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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

One of the more well known VCs in SV gave a talk two weeks ago and told a story about when he met the founders of SnapChat two years ago. He asked them "So, tell me honestly, are people using this app for anything but sexting?" One of the founder replied "No, there are loads of cats too!" The VC asked "Wait, how do you know there are cats too? Isn't everything deleted?" Needless to say he passed on the investment.

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That could be interpreted as being rather spooky. But it could also be a joke based on word of mouth information.

And was it a wise idea to pass on that investment? Seems not...

He mentioned he passed (and passed on Secret as well) because he doesn't want to invest in anything that makes it easy for children to be destructive to each other. Let's put it this way, he's not hurting for deal flow and investments.

That seems like flawed reasoning. It'd be better to teach kids to be reasonable human beings irrespective of the medium of communication. If kids want to be destructive to one another, they will be (people can be just as cruel over FB as they can on an anonymous site).

SnapChat's share of voice has fell off the face of the earth, from a branding perspective it is scary. We don't know their user numbers but the buzz has fell flat and the uncool whatsapp just increased their userbase after the facebook deal. I would be scared as an investor if i invested at a billion dollar valuation, since we are not seeing that stable share of voice instagram had. Maybe its a result of bad engineering like Friendster but who knows, they have enough ,money to hire good engineers especially security specialist but their CEO seems to be a bit immature.

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