10 ms·
Snapchat acquires social map app Zenly
- Warvick 9y agoI wonder if Snapchat will manage to get this money back in one way or another. Instagram is a massively popular app, while Zenly - it is HN where I first heard it. Also, 2 million downloads mainly from teens seem to be not so massive. There are bigger and more unique apps. I wonder how often deals like that comes from pressure from VC's rather than actual strategy.
- emsal 9y agoThey're probably going to integrate elements from Zenly into the main Snapchat app is my guess.
- ladon86 9y agoThey already did, Snap Maps launched today.
- lilbobbytables 9y agoYeah, but what I don't get about this, is that building that tech (if it's just a map and pin tracking your friends) is not hard. And certainly wouldn't be hard for Snap. I can't see how 2 million users are worth it either. It really isn't even that many anyways because I'm sure many were already snap users) Unless it's because they really wanted to do Snap map and are basically paying to have a fast implementation and have that many people with it enabled from day one. This way when Instagram copies them it will take a few months.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoI don't think they will directly monetize the map. They'd integrate it with the product to increase engagement.
- arikr 9y agoBased on the generally good approximation of 10% ownership for series B investors, this wasn't a great return (if any) for Benchmark. Pretty nice for the founders though, and likely nice for the users too - Zenly's product requires all/most of your friends to use it for it to be good, which is really hard to do, but Snapchat already has a lot of users, so it'll take Zenly's tech and turn it into something valuable. Seems like a nice outcome overall!
- flylib 9y agoat the upper bounds (350 million) (10% is 35 million) with 22.5 million invested in 9/2016 and the sale shortly after that is a nice flip and a gain of 10+ million
- kornish 9y agoThey definitely got their money back, but venture economics dictate that the fund is paid for by the outlier returns (10 to 100 to 1000x or more) rather than a nice 1.5x.
- omarchowdhury 9y agoBetter than a loss though.
- tinbad 9y agoWith those amounts, everything adds up. $10 million probably pays for a couple years rent for a fancy VC office on sand hill road.
- majani 9y agoIt's possible that preferred stock agreements ensured that the VCs got a better return than X/10
- arikr 9y agoHow do people think Snap will monetize the map? Brand bitmojis? Location ads - e.g. like Waze where you see McDonalds logos on the map? Local events seems like too much logistics/not enough money.
- foota 9y agoSnapchat already has custom event filters that you can pay for.
- hirsin 9y agoYeah, weddings and graduations are a big hit for them. Definitely a new must have for event planners that just gets folded into the cost of the event.
- mayneack 9y agogathering data about users?
- KGIII 9y agoThey might even integrate it enough so that users tell them what specific thing they were doing in that geographical area. "I'm here shopping for shoes!" This would not surprise me.
- koolba 9y agoEvery time I see a company I've never ever heard of get acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars, I have to step back and wonder what an interesting world we live in.
- Apocryphon 9y agoTo be fair, there are probably dozens of such deals every day in traditional non-tech industries.
- jpatokal 9y agoYup. For example, did you know that CK Infrastructure is buying Ista? Ista builds energy meters, and is worth... $4.5B. http://www.reuters.com/article/deals-day-idUSL3N1JI3AN http://www.reuters.com/article/deals-day-idUSL3N1JI3AN
- geekone 9y agoIs this a fair analogy when considering Ista's history ("Clorius is taken over by ista. -1974")? https://www.ista.com/uk/company/facts-figures/history/ https://www.ista.com/uk/company/facts-figures/history/
- samfisher83 9y agoThey also have a billion dollars in revenue, and generate cash.
- rjvir 9y agoYes, like a Tequila company founded by George Clooney getting bought for $1b today
- toomuchtodo 9y agoIs was mentioned on NPR's Marketplace this evening that Clooney and Co's Tequila company was founded mostly by accident. And ended up being worth $1b.
- speeq 9y agoSo who wants to create a location based messaging app with me? Email me [serious].
- mmanfrin 9y ago2 million downloads. $125 - $175 paid per download. Jesus.
- tyingq 9y agoSounds like users are mostly teens or younger too. ::shrug::
- slackoverflower 9y agoI mean FB paid $1b for Instagram's 30m users. $33/user
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- PKop 9y agoOk so... a much better deal then?
- nemild 9y agoInstagram was financially a steal for FB, in retrospect. And no, you can't just say "they paid this much for download, that is dumb". There is a lot of nuance, for example: - Does the company need it to survive or succeed? - Can the acquiring company better monetize or grow the asset? - Are the growth trends exponential, such that a huge amount of other people may soon be using the product? - Is there some strategic advantage to the team - or product category expertise? - Is the product easily defensible? (e.g., strong network effects) I can't speak to this particular acquisition, but there are a number of examples where heavily "overpaying" may actually be a steal in the long term (and of course, the opposite).
- somerandomness 9y agoTrajectory matters more. Valuations are forward-looking.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wonder_bread 9y agoMore than their entire R&D budget for 2016....I sure hope they have something up their sleeves...
- ghughes 9y agoM&A is the new R&D.
- justincormack 9y agoUseful as Macron pushes France as a startup centre to have a large exit like this. Zenly are based in Paris.
- nextstep 9y agoSnap also debuted "Snap Map" location sharing feature today: https://www.snap.com/en-US/news/post/introducing-the-snap-map/ https://www.snap.com/en-US/news/post/introducing-the-snap-ma...
- Kiro 9y agoI presume you didn't click the link you're responding to because the article is as much about Snap Map as it is about the acquisition.
- Jamieee 9y agoThat introducing snap map video makes me cringe so hard it hurts.
- curiousgal 9y agoIt feels straight out of a shitty indie movie.
- josteink 9y ago> It's easy to get started — just pinch to zoom out and view the Map Snapchat is one of my absolute "I'm getting old" triggers. I absolutely cannot use it. The app may have a notification-bubble on it, but when I start I have to swipe left and right randomly for a given period of time, until I finally, -for whatever reason-, land on a page where I can click the thing which caused the notification. Why swiping left or right should "logically" lead to whatever it leads, I cannot tell. Often I find myself wanting to go -back- from some deeply nested screen, and to do that I have to swipe from right to left (as in "drag" the app -forwards-). WTF? And now this. You can zoom out from a screen you never zoomed in to. Because that's clearly obvious. This whole app is a UX disaster of proportions. I absolutely cannot see the appeal, nor how this app gained such a wide user-base. Every time I accidentally side-swipe when trying to scroll (about one on five times or so) and land on some obscure functionality I have no reason why I'm being lead into, I'm getting one inch closer to just deleting the app and using whatever dumbed down web-version exists instead. Can't we please have the big clicky buttons back? Anything except these "magical" swipes and gestures, seemingly only introduced by some weird cargo-cult "gestures are intuitive" following. At least none of those web-versions has stupid "intuitive" gesture-based navigation and random side-swiping bullshit. And that makes them 100x more usable IMO.
- nostrademons 9y agoHeh, I guess Loopt was just a decade too early.
- vit05 9y agoThey have acquired recently another location based app called Placed. It is become pretty clear that they want focus in construct the best platform for Ads and content based on location. Maybe more than age, gender and education. That could be a shift in their started sttrategy when they only talked to Big world companies like Coke, Nike and Unilever.
- good_vibes 9y agoHow long before Facebook adds this to all of it's apps?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- znewman 9y agoWhat exactly does Zenly do and why is it worth millions? It just looks like bitmoji on google maps.
- flanbiscuit 9y agoSnapchat just update for me today and they rolled a new feature that I'm assuming incorporates what Zenly did. You can now share your location with friends and see public/shared locations and stories. I can now zoom around the map looking at snap stories of specific locations without waiting for Snapchat to show it to me. It also shows a heatmap over your map so you can see areas with heavy activity. You can't click on the "hot" areas, it's just info. Edit: Official Snapchat post: https://www.snap.com/en-US/news/post/introducing-the-snap-map/ https://www.snap.com/en-US/news/post/introducing-the-snap-ma...
- lelandbatey 9y agoInteresting, I totally can tap any "hotzone" I want and Snapchat will serve me random videos from that approximate location. It's very interesting to watch sporting events.
- flanbiscuit 9y agoI'll have to try that again. I thought I had tapped on a couple and it didn't work but maybe I just didn't hit the right spot.
- misiti3780 9y agoIs it just me or is that video pretty corny ?
- beamatronic 9y agoNever heard of it
- Aissen 9y agoZenly has one of the best teams here in Paris (and there are lots of great teams). They also have awesome tech, AFAIK they're the first to leverage gomobile to create a cross platform (iOS/Android + backend) "transport" code based on grpc. It's still weird to see the founders exit now since they should still have a lot of runway after last year's round. But it's probably safer given the company doesn't make any money yet.
- bsaul 9y agoLast time i saw a codebase with gomobile, it wasn't a pretty sight... especially on android. Not sure this is the reason they got bought.
- Aissen 9y agoNo, and I didn't say it was, I was just commenting on a very interesting piece of tech that I haven't seen use at this scale elsewhere. It most probably is a combination of factors. The crown is supposedly their tech to get constant location with minimal battery impact.
- shirazi 9y agoGreat win for European startup scene. Congrats to Zenly team.
- vassilyk 9y agoLocation based ads are a really tough nut to crack. If Snap wants to exist in the ad tech business going this route they will have to become bigger than Facebook or they will just fail. There is no interest in driving 3 persons to a store and no one will want to do it, especially agencies, because it's an enormous pain to setup and micro manage. Also, far less spend than video views or other les restrictive objectives. So if this is Snap strategy, good luck to them especially outside of the US and big Snapchat cities like London or Paris. Zenly has definitely an amazing team, but I don't think their tech is that valuable, at least it's not a valid shield against what Facebook could come up with if they feel they should.
- HNSucksAss 9y agoWhatever "Zenly" is. Hopefully Snapchat dies soon.
- rsp1984 9y agoI just can't get my head around this. 1. Why don't they just build it themselves? That would cost probably low single-digit millions and maybe 1 year of time. I don't mean to downplay the work that went into Zenly but it's not like we're talking about self-driving car tech where there's a real technological entry barrier. 2. If, for some strange reason, they can't build it themselves and need to acquire, why do they go for the expensive VC-pumped startup instead of picking one or several of the hundreds of other less expensive options? Can someone please enlighten me?
- Disruptive_Dave 9y agoAnswer to #2: They both have backing from Benchmark?
- majani 9y agoThis is the right answer. VCs helped Snapchat out, so it's time for Snapchat to help their VCs out and balance their books.
- Quarrelsome 9y agoyou get the users?