your parents being on fb; in reaction to public, permanent social communication. The users love it because they think it's more authentic - that they're not rehearsing for a contrived selfie or food porn. It's cool cuz they're shooting the shit and not going for likes, and no one outside their sphere is gonna see…

Everything you said other than ephemerality applies to every other messaging platform, including Facebook Messenger. How does ephemerality help you shoot the shit better than a text message?
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