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Comment by dopamean | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to me that in May of last year Snap, Inc raised about the same amount of money. I've never understood how some companies need so much money. To me it makes sense for Tesla. They are building actual cars and that is expensive. What on earth did Snap need a 1.8 billion for?

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What on earth did Snap need a 1.8 billion for?

To put it in a pool and swim in it, like Scrooge McDuck?

Precisely. It looks a little something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzba7V8uB04

Hahahaha. Someone needs to take the first 27 seconds of that video and make it into a meme for situations like this.

Did you see how much Snap was/is paying on infrastructure? It is _insane_. $2 billion over 5 years.

The amount of waste that is obviously happening there is maddening.

$2 per user year?

From Twitter:

Chris Moore‏ @ctmoore91 Aug 10 More Quick math on $SNAP marketing numbers: - $3.60 per existing user - $89 per acquired user to make revenue of $1.05 per user in... 3 months

That's a little on the high side, but it's not surprising. I work for a company that pays even more for new customers, though we have much higher revenue. An "acquired" user is like an asset when you sell your company.

That's not the same thing though (infrastructure cost).

That's more than maddening. One company is working on the forefront of an entire ecosystem transformation in a 100 year old entrenched customer base the other...well, let's just say in another 100 years you'll be lucky to find anyone that knows what snap was.

Depends. If Snap fails, and Facebook gets a monopoly for centuries due to network lock-in, we'll know Snap as the last competitor to Facebook.

"Competitor". Externally funded R&D for Facebook.

True - but can you ELI5 for everyone - even though we can infer based on being in tech and can see this - but spell it out for others...

Just imagine how much profit Amazon would make if it were only AWS and no retail operation.

> What on earth did Snap need a 1.8 billion for?

because it's available.

Last week snap was being shot down by some finance guy. They got bubble like fame, and failed to show how to convert user base into money. They're basically worthless

Well, the CEO fluff on the ER call was amusing. Probably doesn't help to brand yourself the same thing as a food stamp program, but I digress.

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2017/08/11/analyst-caught-in-hot-...

I would dump that shit if I owned it.

Burning (through) it mostly.

On what though?

This[0] discussion from the other day has some interesting comments about employee compensation. And then there are acquisitions like this[1], in addition to the infrastructure costs that have been mentioned.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14983800 [1]https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/21/snapchat-buys-zenly/

Filters.

Snapchat is the social networking equivalent of the Kardashians.

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