It indeed does. Firing someone with that kind of track record for incompetence within 3 weeks and then bad mouthing to all four winds about it? Something more credible would be that visions did not align, clash of personalities, or that he did not fit the culture, but incompetence?
Also, isn't standard practice for companies to only confirm employment rather than give a review exactly for this kind of lawsuits?
>Also, isn't standard practice for companies to only confirm employment rather than give a review exactly for this kind of lawsuits?
That would be the problem for me if I was an investor. What other types of liabilities does this firm have? They seem to have management that is unable to control themselves how can I be sure this is a isolated case and not standard operating procedure?
Well, if his claims are accurate and they are defrauding investors, I'm sure they want to trash him before he can suggest anyone else look into it.
"Oh, THAT guy? Ya, he's just angry we fired him because he's an idiot and has no idea what the numbers we were showing him even meant." - quick guys, let's find a way to fix or bury those numbers we showed him!
According to the complaint from Anthony Pompliano:
When they were trying to hire him Snapchat said they would hire 40 people under Pompliano for his growth team. Based on this promise he left FB to join Snapchat. He then found the numbers they were touting were not accurate and they were not committed to what they told him.
When the complaint gets to what happened starting the day Pompliano was hired and more specifically what happened when working there, it is blacked out for the next 8 pages.
After those pages it says he was fired after 3 weeks and Snapchat told employees, media contacts, and a company looking to hire Pompliano he was fired for being incompetent. This misrepresentation has cost him his reputation, money, etc.
proving competency is more difficult in short order unless you end up an emergency situation and respond well, incompetency can be demonstrated in a day but at that level should be weeded up through a good interview process.
still I have seen developers gone in a weeks time, some voluntarily
So the lovely people that hired him and went through that rigorous selection process are they being canned too? They too must be incompetent. Given a big part of Snapchat is trust - and they are clearly not trustworthy - it might be time to divest.
The summary misses the focus on false metrics that is the core of the complaint, and emphasizes the "hiring 40 people for growth team" part. It sounds like the summary is saying "he thought Snapchat would hire a team around him and they didn't" vs "he pointed out Snapchat's metrics were inaccurate and then they fired him."
I would summarize the complaint as:
Snapchat hired this guy from Facebook. He claims Snapchat falsely represented their growth during the process (two metrics which are redacted turned out to be false.) After he joined, he alerted the VP of finance that some of Snapchat's representations were false, who apparently agreed with some of it and told their VP of Comms to stop representing that to advertisers and some redacted group. He thinks that Snapchat fired him because of this, that they thought he would "blow the whistle" on upcoming IPO. Further, Snapchat continually pressured him to breach his confidentiality agreements with Facebook. After he was fired, Snapchat told people internally and externally that he was incompetent.
In the details, a lot is redacted but it mentions there were specific metrics given to him in the hiring process - that were also given while raising capital in Asia - that were false.
Well, no, this is still all alleged. It will have to stick. Even if it is all true as presented here, it may not have a significant impact. For reference, take a look at how Facebook publicly admitting it was misrepresenting certain advertising metrics has impacted the long term outlook of the company's stock (it hasn't). Also take a look at how long Theranos maintained its valuation despite widespread, grievous fraud.
You cannot possibly know if a technical employee (at this level) is incompetent after just 3 weeks. Not possible.
It's the same as firing a CEO 3 weeks into the job... It doesn't make any sense unless that CEO did something blatantly illegal/dodgy during those 3 weeks.
The reality is you won't know how good they are until at least 6 months in.
As an engineer, 3 months is the absolute minimum amount of time I need to figure out if I'm a good match for a company.
> You cannot possibly know if a technical employee (at this level) is incompetent after just 3 weeks. Not possible.
You may be assuming a baseline competence, though.
I've interviewed many alleged senior developers who talk a good talk, can tell you the full ASP.Net page lifecycle without missing a beat - despite (possibly sometimes in spite of) not being asked - and when it comes to actually coding show their utter incompetence in seconds flat.
I'm not being elitist here; they'll do stuff that's just plain weird, like only using strings in C# - no other datatypes, only strings - or if they claim database expertise, create tables with only text columns, no indexes, and storing an integer primary key also as a text field.
At any ability level above this, I'm kinda with you; just take into account there is a very real world of sheer utter incompetence out there, and I doubt it's limited to technical employees.
I have to agree - it is possible to know if someone really just doesn't have a clue.
Case in point, this morning I interviewed a 'senior' C# .NET developer with over 10 years' experience - and yet she didn't even know the syntax for using lambda expressions, was barely able to get started with linq, and was unable to tackle a basic string splitting problem. Oh, and she couldn't do fizz-buzz.
Is that really skill? I work in IT and would like a development job but have never had one. I can easily pull off a fizz buzz in any lanuage I've worked with. Am I missing something?
Is it different? I mean the fizz buzz I've seen only requires the use of conditional statements and a understanding of mathematical operators. What kind of programming job would leave you unfamiliar with those?
I'm saying if you're in IT, you can do fizzbuzz, and you want a development job but don't have one — then this all adds up to mean you haven't been applying for development jobs.
Send out more and fight with confidence to make them hire you. You're in the IT ghetto right now don't let their prejudices keep you there- you're every bit as smart and capable as anyone who happened to start on the developer track.
Fizz buzz is a trivial exercise; if someone that claims to have worked as a software developer can't do fizz buzz, something doesn't add up. How was she able to do her work without understanding basic things?
I was interviewing for a position in India; I just use such basic tests as a filter, so I can quickly weed out the wrong kind of candidate. See my other comment here for more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327100
Likely: She's been working at the same place for most of (if not all of those 10 years) and she's just basically keeping the home-grown system running and punching out some minor features. She probably got that Senior title simply because she'd put in enough time at the company. Maybe they're on .NET 4. Maybe.
If I see a technical candidate resume that has a long stretch (5+ years) at the same company and that company isn't primarily a technical one, huge red flags go up because the previously mentioned 'Senior' candidate is who generally come out of these situations. IF I get past their resume they're going to spend a lot more time telling me how they stay up to date with the world than a candidate otherwise would.
If I see a technical candidate resume that has a long stretch (5+ years)
at the same company and that company isn't primarily a technical one,
huge red flags go up
I'm a fan of this heuristic. You're forced to evolve more if you work in a profit center v. cost center (i.e. technical candidate at non-tech company).
I was interviewing for a position in India. Many developers in India (especially those that work for the big outsourcers) work on overly-large teams and work only on ridiculously specific portions of code. You might have one person that only does fluent mappings for the ORM, another that only makes changes to domain models, another that only does changes to view models... etc.
I do extremely basic programming tasks (no more difficult than fizz-buzz) to quickly weed out that sort of candidate.
"Senior" titles based on tenure length instead of actual skill & ability are one of the biggest problems in hiring. Only leads to pain on both sides. Perhaps we need different terms for these different dimensions.
Getting fired after three weeks for incompetence simply doesn't happen at anything above junior levels. I've seen a few very quick firings up close and personal. On the junior level they really were incompetence, but usually mixed with a combination obvious personal issues (eg creepy around women) and work ethic problems. At the more senior level it was basically either borderline personality disorder (to generalize) or drug/alcohol addiction. It's almost impossible for a senior-ish person to be that incompetent if you're really being honest about it...we're talking three weeks here, not even months. I find it nonsensical that a relatively senior hire could be fired after three weeks simply for incompetence, there is likely a lie in here somewhere. Whether it's Snap or this fella, who knows, but I lean towards believing this guy.
Also, interviewing aside, someone incompetent enough to get fired after 3 weeks at another company surely wouldn't last more than a couple quarters at FB.
> You cannot possibly know if a technical employee (at this level) is incompetent after just 3 weeks.
There are certainly major failures possible in 3 weeks for which the optimistic explanation is gross incompetence, and the pessimistic one is gross misconduct.
“Michaels said the information was withheld pending a determination on whether it is covered by a confidentiality agreement. It is possible that that portion of the complaint — which appears to contain a detailed account of Pompliano’s brief tenure at Snapchat — could become public.”
" It is possible that that portion of the complaint — which appears to contain a detailed account of Pompliano’s brief tenure at Snapchat — could become public.”
Sounds like a thinly veiled threat to strongarm Snapchat into a quick $ettlement.
The sentence before the one you quoted explained the straightforward legal process by which unredaction may be authorized. A judge decides if this is officially released. Not the plaintiff.
I guess by that definition, literally all legal processes in US civil court are "thinly veiled threats".
Which might be a fair perspective, but I think OP should point that perspective out ahead of time in the future. Maybe by instead writing something like this: "Like every engagement with the legal system, this sounds like a thinly veiled threat..."
Being explicit makes clear that one thinks that it isn't anything specific to the case that makes it a threat - it's just the fact that the legal system has been invoked.
Right? I was wondering if it would be possible to build something to guess what these redacted lines(at least for the not-8-page-part) say. Since they redact mid-sentence, could you calculate the font size, estimate how many characters there are, and fill in some common words using an NLP based implementation? Or would the sheer volume/complexity be too much?
"2X successful founder"... looking on Crunchbase, he founded Digiforce "acquired" by Strategic Link partners. digiforce.com directs to some random japanese site and the Strategic Link site looks like something made from a (bad) wordpress template. I almost wonder if he made up a company to acquire his company.
Next, no way Facebook hires someone like that to lead "THE" growth team for pages. Maybe as an entry level PM or something. He was only at facebook for 1.5 years, which also makes me skeptical he was such a high priority hire for Snapchat.
Sounds like a bunch of hot air and resume puffing to me. My guess is that Snapchat realized he had an overly active imagination and had taken liberties with his resume.
The media, especially the tech media, is not as difficult to manipulate as you think. I think its likely those stories were engineered and sensationalized, built up from less credible sources to more credible, each medium citing the previous.
Back in the day, when I was a fresh faced 20-something - and, like now, a complete nobody as well - I joined a fun, pretty unknown, startup and had my photo and bio published in the physical magazine of the time.
This happened because one of their journalists knew our CEO, and they thought it'd be a fun "welcome to the company" for me.
One of the doctors I work with has his own PR person. He is routinely covered in "Best of the Bay" and other interviews for famous doctors, brought on to be a guest speaker on the news, etc. He's sort of a hack. The other doctors I work with are much smarter, but they keep their heads down, help patients and operate with a lot less puffery.
I've been thinking about hiring a marketing person. I build things, I'm great at that. I can run businesses, likewise. A little extra press coverage (deserved or not) would be very valuable for me. Any recommendations on hiring for this role?
PR is different from marketing, so first read up and decide which one you need. IMO marketing/sales is a core, systematic task, an engine, and PR can add much fuel to the engine. Looking for PR, have an idea of which publications, speaking events and biz dev opportunities you want to access with their help. They should be able to demonstrate -- with proof from past clients in your field -- that they have relationships with those gatekeepers. They should also be able to assist you in developing a core narrative around you/your company, and they should be perceptive, skilled and honest enough to tell you what the flaws in that narrative are and how best to address this. Some media training, too.
Thanks, this is a great introduction. I have no idea how I am going to afford this person. But already I don't know how I can afford to NOT have this person!
I registered a throwaway account to play devils advocate with what feels like a straw-man argument from yourself:
>digiforce.com directs to some random japanese site
It could be that the brand digaforce wasn't valuable to strategic link partners & they let it go.
> the Strategic Link site looks like something made from a (bad) wordpress template.
Their target market looks like military and law enforcement. You don't necessarily need shiny marketing to sell to the land of powerpoint: personal selling through established contacts works. Ex military stick together because of how bonds were forged.
>I almost wonder if he made up a company to acquire his company.
Are you suggesting he invented strategic link partners? This is probably pretty easy to validate as their management is well documented on their site - all ex military.
>Next, no way Facebook hires someone like that to lead "THE" growth team for pages.
You've built the next step of your argument assuming your previous allegations are true.
>Maybe as an entry level PM or something.
Is what you argued previously about his character true or not? If he was fraudulent (i.e. inventing companies etc.) then Facebook probably wouldn't hire at all (or he'd get washed out pretty quickly).
> He was only at facebook for 1.5 years, which also makes me skeptical he was such a high priority hire for Snapchat.
His allegation says that Snapchats intent was to gain confidential information about Facebook. Does 1.5 years matter in this case? Recent information is what's key here.
> Sounds like a bunch of hot air and resume puffing to me.
What are the facts we know for sure? He worked for Facebook. He was involved in some startups. He is ex military. He was hired by snapchat briefly and fired.
>My guess is that Snapchat realized he had an overly active imagination and had taken liberties with his resume.
Have you read his complaint? He alleges he was calling out snapchat internally on misrepresenting metrics to prospective investors - and they fired him for it.
What's more likely? He faked his way into Facebook and survived 1.5 year, generated enough demand to get noticed by Snapchat and then jumped to snapchat only to be found out to be completely incompetent in three weeks?
Or... his military / honour based mindset got him in trouble when he saw things happening in snapchat that were at odds with his value system.
There is definitely smoke here in my opinion. You have to be grossly incompetent to get fired within three weeks. If he did manage to fake his way into Facebook then he does have a level of competency. To me, it doesn't make sense that he'd screw up and get fired in three weeks. Especially given his military background.
Yes. Further, if you put yourself in his shoes. What are you doing in those three weeks? You've sold them on the growth strategy - now you're getting up to speed on the details getting ready to execute. It's natural that you'd look into things in more detail. If you find something that's not right... whoah... differences.
If you were a fraudster, you'd just go along with it ;-)
Completely agree with the stronger likelihood of this version. At least the individuals tied to his story (e.g. cofounder mentioned, the principals of the acquiring company) are all real people with credible business careers.
Also, geo-based social media aggregation stuff getting gobbled up by opaque defence industry players just sounds way too scary to make up for any other reason than to instill fear.
I know him personally and collaborated with him on some things while he was running Digiforce. It was always a stealth operation, but I know that the technology was real and that it was legitimately acquired. I know that doesn't amount to much reliability on a forum, but I use my real name for my username, so you can see I'm not making this up.
I only kept in limited contact with him after he went to Facebook, but from my experience with him in Raleigh, he's a stand up guy. I'm inclined to believe his story, because if he was incompetent he wouldn't have run FB's growth for several years before going to Snapchat.
Important to note from the filing: this all went down in September of 2015. I wouldn't be surprised if they had trouble with their growth numbers at that time, but in 2016 they seem to have exploded growth-wise.
Not saying his lawsuit isn't legit, but I wouldn't take this as a sky-is-falling for a 2017 IPO.
Well, the allegation is that they were faking their growth numbers, or planning to. If this is true, than I doubt this was aborted after firing the guy.
But Facebook is very profitable with it. And that's what counts. The lawsuit is in connection to an IPO, so he probably states that user/revenue/profit numbers are somehow misstated. Not the quality of the content, that doesn't really matter here.
When WSJ reported that Facebook inflated its view count metric was inflated, there were no ensuing lawsuits. My significant other works directly in advertising for one of Facebook's advertising partners, and while she told me there was a lot of concern about it, there was almost no trickle down effect to the downstream customers. After a week or two, life went on as usual.
This may not be a completely equitable comparison (Facebook has far better brand equity and a longer history of trustworthiness than Snap at this juncture), but I think it's illustrative that this may not have the "sky is falling" impact we would otherwise anticipate.
In the FB case, advertisers have gotten what they paid for as per contract. The metrics concerned stuff that's not in the sales contract but which FB used to suggest their ad inventory was superior vs. what it actually was. So you're unlikely to see any lawsuits - not worth anyone's while.
You will very likely see FB being pressured to open up to more third party validation of what they claim about their ad inventory at least for big advertizers who put in 10s of millions of dollars into FB advertising.
There have been a few issues with how Facebook has calculated some of their views as well so it's not surprising that there maybe issues with Snapchat.
But regardless of whether they are misquoting some of their growth numbers or not I think even without that they are going to have a difficult time with their valuation and IPO. They are already at $25B in the private market and with an IPO investors would be hoping for at least $40-50B. To justify that price just look at some of the companies in that range and the amount of revenue and growth they have in order to justify it.
Snapchat is not a ubiquitous service like Facebook so ultimately it's going to be in a category somewhere between Twitter and Instagram.
Instagram has one of the easiest on-boarding processes and with their static stream from friends that are now directly hooked into FB you are immediately immersed in what the experience is. Snapchat is a bit more complex.
Regardless to justify a $50B valuation they are going to need a substantial revenue growth story with no hiccups. And they are ultimately going to have to prove out to about $2.5B of revenue in 2017 which is impossible.
Comparatively speaking FB IPO'd for $100B in 2012 and had $5.2B in revenue for that fiscal year and also don't forget that it lost about 30% of it's value after IPO before rebounding substantially and their revenue growth and profitability has been world class.
So I'm not looking at Snapchat with a commentary on it's product, but simply from a financial perspective and it's hard to create a story that validates their $40B-50B IPO target that they are most likely shooting for.
just as a little side note.....I don't believe anything Pompliano says. I created this account to further hide my identity since I live/run a company in Raleigh where he is now a "VC". He claims to "innovate VC" and was written about in the business insider (http://www.businessinsider.com/full-tilt-capital-22-deals-90...).
I work/live with the supposed 22 deals. Only 1 of these 22 deals has been paid (100k checks). The only one that was paid was paid after the founder threatened to go public with these numbers.
Look into his firm and ask around in the raleigh area. 21 unpaid checks.
87 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadThe General Allegations reads like the synopsis of a Silicon Valley episode.
That would be the problem for me if I was an investor. What other types of liabilities does this firm have? They seem to have management that is unable to control themselves how can I be sure this is a isolated case and not standard operating procedure?
"Oh, THAT guy? Ya, he's just angry we fired him because he's an idiot and has no idea what the numbers we were showing him even meant." - quick guys, let's find a way to fix or bury those numbers we showed him!
According to the complaint from Anthony Pompliano: When they were trying to hire him Snapchat said they would hire 40 people under Pompliano for his growth team. Based on this promise he left FB to join Snapchat. He then found the numbers they were touting were not accurate and they were not committed to what they told him.
When the complaint gets to what happened starting the day Pompliano was hired and more specifically what happened when working there, it is blacked out for the next 8 pages.
After those pages it says he was fired after 3 weeks and Snapchat told employees, media contacts, and a company looking to hire Pompliano he was fired for being incompetent. This misrepresentation has cost him his reputation, money, etc.
Source: https://www.totaljobs.com/careers-advice/money-and-legal/ref...
still I have seen developers gone in a weeks time, some voluntarily
I would summarize the complaint as:
Snapchat hired this guy from Facebook. He claims Snapchat falsely represented their growth during the process (two metrics which are redacted turned out to be false.) After he joined, he alerted the VP of finance that some of Snapchat's representations were false, who apparently agreed with some of it and told their VP of Comms to stop representing that to advertisers and some redacted group. He thinks that Snapchat fired him because of this, that they thought he would "blow the whistle" on upcoming IPO. Further, Snapchat continually pressured him to breach his confidentiality agreements with Facebook. After he was fired, Snapchat told people internally and externally that he was incompetent.
In the details, a lot is redacted but it mentions there were specific metrics given to him in the hiring process - that were also given while raising capital in Asia - that were false.
You cannot possibly know if a technical employee (at this level) is incompetent after just 3 weeks. Not possible.
It's the same as firing a CEO 3 weeks into the job... It doesn't make any sense unless that CEO did something blatantly illegal/dodgy during those 3 weeks.
The reality is you won't know how good they are until at least 6 months in.
As an engineer, 3 months is the absolute minimum amount of time I need to figure out if I'm a good match for a company.
You may be assuming a baseline competence, though.
I've interviewed many alleged senior developers who talk a good talk, can tell you the full ASP.Net page lifecycle without missing a beat - despite (possibly sometimes in spite of) not being asked - and when it comes to actually coding show their utter incompetence in seconds flat.
I'm not being elitist here; they'll do stuff that's just plain weird, like only using strings in C# - no other datatypes, only strings - or if they claim database expertise, create tables with only text columns, no indexes, and storing an integer primary key also as a text field.
At any ability level above this, I'm kinda with you; just take into account there is a very real world of sheer utter incompetence out there, and I doubt it's limited to technical employees.
Case in point, this morning I interviewed a 'senior' C# .NET developer with over 10 years' experience - and yet she didn't even know the syntax for using lambda expressions, was barely able to get started with linq, and was unable to tackle a basic string splitting problem. Oh, and she couldn't do fizz-buzz.
I was interviewing for a position in India; I just use such basic tests as a filter, so I can quickly weed out the wrong kind of candidate. See my other comment here for more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327100
If I see a technical candidate resume that has a long stretch (5+ years) at the same company and that company isn't primarily a technical one, huge red flags go up because the previously mentioned 'Senior' candidate is who generally come out of these situations. IF I get past their resume they're going to spend a lot more time telling me how they stay up to date with the world than a candidate otherwise would.
I do extremely basic programming tasks (no more difficult than fizz-buzz) to quickly weed out that sort of candidate.
There are certainly major failures possible in 3 weeks for which the optimistic explanation is gross incompetence, and the pessimistic one is gross misconduct.
“Michaels said the information was withheld pending a determination on whether it is covered by a confidentiality agreement. It is possible that that portion of the complaint — which appears to contain a detailed account of Pompliano’s brief tenure at Snapchat — could become public.”
Sounds like a thinly veiled threat to strongarm Snapchat into a quick $ettlement.
The sentence before the one you quoted explained the straightforward legal process by which unredaction may be authorized. A judge decides if this is officially released. Not the plaintiff.
Which might be a fair perspective, but I think OP should point that perspective out ahead of time in the future. Maybe by instead writing something like this: "Like every engagement with the legal system, this sounds like a thinly veiled threat..."
Being explicit makes clear that one thinks that it isn't anything specific to the case that makes it a threat - it's just the fact that the legal system has been invoked.
"2X successful founder"... looking on Crunchbase, he founded Digiforce "acquired" by Strategic Link partners. digiforce.com directs to some random japanese site and the Strategic Link site looks like something made from a (bad) wordpress template. I almost wonder if he made up a company to acquire his company.
Next, no way Facebook hires someone like that to lead "THE" growth team for pages. Maybe as an entry level PM or something. He was only at facebook for 1.5 years, which also makes me skeptical he was such a high priority hire for Snapchat.
Sounds like a bunch of hot air and resume puffing to me. My guess is that Snapchat realized he had an overly active imagination and had taken liberties with his resume.
There is coverage of him pitching: http://upstart.bizjournals.com/companies/hatched/2013/03/25/...
And coverage of the acquisition: http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2014/01/02/apex-tec...
Anecdote: it takes surprisingly little.
Back in the day, when I was a fresh faced 20-something - and, like now, a complete nobody as well - I joined a fun, pretty unknown, startup and had my photo and bio published in the physical magazine of the time.
This happened because one of their journalists knew our CEO, and they thought it'd be a fun "welcome to the company" for me.
(scary to imagine someone doing surgery with lots of puffery)
>digiforce.com directs to some random japanese site
It could be that the brand digaforce wasn't valuable to strategic link partners & they let it go.
> the Strategic Link site looks like something made from a (bad) wordpress template.
Their target market looks like military and law enforcement. You don't necessarily need shiny marketing to sell to the land of powerpoint: personal selling through established contacts works. Ex military stick together because of how bonds were forged.
>I almost wonder if he made up a company to acquire his company.
Are you suggesting he invented strategic link partners? This is probably pretty easy to validate as their management is well documented on their site - all ex military.
>Next, no way Facebook hires someone like that to lead "THE" growth team for pages.
You've built the next step of your argument assuming your previous allegations are true.
>Maybe as an entry level PM or something.
Is what you argued previously about his character true or not? If he was fraudulent (i.e. inventing companies etc.) then Facebook probably wouldn't hire at all (or he'd get washed out pretty quickly).
> He was only at facebook for 1.5 years, which also makes me skeptical he was such a high priority hire for Snapchat.
His allegation says that Snapchats intent was to gain confidential information about Facebook. Does 1.5 years matter in this case? Recent information is what's key here.
> Sounds like a bunch of hot air and resume puffing to me.
What are the facts we know for sure? He worked for Facebook. He was involved in some startups. He is ex military. He was hired by snapchat briefly and fired.
>My guess is that Snapchat realized he had an overly active imagination and had taken liberties with his resume.
Have you read his complaint? He alleges he was calling out snapchat internally on misrepresenting metrics to prospective investors - and they fired him for it.
What's more likely? He faked his way into Facebook and survived 1.5 year, generated enough demand to get noticed by Snapchat and then jumped to snapchat only to be found out to be completely incompetent in three weeks?
Or... his military / honour based mindset got him in trouble when he saw things happening in snapchat that were at odds with his value system.
There is definitely smoke here in my opinion. You have to be grossly incompetent to get fired within three weeks. If he did manage to fake his way into Facebook then he does have a level of competency. To me, it doesn't make sense that he'd screw up and get fired in three weeks. Especially given his military background.
Does this make sense?
Agreed. grossly incompetent
If you were a fraudster, you'd just go along with it ;-)
Based on the last link in the bhouston comment nearby: http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2014/01/02/apex-tec...
I only kept in limited contact with him after he went to Facebook, but from my experience with him in Raleigh, he's a stand up guy. I'm inclined to believe his story, because if he was incompetent he wouldn't have run FB's growth for several years before going to Snapchat.
Not saying his lawsuit isn't legit, but I wouldn't take this as a sky-is-falling for a 2017 IPO.
[Conway's law]
So if Snapchat is what Snapchat Inc designs then I'm not at all surprised if the initial communication structures turn out to be of the alleged kind.
I mean Snapchat is a shallow concept promoting short-term thinking and used for boasting :D
It's like Facebook - just worse. Facebook is almost academic in comparison - you actually have to write things.
Maybe storytime won't always be sufficient to run a business.
Also, it is well known now that Reddit's initial userbase was all fake - so does anyone know what the appropriate way to report this to customers is?
This may not be a completely equitable comparison (Facebook has far better brand equity and a longer history of trustworthiness than Snap at this juncture), but I think it's illustrative that this may not have the "sky is falling" impact we would otherwise anticipate.
You will very likely see FB being pressured to open up to more third party validation of what they claim about their ad inventory at least for big advertizers who put in 10s of millions of dollars into FB advertising.
But regardless of whether they are misquoting some of their growth numbers or not I think even without that they are going to have a difficult time with their valuation and IPO. They are already at $25B in the private market and with an IPO investors would be hoping for at least $40-50B. To justify that price just look at some of the companies in that range and the amount of revenue and growth they have in order to justify it.
Snapchat is not a ubiquitous service like Facebook so ultimately it's going to be in a category somewhere between Twitter and Instagram.
Instagram has one of the easiest on-boarding processes and with their static stream from friends that are now directly hooked into FB you are immediately immersed in what the experience is. Snapchat is a bit more complex.
Regardless to justify a $50B valuation they are going to need a substantial revenue growth story with no hiccups. And they are ultimately going to have to prove out to about $2.5B of revenue in 2017 which is impossible.
Comparatively speaking FB IPO'd for $100B in 2012 and had $5.2B in revenue for that fiscal year and also don't forget that it lost about 30% of it's value after IPO before rebounding substantially and their revenue growth and profitability has been world class.
So I'm not looking at Snapchat with a commentary on it's product, but simply from a financial perspective and it's hard to create a story that validates their $40B-50B IPO target that they are most likely shooting for.
I work/live with the supposed 22 deals. Only 1 of these 22 deals has been paid (100k checks). The only one that was paid was paid after the founder threatened to go public with these numbers.
Look into his firm and ask around in the raleigh area. 21 unpaid checks.