Snap CEO Named a Chief Business Officer, Then Changed His Mind
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Maybe the handling of the situation was unprofessional and I bet there are ways to avoid these fake start promotion situations, but I think at this stage you gotta play your cards. Either you save face and do the politically correct decision (promoting a good employee, but ultimately an employee with no new insights or inputs) or you take a risk for the company knowing that you're about to make a decision that could be decisive for the company's future but that may have an impact on the impressions people have about your decision-making abilities.
Given that Snap is running out of cash and cred, I think it makes sense to do the latter. It also seems that Snap may be looking for a buyer pretty soon and some of their recent moves indicate that they are trying to create a story on why Snap would be a good an asset for Amazon.
Characterizing her as a "good employee, but ultimately an employee with no new insights or inputs" is probably not accurate.
Also, 2 months is a very short time for everyone but Snap. In a 12 months runway, 2 months is 16% of the time you have before running out of cash.
I was defending Spiegel's decision (hence my devil's advocate opener) and why something that seems wrong for the general public may be what's best for a company like Snap at this point.
And the entire basis of your presumption was that O'Hara wasn't exactly what she is ("a well connected, veteran exec who comes from a company known for its operational excellence" who is also a new employee.)
Even if you were right from the start, you're just absolving a CEO of poor decision making. He didn't just "make a decision", he publically promoted someone to an important role and soon after changed his mind. Not exactly grand leadership on display.
I know that if it were me and I had a boss for two months -- someone I liked working with -- and we had a game plan and then my boss was promoted, that would make me feel relatively secure in where things were headed. But if two days later, my boss is no longer promoted, an outside hire is brought in (who doesn't know the team or the job -- and two months or not, that matters), and my boss has now left the company -- well, I'd feel a lot less secure in my job and in the company as a whole.
And honestly I feel for the new person coming in -- because if there is loyalty to O'Hara -- no matter how qualified Gorman might be -- that's an awkward staff meeting.
This isn't a situation where you had a few candidates in the running and one candidate thought they had the job and then didn't get it -- that happens a lot and that is uncomfortable too.
This is your CEO made an offer, told the staff, and then changed his mind. It's not speculated in the Bloomberg piece -- and this is total conjecture on my part -- but perhaps Gorman turned down the role or hadn't responded by the deadline -- then did, and Spiegel felt he had to undo his mistake. Even then, I don't know if that kind of about-face is helpful from an optics perspective or from a team morale perspective.
Even if this was the right move from a personnel perspective, it just makes Spiegel look out of his depth as a leader and manager. And in the case of Snap -- Evan is the face of the company and his perceived competency matters as much as anything else.
You're right; I don't have facts to fight your non-facts aside from the facts which have already been stated which show that your facts were non-facts to begin with.
As an aside, you have no facts to disprove the existence of the abominable snowman.
- He continued backing the redesign long after it was clear the public hated it
- He continued to push spectacles and insist they were a "camera" company, long after the market showed there was no demand from it.
- In the last 5 years he's gone from insisting that snap is a "social media company", to "a camera company", to "the fastest way for people to connect".
In my mind, he seems like he's pretty out of touch with what the public wants from Snapchat and is just bouncing from one idea to another hoping to get lucky again.
I feel like he was a college kid who built an app that he wanted, but as he's aged he no longer identifies with Snap's user base. He's trying to push his idea of what Snap should be (because that worked originally) as opposed to asking users what they want.
Welcome to the world of social software!
I'm not convinced that anyone really knows what people want in this market.
https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=evan+spiegel+%22pro...
But not a leader of a large organization. That takes experience gained from multiple stages of a career. It is more than luck and timing.
I have worked on such a redesign of a crucial part of a popular service.
Thankfully this was killed before it was launched to everybody.
Basically as soon as the first working prototypes were out, nobody could say with a straight face that this was ever going to go well.
and that is exactly what he is doing.
Sure, walk back a commitment if it's the right thing to do--but your employees/investors will be right to ask why you made the commitment in the first place.
If you're looking for a stock to short Snap seems like a good choice - I'd bet on failure in a few years or some sad acquisition on poor terms.
The only other tech company I'm pretty confident will fail is Magic Leap, but unfortunately they're private so hard to bet against.
Granted I haven't tried any other AR or VR device but combine that with some CAD software, google assistant, and some leap motion style hand tracking and you're now Tony Stark building iron man.
- It was dark, it looked like I was looking at a screen with sunglasses to the outside world.
- It didn't feel like I was looking at things in the real world.
- The FOV was pretty poor, I could see the edges on the sides and above.
- The battery life was short and the device was expensive.
Successful AR has obvious applications and will be huge, but the Magic Leap device falls way short of the hype [1] and I'm not convinced they'll be the ones to pull it off.
If you have a chance you should try VR (like the HTC Vive) - current VR is actually impressive.
[1] https://twitter.com/fernandojsg/status/1017411969169555457
In the baseball card mania of the 90s, it was said they go up and down in value as the player does well and poorly. But, hey are completely devoid of inherent value.
I'm told SNAP shares would still get you some % if the company is bought, but I figure if someone does by SNAP they'll just purchase the voting stock from the founders and leave SNAP out there hanging around.
If in the future Snapchat pays dividends, won't the non-voting SNAP shares still have dividends paid out at the same rate as everyone else? It was my impression that this (along with other profit-sharing mechanisms like buybacks) was what drives the inherent value of stock.
Normally, you wouldn't do that because the stock owners would vote in a new board of directors, or they'd just vote in a dividend.
Perhaps if SNAP's money problems get too dire the founders would open up class A to more rights in order to sell them to raise money. My guess since people still trade the baseball cards, they wouldn't need to.
There's nothing illegitimate about raising money without selling voting rights. You want voting rights, want to play active investor? Buy another stock.
Dig for securities fraud and encourage the SEC to require voting rights as part of a settlement agreement?
It's kind of a rookie move ... but in a way, maybe it's the rookies advantage.
Evan can get away with doing this because he's young.
Consider that an older exec would have not changed his mind out of fear of 'looking bad' even if it were not the right thing for the company.
This isn't good, but it's not a big deal at all.
Of course this assumes he mad the right decision in the end ...
Being inexperienced isn't a good excuse for being a bad CEO (please give any evidence you have of him being an effective one). Realizing two days after you make an important public decision that you should have made a different one is a failure, regardless of if you got it right the second time.
Founding a company doesn't mean you should be CEO.
Because Snap is a consumer facing company - we hear about this all the time.
Tons of startups do stuff like this - we just don't hear about it.
AirBnB, Stripe etc. are all making clumsy decisions daily, even some occasional big ones - but it's just not newsworthy. Neither is this item frankly, it's just kind of fluff. Nice to know but not news.
This kind of mistake is well within the entitlements of a Founder/CEO for example, I'd imagine the board won't have much to say about it. He knows he kinda screwed this up surely.
Back in the day a long long time ago I remember someone who had taken a job at Sun. Two weeks later he left because Apple came through with an offer and he really wanted to work for Apple. I thought it was really rude because I would have never had the guts to do that. I would have felt obligated to stay at the job that I had because that is the way I was raised. But when you consider that Sun would have let him go at the drop of a hat if it suited their business purpose it actually made sense and I learned from that event and seeing what happened later because he went with Apple.