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Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

185 points by zhuxuefeng1994 10y ago

traviswingo 10y ago
This is total bs. $54 million in revenue with an $18 billion valuation? I understand investing in the "future value" of companies, but this shit is getting out of hand, lol.
- kneel 10y ago
  Their demograph is just graduating high school. They will be very valuable in the future.
  - johnloeber 10y ago
    ...assuming they are able to retain these users. I am not entirely optimistic that Snapchat will manage to hold on to their users in the long term.
  - Phlarp 10y ago
    Isn't this what people said about Facebook when they were at this stage? I feel as though that has failed to materialize, and their new demographic is "relatives over 50 desperate to appear 'hip'"
    - kneel 10y ago
      I'm wondering if it's a coincidence that facebook's revenue was 18 billion last year...
      - Phlarp 10y ago
        More and more it seems the entire excersize is just elaborate cover for Evan and Mark to have a dick measuring contest. Evan: "I'm coming for you, you know you'll have to buy it all sooner or later, try not to insult me with your next offer!" Zuck: "In your dreams kid!"
        freyir 10y ago
        That's an interesting interpretation. I think Zuckerberg is extremely paranoid about Facebook being displaced. Facebook knocked MySpace off the throne, and everyone predicted Facebook would suffer the same fate. It hasn't happened because Zuckerberg has been strategically paranoid. Even after getting a slow start in mobile, he threw ridiculous amounts of money at the situation until they were back on top. I think the present-day VR hype is due to Zuckerberg being paranoid that VR would be the next mobile, and wanting to get ahead of it. Everyone followed his lead and people are betting the farm on VR being the next big thing, when that's just not clear at all. But for Facebook, spending $2B on Oculus was an ounce-of-prevention purchase.
        Phlarp 10y ago
        Zuck tried to do the same with Snapchat a long time (2012 or 2013?) ago but most accounts of the situation have Evan scoffing at the $3 billion offer. Surely he (Zuck) will run out of cash and stock with which to make $20 billion dollar acquisitions sooner rather than later?
    - onewaystreet 10y ago
      People did say that and they were right. Facebook is currently valued at over $300 billion.
      - kirykl 10y ago
        foolishly tho; they have 4B profit on 18B revenue, pretty short of 300B
        mr_tyzic 10y ago
        It's an investor's job to be so foolish.
        kirykl 10y ago
        their P/E ratio is huge, they are not worthless just overvalued
    - freyir 10y ago
      I'm not a fan of Facebook, and I think their core product is fundamentally antisocial and creepy. That said, the company is hugely successful. There's no denying it. While Facebook may be less hip than it once was, the company now owns mobile (Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp). They would have loved to had Snapchat too.
  - mikeryan 10y ago
    Small bit if anecdata. My Niece graduated high school last year started UCLA and promptly switched to Facebook.
  - _RPM 10y ago
    It seems popular with that demographic. It came out when I was like 20 or 21. I was never really into it. My peers were, but it just seemed silly to me.
  - overcast 10y ago
    People growing up will not be using Snapchat, for the exact reason you stated.
    - iliaznk 10y ago
      Well, Mark Suster and Justin Kan are just two examples of gorwnups using Snapchat successfully for video blogging.
      - overcast 10y ago
        They're using it as a business, not what the other 99.9% of people are using it for.
        iliaznk 10y ago
        There's a chance then that more people will be using it for that purpose targeting wider audience.
        overcast 10y ago
        Sure, but the point here is, that is relies on a young user base. They are widely known as having zero loyalty, and will drop and move on to the next big thing on a whim.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    So that's the whole thing ? cultural stockholm syndrom ?
    - Mikushi 10y ago
      Yes, and revenue based in online advertising, which is itself mostly fraud and lies bound to collapse on itself sooner or later.
  - Grue3 10y ago
    Just like MySpace users are very valuable now. Oh, wait.
- jdross 10y ago
  Your comment reminds me of this incredibly wrong post by DHH: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33000000000 https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33...
  - traviswingo 10y ago
    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 really affect anyone? Nope, the World would keep on spinning. It's time to incentivize people to make a difference, not build photo sharing apps. There are real problems in the world that desperately need to be solved, yet we're getting rich off dick picks and calling ourselves the "innovator of the century." Yeah...no thanks.
    - andrepd 10y ago
      That's a symptom of capitalism. When your sole objective is maximizing profit, all else be damned, there is no such thing as working for the greater good or solving any of the critical problems we need to solve to keep our species moving forward. You get photo-sharing apps.
      - stvswn 10y ago
        Yes, this! Too many entrepreneurs are building things people like to use, instead of things people need. What if there was a committee of experts -- leaders in the field -- who decided what startups got investment? They could truly weigh the cost-benefit analysis. Of course, it would only work if there were some enforcement mechanism. So unauthorized coding would need to be outlawed. At least you couldn't spend any money on it. We'd have to pick the right experts, too. That shouldn't be too hard, we could start right here on HN! Lots of smart people. The free market is so random, amoral, and inefficient. Obviously a group of well-educated, experienced software engineers could allocate labor way more efficiently. This can't fail. When we get the pesky market out of the way, the sky's the limit! Progress together! History marches on!
- toosmart4u12 10y ago
  lol you mad bro?
- st3v3r 10y ago
  $54 million in revenue in the year they first tried to get revenue.
CameronBanga 10y ago
I know that I don't "get" venture capital, but is Snapchat even profitable (or close to) yet? If not, and it's going to take nearly 2 billion more to get there, do they really have a product that will ultimately return value? It's the cynic in me, but by a series F, and needing 2 billion, this feels like the sort of funding where early investors are propping the valuation of Snapchat in order to sell off to someone like Yahoo for a crazy amount of money, where the product will go and eventually die. All in the name of advertising. I guess I just don't get it.
- JonFish85 10y ago
  The article says they had revenue of $59m in 2015, so A) they're not profitable and B) they probably aren't even thinking too hard about trying to be. For now, growth numbers are enough to get them buckets of cash, so that's most likely what they're focusing on.
  - carleverett 10y ago
    Given the context, the $59m revenue isn't that bad. They clearly just started trying to monetize in 2015, and averaged double revenue growth each quarter, finishing with over $120m run rate. The $250-$350m forecast for 2016 is completely reasonable. Hitting that target still means a 60x valuation (and props to Snapchat for getting that kind of valuation these days), but I don't think it takes a delusional investor to see Snapchat passing $1b in just another year or two, and soon going well beyond that.
- underyx 10y ago
  >needing 2 billion They probably don't need 2 billion but can grow faster by making use of this money instead of going for some aggressive monetization. I don't get why everyone acts like Snapchat is unable to monetize the platform — they just don't want to if they don't need to yet.
  - edgyswingset 10y ago
    > I don't get why everyone acts like Snapchat is unable to monetize the platform — they just don't want to if they don't need to yet. I'm not convinced that's true. Reportedly, in 2014 they made 3.1 million in revenue and -128 million in net income [0]. I don't think a difference that's two orders of magnitude is a function of "not wanting" to monetize the platform. I'm convinced they're a <100 million/yr in profit product. [0]: http://gawker.com/snapchat-lost-a-ton-of-money-last-year-1706957414 http://gawker.com/snapchat-lost-a-ton-of-money-last-year-170...
mikeryan 10y ago
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.
- iliaznk 10y ago
  It's been much more than only disappearing images for a while.
  - mikeryan 10y ago
    Good point, Edited - I meant what it launched as.
  - arsalanb 10y ago
    Yea. Slap on a pair of dog ears and a filter. And then disappear.
    - iliaznk 10y ago
      Please, I can see you don't know what you're talking about.
    - milesokeefe 10y ago
      Between stories, geo filters, face filters, discover, chat, video chat, trophies, streaks, etc. it's become a bit more than just disappearing images.
- ryanSrich 10y ago
  Not only a product with minimal apparent value, but one that is incredibly difficult to use. It's been suggested that a poor UX and ugly product was actually what helped it take off [1]. That young users knew their parents wouldn't "get it". 1. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/01/snapchat_why_teens_favorite_app_makes_the_facebook_generation_feel_old.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/01/...
georgiecasey 10y ago
forget the valutation, what can a social media app possibly spend nearly $2B on? not like it's uber where they need money to enter new markets. maybe google appspot bumped up the bills lol only logical thing is founders taking a load of money off the table
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
Nobody wants to be the last person to invest in Snapchat.
jbob2000 10y ago
Wow, this is kind of scary. Snapchat is so clearly a fad, I don't know what to say to these investors. Most of their users are youth, who will drop Snapchat in a second once it isn't cool. As soon as moms and marketers get on it, the service is dead. Having your messages disappear was kinda cool, but they're starting to ease up on that a little (you can re-view some snaps, always possible to screenshot the app to save the picture). The whole dog-face, barfing rainbows thing is getting tired now, everyone knows how these work, it's nothing special any more. They have some sponsored content, but the user is under no obligation to view it.
intrasight 10y ago
Limited audience. Limited monitization potential. It's a simple utility app so there is limited IP. I think this valuation will be as fleeting as the images they send. But still kudos to the founders for making hay from something so simple.
bqe 10y ago
Can someone who uses Snapchat routinely tell me why you use it routinely? I've been using it for a few weeks to send a picture or two to the few people I know who use it, but it seems pretty limited. I follow a few "famous" people on it, and they basically just post random images of them walking around NYC or them traveling. I don't yet see the benefit.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  It's more immediate than a text, less intrusive than a call. With a snapchat, you're more likely to open it and respond quickly than a text message, because just like the time limit on images, once the time has passed, the moment is gone. It keeps you hooked in.
  - bqe 10y ago
    Sometimes I worry about a dystopian future of tech where each startup is making small incremental improvements on various minor aspects of life ("It's slightly easier than sending a text!") only to be disrupted by a newcomer with another small improvement on it ("It's even more slightly easier to send than a text than the last startup!"). The big breakthroughs never happen. We just continue to iterate and A/B test ourselves into a convenient oblivion.
    - jwn 10y ago
      Yes, but the marginal gains add up to equal the big breakthroughs! Eventually we increase the ease of texting to the point where we're reading minds and the user never has to touch their phone. I may be serious, I can't tell.
    - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
      It's worth remembering that on a human scale, the Internet is still in its infancy. It took a looooooong period of industrialization before we had anything close to a mass railway system. The Snapchats of today are just looking to do things differently enough to make some coin before the real next big thing arrived. It's like how much customization for AIM and other desktop messenger accounts existed before smartphones, but then after smartphones became ubiquitous, there is no "profile" or anything that takes up real estate. Just your name and your messages. Going back to industrialization, just look at bikes. There were zillions of kinds of bikes in that era but nowadays we only really know 2: on-road and off-road. So even if things seem crazy now, it will only be crazy in retrospect as we live through a more technologically reasonable future.
argonaut 10y ago
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) Snapchat has been around for 5 years now and hasn't gone anywhere, and 3) Users of Snapchat use it very actively. Personally, I think one good way to see why people use the product is to 1) be in a relationship, and 2) regularly send pictures of what you're doing / funny things you've encountered / your face, back and forth with your partner. Where I feel like there is legitimate criticism of Snapchat is their ability to monetize. Unlike Google, there is no purchasing intent. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, there is little ability to target users beyond age/gender/location (and no amount of computer vision in the short term will change that). Their Discover / Live products (which allow you to see snippets from brands / news channels / publishers) are promising but unlike the core product, 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.
- chubot 10y ago
  Don't forget that lots of people said Facebook wasn't monetizable either, just a few years ago.
  - mikeryan 10y ago
    Is Facebook or Twitter the better analogue to Snapchat? Twitter has revenues of around 600M per quarter but lost 80M as its growth stalls.
  - mdorazio 10y ago
    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 wasn't monetizable, still isn't profitable, and has absolutely tanked since its IPO.
sarreph 10y ago
Anyone know where we can download the leaked pitch deck?
wtvanhest 10y ago
Every single person here seems negative about Snapchat. I am 30+, use it occasionally, and see more and more of my older friends signing up. Especially those friends far away from the echo chamber. This fundraising feels smart for investors who want a great return and for the company to use to get to an IPO. If you don't use Snapchat, or haven't used it in a few years, it is probably time you take a second look.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  People on tech forums are typically negative about social media apps and platforms. It's pretty interesting.
  - jakebellacera 10y ago
    Which is ironic, because tech forums, reddit, HN, etc are "social" sites as well.
    - OJFord 10y ago
      It's hard to define 'content' in a way that doesn't make HN and tech forums sound more valuable than 'pure social' platforms, though.
  - kirykl 10y ago
    [Many respectable technologists said that they weren't going to stand for this -- partly because it was a debasement of technology, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of funding series]
  - gjolund 10y ago
    I can only speak for myself here. I have no problem with snapchat the app. I think it is dumb, and don't enjoy using it, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't exist. What I do have a problem with is Snapchat being put on a pedestal, and perpetuating the SV cash grab business model. Get a bunch of users with a trendy app, data mine the shit out of them, and serve them ads until the app folds. There is no lasting value, and it is just the kind of rampant speculation that collapsed our industry in the past.
xhrpost 10y ago
I've been denying the "bubble" hype for a few years now, but seeing numbers like this makes me start to wonder. However, perhaps this is not the effect of a bubble, but simply the effect of companies looking more to raise IPO level money from the private VC sector. http://www.vox.com/2014/6/26/5837638/the-ipo-is-dying-marc-andreessen-explains-why http://www.vox.com/2014/6/26/5837638/the-ipo-is-dying-marc-a...
slackstation 10y ago
Snapchat and the like are low hanging fruit. Someone should start a DAO where users can either see ads or pay a small annual fee to pay for the service and also invest in their own security and sanity. There are programmers who are interested, there is a public that could be convinced. All we need really is to solve the human problem or aligning money with incentives. There should be a high quality social network where you use personal filters rather than relying on central intelligence to do the heavy lifting. Rather than be beholden to people who are willing to invest billions in a free product so that they can traffic ads and/or data mine.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
aznpwnzor 10y ago
I completely agree with the implied valuation, but had slight pause as to what this money could be used for. I think Snapchat has had mild success with monetizing Discover and Stories. However, I think correct course of action is moving from a incentivizing content distribution role to incentivizing content creation role. For example creating partnerships. What you have right now are middling ready to explode and fame driven celebrities like YouTube had before partnership incentives. Snapchat is exactly there in their timeline.
nooron 10y ago
I think Snapchat will own media curation for wearables/AR displays in a few years. They can be the Comcast of your face– you'll be able to flip through a number of channels, from "X NAME OF HOLIDAY" to "THING HAPPENING IN CITY" to Vice to National Geographic. I think their goal is to serve as a demand-generation tool, like TV used to be.
cassieramen 10y ago
How are snapchat employees making out here? It seems like share dilution and even more investors getting exit preference has got to be eroding value like crazy. Perhaps someone with some experience can shed some light here, if you joined snapchat 2 or 3 years ago are you seeing all of your supposed value evaporating away?
- imaginenore 10y ago
  You're forgetting that the valuation of the company has been growing exponentially https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_800_800/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAibAAAAJDA0MmU1YzZjLTE5MDctNDFlYS1iNDkxLTE0Yjg2OTZkMTE5Zg.png https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_800_800/AAEAAQAAAAA... With this latest round it exceeds $20 billion.
  - cassieramen 10y ago
    This is part of what I'm asking. The valuation is growing, as is the amount of money their taking. That means the company now has to exit for that much more in order for employees to see any return. If I'm an early employee I now have to hope they exit for $X billion for my shares to be worth anything. If they exit for less there's a chance I see nothing after investing years of my life and watching them pass on a $3 billion offer. I hope that's not the case.
    - chresko 10y ago
      The company doesn't have to exit for billions in order for early employees to make a substantial return. Being employed now is a different scenario, though.
    - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
      There are other ways of making employees benefit before a liquidity event, but generally what you describe is how all this works, and has worked since the beginning. That's the risk everyone is taking.
    - downandout 10y ago
vgt 10y ago
Shameless Google Cloud plug: Snapchat runs entirely on Google Cloud Platform, and have famously declared that they have 0 Ops people because everything they use is fully-managed and no-ops. This is one of the reasons they are able to deliver features at such a rapid pace - they aren't worried about scale or reliability the way anyone at the scale is on-premise or on AWS/Azure.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  I find it somewhat humorous that the examples GCP reps hold up as use cases are grossly unprofitable startups (Snapchat, Spotify).
  - cm3 10y ago
    What are you implying?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      Exactly what you imply in your sibling post to mine.
      - cm3 10y ago
        Hah, okay.
  - chejazi 10y ago
    It can't hurt that the aforementioned companies, however unprofitable, don't need to spend as much on ops.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      You're trading ops costs to be locked into a platform. Does that matter? Probably not if you're targeting being acquired by Google. If you intend to eventually move to your own equipment, it does matter. There is no such thing as no ops. Only someone else doing ops, no more than I can have TensorFlow write code instead of developers.
ljk 10y ago
For people who read the "How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds" article, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737232, does snapchat implement any of the "traps" the article mentions?
- licnep 10y ago
  I think a few of them, although most social apps are bound to have these kinds of features: hijack#2 (slot machine): you get a notification when you receive a snap but you don't know what it is until you open it hijack#3 (Fear Of Missing Something Important): snapchat stories disappear after 24hr, so if you don't wanna miss content from your friends you must make sure to log in at least once a day hijack#4 (Social Approval): when you post a story you can see how many people viewed it hijack#5 (Social Reciprocity): when someone sends a snap to you personally and not to their story you feel compelled to send something back
gjolund 10y ago
The only real value of Snapchat is that now I dont have to scroll past the innane content snapchat is used for on other social networks. Im not going to say snapchat is or isnt worth $20b. I am going to say that I am sad that so much energy and money is being thrown at such a trivial application. Im a software engineer, and i like solving real problems. I cant imagine working at snapchat and trying to motivate myself to be excited about its useless app.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- nostrademons 10y ago
  You have to understand, though, that most people in the world are not software engineers and interacting with their friends is one of their favorite things to do. The essence of business is solving problems that are important to other people with solutions that are interesting to you.
  - gjolund 10y ago
    Like I said, I am glad that those people have a sandbox to "interact" in. Do you honestly think that sandbox is worth $20b?
    - nostrademons 10y ago
      I think it's worth more, honestly. Probably $100-200B. That sandbox is a lot bigger than the sandbox you & I like to inhabit. The set of folks interested in technical programming & startup-related news probably numbers under 100K. I was an admin for a Harry Potter fansite in college that had 100K registered users, close to 1M when guests were counted, and we were far from the largest Harry Potter fansite. The set of folks who like clickbait, celebrity gossip, hanging out with friends, and making funny faces is a couple orders of magnitude larger than that, probably past a billion. People are very different in their refined passions but alike in their base desires. That means that anything that caters to base desires, by definition, will have a market size much, much bigger than sites that cater to refined passions.
heavenlyhash 10y ago
1.8B. 1,800 Million, right? Stop me when the math goes wrong. Divided into bundles of 200k: 9000x. Let's say each member of a team costs 200k/yr. High for some, low for others, whatever. 1.8B dollars is enough money for a team of OVER NINE THOUSAND people. What... exactly is taking that much effort, here? What is this money fueling? I honestly boggle to imagine.
- dboshardy 10y ago
  That math holds if they are planning to only spend money on hiring those people for 1 year only. More realistically, the money is probably for tech overhead. Server space, software licensing, money for keeping all their servers working for a while (support, replacement servers/drives) etc.
  - MichaelGG 10y ago
    Not being adversarial: What kind of software licensing is Snapchat paying? Dev tools, ok. Some BI/reporting stuff? I'd imagine everything else would be open source, right?
    - askafriend 10y ago
      They run fully on Google App Engine and obviously they have to store all of that heavy video data somewhere so bandwidth costs will be crazy. So a combination of them not having their own infra like FB does, and just the nature of the data they are responsible for is very heavy.
- mathattack 10y ago
  I suspect it's for a lot of other things: Advertising, technology (HW & SW), customer support, paying off initial investors, space, etc.
  - hamana 10y ago
    > paying off initial investors Here comes Charles Ponzi ...
connoredel 10y ago
I wonder if there was any secondary equity sold. Spiegel famously took out $10M back in 2013 and bought a Ferrari. As an investor/BOD member, I think you need to balance between giving founders a taste of something so they don't sell at the first offer or push to IPO too early and potentially giving someone generational wealth when there is still so much work to do. Remember Secret? Founders got $3M while investors with preferred stock even couldn't recoup their loss. I can't help but think employees with common stock are always the losers here. Founders' "common stock" is really given preferential treatment -- it's obviously more liquid. Your average employee didn't get to sell his shares directly to some poor VC before the company went under.
macandcheese 10y ago
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 consider the appropriateness of my content because I choose exactly who receives it, just like how in real life you probably speak differently around your friends than you do your co-workers, or your family, without really thinking about it. Snapchat provides a medium for users to share content without the baggage of social validation that other networks like Twitter and Facebook are beholden to (intentionally and unintentionally). Nobody can see how popular your content is but yourself, and you control the reach down to the individual. No other content network is like this. Plus, you can draw bunny ears on people.
- gjolund 10y ago
  "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.
  - dwaltrip 10y ago
    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.
- 10y ago
cpach 10y ago
Wow. I had no idea investment rounds were in the size of billions these days. Perhaps not so surprising though that investors wants larger yields than what the public stock markets can offer.
fitzwatermellow 10y ago
Currently developing tools to do market research and user analytics on Instagram. Experience so far with the Instagram API is quite positive. Take a look at the endpoints on their dev page and its immediately evident: Instagram exposes a lot of precious data. Consequently, it is the platform of choice for users who accept sponsorship for posts. Also, when reaching out to the Instagram team about improving tag discovery and search, they were very amenable :) If anyone from Snapchat is monitoring this convo, I would implore you guys to prioritize your API rollout. Provide the tools that allow your users to be able to make data driven decisions. Building an ecosystem of creators who can figure out how to monetize their Stories better than any one else can is "the key"
the_watcher 10y ago
I've been impressed with Snapchat, and generally think they are moving in the right the direction. That said, can someone please explain what they are spending all this money on? They've raised over $2.5B. That's simply an astounding amount of money.
EGreg 10y ago
I love how they are not doing an IPO
kevando 10y ago
When you look up hive mind in the dictionary, you will find this thread.

185 points by zhuxuefeng1994 10y ago

This is total bs. $54 million in revenue with an $18 billion valuation? I understand investing in the "future value" of companies, but this shit is getting out of hand, lol.

kneel 10y ago
Their demograph is just graduating high school. They will be very valuable in the future.
- johnloeber 10y ago
  ...assuming they are able to retain these users. I am not entirely optimistic that Snapchat will manage to hold on to their users in the long term.
- Phlarp 10y ago
  Isn't this what people said about Facebook when they were at this stage? I feel as though that has failed to materialize, and their new demographic is "relatives over 50 desperate to appear 'hip'"
  - kneel 10y ago
    I'm wondering if it's a coincidence that facebook's revenue was 18 billion last year...
    - Phlarp 10y ago
      More and more it seems the entire excersize is just elaborate cover for Evan and Mark to have a dick measuring contest. Evan: "I'm coming for you, you know you'll have to buy it all sooner or later, try not to insult me with your next offer!" Zuck: "In your dreams kid!"
      - freyir 10y ago
        That's an interesting interpretation. I think Zuckerberg is extremely paranoid about Facebook being displaced. Facebook knocked MySpace off the throne, and everyone predicted Facebook would suffer the same fate. It hasn't happened because Zuckerberg has been strategically paranoid. Even after getting a slow start in mobile, he threw ridiculous amounts of money at the situation until they were back on top. I think the present-day VR hype is due to Zuckerberg being paranoid that VR would be the next mobile, and wanting to get ahead of it. Everyone followed his lead and people are betting the farm on VR being the next big thing, when that's just not clear at all. But for Facebook, spending $2B on Oculus was an ounce-of-prevention purchase.
        Phlarp 10y ago
        Zuck tried to do the same with Snapchat a long time (2012 or 2013?) ago but most accounts of the situation have Evan scoffing at the $3 billion offer. Surely he (Zuck) will run out of cash and stock with which to make $20 billion dollar acquisitions sooner rather than later?
  - onewaystreet 10y ago
    People did say that and they were right. Facebook is currently valued at over $300 billion.
    - kirykl 10y ago
      foolishly tho; they have 4B profit on 18B revenue, pretty short of 300B
      - mr_tyzic 10y ago
        It's an investor's job to be so foolish.
        kirykl 10y ago
        their P/E ratio is huge, they are not worthless just overvalued
  - freyir 10y ago
    I'm not a fan of Facebook, and I think their core product is fundamentally antisocial and creepy. That said, the company is hugely successful. There's no denying it. While Facebook may be less hip than it once was, the company now owns mobile (Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp). They would have loved to had Snapchat too.
- mikeryan 10y ago
  Small bit if anecdata. My Niece graduated high school last year started UCLA and promptly switched to Facebook.
- _RPM 10y ago
  It seems popular with that demographic. It came out when I was like 20 or 21. I was never really into it. My peers were, but it just seemed silly to me.
- overcast 10y ago
  People growing up will not be using Snapchat, for the exact reason you stated.
  - iliaznk 10y ago
    Well, Mark Suster and Justin Kan are just two examples of gorwnups using Snapchat successfully for video blogging.
    - overcast 10y ago
      They're using it as a business, not what the other 99.9% of people are using it for.
      - iliaznk 10y ago
        There's a chance then that more people will be using it for that purpose targeting wider audience.
        overcast 10y ago
        Sure, but the point here is, that is relies on a young user base. They are widely known as having zero loyalty, and will drop and move on to the next big thing on a whim.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  So that's the whole thing ? cultural stockholm syndrom ?
  - Mikushi 10y ago
    Yes, and revenue based in online advertising, which is itself mostly fraud and lies bound to collapse on itself sooner or later.
- Grue3 10y ago
  Just like MySpace users are very valuable now. Oh, wait.
jdross 10y ago
Your comment reminds me of this incredibly wrong post by DHH: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33000000000 https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33...
- traviswingo 10y ago
  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 really affect anyone? Nope, the World would keep on spinning. It's time to incentivize people to make a difference, not build photo sharing apps. There are real problems in the world that desperately need to be solved, yet we're getting rich off dick picks and calling ourselves the "innovator of the century." Yeah...no thanks.
  - andrepd 10y ago
    That's a symptom of capitalism. When your sole objective is maximizing profit, all else be damned, there is no such thing as working for the greater good or solving any of the critical problems we need to solve to keep our species moving forward. You get photo-sharing apps.
    - stvswn 10y ago
      Yes, this! Too many entrepreneurs are building things people like to use, instead of things people need. What if there was a committee of experts -- leaders in the field -- who decided what startups got investment? They could truly weigh the cost-benefit analysis. Of course, it would only work if there were some enforcement mechanism. So unauthorized coding would need to be outlawed. At least you couldn't spend any money on it. We'd have to pick the right experts, too. That shouldn't be too hard, we could start right here on HN! Lots of smart people. The free market is so random, amoral, and inefficient. Obviously a group of well-educated, experienced software engineers could allocate labor way more efficiently. This can't fail. When we get the pesky market out of the way, the sky's the limit! Progress together! History marches on!
toosmart4u12 10y ago
lol you mad bro?
st3v3r 10y ago
$54 million in revenue in the year they first tried to get revenue.

CameronBanga 10y ago

I know that I don't "get" venture capital, but is Snapchat even profitable (or close to) yet? If not, and it's going to take nearly 2 billion more to get there, do they really have a product that will ultimately return value? It's the cynic in me, but by a series F, and needing 2 billion, this feels like the sort of funding where early investors are propping the valuation of Snapchat in order to sell off to someone like Yahoo for a crazy amount of money, where the product will go and eventually die. All in the name of advertising. I guess I just don't get it.

JonFish85 10y ago
The article says they had revenue of $59m in 2015, so A) they're not profitable and B) they probably aren't even thinking too hard about trying to be. For now, growth numbers are enough to get them buckets of cash, so that's most likely what they're focusing on.
- carleverett 10y ago
  Given the context, the $59m revenue isn't that bad. They clearly just started trying to monetize in 2015, and averaged double revenue growth each quarter, finishing with over $120m run rate. The $250-$350m forecast for 2016 is completely reasonable. Hitting that target still means a 60x valuation (and props to Snapchat for getting that kind of valuation these days), but I don't think it takes a delusional investor to see Snapchat passing $1b in just another year or two, and soon going well beyond that.
underyx 10y ago
>needing 2 billion They probably don't need 2 billion but can grow faster by making use of this money instead of going for some aggressive monetization. I don't get why everyone acts like Snapchat is unable to monetize the platform — they just don't want to if they don't need to yet.
- edgyswingset 10y ago
  > I don't get why everyone acts like Snapchat is unable to monetize the platform — they just don't want to if they don't need to yet. I'm not convinced that's true. Reportedly, in 2014 they made 3.1 million in revenue and -128 million in net income [0]. I don't think a difference that's two orders of magnitude is a function of "not wanting" to monetize the platform. I'm convinced they're a <100 million/yr in profit product. [0]: http://gawker.com/snapchat-lost-a-ton-of-money-last-year-1706957414 http://gawker.com/snapchat-lost-a-ton-of-money-last-year-170...

mikeryan 10y ago

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.

iliaznk 10y ago
It's been much more than only disappearing images for a while.
- mikeryan 10y ago
  Good point, Edited - I meant what it launched as.
- arsalanb 10y ago
  Yea. Slap on a pair of dog ears and a filter. And then disappear.
  - iliaznk 10y ago
    Please, I can see you don't know what you're talking about.
  - milesokeefe 10y ago
    Between stories, geo filters, face filters, discover, chat, video chat, trophies, streaks, etc. it's become a bit more than just disappearing images.
ryanSrich 10y ago
Not only a product with minimal apparent value, but one that is incredibly difficult to use. It's been suggested that a poor UX and ugly product was actually what helped it take off [1]. That young users knew their parents wouldn't "get it". 1. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/01/snapchat_why_teens_favorite_app_makes_the_facebook_generation_feel_old.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/01/...

georgiecasey 10y ago

forget the valutation, what can a social media app possibly spend nearly $2B on? not like it's uber where they need money to enter new markets. maybe google appspot bumped up the bills lol only logical thing is founders taking a load of money off the table

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

Nobody wants to be the last person to invest in Snapchat.

jbob2000 10y ago

Wow, this is kind of scary. Snapchat is so clearly a fad, I don't know what to say to these investors. Most of their users are youth, who will drop Snapchat in a second once it isn't cool. As soon as moms and marketers get on it, the service is dead. Having your messages disappear was kinda cool, but they're starting to ease up on that a little (you can re-view some snaps, always possible to screenshot the app to save the picture). The whole dog-face, barfing rainbows thing is getting tired now, everyone knows how these work, it's nothing special any more. They have some sponsored content, but the user is under no obligation to view it.

intrasight 10y ago

Limited audience. Limited monitization potential. It's a simple utility app so there is limited IP. I think this valuation will be as fleeting as the images they send. But still kudos to the founders for making hay from something so simple.

bqe 10y ago

Can someone who uses Snapchat routinely tell me why you use it routinely? I've been using it for a few weeks to send a picture or two to the few people I know who use it, but it seems pretty limited. I follow a few "famous" people on it, and they basically just post random images of them walking around NYC or them traveling. I don't yet see the benefit.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
It's more immediate than a text, less intrusive than a call. With a snapchat, you're more likely to open it and respond quickly than a text message, because just like the time limit on images, once the time has passed, the moment is gone. It keeps you hooked in.
- bqe 10y ago
  Sometimes I worry about a dystopian future of tech where each startup is making small incremental improvements on various minor aspects of life ("It's slightly easier than sending a text!") only to be disrupted by a newcomer with another small improvement on it ("It's even more slightly easier to send than a text than the last startup!"). The big breakthroughs never happen. We just continue to iterate and A/B test ourselves into a convenient oblivion.
  - jwn 10y ago
    Yes, but the marginal gains add up to equal the big breakthroughs! Eventually we increase the ease of texting to the point where we're reading minds and the user never has to touch their phone. I may be serious, I can't tell.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    It's worth remembering that on a human scale, the Internet is still in its infancy. It took a looooooong period of industrialization before we had anything close to a mass railway system. The Snapchats of today are just looking to do things differently enough to make some coin before the real next big thing arrived. It's like how much customization for AIM and other desktop messenger accounts existed before smartphones, but then after smartphones became ubiquitous, there is no "profile" or anything that takes up real estate. Just your name and your messages. Going back to industrialization, just look at bikes. There were zillions of kinds of bikes in that era but nowadays we only really know 2: on-road and off-road. So even if things seem crazy now, it will only be crazy in retrospect as we live through a more technologically reasonable future.

argonaut 10y ago

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) Snapchat has been around for 5 years now and hasn't gone anywhere, and 3) Users of Snapchat use it very actively. Personally, I think one good way to see why people use the product is to 1) be in a relationship, and 2) regularly send pictures of what you're doing / funny things you've encountered / your face, back and forth with your partner. Where I feel like there is legitimate criticism of Snapchat is their ability to monetize. Unlike Google, there is no purchasing intent. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, there is little ability to target users beyond age/gender/location (and no amount of computer vision in the short term will change that). Their Discover / Live products (which allow you to see snippets from brands / news channels / publishers) are promising but unlike the core product, 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.

chubot 10y ago
Don't forget that lots of people said Facebook wasn't monetizable either, just a few years ago.
- mikeryan 10y ago
  Is Facebook or Twitter the better analogue to Snapchat? Twitter has revenues of around 600M per quarter but lost 80M as its growth stalls.
- mdorazio 10y ago
  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 wasn't monetizable, still isn't profitable, and has absolutely tanked since its IPO.

sarreph 10y ago

Anyone know where we can download the leaked pitch deck?

wtvanhest 10y ago

Every single person here seems negative about Snapchat. I am 30+, use it occasionally, and see more and more of my older friends signing up. Especially those friends far away from the echo chamber. This fundraising feels smart for investors who want a great return and for the company to use to get to an IPO. If you don't use Snapchat, or haven't used it in a few years, it is probably time you take a second look.

sotojuan 10y ago
People on tech forums are typically negative about social media apps and platforms. It's pretty interesting.
- jakebellacera 10y ago
  Which is ironic, because tech forums, reddit, HN, etc are "social" sites as well.
  - OJFord 10y ago
    It's hard to define 'content' in a way that doesn't make HN and tech forums sound more valuable than 'pure social' platforms, though.
- kirykl 10y ago
  [Many respectable technologists said that they weren't going to stand for this -- partly because it was a debasement of technology, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of funding series]
- gjolund 10y ago
  I can only speak for myself here. I have no problem with snapchat the app. I think it is dumb, and don't enjoy using it, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't exist. What I do have a problem with is Snapchat being put on a pedestal, and perpetuating the SV cash grab business model. Get a bunch of users with a trendy app, data mine the shit out of them, and serve them ads until the app folds. There is no lasting value, and it is just the kind of rampant speculation that collapsed our industry in the past.

xhrpost 10y ago

I've been denying the "bubble" hype for a few years now, but seeing numbers like this makes me start to wonder. However, perhaps this is not the effect of a bubble, but simply the effect of companies looking more to raise IPO level money from the private VC sector. http://www.vox.com/2014/6/26/5837638/the-ipo-is-dying-marc-andreessen-explains-why http://www.vox.com/2014/6/26/5837638/the-ipo-is-dying-marc-a...

slackstation 10y ago

Snapchat and the like are low hanging fruit. Someone should start a DAO where users can either see ads or pay a small annual fee to pay for the service and also invest in their own security and sanity. There are programmers who are interested, there is a public that could be convinced. All we need really is to solve the human problem or aligning money with incentives. There should be a high quality social network where you use personal filters rather than relying on central intelligence to do the heavy lifting. Rather than be beholden to people who are willing to invest billions in a free product so that they can traffic ads and/or data mine.

deleted 10y ago

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aznpwnzor 10y ago

I completely agree with the implied valuation, but had slight pause as to what this money could be used for. I think Snapchat has had mild success with monetizing Discover and Stories. However, I think correct course of action is moving from a incentivizing content distribution role to incentivizing content creation role. For example creating partnerships. What you have right now are middling ready to explode and fame driven celebrities like YouTube had before partnership incentives. Snapchat is exactly there in their timeline.

nooron 10y ago

I think Snapchat will own media curation for wearables/AR displays in a few years. They can be the Comcast of your face– you'll be able to flip through a number of channels, from "X NAME OF HOLIDAY" to "THING HAPPENING IN CITY" to Vice to National Geographic. I think their goal is to serve as a demand-generation tool, like TV used to be.

cassieramen 10y ago

How are snapchat employees making out here? It seems like share dilution and even more investors getting exit preference has got to be eroding value like crazy. Perhaps someone with some experience can shed some light here, if you joined snapchat 2 or 3 years ago are you seeing all of your supposed value evaporating away?

imaginenore 10y ago
You're forgetting that the valuation of the company has been growing exponentially https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_800_800/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAibAAAAJDA0MmU1YzZjLTE5MDctNDFlYS1iNDkxLTE0Yjg2OTZkMTE5Zg.png https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_800_800/AAEAAQAAAAA... With this latest round it exceeds $20 billion.
- cassieramen 10y ago
  This is part of what I'm asking. The valuation is growing, as is the amount of money their taking. That means the company now has to exit for that much more in order for employees to see any return. If I'm an early employee I now have to hope they exit for $X billion for my shares to be worth anything. If they exit for less there's a chance I see nothing after investing years of my life and watching them pass on a $3 billion offer. I hope that's not the case.
  - chresko 10y ago
    The company doesn't have to exit for billions in order for early employees to make a substantial return. Being employed now is a different scenario, though.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    There are other ways of making employees benefit before a liquidity event, but generally what you describe is how all this works, and has worked since the beginning. That's the risk everyone is taking.
  - downandout 10y ago

vgt 10y ago

Shameless Google Cloud plug: Snapchat runs entirely on Google Cloud Platform, and have famously declared that they have 0 Ops people because everything they use is fully-managed and no-ops. This is one of the reasons they are able to deliver features at such a rapid pace - they aren't worried about scale or reliability the way anyone at the scale is on-premise or on AWS/Azure.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
I find it somewhat humorous that the examples GCP reps hold up as use cases are grossly unprofitable startups (Snapchat, Spotify).
- cm3 10y ago
  What are you implying?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Exactly what you imply in your sibling post to mine.
    - cm3 10y ago
      Hah, okay.
- chejazi 10y ago
  It can't hurt that the aforementioned companies, however unprofitable, don't need to spend as much on ops.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    You're trading ops costs to be locked into a platform. Does that matter? Probably not if you're targeting being acquired by Google. If you intend to eventually move to your own equipment, it does matter. There is no such thing as no ops. Only someone else doing ops, no more than I can have TensorFlow write code instead of developers.

ljk 10y ago

For people who read the "How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds" article, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737232, does snapchat implement any of the "traps" the article mentions?

licnep 10y ago
I think a few of them, although most social apps are bound to have these kinds of features: hijack#2 (slot machine): you get a notification when you receive a snap but you don't know what it is until you open it hijack#3 (Fear Of Missing Something Important): snapchat stories disappear after 24hr, so if you don't wanna miss content from your friends you must make sure to log in at least once a day hijack#4 (Social Approval): when you post a story you can see how many people viewed it hijack#5 (Social Reciprocity): when someone sends a snap to you personally and not to their story you feel compelled to send something back

gjolund 10y ago

The only real value of Snapchat is that now I dont have to scroll past the innane content snapchat is used for on other social networks. Im not going to say snapchat is or isnt worth $20b. I am going to say that I am sad that so much energy and money is being thrown at such a trivial application. Im a software engineer, and i like solving real problems. I cant imagine working at snapchat and trying to motivate myself to be excited about its useless app.

deleted 10y ago
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nostrademons 10y ago
You have to understand, though, that most people in the world are not software engineers and interacting with their friends is one of their favorite things to do. The essence of business is solving problems that are important to other people with solutions that are interesting to you.
- gjolund 10y ago
  Like I said, I am glad that those people have a sandbox to "interact" in. Do you honestly think that sandbox is worth $20b?
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    I think it's worth more, honestly. Probably $100-200B. That sandbox is a lot bigger than the sandbox you & I like to inhabit. The set of folks interested in technical programming & startup-related news probably numbers under 100K. I was an admin for a Harry Potter fansite in college that had 100K registered users, close to 1M when guests were counted, and we were far from the largest Harry Potter fansite. The set of folks who like clickbait, celebrity gossip, hanging out with friends, and making funny faces is a couple orders of magnitude larger than that, probably past a billion. People are very different in their refined passions but alike in their base desires. That means that anything that caters to base desires, by definition, will have a market size much, much bigger than sites that cater to refined passions.

heavenlyhash 10y ago

1.8B. 1,800 Million, right? Stop me when the math goes wrong. Divided into bundles of 200k: 9000x. Let's say each member of a team costs 200k/yr. High for some, low for others, whatever. 1.8B dollars is enough money for a team of OVER NINE THOUSAND people. What... exactly is taking that much effort, here? What is this money fueling? I honestly boggle to imagine.

dboshardy 10y ago
That math holds if they are planning to only spend money on hiring those people for 1 year only. More realistically, the money is probably for tech overhead. Server space, software licensing, money for keeping all their servers working for a while (support, replacement servers/drives) etc.
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  Not being adversarial: What kind of software licensing is Snapchat paying? Dev tools, ok. Some BI/reporting stuff? I'd imagine everything else would be open source, right?
  - askafriend 10y ago
    They run fully on Google App Engine and obviously they have to store all of that heavy video data somewhere so bandwidth costs will be crazy. So a combination of them not having their own infra like FB does, and just the nature of the data they are responsible for is very heavy.
mathattack 10y ago
I suspect it's for a lot of other things: Advertising, technology (HW & SW), customer support, paying off initial investors, space, etc.
- hamana 10y ago
  > paying off initial investors Here comes Charles Ponzi ...

connoredel 10y ago

I wonder if there was any secondary equity sold. Spiegel famously took out $10M back in 2013 and bought a Ferrari. As an investor/BOD member, I think you need to balance between giving founders a taste of something so they don't sell at the first offer or push to IPO too early and potentially giving someone generational wealth when there is still so much work to do. Remember Secret? Founders got $3M while investors with preferred stock even couldn't recoup their loss. I can't help but think employees with common stock are always the losers here. Founders' "common stock" is really given preferential treatment -- it's obviously more liquid. Your average employee didn't get to sell his shares directly to some poor VC before the company went under.

macandcheese 10y ago

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 consider the appropriateness of my content because I choose exactly who receives it, just like how in real life you probably speak differently around your friends than you do your co-workers, or your family, without really thinking about it. Snapchat provides a medium for users to share content without the baggage of social validation that other networks like Twitter and Facebook are beholden to (intentionally and unintentionally). Nobody can see how popular your content is but yourself, and you control the reach down to the individual. No other content network is like this. Plus, you can draw bunny ears on people.

gjolund 10y ago
"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.
- dwaltrip 10y ago
  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.
10y ago

cpach 10y ago

Wow. I had no idea investment rounds were in the size of billions these days. Perhaps not so surprising though that investors wants larger yields than what the public stock markets can offer.

fitzwatermellow 10y ago

Currently developing tools to do market research and user analytics on Instagram. Experience so far with the Instagram API is quite positive. Take a look at the endpoints on their dev page and its immediately evident: Instagram exposes a lot of precious data. Consequently, it is the platform of choice for users who accept sponsorship for posts. Also, when reaching out to the Instagram team about improving tag discovery and search, they were very amenable :) If anyone from Snapchat is monitoring this convo, I would implore you guys to prioritize your API rollout. Provide the tools that allow your users to be able to make data driven decisions. Building an ecosystem of creators who can figure out how to monetize their Stories better than any one else can is "the key"

the_watcher 10y ago

I've been impressed with Snapchat, and generally think they are moving in the right the direction. That said, can someone please explain what they are spending all this money on? They've raised over $2.5B. That's simply an astounding amount of money.

EGreg 10y ago

I love how they are not doing an IPO

kevando 10y ago

When you look up hive mind in the dictionary, you will find this thread.