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Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

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Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#261

Post by stvswn »

traviswingo wrote: post #31
jdross wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment reminds me of this incredibly wrong post by DHH: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33...

Alright, touche. Facebook is actually worth what the market claims it to be worth, because of the large amount of people in one place, all willing to tell the world exactly what their interests are. Its a marketing heaven. Snapchat might be worth a lot, but I'm just sick of companies like this being valued so high, simply because they provide literally no benefit to society. If Snapchat went down tomorrow, would it r…

When you say "it's time to incentivize," where would the incentive come from?

VCs should change? Fine, be the VC who only invests in ideas that have social impact. There are tons of VCs like that. They don't get a lot of LP money, but some are doing just fine.

Maybe the LPs should change? Fine, be the LP who doesn't invest in a VC who's investing in Snapchat. You can explain to your investment committee why you're missing out on returns, and when that means that a State pension fund can't pay teachers their pensions -- well there's a fair argument that better returns are good for everyone.

Maybe it's the consumer's fault? Maybe the consumer shouldn't enjoy Snapchat? The great thing is, you're free to not enjoy Snapchat.

Do you think it's the government's fault? Maybe they should prevent people from enjoying Snapchat, or incentivize something else?

I get it: you think there should be financial incentives from the government? Is that it? Tax money to go to the "right kind" of startups, the ones that would get praise on HN from Serious Engineers?

Well, that sounds to me like "we can't get people to voluntarily invest in these ideas, so let's coerce the public into being LPs in risky ventures that weren't good enough for private markets." And, so: no thanks, I'm good.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#262

Post by dublinben »

henshao wrote: post #138
mikeryan wrote: post #12

There's been a bunch of apps out there that have taken off and completely surprised me. But I can't think of another succes that makes me feel out of touch more than a 20B valuation for what launched as "the app that sends disappearing images". Kudos to the team though. Evan and Co, seem to have made a lot of very smart decisions in growing this business.

The main thing is that it's what facebook SHOULD be - a window into the lives of my friends and the people I care about. Facebook now just shows me constant shares of auto-playing videos from various click-bait and viral sites. Every single one of these videos flow up to the top of my newsfeed, but NONE of the people sharing them I would consider a "close friends" or anything like that - their newsfeed algorithm has…

I recommend unfollowing (or even unfriending) those people. You will no longer see their drivel in your newsfeed.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#263

Post by dwaltrip »

gjolund wrote: post #244
macandcheese wrote: post #157

Snapchat is the medium that most closely represents a real life conversation - between individuals, between friend groups, between performers & fans, etc. That's why it's popular and will continue to be so. The beauty of Snapchat is that you don't need to think about what you are posting: It's ephemeral, it's kept close to the vest (you choose explicitly who sees it), and above all, it's without reservation. I don't…

"The beauty of Snapchat is that you don't need to think about what you are posting" Exactly why it holds no value at all for me.

What the poster meant with that statement is that you don't need worry or obsess about the long term reaction of all your hundreds or thousands of followers/friends/acquaintances and what they will think the way you do with something like Facebook (really any other network). In my opinion, this is a major problem with those sites. You automatically and subconsciously become your own personal "brand manager" and "self-marketing team", and are subjected the output of everyone else on the network who is doing the same thing. It's greatly magnified version of the old "you only see everyone else's highlight reel" dynamic. A lot of studies are coming out with interesting results on this and related issues.

On Snapchat, the communications are all shortly lost to the sands of time, like most real-world interactions. This has a big effect on how people orient themselves with the app.

I'm not saying it is or isn't worth $XX billion, but it's not something to disregard without any thought.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#264

Post by zzz157 »

overcast wrote: post #124
pjc50 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text message pictures are IME incredibly unreliable and you may be charged for them. And god help you if you accidentally send one internationally; who knows what it might cost?

So like international data costs over Snapchat?

What? I mean, if YOU are overseas and send a Snapchat, sure. But it's no different from any other data. Sending a MMS picture or video to someone else who is overseas, could be expensive. Snapchat won't incur any fees that all other data wouldn't, such as uploading the picture to Facebook.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#266

Post by jamiequint »

gjolund wrote: post #258
jamiequint wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which had a bigger impact? Almost certainly social media over any kind of liver transplant research. There are 20k liver transplants a year. You realize that social media has created tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of economic value right? Even Twitter, which has struggled has created billions of dollars of economic value. From a utilitarian perspective that is worth far more.

Your opinion would change if someone you cared about needed a new liver.

I'm certain that if I knew someone who needed a liver transplant that I would then personally value liver transplant tech over social media, that's completely beside the point though. My feelings in a given scenario don't make work on liver transplants more important than work on social media. What matters is net impact.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#267

Post by largote »

shostack wrote: post #154
argonaut wrote: post #35

People need to stop focusing their criticism on how stupid the app is or how they're going to lose all their users. It's almost a meme by now of how people say this every time Snapchat is brought up. By now it's a foregone conclusion, and requires active ignorance and not really caring to keep an open mind, to continue to hold onto that belief in the face of tremendous evidence that 1) Snapchat is very popular, 2) Sn…

The monetization piece is interesting, because unlike FB, Snapchat has been all about privacy and anonymity from day one. Their recent ToS change makes it clear that this might not always be the case, and I'm really curious to see how their users react as they get more and more aggressive on monetization. The core functionality doesn't necessarily require the network effect to be useful, unlike Facebook, so there is…

Privacy? They don't allow you to opt-out of Friend Emojis...

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#268

Post by the_watcher »

argonaut wrote: post #234
gjolund wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is debating the popularity of Snapchat. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said "I think there is legitimate reason to be doubtful about the appeal of these products because they have nothing to do with chatting with friends". In my opinion, when Snapchat is truly forced to monetize (such as twitter/fb after ipo) it will dillute the core product to the point that people will search for…

I don't buy this scenario. The failure scenario I have in mind is their monetized products fail to catch on, and they are basically like Twitter - no other products that directly compete in that niche, but not a cash cow either. Or WhatsApp - very popular, not a cash cow.

Common misconception: Twitter has actually pretty steadily increased its revenue per user. Their issue is that their user growth has basically plateaued far short of the ubiquitous level they need.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#269

Post by the_watcher »

swombat wrote: post #212
petercooper wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a heavy Snapchat user and just sending stuff to a partner doesn't seem to be the main use case nowadays - it's stories (basically a video equivalent of Twitter and Instagram mushed together) or throwaway group sending.

Hey Peter. What's the point of stories? Seems like a more limited version of Twitter - you can post photos and videos on twitter too... and there you have 21k followers. Surely a better place to post stuff if you want to reach an audience?

More people use Snapchat actively. They also persist, in that they aren't in a stream that requires the follower to currently be in the app to see.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#270

Post by the_watcher »

gjolund wrote: post #240
mdorazio wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember that. People thought that Facebook couldn't match Google-level ad revenue, but the monetization model was abundantly clear for Facebook as soon as it became obvious how much personal data they were tracking. Facebook IPO'd in 2012, at which point it already had over $4B in revenue, and had been generating revenue for years before that. The much better example is Twitter, which people did indeed say w…

Exactly. All the data showed that Twitter wasn't monetizable, yet people still threw huge valuations at it. There is nothing wrong with building apps and platforms that don't have clear paths to monetization, I just don't see why any sane VC would ever invest in one.

Because good VCs make money on the ones that successfully monetize, not on consistent 10% ROI. That kind of return is great, but just be a PE firm if that's your goal.
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