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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?
https://archive.is/IYtQX
You could save a bookmarklet that allows you to bypass the header: https://gist.github.com/jashkenas/9a4d9e648eb11aab394e
Or you could just skip the article when you see it. I don't see why we'd ban wsj.com just because you have trouble reading it.
Try this. It's the URL from a Google Search for the article :)
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
Please don't make comments needlessly personal.
You don't have to create an account. Just google the title. WSJ breaks enough good stories, and it takes all of 2 seconds to view the articles through google that it would be counter productive to suggest "banning" them.
HN should implement a feature to optionally hide paywalled articles for those who don't want to see them.
I actually agree with you much to the chagrin of the majority of the board. Clicking a link and hitting a paywall is a bit of a nuisance, and if people are going to submit a link to this site or any other link aggregation site, they should make sure that "everyone" can read it.
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?
3 major reasons:
1 - After a certain point in time (based on # of shareholders) it becomes more onerous to be private, and you wind up with all the reporting responsibilities of being public.
2 - It's easier for a public company to engage on both sides of M&A. There's less quibbling about theoretical valuations since the company has a price. (When one private firm buys another with stock, there's 2 theoretical prices that need to be negotiated)
3 - For enterprise deals (not Snapchat) some customers prefer the stability of public ownership.
Cool, thanks!
That said I wonder if 1 will always be that big an issue. What if you structure it so that you have a small number of large shareholders that represent larger groups? For example, in the case of stock options, a sort of labor union owns the stock, sits on the board and is responsible for distributing dividends to employees following a schedule of percentages.
2 is clearly troublesome, but perhaps more in the M than the A. If you acquire small companies, you may be able to do it in cash or again as some sort of contract entitling people to percentages of dividends. After all, that's kind of what a stock certificate used to be in practice, not just theory (yes oversimplification, but it seems people care far more about stock price than dividend these days).
I wonder whether these issues will always be as troublesome. As these kinds of mega deals become more common, it seems quite possible that a sort of parallel private market could emerge. Anyway, thanks for the reasoning!
The trend is against all three of these, but it's a slow trend.
On #1 - the issue is individual employees each have shares tied to their hire date. It's possible that someone could do some kind of financial engineering to make it look like 1, but this hasn't been done yet. This is the issue that forced Facebook to go public.
On #2 - If it's a cash purchase, the problem is less an issue. It gets tricky when the acquirer is significantly away from a funding event. The values of many high tech firms can be +500% or -80% just 6 months after a prior event. This has a massive impact on share-based acquisitions. Less of an issue with more mature companies.
All this said, it's fairly easy to see a world 20 years from now where there are much fewer public firms.
My guess is for these things to change (if they ever do) there would have to be a crisis event. Maybe after the next crash employees will be more reticent to take pure stock and will go for an alternate arrangement. Maybe the structures built for those arrangements will allow contracts for acquisitions to be structured differently.
It's going to be interesting to see how long this private valuation explosion will last and what the fallout will be after it pops.
A fully private market isn't great either. There's a lot of value for the investment community in general to know what the daily value of a given stock is. If you try to get this transparency via off-market transactions, aren't you just recreating the public market?
Oh totally. I think it would be a bad thing overall, but that doesn't mean it won't happen. If you have enough capital in a relatively small number of private entities, perhaps they will find it to their advantage to compromise a little on clarity, in exchange for more control or less regulation.
Overall, I suspect a shadow market would be a bad thing, but it's hard to argue that for the moment there isn't something like a shadow market in silicon valley. I don't think it's a sustainable one, and it certainly is opaque (what's in those term sheets?), I'm just thinking of whether something similar could exist in a more permanent form.
I thought they had to go public not because of how many employee shareholders they had, but because of how many employees had sold shares on secondary markets.
I'm having a bit of a laugh here trying to imagine what an enterprise version of Snapchat might look like.
It could be very useful. People may be more willing to share opinions if they know it won't be kept on record forever.
Possibly also illegal though from a document preservation perspective.
The private valuations are not really comparable to the public market caps, given the conditions these private investors get.
Maybe I'm being cynical, but given the exuberance of public tech stocks, and the bubbliness of the tech market in general, some may be impatient to cash out.
Also see: "greater fool theory"
Probably makes sense from a founder's perspective, but investors eventually need an exit( long-term or not).
IPOs are now less necessary for raising funds than they are for cashing out shareholders.
The biggest thought that comes to mind is that these companies don't actually make money. If Snapchat was pulling in the $33bn in revenue that Mars Inc. pulls in, then I imagine they would be much more likely to keep it private.
But these companies' valuation is based on the idea that they have a huge market, and MAYBE they'll make money someday. Generally I believe that when these social network companies go public, their price-to-earnings is insanely high, meaning that in order for investors to receive value, they'd have to either hold the stock for a very long time, or be confident that the revenue will ramp up quickly enough to start making money very soon.
Ultimately, a VC has taken the risk that the company can be sold to "someone else", whether acquisition or IPO. That's when they see the company as having it's maximum value to them. They're not in the business of creating a sustainable business, they're in the business of taking something small and making it big. Once they get a valuation that they feel can maximize their investment (either IPO or acquisition), they're happy to lock in their money and move on.
Take Zynga or King for example. They were revenue machines when they were close to IPO. But investors knew the money-train was coming to a close, so they sold out and locked in their massive gains. The companies were very lucrative for a short period of time, so that drove up their IPO price. But VCs needed to get out before the popular games took a dive, which they inevitably did, and the investors got out at excellent valuations. If they had kept the company private, they wouldn't have had nearly the return they had.
At some point the investors need a way to get their money out.
There's not a lot of incentive for the company outside of the pressure the board puts on.
For some companies, an IPO is more about their financial structuring than the dollar investment. Legally a private company can only have a maximum of 500 individual stock holders before they have to make public financial disclosures. This was part of the reason why Facebook decided to IPO even though it definitely didn't need the investment.
1) More capital/money. 2) Pressure from existing investors who want to cash out.
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.
these kids must have parents that spoil them with unlimited mobile data. That's the main reason why i'm not active on it.
You're sure they aren't watching one of the featured stories about a city or an event? At a 10 second maximum, that gives a minimum of 270 snaps - not too impossible but I think there might be more going on there if you're not too familiar with the platform.
Some of the more fanatical users I'm acquainted with have a 200+ second story, every single day. Three minutes a user gets you to 45 pretty quickly.
Yes, that's another possibility, other users' stories. But I would equate that to reading my entire Facebook news feed every day - I don't even think that's possible anymore with the current mysterious sorting algorithm.
This is why I think their valuation is less absurd than it seems. Their rate of adoption among college age and younger demographics is astounding. Way faster than facebook, or twitter, or any other social network was adopted.
I think a lot of people are skeptical because the concept seems really dumb. But I've just kind of accepted that social networks get popular for very subtle reasons, some of which are non-technical.
Building a social network seems to be more of an art than a science.
Most people are sceptical for the simple reason that the social networks that shed most of their user base long before ever threatening to make a reasonable profit actually had far more lock-in. If Snapchat's user base - a demographic not exactly noted for their long attention spans - gets bored or sick of ads once Snapchat actually manage to sell them in significant numbers, they're not leaving anything behind when they download the next flavour of the month.
The terms attached to this probably make their chance of selling out to Facebook for ~$20bn slim too.
Couldn't you have said the same thing about early Facebook?
Perhaps, although snapchat is deliberately oriented towards a lack of history. I could move my messaging off facebook easily enough, but photo albums of vacations less so.
Early Facebook had the facility to get in touch (or stalk!) people I had no contact details for provided I knew their name, and check out upcoming party details, not mention a photographic record of my university life complete with comments and status boosting likes. Facebook didn't need to remain cool to be relevant and useful, and I logged in far more often than someone sent me an actual message from the service - still do a decade on.
Snapchat is a messaging app which distinguishes itself from the other messaging apps users also have installed on their phones by the fact it doesn't preserve any past interactions. Much like when I stopped bothering to log into MSN Messenger because people sent me messages in other ways, it dies in the eyes of its users once the daily updates stop, or even more quickly if the daily updates become near-exclusively advertising of the unwanted kind
This is why I think their valuation is less absurd than it seems. Their rate of adoption among college age and younger demographics is astounding.
Yep. But at the same time, there's no reason to think that these teens might also adopt a new app just as quickly if it were to come along.
One factor that probably affects rate of adoption is smartphones. It's much easier to actually observe your friends in the act of social networking.
Smartphone and technology adoption is higher than it was in the 2000s. Most new social networks will be adopted faster than Facebook was in the early 2000s. I believe even Pinterest at a point was "growing faster than Facebook."
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.
What do you use it for?
I ask the same question. What can snapchat do that mms cant?
Edit: So they took a service that was as simple and flexible as could be, put arbitrary restrictions on it, and wrapped it in pretty UI. Kids are dumb man. (I'm 26)
Do it's best to guarantee that a post will be removed.
In a world where everything you do is recorded and stored long term the promise of something fleeting is a beautiful promise.
It is also a lot faster. App owns to the camera. Tap to take a picture. You can add a caption or a doodle and send it to multiple people.
MMS doesn't even come close to that experience.
Not send a picture already taken. There's a sense of immediacy on the sender side (and urgency on the viewer side, before it goes poof) that reinforces the nowness. If you're into that.
Doodling on the photos is surprisingly useful. To do that via mms you would open the camera app, take the picture. Open the drawing app, draw it save it. Open the texting app, load the picture and send. Snapchat is snap, doodle send.
I'm 27 and I have two separate use cases:
1) With my girlfriend we just say hi and see a little bit of each other's daily work lives in each picture
2) With my buddies on inside, fleeting jokes that require the context of a picture and some art work
Fleeting jokes is one. Like you were talking about a shirt, you see that shirt, you want to tell the person but sending them a text and a picture that they will have to delete or keep forever seems heavy.
Snap Stories are also very common. I don't want to tell someone explicitly what I am doing, but it is still fun to share slices of life, so I will record a few seconds of an event and post it to my snap story. If someone wants to know they can. Usually about 30 people watch each of my stories.
So, I've witnessed this horrifying thing where someone snaps a photo of, say, the floor, or a blank wall, and then uses the caption line to send their actual message.
Packing roughly 60 bytes into 8 megapixels makes me cringe, although thankfully at least the backdrops are usually high compressible.
Is this practice common, or do I just find myself around the wrong sort of bandwidth-sociopaths?
I believe that's how it's done.
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?
Besides Alibaba I have never hear of any of these funds.
unbelievable :) $32B at IPO
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.