from Hacker News

Snapchat Discloses $650M Private Placement

by abetaha on 5/29/15, 4:12 PM with 54 comments

• by kvcc01 on 5/29/15, 5:39 PM

  Snapchat is doing well. I sometimes get on the bus around the same time when the local high school is dismissed, and watch in amazement all the kids pull out their phones and work through their accumulated snaps for the day. Some have hundreds. It's a 45-minute ride to my stop and they’re still watching when I get off.

  Few months back I got jealous and installed Snapschat myself. It conveniently scanned my contacts, and found that none of my friends are on it. (I’m late 30s.) To this day, the only snap I received is the default welcome message they send to everyone.

  They’re doing a good job of confining their appeal to their target age group. The minute I and my peers appear on Snapchat, it's time to get worried.

  And then there's snapchat.com, which is another enigma. I consider myself a reasonably competent technologist but Snapchat makes me feel like an ape trying to figure out a mysterious monolith.

• by entee on 5/29/15, 5:25 PM

  I'm curious given these kinds of deals, what the point of an IPO is anymore? For some of these companies the valuations are so high, and private capital so available that it seems incredibly unlikely that they'd get a better deal on the public markets. Who wants to abide by public market standards if you can avoid it?

  I wonder if there's a new model, kind of like large privately held companies such as Mars or Cargill, but with multiple investors. Granted, many of the tech companies getting these valuations have unclear economics, but what if they had real revenues, profits and paid a dividend?

  Honest question, why go public at all these days?

• by espitia on 5/29/15, 7:39 PM

  A year or two ago I saw my little brother and sister on Snapchat (16 and 15 respectively). I didn't understand it at all. Soon enough I was on it and let me tell you, it is used far more than Instagram and if not more, the same as Whatsapp. It is because you can share real moment of your normal everyday life. They mentioned how on Instagram most of the pictures they see there are uploaded celebrities/funny accounts/etc. Normal people don't have amazing moments to share everyday. Plus, they would be embarrassed to share what they share on Snapchat in any other network (i.e. funny faces, what you cooked, the funny kid on the school bus, your boredom).

  I believe they are in unchartered territory thus comparing it to anything else is just a shot in the dark. If you could wave a magic wand and ask for the best way to share moments of your life you would probably get a hologram of your friends to show them that instant of you life that you wanted to share. Snapchat gets closest to this. Moments come and go, not all moments should be forever saved, moments should be only for those you intend to share with, moments should be feel lively (video/images) not text, etc.

  Also: Discovery feature - I give Snapchat so much credit for this. They got the younger demographic watching 'TV' again. Snapchat accommodated the channel these kids are using (mobile) to connect with the big media outlets in a way that they actually consume content. That is, by short clips of < 5-10 minutes.

• by randomname2 on 5/29/15, 6:20 PM

  Bloomberg: Snapchat Said to Be Valued at $16 Billion in New Fundraising

  http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-29/snapchat-s...

  Any bets on what market cap this will get to at IPO time?

• by joshdance on 5/29/15, 6:13 PM

  I am 29 and a lot of my friends and I use SnapChat. I don't love it, but it is useful enough that I post pretty regularly to it.

• by AndroidJunky on 5/29/15, 6:29 PM

  unbelievable :) $32B at IPO

• by tomkin on 5/29/15, 5:00 PM

  When it comes to a new article being behind a paywall, I would rather not know the news than have to make an account to view it. Can we ban wsj.com from HN?