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Comment by hemancuso | Hacker News Reader

So they hit $400m of revenue in 2016 and have committed to spend at least that much on infrastructure each year for the next 5 years? After all the costs for staffing and everything else they better I hope they achieve amazing growth if they ever intend to profit.

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I think Techcrunch read:

  We have committed to spend $2 billion with Google Cloud over the next five years

and decided "that's $2B/5=$400M per year."

In reality, it's probably more like $200M, $300M, $400M, $500M, $600M

The filing says:

> On January 30, 2017, we entered into the Google Cloud Platform License Agreement. Under the agreement, we were granted a license to access and use certain cloud services. The agreement has an initial term of five years and we are required to purchase at least $400.0 million of cloud services in each year of the agreement, though for each of the first four years, up to 15% of this amount may be moved to a subsequent year. If we fail to meet the minimum purchase commitment during any year, we are required to pay the difference.

> If we fail to meet the minimum purchase commitment during any year, we are required to pay the difference.

Being frugal until you hit the $400MM doesn't matter anymore...

Interesting, so more like 340MM, 391MM, 399MM, 400MM, 471MM.

That's a lot for the first year. Not much scaling at all. Why would they structure it like this?

I would invest in Snapchat at any valuation that is below Facebook's. Sounds crazy but the first time I opened the app (on a friend's phone) and it landed me on a camera screen (almost forcing to contribute content to use the product) I felt like the guys were going to win whatever space they were in.

Facebook is worth $377B today. Could you explain why Snapchat is or will be worth that much?

If facebook loses users to snapchat in a massive way, it could happen.

Otherwise they wouldnt have tried to buy snapchat.

Facebook copied snapchat with some of the new features in Instagram. Most of the people I know migrated from Snapchat to Insta when that happened.

My understanding is that Snapchat is cool among teenagers and tweens, whereas Facebook is old news. I've watched people "use" Facebook and it seems to provide negative value. If you are interested in diverse things your feed will be a total freak show, images of deformed penises (Medizine groups have those) mixed with 5 step cooking gifs. Snapchat seems to have a much better focus on stuff people actual want to do, whereas the core Facebook experience seems to be just aweful and outdated.

Facebook may be old news, but Instagram certainly isn't.

Will Snap exist in 5 years?

Will "Google Cloud Platform" exist in 5 years?

Will America exist in 5 years?

(See how obnoxious this sounds?)

Will MySpace exist in 5 years?

https://myspace.com/

Obviously this doesn't have the same infrastructure requirements

One supposes that might seem "obnoxious", to those who were somehow psychologically committed to what... the perpetual existence of America? That ain't me. It seems unlikely that the continent will sink into the ocean anytime in the next five years, however.

Perhaps I could have been clearer, but I didn't say that Alphabet would fail anytime soon anyway. I referred rather to G's habit of discontinuing popular services.

Well with this agreement in place I reckon it would. I was a bit skeptical before.

Yes.

If anyone wants to bet against them existing, I'll take the bet.

I would bet that they don't end up completing the terms of the Google contract as signed; and that it would be heavily modified by year 3 of the contract.

It's a shame that what started as one of the most private messaging apps around still doesn't use end-to-end encryption and has since been surpassed by many on that front, though.

What are the terms? I'd take that action if we're talking in their current form/focus.

They'll exist, doesn't mean they'll be relevant, or profitable. If I were asked to bet against the stock, I probably would. Everything about their valuation and IPO smells to high heavens.

Fortunately for you, you can take that bet!

As soon as Snap goes public, you can short the stock. Go for it!

I prefer to deal in options, and options won't trade on the symbol for a while.

They can't possibly. Those spectacles are unforgivable

Yes, I think so.

I'm not sure about Twitter, Groupon, or Uber.

An article much more relevant to that question: https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/slowchat/

It took Instagram Stories two quarters to catch up to Snapchat's total MAU.

Won't matter, enough money would have been extracted from the public. Why do you think they are going public?

It's a crazy world we live in that's for sure.

There is surely a way to turn that into "accounting debt" that will cancel lots of taxes and save a lot of money one way or another.

I don't know what you mean by "accounting debt" but yes companies only pay taxes on profits. In addition, present day losses can cancel out future profits. There is nothing nefarious about this.

That's... just normal expenses. This is how things operate.

It always boggles my mind how often I come across people that don't understand how our tax system works...

Ha! Assuming we're discussing the US, I'm consistently amazed at how complicated it is. The number of tax accountants and wide success of TurboTax lend credence to the idea that it's more complicated than a lot of people want to deal with.

I guess I should have been more specific. Really I mean the basics like how tax brackets and deductions work.

Even deductions can get pretty hairy, in my experience. And frankly, if you have to say "just the basics", you're talking about a system that has more than just the basics. :)

Nope. Not at all.

Normal expenses are things you pay, and then you declare how much you just paid.

This is not a normal expense, it's a long term contract. It states how much they'll pay IN ADVANCE over a long period of time. That can be used to make all sort of accounting magic , adjusted per year over multiple years however you like it.

Where cloud-hosting costs are recurring, it's something that won't amortize.

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