Snap Says DOJ and SEC Are Investigating IPO Disclosures | Hacker News Reader

Snap Says DOJ and SEC Are Investigating IPO Disclosures

bloomberg.com

115 pointsraiyu60 comments

Does anyone see a path to Snap continuing to exist 10 years from now?

I just don't see what they bring to the table that can possibly keep them afloat much longer.

Diversification. They won't be able to survive on just Snapchat, but they have the money to build/buy some other properties.

That was partially the objective of the Spectacles. (diversification into hardware)

It didn't go well.

My guess is they effectively become Venice Beach Real Estate and IP Holding Co.

Happens a lot with formerly high flying companies that don't know how to spend their $$ and just buy buildings.

They've vaporized $600m in cash in the last three quarters. They're running a negative $300m operating loss quarterly. They're barely going to have enough money to safely survive as is for another six quarters (before the pressure gets overwhelming to sell or cut limbs off), much less have enough money to build or buy other properties.

You can't buy much diversification against a $300m operating loss with a few hundred million in cash, that they can currently theoretically spare. They have an extraordinarily mismanaged business and operating cost situation. Calling it wild incompetence wouldn't do it justice.

They have two choices. Slash and burn immediately, all the way down to the core product viability. That should have been done over a year ago when it was obvious the growth was gone and the bleed was going to kill them. Or sell, the sooner the better; now here they are, in a death spiral, having already waited too long to sell.

They have to cut their quarterly cash burn down to sub $50m within four or five quarters to remain viable as an independent company. And by that point, the stock might get cut in half again. This is still a high multiple / bubbly market, if that changes they go from an $8b valuation to a $2b valuation, if they're lucky.

Acquisition by Apple / Amazon / Google once the price is low enough. They have 100mil+ DAUs of an attractive demographic to advertisers (unless they are lying), but they can’t monetize and their costs are too high. Snap could fit into some master plan to break into social.

Why can’t thet monetize?

On my Snapchat anyway there are plenty of ads under the stories

Are those not paid for?

They are trying to monetize but it isn’t very effective thus far.

Amazon makes a lot of sense. They're trying to get into advertising and they could turn Snapchat into a shopping lens. ALexa, AWS and Twitch would play with it nicely too.

Interesting take. I'm not close enough to either Bezos or Spiegel but that does not seem like a good combination. Although at that point I'm not sure Snap will have a choice.

But you can't buy SNAP by buying the stock. The stock has no voting rights and thus it's price really is not what someone can buy the company for.

Spiegel etc still have majority ownership.

The majority voters cannot simply freeze out minority shareholders. They can decide to sell if it's in everyone's best interest over remaining independent, though. If the offer isn't for more than what the publicly held shares are worth, then Spiegel et al get sued over selling the company.

I'm not seeing it. Maybe someone like Verizon or Comcast gets a wild hair and decides they want to add it to their new weird portfolios, but I really don't see one of the AAG's picking it up.

Google could finally have a chance with social! Use their software camera wizardry so that photos, especially low light ones look infinity better on Snapchat (on any platform) than competing social networks. Integrate stories natively into Android, under a different brand that shares the network with Snapchat to solve the cold start problem.

Does it make a lot of sense? No, but I think it makes some sense.

I feel that once growth stalls out or declines, those larger companies become very uninterested, even if the price is cheap.

Sell user data on the black market?

Snap is bringing in significant revenue and they will book over $1B in revenue, the challenge is that revenue growth has slowed significantly. That coupled with high operating costs and headcount expenses leaves them very much in the red. And it's debatable how many quarters this can continue without restructuring or another capital infusion.

They have been able to increase revenue per user but still trail Facebook and the growth story pitched at IPO around user growth is the biggest challenge.

With the platform stalling in user numbers increasing revenue per user is only one side of the equation.

The more damning item is really what they knew during the roadshow and how they disclosed it. Obviously Instagram stories has had a material impact on their business and the "whistleblower" was bringing this to management's attention while being shutdown most likely to not derail the momentum of the IPO.

It is quite possible that this may result in fines because there will most likely be a paper trail internally that detailed these issues. Then it's up to a judge to decide if enough disclosure was done.

That's the DOJ/SEC issue as for the ten year plan that's even trickier. Anecdotally Instagram delivers more value to advertisers with actual intent and purchases whole snap is more of an awareness play. But as we've seen with MySpace and Digg even high flying priorities can fizzle out as quickly as they give traction.

In each case a competitor really takes the lions share of the users and it's obvious that in snaps case that is Instagram. And buying a stalled out social platform is a bad play for any company that's serious about building the future.

Given the voting structure I think this will be playing out for a couple of years but at the moment the prospects certainly don't look good and the stock price reflects as much.

>Obviously Instagram stories has had a material impact on their business and the "whistleblower" was bringing this to management's attention

The "whistleblower" that was fired after 3 weeks on the job back in 2015 was bringing Instagram stories to management's attention? The Instagram stories that came out in 2016?

Was he clairvoyant?

2015 whistleblower was claiming Snapchat misreported their user metrics and the lawsuit had nothing to do with Instagram stories.

What may have happened is that somehow Snapchat further doctored their numbers after Stories came out to hide the impact it was having on their userbase, then slowly rolled the impact in post IPO leaving the company where it is now, with a sudden slowdown in user growth post IPO and $6 share price down from $24 on first day of trading. same issue of doctored numbers with 2 different timeframes

The main issue is probably more that Snapchat was doctoring engagement numbers rather than not accurately forecasting and communicating Instagram's effect on the market, which would have been due diligence for investors to conduct (and probably market forecasts/prediction anyways, not historical reported data).

The reason this is coming out now is that large institutional investors that bought in at $17/share at the IPO are now left with $6/share stock are looking for a way to recoup losses from a bad bet. If Snap had gone up, nobody would have cared about the doctored metrics.

Usage metrics have always seemed extremely unreliable/easy to game from my perspective, but if investors can somehow prove Snap was lying about its metrics, they could win back some $$$. Just not sure how they could prove it - Snap is probably the only company that has full visibility into these numbers and I don't think there's a paper/audit trail like there would be for accounting fraud

Here's a summary of how the whistleblower, Anthony Pompliano (not sure if it's the same guy that incessantly shills for bitcoin on twitter), accused Snapchat of doctoring numbers in 2015: https://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-unseals-anthony-pom...

The investors will probably try to prove that Snapchat continued to do the same shady user engagement reporting through 2017 when Snap IPOd

> If Snap had gone up, nobody would have cared about the doctored metrics.

This is essentially the game that most VC-backed startups have to play as far as I can tell. Everybody hopes to achieve breakout market dominance before anybody starts to ask questions about what's really true.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. In recent years we (i.e. investors) have found out before IPO, but Snap is perhaps a reminder of some of the downsides of the old dot-com bubble.

I think what they bring to the table is drastically different than anything else out there. Although, admittedly imo they have lost their ways and people are moving to Instagram as an alternative (myself included).

But what separates them, and what they think people will eventually realize is that living in the moment is healthier, more rewarding and authentic than doing things for the purpose of likes and attention. Instagram is touching on this with stories that they copied but the entire Instagram platform just feels grimy overall (and snap is starting to feel that way as well with their uncustomizable discovery page).

So the path I see is them really focusing on authentic communication, and making the best ways to let friends share their true selves without worrying about likes because that's when you can have more fun. I think instead of being a camera company snap should be the 'moment' company. To me, there are lots of ways to enable people to have engaging experiences with others in the moment outside of a camera.

This video by Evan sums up the difference well too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQYBLeV6sbM&t=7s and also see Kanyes tweets (https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1042779425048211456?ref...) on the matter :p

> people will eventually realize is that living in the moment is healthier, more rewarding and authentic than doing things for the purpose of likes and attention.

I have nothing to back this up other than intuition, but I think this is a stretch. People love and live for attention and validation.

That's not to say the world wouldn't be a better place if more of us didn't give a shit about the 'gram or whatever. But it seems like people definitely do, and I don't think we can stop them.

Oh totally, it's a big bet that people will come around. Some trends that give me hope is the increased interest in meditation, yoga and the ideas becoming more 'mainstream' with people like Kanye and others talking about it. But still, it's like trying to compete with cocaine and a wild all nighter while you're selling a home cooked meal and a movie with a couple of your close friends that go home before midnight.

But I also don't think it has to be one or the other. Both can have their place.

“ it’s a big bet”-> is this different then a long shot?

Same thing? Long shot, hail mary, moonshot. All work :p

Its the reason I use snapchat to the exclusion of almost every other form of social media. Not sure how many other people think this way though, whether it actually makes a difference.

But are people getting the attention and validation the are seeking on Instagram? My impression is that attention tends to gravitate to a small subset of hot people on these platforms, which means that the average person gives more attention than they receive. In the long this is fairly frustrating.

This does not match with how I have seen friends using Snapchat - friends spending time focused on recording videos for Snapchat while with other friends instead of valuing the time with the friends they're with. I've experienced it first hand and it soured me pretty quickly on the platform.

This is not authentic communication to me, and I want no part of it.

So I think Snapchat provides the "moment" experience in 2 ways.

1. When you are with people, like at a concert, the spontaneous authenticity of the platform encourages you to just take a quick video or photo and then put the phone away so you don't get 'lost' in the app spending time adding filters, stickers, prettified text etc (ala Instagram, Snap also has these but feel more lightweight to me) and instead get back to the real life.

2. The people receiving these snaps get a more authentic version of you and your experience so are maybe more connected to your moment.

I agree with your point though that it can still be used in a way that is unauthentic and distracting from the moment (now instead of just living and experiencing whatever is happening I think 'oh I should share this on Snapchat') but I suppose why I like it vs other tools is that for me it encourages the more positive direction although not perfect.

i was at a concert last night with my 14 year old daughter... every kid had their phones out the entire time and was constantly snap chatting/IG story-ifying everything and there were spending more time trying to impress people that weren't there than they were actually spending time enjoying the show...

oh, snapchatting them smoking or vaping.. IG'ing the band. apparently its just cool to show how they're breaking the rules on snapchat and then bragging about being at a show on ig...

luckily my daughter just laughed it off... but she did IG a few songs so /shrug

> But what separates them, and what they think people will eventually realize is that living in the moment is healthier, more rewarding and authentic than doing things for the purpose of likes and attention.

People who realize this also realize that they can opt out of Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. If Snapchat wants to be viewed this way, sure, that is a noble goal and an interesting proposal for their brand. But it's still just that, a brand, and using any sort of device to record your life is a step in the wrong direction when talking about "living in the moment."

The moment doesn't need to be captured, not even on temporary social media that doesn't record likes.

heh, I agree with you. But baby steps :P

Plus also, friends and relationships are more and more spread out. Sharing your moments can help keep those alive.

Question for you though curious what you think: Does capturing the moment go against living in the moment because it takes you out of the moment for that brief period you capture it? Or just because it 'shouldn't be captured'? If you could share your moments remotely as seamlessly as they are 'shared' with the people right next to you is that ok?

Why can’t you just “capture the moment” using Instagram or your phones Camera app?

Capture the moment, and then share it when you’re out of the moment with the social network of your choice.

What does SNAP give you that makes capturing it using their app any more authentic or meaningful than the millions of other apps?

Disclaimer: I've never used Snapchat. And I'm An Old (37).

I just can't get behind "stories" on Instagram. In fact, I'm not even really sure why I use Instagram instead of just posting the same photos on FB; it's sorta a random decision, but it's enjoyable enough, I guess.

But I just have no desire to click on some thing you decided to share, and be captive to your content, and whatever pacing you chose, whether bad or good, and worry about whether the sound will be blaring or not. I'd much rather scroll through photos for a second or 500 seconds or whatever my attention span happens to be at that moment -- to fill the amount of time I have to fill, not to be captive for as long as you want me to be.

I'm slowly realizing that every time I see "kids these days" taking endless amounts of time "taking pictures", they're actually creating these stories/snaps/whatever that are apparently as tedious to create as they are to consume. My most recent experience with it was out hiking at a state park, and I kept accidentally stumbling into the background of a photo, so I'd go back to the group i was with, and then start going up the trail again a minute later, and they're STILL THERE "taking photos". I don't mind the fact that they're blocking the trail, I'm in no hurry and if I wanted to be on my way I'd just walk through whatever they're shooting, that's fine. I'm happy to accomodate whatever they're trying to do, I appreciate it when people pause to stay out of a photo I'm composing as well. But it all just seems like the polar opposite of "living in the moment".

You're not an Old. Don't buy into this. The worship of < 27yo culture is pervasive, pernicious and toxic; and should be called out. Nothing good from this thing comes.

It's because this age is a key marketing demographic. They have some earning power but usually dont have kids or other bigger responsibilities.

Its worship in the sense that a hunter might worship the spirit of their prey.

It sounds like you aren’t a good fit for the platform. Plenty of people get a lot of enjoyment out of Instagram. Like anything, it depends on how you choose to use it and interact with it.

Personally I follow a lot of artists and I enjoy seeing their art on Instagram. You get to choose what you expose yourself to.

In regards to people taking lots of photos, I don’t really see the harm. They enjoy it, so let them.

Your reply is sort of the standard response to criticism for any platform, appearing to defend reddit, facebook, etc.

It doesn't address the essence of the criticism though, that there is a way that is easiest to use a platform, and that way is followed by the majority of people.

If someone says caltrops are dangerous, and you reply with the idea that they can be used to clean gunk from under fingernails, you have not added anything to the conversation.

As I mentioned, I enjoy the static photos on Instagram; occasionally I try to get into following other folks' stories, but mostly I get annoyed by the captivity of them. I follow about half friends and half artists or other fun-to-look-at stuff (cars, pets, whatever).

I did a story once; I was on solo vacation and spending the day biking through Austrian wine country. It was actually pretty fun to play with, more so than I expected. I was also learning along the way, making mistakes, learning from them. That was the best part. It's not something I'd normally want to subject myself to; a quick snapshot is all i can usually be bothered with. But I can see why they're enjoyable to make if you have nothing else going on.

Different horses/ platforms for different courses. I use FB, Insta as a virtual blog of what's going/ went on in my life. I don't post every single thing, but upload stuff which stands out for me. I joined FB back in '04/05 in my college freshman year (christ, I am old!) and it's nice to scroll back and see how my friends and I evolved over the years. All those moments, dare I say, even silly pics/posts, are nice to go through sometimes. Same with Insta, but obviously, here it's all about just pics and focused comments on them from friends.

Snap is just for posting those "in the moment" stuff which I really don't care too much about documenting.

Anyways, that's the way I operate. Different for everyone.

> So the path I see is them really focusing on authentic communication

That's a valiant and viable path, but it's not a path that fits their valuation.

You have a point but Snap took vc and went public at an enormous valuation. The only way they can support that valuation is through advertising.

kids use snapchat because parents aren't on it... and the stories go bye-bye without evidence of every dumb and silly thing they do on there. Moms posting on snapchat will probably chase the kids away... and what kid wants to see dog eared mom?

Kids use instagram because its cool to be popular there...

both support terrible social hierarchies that kind of suck the life out of people... now people do stupid things to get more views and they experience things just to IG or snap them - completely oblivious to being in the moment.

I'd buy puts - Zuckerberg outplayed them, I don't think they know what they're doing.

I don't think they'll be around much longer, it's also interesting that puts a couple years out are pretty expensive so the market doesn't really think there's much hope for them either.

Calls and puts are (both) almost always significantly more expensive several years out compared than they are in the present. The longer your time horizon the more uncertainty you have to build into your price, which means you need to account for greater volatility.

You shouldn't interpret that as optimism or pessimism in the market, because both long and short derivatives are expensive.

No he means the calls are cheap and the puts are expensive. I agree, the smart investors have already put the pressure on

Ah, fair enough. I see that reading now.

The have a fairly strong incumbent userbase among younger folks who's only other option is instagram.

They don't want to be on FB really.

So until the next 'cool messaging app' comes along I think they'll maintain an audience.

Spectacles was a flop. Snap Map was a flop. Discover as a separate section leaves much to be desired (Daily Mail thanks for the consistent cleavage /s). Instagram ate stories and interactive filters. It’s been over for a while now.

* sarcasm on Dialy Mail part. It was always the first item at the top of Discover for me and very noticeable.

Seriously I really wish I could stop having unwanted softcore porn show up in my discover section, since that's how I access friend's stories.

I would have switched to Instagram a long time ago if it wasn't the devil that is Facebook.

If they thought snaps IPO was bad, what about Ben Horowitz's loud cloud IPO?

How is that relevant?

We’re talking about not disclosing important info at the time of IPO. Loudcloud was weeks from not being able to make payroll as they incorrectly stated cash designated for lease payments as free cash.

My point is the SEC only punishes selectively.

Does anyone have a copy of the 15 minute Snap pre IPO roadshow video? I have tried to find it before with no luck.

The DOJ that helps Facebook “fight election fraud” while benefiting from access to its data firehose has time to sniff around at Snap, which will only drive its stock price lower, which further helps Facebook weaken one of its only direct rivals.

This is why it pays to be corrupt. Notice there’s not even a thought of an antitrust trial in the opposite direction.

But realistically what is Facebook doing that could be considered anticompetitive?

Ben Thompson at Stratechery writes thoughtful pieces around this for a start:

- https://stratechery.com/2017/why-facebook-shouldnt-be-allowe... - https://stratechery.com/2017/manifestos-and-monopolies/

How do you know there's not even a thought of an antitrust trial? People who would know would be prevented from discussing it in a public forum, so it's not going to be in their press releases.

Who are you alleging is corrupt in the above? Is the DOJ corrupt because you believe they have access to Facebook's "data firehose" (as far as I am aware, they have to subpoena data per investigation, just like anyone else). Is Facebook corrupt for complying with a legal data access request? It's really easy to make vague conspiracy allegations - please make some actual provable claims and ideally cite some sources for them.

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