They seem like the smart money here.
Wonder how long the american proletariat will accept that?
The CEO compensation is coming from diluting shareholders, he's receiving stock compensation there. That $638m doesn't cost them cash. Is it morally obnoxious to be rewarding an outsized pay package on a business that is financially struggling to survive? Of course, it's reprehensible in my opinion, however that value judgment is entirely subjective in nature. What kind of business rewards huge stock compensation plans while accelerating toward a brick wall of insolvency?
What's not subjective, is cash going out the door and being unable to keep the lights on.
Snapchat firing employees improves their extremely bad cash burn situation. That's why they're doing it. In about five or six quarters at the current rate of burn, Snapchat will be in dire condition from a cash position, which will threaten their ability to continue as an operating business. That's especially true if growth doesn't dramatically pick up soon. When they hit seven or eight quarters out, they're on bankruptcy watch unless they raise a lot of capital or slash expenses deep (they could obviously sell the business as well).
They could offer it to their employees in exchange for a salary reduction totaling those $34M/year.
Alternatively, they could have sold that stock.
Or taken a loan using that stock as collateral.
Last thing you want as a software engineer is coworkers under artificial pressure from worries of not performing enough to the point that they will get laid off & lose the upside of working for a public company offering stock - there are enough real world pressure situations I would rather save that for.
What?! I've never heard of this, other companies follow this madness? Who are they so I can stay away?
What does this mean?
It means that you have barely more than a quarter even after two years, and barely more than half after three.
So you'd get 10 percent of your options after one year, another 20 percent at the end of your second year, another 30 percent at the end of your third, and the remaining 40 percent at the end of your fourth year.
Note that in order to collect even half of your options, you need to work there for three years.
She had tons of snaps, but informed me that they were almost all blank images. She and her friends send each other these blank images to maintain 'streaks,' which count the number of continuous days that two people have messaged each other.
So attached to these streaks were the cousin and her friends that if the 24 hour mark was approaching and the cousin hadn't sent a blank message to her longest streak, the counterparty would log-in to the cousin's snapchat and send _herself_ a message, to make sure the streak continued.
My cousin said that the blowup in (blank) picture messages had slowed the app to a crawl, leading her not to use it anymore, aside of course for streaks.
Not the kind of of daily-active-users that advertisers crave. I'm 28; never heard of streaks before this.
edit: he says they've done that at least twice
It's amazing that at their scale, they are still mostly in GCE. They are easily an order of magnitude larger than netflix, and at least netflix is smart enough to have built their own CDN.
Edit: I must have had a brain fart when I wrote this, because I was thinking over a million per employee. Now it seems too low.
Not disagreeing with what you say; I would be very interested in a side by side analysis of FB and SNAP to see why one succeeded and one is struggling.
Perhaps one main reason is simply that FB is aggressively trying to kill SNAP whereas FB itself didn't have that kind of a determined opponent.
But as an aside, when I worked as Zenefits, we hired irresponsibly, but the intentions weren't to be deceptive; the mistake was thinking that the hockey stick curve would climb forever.
