The Ledger
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Weitzman: Speechify's early hires from Apple and Snapchat failed within three months
“We had two people that we hired from Apple and Snapchat, like very legit people. And they messed up the culture of the company. They would leave at 5:30 p.m. They like didn't live and breathe the company. And in the end, both of them quit after three months.”
Calacanis: Snapchat will reach a $1B run rate by end of 2017
“They'll be at a billion-dollar run rate by the end of the year, you know, two hundred fifty million a quarter.”
New breakout consumer mobile companies will emerge soon
“And I think you'll see new companies emerge. Is it going to happen this year? Is it going to happen next year? It's going to happen soon. It hasn't happened since Snapchat, right? They're the Snapchat, Tinder are the last big consumer companies to emerge. Thos…”
Teare: Series A and B Face Severe Capital Shortage
“There's about five billion dollars available at the seed stage for all the companies every three to five years. There's about one to two billion available at the A and B stage. And then at the growth stage, at the other end, there's more than a hundred billion…”
Lightspeed Invested in Snapchat's Seed Round at a $4.25M Valuation
“At the seed at four and a quarter pre, and, like, here we are looking at 13, and just thinking, well, you know, that's three times higher.”
Snapchat Stories Became the Dominant Format Across All Social Networks
“And with that one insight, starting from first principles, thinking about how people interact with each other, he has changed the course of all social networks, because you can't find, you know, whether it's Twitter, or LinkedIn, or, you know, obviously, Whats…”
Lightspeed's Snapchat Investment Originated From a Partner's Daughter Using the App
“I think it was at light speed, I think, where one of the partner's daughters was on Snapchat permanently, and he was asking her what it was, and that stemmed their investment.”
Wu: Moving Snapchat Discover next to stories completely changed its fate
“We moved Discover one screen to the left, essentially, to be on the same screen as where you see your friends' stories, And that completely changed the fate of Discover.”
Snapchat's Monthly Burn Rate Exceeded $1M Within a Year of Seed
“Burn, within a year from our investment, Burn was in excess of a million dollars a month”
Snapchat Had 50% MoM Growth and 50% 90-Day Retention in 2012
“But I remember seeing 50% month on month growth. 50% DAU to MAU ratios, which suggests very high engagement, and 50% retention after 90 days, which again suggests high engagement, high retention, high growth.”
Snapchat Had 90,000 DAUs on 180,000 Installs When Lightspeed Invested
“So when we met them in, you know, March, April of 2012, they had about 90,000 daily active users off of a base of 180,000 installs.”
Liew: Snapchat grew 50% month-over-month prior to Lightspeed's investment
“It was growing at a 50% per month rate. It was showing incredible retention and incredible engagement.”
Benchmark: Snapchat was 12 people in a dining room at Series A
“When we invested in the Series A, the company was essentially a dozen people camping out in the dining room of Evan's dad's house in Los Angeles.”
A successor to Snapchat will emerge within five years
“I have absolutely no doubt that there will be another, you know, the next version of Snapchat will come along in five years”
Major telcos will launch mobile payments to compete with Facebook and Snapchat
“I think there are much more other big players offering similar services in the next few months, including a lot of the big telcos, because they're not really interested just to let the Facebooks and Snapchats taking away this interesting interaction to the end…”
Bobby Murphy Built Early Snapchat Code Off-Hours While at Another Startup
“Evan was partnered with Bobby Murphy, who was a fraternity brother of his from Stanford, who graduated a couple of years earlier. And he'd been the guy who was building all of this and had obviously demonstrated an ability to like build high quality, scalable …”