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Snap Jumps in Debut After App Maker Raises $3.4B in IPO

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Re: Snap Jumps in Debut After App Maker Raises $3.4B in IPO

#331

Post by prostoalex »

linuxkerneldev wrote: post #34

This $27.8 billion dollar valuation tells me that somewhere along the line, my job and lifestyle have caused me to detach from a significant chunk of society. I've never used Snap or their platform. I don't even really know what the benefit of their service. I am curious if I'm in the minority or if there's lots of developers like me who aren't able to comprehend these valuations.

I'd recommend Tim Wu's "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads" for broader understanding.

The only valuable currency of the information economy is human attention, and those who harvest it most efficiently tend to command higher prices while re-selling it to advertisers, who all vie for a piece of it.

In this sense Snap, Facebook, television networks, books, Netflix, newspapers, churches, 9gag, radio stations, PlayStation Network, billboards, blogs, professional sports leagues and magazines all compete for the same currency and those who accummulate the most get to name their price.

Re: Snap Jumps in Debut After App Maker Raises $3.4B in IPO

#332

Post by __derek__ »

jmharvey wrote: post #134
pm90 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So now we know that there is atleast some appetite for shares with no controlling interest and no indication of paying out a dividend any time soon. A current market cap of 30 Billion is a pretty darn big accomplishment! This is really disturbing. I don't know if its an indicator of too much money in the market, or just the fact that the market itself has expanded so much. Why would investors be OK with losing powe…

It could be an indicator that a lot of people invest without regard for foundational questions like "does this valuation make sense" or "does my ownership interest grant me any control of the company?" And I'll be the first to raise my hand on that front. On the face of it, I'm not really interested in owning a stock like this. But I've stopped picking stocks entirely, now I just invest in the stock market through in…

Vanguard index funds don't participate in IPOs. Their rebalancing occurs on a regular schedule. Constant purchases would undermine the effort to keep fees low.

Re: Snap Jumps in Debut After App Maker Raises $3.4B in IPO

#333

Post by dvt »

vecter wrote: post #326
dvt wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interviewed with Snapchat about 3-4 years ago (sub-100 employees). Did not get an offer, but their interview process was pretty standard and professional. They were giving out 0.001% equity at the time. I'd say it would come out to 250k-500k, but it's very hard to extrapolate. They were already a mega hit with like 10 employees so I doubt anyone that hasn't been there super early (like first 5 employees) will become…

Given they were giving out 0.02-0.07% in 2014, it seems you're off by at least an order of magnitude if not more: https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/139607 .

If those leaks are accurate, I stand corrected. They were advertising 0.001% on Angel.co (when they approached me). See: https://www.quora.com/Is-Snapchat-really-offering-just-0-001...

Re: Snap Jumps in Debut After App Maker Raises $3.4B in IPO

#334

Post by [deleted] »

vecter wrote: post #326
dvt wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interviewed with Snapchat about 3-4 years ago (sub-100 employees). Did not get an offer, but their interview process was pretty standard and professional. They were giving out 0.001% equity at the time. I'd say it would come out to 250k-500k, but it's very hard to extrapolate. They were already a mega hit with like 10 employees so I doubt anyone that hasn't been there super early (like first 5 employees) will become…

Given they were giving out 0.02-0.07% in 2014, it seems you're off by at least an order of magnitude if not more: https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/139607 .

[deleted]

Re: Snap Jumps in Debut After App Maker Raises $3.4B in IPO

#335

Post by dvt »

was_boring wrote: post #290
dvt wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, equity isn't compensation, it's ownership. Second, it's about risk. Third, it's about luck. So, if you get paid a market salary and benefits, you can't really expect to own much of the company that's providing you with that salary and benefits as it's essentially burning money on you. If you came in and said "can I get 1% ownership if I take 15k a year with no benefits" that would be a different story, but tha…

I don't know about years prior, but Snapchat's executive team is making over a million a year. Not much risk at this point.

My comment was in the context of engineering (as that's what I interviewed for). Executive-level positions are a lot more nuanced.

Re: Snap Jumps in Debut After App Maker Raises $3.4B in IPO

#336

Post by snapemployee »

econner wrote: post #321
snapemployee wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

check out this leaked email: wikileaks-DOT-org/sony/emails/emailid/139607 Looks like engineers were offered 10k-35k shares at a $9.90 strike price in Jan of 2014. So $250k - $875k. Not bad, but also not millionaire status. Also ISO's will be taxed heavily.

Snap did a 1 to 10 stock split in July 2014 ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/08/08/snapchat-... ). That means, today, those grants are at least 100k - 350k shares at a $0.99 strike price (assuming no other splits). Or $2,300,000 to $8,050,000. Unless I'm missing something? Edit: Ah the numbers above are actually too low. If you look that email also lists the percentages. 10,000 shares at that time was 0…

I believe that's on preferred shares, not the common stock issued to the employees.

Re: Snap Jumps in Debut After App Maker Raises $3.4B in IPO

#337

Post by angryasian »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #282
angryasian wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, Myspace could have done incredibly well if they focused on their strengths in music early on. Instead they wanted to be a media company going in a bunch of different directions, which sounds very very familiar. Snap is doing publishing with content partners, they announced special formatted tv shows, hardware and glasses, AR and adtech.

Wanting to be big in music = wanting to be a media company, and comes with a similar set of pitfalls, namely being beholden to a bunch of anti-tech established music companies. Also, I'd challenge whether there is room for incredible success. What's the biggest music success? Spotify? Pandora? Compare that to Facebook, and it is clear which direction had more potential.

>big in music = wanting to be a media company

I would disagree, being a publishing company, a movie review company, a comic book company, video company ... these are all things Myspace was attempting, is not the same as being a music company.

Re: Snap Jumps in Debut After App Maker Raises $3.4B in IPO

#338

Post by Trundle »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #190
probe wrote: post #84

The SNAP thesis I like the best is - "Twitter-like growth with FB ARPU". The monetization potential of this company is massive (geofilters, sponsored content, hardware with spectacles, etc.) and there's no direct comp for that. Pokemon Go showed us the bleeding of digital to physical, and Snap has the potential to be the first company to unlock value from it (ex. geofilters). Plus you can view SNAP as a call option o…

> Pokemon Go showed us the bleeding of digital to physical Niantic had another game (Ingress) that Pokemon Go is pretty much a copy-paste of. Compared to P:GO, Ingress was/is not very successful. I think this only shows us how desperate people still were for a real-life Pokemon game (and also one that didn't require buying gaming specific hardware). They put up with a terribly unstable app with few features that got…

Also everyone I encountered when I was playing had AR turned off. It was a fad itself within the fad of pokemon go. Fun for the first like 5 catches and then an annoyance/battery drain.

Re: Snap Jumps in Debut After App Maker Raises $3.4B in IPO

#339

Post by retube »

hueving wrote: post #271
hugs wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, "wait a year" fixes most of these problems.

Well no, it depends on what you are waiting on. Some of the worst horror stories are from people that exercised their options and then waited a year to sell the stock to qualify for long term capital gains. Then the stock subsequently crashed so they owed a massive AMT tax for the difference between strike price and price on exercise and got almost nothing from the actual stock sale.

US tax law is bonkers

Re: Snap Jumps in Debut After App Maker Raises $3.4B in IPO

#340

Post by retube »

linuxkerneldev wrote: post #34

This $27.8 billion dollar valuation tells me that somewhere along the line, my job and lifestyle have caused me to detach from a significant chunk of society. I've never used Snap or their platform. I don't even really know what the benefit of their service. I am curious if I'm in the minority or if there's lots of developers like me who aren't able to comprehend these valuations.

Yeah.... you know I bet there's a lot of 30bn companies out there you've never heard of, or have never used their products. Society is BIG, 7bn people in the world.
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