Snap CFO Tim Stone Is Resigning | Hacker News Reader

Snap CFO Tim Stone Is Resigning

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121 pointscribbles59 comments

While Snap's poor product decisions and failing business are constantly called out in the media, what I don't see covered as much about the company is that their executives managed to massively enrich themselves by paying themselves huge bonuses right before the IPO and subsequent stock collapse.

Their "Chief Strategy Officer" Imran Khan: $100M+

https://www.businessinsider.com/snap-ceo-evan-spiegel-cfo-im...

CEO Evan Spiegel": $637M+ (3rd highest CEO payout ever) https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/22/snap-ceo-evan-spiegel-got-...

I'm surprised there hasn't been an investor lawsuit/class action yet. The whole thing seems like a massive pump and dump scam.

My understanding is that Evan's bonus was agreed upon years in advance when Snapchat turned down FB's various offers. The investors, represented by the board, wanted him to go for a large, somewhat risky, IPO instead of taking a sure thing and incentivized Evan to do so.

If true, this should be in their S-1 SEC filing right?

It is in their S-1 (page 135): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1564408/000119312517...

What's interesting is that these execs, including the founder/CEO got renegotiated packages just before the IPO.

there is a lawsuit pending that focuses on snapchats potential misrepresentation of instagrams size and effect on the mkt

investors should've done their own due diligence on that, what i believe is more likely is that snapchat misrepresented its user numbers pre IPO as alleged by a fired employee in 2015

investors wouldn't have cared if the stock went up, but it went down so they need to find an actual tangible way that snapchat lied to them to recoup any money from a bad bet

Snap is the living dead now. No users left after boneheaded redesign, all their ads running are promoting their competitors, employees I know are basically pulling the copper wire out of the walls.

Abandon ship!

Also, will somebody please make a simple private picture app for grown-ups? I'd love to be able to share stuff with my sig other/parents/grandparents - and that's it. I can't recommend SnapChat in the state it's in now.

> will somebody please make a simple private picture app for grown-ups?

WhatsApp? That's how my family uses it.

We use Viber group chat exactly for this purpose

Google Photos?

Yes, this is what you want, unless you hate Google. I stopped using Facebook for photos because I didn't feel safe navigating their privacy settings. Now I know the only people scanning my kids' photos are thousands of only potentially malicious algorithms.

It's great. Automatically adds all the pictures of my son to a shared album.

I have about 10 family members on an Apple Photos shared album, whatever the latest name is. iCloud, probably. Not cross-platform though, obviously.

I’m pretty sure Apple still lets people consult iCloud photo albums through a website.

Yes - but it's a public site for anyone with the link.

It's not the same, but you can access Photos from the iCloud.com website.

Yep, same here. After the latest iOS updates my entire family has been using it a lot more.

I just wish it was cross platform. Seems like a good way to creep people into the Apple ecosystem.

As others have mentioned, Google Photos works pretty well, even on iOS, but I have zero trust that Google will commit to it for more than a year or radically change the functionality.

Instagram rolled out a "close friends" option for sharing stories. That may meet your need.

It sure sounds like it's dead.

> Snap is currently finalizing its Q4 2018 results and says it expects to report revenue and adjusted EBITDA results “that are slightly favorable to the top end of our previously reported quarterly guidance ranges for each.”

The guidance was a loss between $100 and $75 million for the quarter, so even if they slightly beat that, it’s not doing much to stop the bleeding.

Jesus. A picture sharing app bleeding 100 million a quarter sure sounds like a industry-wide valuation issue.

Glad I bailed on some SNAP interviews a few months back.

They've got a 5 year, $2 billion contract with Google for cloud services. There's $100 million / quarter right there. Plus they have staff.

Yes, servers cost money, but locking in that cost doesn't make sense to me, because it makes it very hard to reduce costs, even if you invest developers in efficiency.

I was a huge user of snapchat, even though my phone (Nexus 5x) was so painfully slow on it that I hated using the app. I got a lot out of it (keep up with actual friends lives, I don't use instagram). After the redesign, it was bad enough to tip me over the edge. I haven't opened it in months, and I miss the friends I kept in touch with it.

My family uses FamilyAlbum and everyone loves it (cross platform as well).

Simple and private, have you considered Signal? End-to-end encrypted and quite a simple UI too, no need for accounts, works well on Android and iOS, etc.

I use Google photos, primarily because of how friendly it can be cross-platform. It's especially helpful that I can easily build custom albums with just a couple of taps and usher it out to any contact, regardless of whether or not they already have an account set up. Sending invites over text message or any other messaging platform is dead simple. I used to support Apple's shared albums but I haven't been engaged with that platform since I started to use the G Photos app to back up and free storage space on my phone. It also made switching devices relatively painless since I didn't have to worry about 10+ Gb of transfer.

If it didn't feel like Apple was playing catch up with Google Photos, I might've used iCloud more. Also, I hit that 5 Gb threshold very early on.

Mike Elgan wrote a post about this: https://elgan.com/blog/how-to-replace-facebook-with-nicebook

Perhaps Google will quietly sunset their Photos product in the next fiscal year...

Perhaps they will. You better hurry and use this great product before it's gone.

Hopefully given the launch of Google One, someone inside Google is committed to this product set...

Everyone is committed to a product, until they get their level promotion and switch roles.

Google Photos has been great for that usage, although it depends what you mean by private..

My GF also uses a private Instagram account for this, but that's even less private than a Google service.

I've used Cluster and it worked pretty well.

Funny, in my group of friends (for context 21-24 year olds, NZ) snapchat is used far more than Instagram.

The primary appeal of snapchat is we can very easily send disposable ugly unfiltered often funny vids/images to groups of people. Where as Instagram is more of a social media and is just used for casual content consumption onl

My 20 something friend group has been consistent with snapchat since ~2013

I suspect that unless forced to migrate, or really nasty stuff comes to light, most people will use what they are used to, with the people that are used to doing it with. If a group stabilized on a platform and knows everyone has it and those people and be reached and expect to be reached on it by them, why change? Who wants to be the "hey, let's all just switch to some random new thing" person after you're old enough to be too busy to see most the people all at the same time in real like that often anyways?

My cohort of late 20s kids switched to insta now that it has stories and disappearing chat too

Seriously. My friends use it a lot, but even more of my students do. It's rare to find a student who doesn't try to spend the day just snapping candid pictures of others... It's a mess and a half, but they're all over it. Don't see it dying out with that age group anytime soon.

Check out https://textile.photos (full disclosure, I'm on the team)!

You can email contact@ textile.io for a referral :)

What's wrong with using WhatsApp for this? That's what everyone I know does.

Signal!

They’re a public company whose income over the last several quarters is consistently near or less than the negative inverse of their revenue. You don’t need an MBA to know that even by bubble standards that ain’t good.

They would literally have a more profitable business selling dollar bills for a quarter.

An income cannot be negative

I think yours is a pretty accurate summary of OP

My wife, who is obsessed with clickbait and loves buying nonsense-products from ads, recently quit Snapchat to use Instagram exclusively. That was my signal to double-down on SNAP puts. Straight to the bank!

> My wife, who is obsessed with clickbait and loves buying nonsense-products from ads

Have you ever confronted her about that? Such behavior would be hard for me to tolerate, especially if it meant money out the window.

I couldnt care less about my SO’s web browsing habits. Maybe I’m different.

Prediction: Snap’s stock price will tumble down over the next two years to around $1, at which point it will be acquired by Verizon Media.

Is Snap actually dying? I recall there were similar news for Apple, Facebook(debatable on their current state) etc, but they rebounded back up.

Maybe this is the time to buy low and make it big (when everyone is doubting them). It'll be interesting to see.

It’s going down for good reasons.

They released a horrendous UI redesign and user count has been dropping for two quarters in a row now. IG's Stories feature (basically a snapchat clone) has 2x the active users of Snap and IG as a whole has over 5x the active users, and they are still growing while Snap is shrinking.

They've been operating for over 7 years and have yet to turn a single quarterly profit. With negative growth the past two quarters it's looking increasingly unlikely they'll ever be profitable.

In those cases, the news were backed by the reporter asking all of their friends, who all said FB/Apple/etc are so uncool now.

In Snap’s case, the news is backed by quarterly results and actual facts.

What bizarre comparisons! Apple has always sold sought-after physical products for profit. FB for all its crime makes incredible income through paid advertising. Snap is a dot-com gusher bleeding red ink.

The company seems near dead and still headed in the wrong direction. Every feature they have can be replicated by others, as shown by Instagram. Or there is no reason some new upstart for younger people can not replicate it.

Snapchat seems obsessed with those snap glasses too. They were a failure on the first release and they still seem to be pushing it to this day as a big part of their strategy. I don’t think consumers are ready to commit to a wearable like that, at least not yet.

I can't believe an app that is primarily meant for sharing nudity and more recently brand whoring had an IPO.

Oh I forgot about adding weird furry ears to photos for some reason.

1 year cliff, non-news

Still bad news for Snap confidence, of course

edit: didn't make it 1 year, whoops hope they got the golden parachute negotiated in

He started in May 2018, so it's not clear he will reach the 1 year cliff.

ah thanks, I misread the 12 months part of the article

Useless comment.

Lasted 8 months at Snap, 20 years at Amazon. Something is clearly wrong with Snap, and it's their CEO.

I'm gonna have to agree with you on that. Successful 20 year veteran execs don't make big leaps lightly. Pulling the plug this quick is a very bad sign and you can't really blame "creative differences" or disagreements over control. In a public company the CFO role is well-defined and not subject to much creative opinion.

At a certain point you gotta start blaming the guy at the top.

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