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Comment by brentm | Hacker News Reader

Much greater losses than Twitter's S1. Snap's revenue is 27% higher but 548% greater net losses.

Twitter s1: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312513...

Also quite expensive in terms of trailing sales multiple.

> Twitter went public at valuation around 30x trailing year sales and 15x forward year sales. At $25 billion, Snap would be valued at a huge 62x trailing sales.

> Assuming they could reach $1 billion of revenue in 2017, the 25x multiple would still be steep relative to the two predecessors.

(via http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2017/02/02/snaps-ipo-filing-e...)

I think their losses can be at least partly explained by their somewhat inexplicable number of employees, which happen to number 1859 at the end of 2016.

Don't understand why a company with a mobile app as their sole product need that many employees. I was expecting that number to be more like 100.

I'm always a little surprised about how naive HNers are about corporate sales (and BD). We can bikeshed all day how many engineers they "really" need, but for $400m in annual revenue (plus that growth) they probably need a 400 person sales org minimum.

I'm wondering where the loss is coming from. I'm skeptical that it's all coming out of the cost of infrastructure and workforce. I know they've had some company acquisitions in the past, so I wonder how that is coming into play.

400 million a year to Google and then who knows how much more on AR/VR stuff.

Well, they do have 1859 employees. If you say on average they're paid $50k each (totally made up estimate, would love for someone to give me a better one), that would be almost $100mil a year in base salary alone.

I would 2.5x that estimate and with benefits etc, round it up to total cost $200k per employee.

Keep in mind it's highly unlikely that all of those employees are engineers, probably lots of sales/marketing/customer service people. Still, with benefits and stuff I'd estimate maybe 100k per on the low end.

...and TWTR isn't doing so well

Which could in part be because of Snapchat, if we're being honest.

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