That would involve admitting you're a niche company/service and not headed for global dominance. Can't do that.
Yes they can - once the market stops believing them, private equity takes them private, cuts costs massively and streamlines, then gets re-acquired or goes public again much improved - minus the founder.
> not headed for global dominance
I guess global dominance is shown more by metrics like MAU/Revenue per user and so on
It is interesting how some companies have a valuation based almost entirely on this illusion. I'm sure there's a Silicon Valley episode that covers this.
This assumes a perfectly functional management. Unfortunately, management is a notoriously hard problem for scale-out. For 10x headcount, 20% productivity loss per employee is perhaps the best we can hope for. Unfortunately, it's usually 30~40% for a successful company and Snap is perhaps not an exception.