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Comment by naturalgradient | Hacker News Reader

I am the only one thinking of http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html?

Why place an over one year old alleged offer in the media today?

Because the shares are free-falling, user growth quarter-over-quarter will likely be abysmal and float will drastically increase in 2 weeks.

The only possible sliver of hope for shareholders right now is a potential buyout. Remember how many times Twitter rallied on 'chatter' of a Google bid?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/08/twitter-s...

https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/twitter-buyout-rumors-google-sa...

Edit: interesting number of down votes, is this such a far fetched conspiracy theory? If it was such an open secret at Snap, why has this not come out yet?

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Yep. I feel like it's time to manually make a list of egregious submarine launchers, though it seems that it's journalists who's coverage is over a limited set of companies such as social media that are prone to doing things like this.

It feels like there should be a filter that considers who owns a paper, who the journalist has previously covered in depth, and what kinds of stories they're printing. Maybe something like a shill or hater score?

I'm not sure how easy this would be. Does anyone know if something like this exists?

Pick a reporter from any outlet and manually perform the analysis that you've suggested and I think you'll see that it is not easily computational. Even basic taxonomy of "kinds of stories" is not well implemented on a service such as Google News.

You'll also find that almost all reporters do the things you don't like. It's a mostly-inevitable consequence of the system of incentives and constraints that apply to almost all reporters.

The only correct thing to do is make it a public dataset on GCS and analyze it with BigQuery.

Why will that make a difference? By knowing what a baseball players salary is and who he plays for today do you magically influence what his salary is and who he plays for tomorrow? These things are way abv the paygrades of anyone sitting around here.

If you are going to detect Google fraud, you should use Google tools to do it!

It's all journalists. It's all media. Some are for sure outright corrupt but it's just part of the job.

> I'm not sure how easy this would be. Does anyone know if something like this exists?

Don't know of any such thing that exists today. But it shouldn't be that difficult. A simple database linking journalists, news organizations, to topics/companies/keywords/etc.

The data set shouldn't even be that large.

All orgs with a PR dept have a list and a rate card. It's not like this info doesn't exist. It's just that the general public can't do jack about it. It's like knowing the salaries of baseball players and what team they are on. General public has zero influence on that. The only people who have influence on these things is people who can buy the whole team and set an agenda.

Or perhaps someone who was subject to a 6 month lockup is pissed. Evan's a billionaire so nothing matters either way, but if you're not as high up, a 100% difference could be pretty material to your life.

It's worse than that, because your basis is not anywhere near $0 unless you're Evan and his bros. If you're an engineer who has worked there for 2-3 years you are probably getting near (or already below) your strike.

That said, if you're an insider still, you probably feel it's going to get better, so you hold. You're used to shares being illiquid and it's easy to continue seeing them as such. Plus, you get some bonus cash with follow-on RSU grants that are certainly being doled out.

I read that most employees have a strike price above $15. I think this is an unmitigated disaster for employees, especially with the vote structure etc prohibiting the board or any major investor taking influence.

I personally would probably recommend to cut losses and run - it looks more like Groupon, Gopro or Twitter right now than anything else.

Who is to blame? CEO and underwriters for overpricing their IPO? To me it looks like Snap was simply strangled by Instagram in the worst moment. The last private round was priced when it still looked like Snap would continue growing explosively, IPO was hence massively overpriced and employee options as well.

It probably is not helping company moral right now that the CEO gave himself an $800 million bonus for the IPO.

Source (paywall but free figure at the top):

https://www.theinformation.com/soon-free-to-sell-few-snap-em...

[rhetorical question] How is it possible that a company has tens of millions of users, IPOs, and the common stock is worthless? That's basically theft from your employees. Any early employee at a company as successful as Snap should be making a small fortune in stock options.

The common stock isn't "worthless", it's the stock options to later-stage employees that are possibly worthless, or at least worth less than imagined. The lesson here is to never rush to judgement about the value of your options at a startup. You need to think about "how much more will the company be worth when I exercise vs how much it was worth when I joined", vs the less meaningful "I have XXX dollars worth of options".

And yes, I am aware of the inherent discount for ISOs, so as an employee you still stand to make about 2/3rds the value of your options if the company is worth about as much as it was when you joined. This makes me a little suspect of the stated $15 strike price for ISOs, that doesn't sound like the typical 2/3 discount unless if the stock was privately worth $30-45/share at grant time.

[rhetorical answer] By offloading as much economic risk as possible on to producers with the least means of asserting corrective action in case of inequitable decision making.

(In other words pass losses on to employees and guarantee [as much as possible] returns to investors despite risks.)

Where's corporate profit in your equation? Exactly.

People who jumped on the 2015 startup hype train, do learn a lesson, in a hard way.

Disclaimer: myself.

Who's to blame for strike price above market price? Not sure there's any real blame to assign for that particular thing.

the ceo failed to grow revenues to the level required to meet the expectations of the investors who priced the rounds

Yup, looks like a pump and dump strategy by investors or SNAP inflating itself before a sale.

What you are saying makes a lot of sense.

It is fairly common (and illegal!) for an insider to leak a fake buyout rumor to the media, in hopes that it will cause the stock price to rise.

That's what people think was happening with all those twitter rumors while ago.

This would be a very odd way of going about trying to sell the company by saying that someone was going to by it for 2x what it is presently worth ... so why not buy this falling knife right now!

What does it say about the magazines/sites that publish these submarines?

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