> Nearly all senior executives who worked with him before the IPO are gone, and more than 10 senior employees have departed in the past year.
If you want to retain good people, you need to give them real input and control.
Senior managers were trying to prevent a disaster and Spiegel did not listen to them -- but even if every decision he made had turned out to be correct, his leadership style still would have alienated many of them to the point they would have wanted to leave. These are successful people who have no problem finding other opportunities.
Speigal is yet another disciple of the Steve Jobs school of management. The idea that if you are an asshole to everyone and care a lot about fonts, you’ll repeat the success of Apple. It’s a toxic notion of startup culture and it needs to die.
But on some level it worked for Steve Jobs, arguably it worked two times. What are the differences that made it work out for Jobs, but didn’t make it work out for Evan Spiegel to the same degree?
Jobs was right more often and despite everything, people still wanted to work with him. I guess the answer is “you can be an asshole if you’re a once-in-a-generation product developer with charisma”. Otherwise, stick to the tried and tested ways of using a team as a lever.
Perhaps in twenty years we will hear about “awful conditions at Tesla but I knew we were changing the world” or some such.
How about “You can be an asshole if you’re a once-in-many-generations product genius with charisma”.
I have yet to see a SINGLE sign of Evan any where close to Steve Jobs quality. Evan may be good, but he is not a genius like Steve. The only one praising are his VC which during Pre IPO era were constantly spamming twitter about how good his Keynote and unseen since Steve passed away.
Yeah, I’m fine with that. Essentially, Steve Jobs was exceptional so everyone tolerated exceptionally shitty behaviour from him. If you’re not exceptional, nothing useful is going to come of acting the same way.
I will never understand the desire to radically change an interface on any product <10 years old. Especially Snap's, as I don't remember anyone complaining about the interface. Instead, why not make your app use less battery power and improve the camera's functionality? Those types of improvement are universally appreciated, yet the least likely to be implemented.
> Especially Snap's, as I don't remember anyone complaining about the interface.
Surely you’re joking? I make software for a living and I was utterly and completely lost in Snapchat. Easily the most confusing software I’ve used in a long time.
I think he’s referring to Snapchat’s initial UI around 2013. This was the best UI - one single list of all your sent & received snaps and that’s it. No stories, no “discover”, no bullshit. Just double tap on any contact you want to send a snap to and you’re good to go.
There was also this lovely feature where you could see anyone’s “best friends” (aka who’s banging who).
As someone who’s Snapchat’s target market I greatly miss all of that. After they ruined the app I deleted my account and never looked back.
Indeed. Similar to how young people will read books while their parents barely finish the sensational short articles in a newspaper. They seem to be more willing to figure things out, especially combined with their tribal actions like going to great lengths to make sure that everything they wear is black, or has a certain logo on it, or that they only listen to particular music. If a particular social app has a gate, then it can be all the better for them. [1]
Not to say that making your app unnecessarily annoying is grounds for success! There were probably 500 apps on the very same day as Snapchat launched that you never heard about.
[1] No peer reviewed study or anything. Just, you know, kids.
Very good points. That idea of creating something for kids that others are not/not willing to figure out, is really fascinating. Probably happens most of the time unintentionally.
Snap, and also Twitter, are in a bit of a bind. They can't change anything without alienating some of their most passionate users, but if they change nothing they will stagnate and cede all of the possible benefits of innovation to their competitors. A company that lets its competitors come up with all the new ideas is probably not going to survive very long.
It's understandable that Snap wanted to improve its design. On principle there is nothing wrong with that, but that's not what they actually did because the CEO ignored a lot of warnings that the changes were not improvements.
> A company that lets its competitors come up with all the new ideas is probably not going to survive very long.
They can just acquire those companies, which is the strategy used by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other giants that are moving faster than startups now by deploying capital faster and better than ever before.
They can't easily afford to splurge on the best acquisitions at this point. Instagram cost $1 billion. YouTube cost $1.65 billion.
Snapchat is heading toward bankruptcy or a forced sale if they don't dramatically cut costs. They're down to $1.4b in cash (from $2b three quarters prior). They can't safely buy an Instagram at this point. Pretty soon they're going to be the $1-$2 billion acquisition.
Twitter is in much better financial condition of course, although a $1-$2 billion acquisition is still a huge chunk of change for their business ($6b in cash, ~$300m-$400m per year in profit). Twitter's problem is that their cash is precious, because their business doesn't generate a ton of it (they've been persistently hauling billions of cash around from their past funding days). That cash is a big safety buffer that they can't easily replace if they burn it. They can use their market cap of course, and shareholders will only tolerate so much of that at their size and given their non-growth context. Twitter needs to figure out what it wants to do before the market 'realizes' what they're actually worth (zero growth gets you an optimistic ~20 PE * $350m profit = $7 billion; a further 2/3 drop from here); it's similar to the old Yahoo scenario pre Alibaba (no growth, the market temporarily giving you an abnormally high valuation, a trapped product).
The giants are seemingly moving fast because they have comically obscene amounts of cash pouring in and can't figure out what to do with it (other than share buybacks ala Facebook, or other capital return programs; in Google's case, they're just piling it up or buying real estate). So they spray it all around. A billion dollar acquisition mistake is meaningless if you're Microsoft and generating ~$40b in operating income (next four quarters). For Snapchat, it'd be fatal.
Google's net tangible assets are up to $149 billion now. They're starting to look more like a financial company than a tech company. Like a private equity company that happens to own a lucrative search engine monopoly and a media company (YouTube). JP Morgan's net tangible assets by contrast are $182b and Bank of America is $170b.
Sure, but I'm talking about buy competitors before they get to the 1B acq price, otherwise they're already close to Snap's size.
Agree with the rest. It's both interesting and troubling that the giants have so much cashflow that they continue consuming new companies for a long time without worry. All companies die eventually but we're in a whole new world with 1T market caps.
Instagram had 30 million monthly active users when they were acquired. Roughly 1/10th the size of Snapchat today. It was the growth curve that caught Facebook's attention of course.
YouTube was a bleeding disaster of a business when Google scooped them up, for a price that was universally mocked as outrageously high. I'm skeptical even Twitter with their $6b in cash could absorb that type of mess and see it through.
The problem you run into, in trying to buy interesting competitors, is they're not for sale for cheap if they're actually any good. That's the specific reason Instagram went for what was considered a very high price. When growth looks that good, the VCs will fund you indefinitely, so the acquirer has to pay a massive premium. In the post Flickr era you can't buy Instagrams for $50m.
Might be in Google's best interests to keep Snapchat running, for the simple fact that Snapchat is Google's largest customer (>50% of App Engine annual revenue) of App Engine.
Twitter is a fundamentally 'narrow' product. A global chatroom for the 'in' crowd, no matter which in crowd that is. Yes, it's searchable, and historical, but fundamentally 99.9% of Twitter's functionality only exists if you're on it today, constantly.
I don't see how you can ever make it valuable in its current form to people who don't need to see this tweet or this thread before anyone else does. Hashtags are fundamentally, unalterably, different from usenet groups or message boards or even facebook groups. Content is less permanent, but not in an arguably "good" way as Snapchat's is.
Make it so that you can only change one or two characters, and make every edited tweet have a prominent button to see the original tweet. Maybe make it so that you can’t change links, images, or other media.
"What an amazing pitch!" becomes "what an amazing witch!" (or worse). Well-known users would hate it because they'd be mocked for stepping into the troll trap.
HN also has a stricter set of community guidelines (which aren't in themselves all that strict to start with), more heavily moderated, and a generally well-educated, mature-minded user base that is generally appreciative of these two elements.
Yep, way fewer users. And what spam accounts exist get squashed pretty quickly. If HN ever releases statistics on the number of users, I'm sure they have more dignity than to include spam and bot accounts — which is, I'm sure, the majority of Twitter accounts.
All of snapchat's changes felt like a game transitioning from paid to free to play. similar levels of confusion and forum visits required to navigate the UX changes and how i would now "pay" by viewing ads to view the content i had before.
> Instead, why not make your app use less battery power and improve the camera's functionality? Those types of improvement are universally appreciated, yet the least likely to be implemented.
That requires hiring one or two really good developers and product managers and letting them polish the product. You can get a great product that way, but not a billion-plus valuation.
If you want your valuation to grow, you need to hire thousands of really bad programmers and hundreds of very bad managers, endlessly churning out "updates" and "redesigns" and "refactorings".
Nobody ever got to be a billion-plus company by keeping headcount and expenses low.
Snapchat is really bad at doing the one thing I want it to do well: take pictures. It takes awful pictures most of the time. Applies some kind of super-harsh filter that I don't get with my camera?
They deliberately give you a bad quality photo and I don't know why. Snapchat takes a screenshot. It doesn't use the camera API on your phone as it should. So it doesn't get any of the processing which is integral to taking good photos on phones. Apple should reject it from the App Store for doing this, but for some reason they let them do it, as well as Instagram and Facebook.
Well it's almost certainly going to be faster (thumb to save latency) to run the camera in video mode and then snatch a frame when the user hits the button than the normal preview-stillshot way the phone takes pics natively.
Cell phone OEMs differentiate with camera quality and so some run some pretty heavy post processing to make images come out okay.
Snap probably cares more about quickly taking picture and the filters.
Faster as in, faster to take pictures. Not faster to code. The native camera app on my phone is horrendously slow to take a picture; Snap is instantaneous.
Latency is a concern on the native apps too, but as tradeoffs go, cell OEMs care about mag/site reviews and "it takes a little longer to take a capture" buried deep in the text will be worth much less than better-looking example photos in the side by side.
Iirc the issue comes down to Android. Until very recently there was not real uniform api for accessing the camera between Android versions and the tweaks hardware vendors make. Basically it was much easier to screenshot the live preview then access the raw camera data.
This changed a couple of versions a go and if you used SnapChat on the pixel 2 it used the new APIs instead of taking a screenshot.
But I can’t comment persoanally on the quality of snapchats pictures as I’ve never used it.
Huh? There has been a camera API since the very first release of Android and it's been systematically updated for the entire history of the platform. What do you mean by "real uniform API for accessing the camera", exactly?
What I mean is snapchat was having issues with using the camera API in android across the variety of devices when they first ported the app to Android (2012 iirc) so they took "the easy route" and captured the still from the live preview instead. The API would work for some devices but not others (I remember other camera app's having similar issues around the same time, mainly not being able to tweak the camera settings within 3rd part camera apps) so basically they said "fuck it" and took the easy path and it just stuck around.
I believe since Lollipop they have been using the new camera API for Android.
If you've ever taken a selfie before, it feels weird to freeze your smile pose for even a full second. People taking a selfie want to touch the button when they see their face look natural in the preview and they want it to save instantly.
And, depending on phone (esp budget android) it really can take up to like 2s for a still to go off.
They deliberately take screenshots of the camera preview so that what you see is exactly what you get. Given the horrendous (i.e. several second) lag of the shutter button on many smartphones, this makes a lot of sense for an app designed to capture fleeting moments (especially since they won't be viewed for more than a few seconds).
I also despise the new redesign. As much as I love them for allowing the option to stick with the old design I'm not sure how "indefinite" support actually means, for example subreddit designs are split between the new and old. Eventually subreddit admins won't bother to support both.
The new redesign completely melts down my MacBook (2016, so not outdated by any means) every time I try to load a page. It’s loading more shit JavaScript than actual content.
I’m not sure what is it that you find good about the new design? The old one did the job perfectly with the added bonus on working on less powerful machines.
And they made it so smooth, too - just replace www with old! Considering, too, their incredible API, I have a lot of respect for the Reddit developers.
Not on mobile. I don't want to install the app, and the mobile site is basically a bunch of dark patterns piled on deliberately broken functionality. It's amazingly, and consciously terrible.
It's very slow and unresponsive. Any time saved with not having to reload the page is wasted several times over in the clunky UI, and the lags in loading data still remain.
The information density is much lower. It's harder to scan a page for its content because everything is more embellished. It's less focused on text, which IMHO used to be one of Reddit's best features. (Design feature.) And it feels very generic, like a basic Bootstrap template.
Mobile is nagware until I enable JS or use desktop mode. Blocked for being some goddamn frustrating now. I was formerly a heavy user, about fed up with the astroturfing, but this was the last straw. Life is noticably better now.
Really wonder if articles like these are produced by people shorting the stock.
I think the guy is a genius but he made a very bad mistake with the redesign and is clearly paying for it. There were some very interesting people producing content for entrepreneurs on there but they're all gone for now.
I've gone from daily to monthly use. But I keep checking in because I'm really convinced that they can still pull a rabbit out of the hat.
> Really wonder if articles like these are produced by people shorting the stock.
Everything is about money, so I always assume that to be the case for all these kinds of articles. Regardless, I’m pretty sure snap will be gone in a couple years. No way they can stand up to Facebook imo.
$294 million operating loss on $297 million in revenue for their latest quarter.
Snap's operating picture is an accountant's nightmare.
By the time Facebook was five years old, fiscal 2009, they generated a $229m profit on $777m in sales. They turned profitable in the second half of their fourth year. Why? Relative financial discipline. Snap has taken the opposite approach, wild financial irresponsibility (no doubt encouraged by the fairly bubbly funding environment they got to enjoy).
By the time Facebook went public, they had been profitable for over three years. They generated a $1b profit on $3.7b in sales in 2011, the year prior to the IPO. The situation could hardly be any more different from Snap at IPO or today.
While I agree with your statement, I think you are giving "financial discipline" way too much weight.
As you probably know Facebook( Instagram) did copy " stories" from Snapchat. When your competitor effectively steals your secret sauce, what do you do? I believe that is why they went with their radical UI design change.( In order to retain users, which backfired)
I am not justifying the cash burn that snap had, just saying that competitors definitely were a factor in them not being financial disciplined.
Another major negative was from the get go with that their shares listed are non voting which was a major turn off to wall street which got them blackballed from being included in the SP500.(Has nothing to do with running a company or financial discipline, but definitely a negative when large institutions cannot invest in you because of strict bylaws.)
> Nearly all senior executives who worked with him before the IPO are gone, and more than 10 senior employees have departed in the past year.
If you want to retain good people, you need to give them real input and control.
Senior managers were trying to prevent a disaster and Spiegel did not listen to them -- but even if every decision he made had turned out to be correct, his leadership style still would have alienated many of them to the point they would have wanted to leave. These are successful people who have no problem finding other opportunities.