They apparently have 2,360 employees doing who knows what (not growing the user base).
My favorite part:
"Spiegel laughed out loud when asked if he was worried about Facebook copying his features. “Just because Yahoo has a search box doesn’t mean they’re Google.""
We'll check back in a year to see if he feels the same way.
I don't understand what all these people do all day. Same with Twitter, they have 3860 employees according to their website. It seems like 10X as many as needed. I've worked in a few offices with less than 100 employees total, and while I have no idea what it takes to run a service with that much traffic, Snapchat runs on Google's cloud service.
> “Just because Yahoo has a search box doesn’t mean they’re Google.""
Maybe it will be a classic in the same genre as Ballmers answer to what he thought about Apple's new product the iPhone.
Unfortunately B2B sales is still very much people driven. Lots of calls, emails, meetings x 10 until you close.
snapchat rejects 3bn buyout... yahoo rejects 45bn buyout. how far can it go?
That's like paying $234/month in hosting alone for 1K daily actives. What is all that computing power used for?
That's interesting. I was curious how their choice to use Google App Engine would work out. It's reputation is easy to start with but expensive to run and some other issues. https://www.recode.net/2017/3/1/14661126/snap-snapchat-ipo-s...
I wonder if they would have done better with a stack like WhatsApp - Erlang running on their own servers. Or even switching over to that in the future. I think WhatsApp at 500m users had about 35 engineers and 550 servers and so costs maybe 10% of Snap's. http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...
It's funny, a lot of people think you exit AWS/GCE to rack your own machines, but I was on a datacenter tour in SV a few years back and was reminded that having fine-grained control of your network is just as a big a reason to do it. Adtech/finance do this all the time to control latency, I imagine it's also a consideration for Snap.
I wonder if they'll ever build a CDN. It's probably not the right traffic pattern without a lot of re-sharing, but still, I could see it.
2360 if you're Snapchat!