Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Yup. One of the things, there was a great article – shoot, I can’t remember where, we’ll find it and link to it in the show notes – that just came out, another one of the many profiles of Evan and of the company. And one of the things it talks about, it’s notoriously been hard to work for Evan and there’s been a lot of employee turnover at Snapchat. But one of the things it says in there is that any discussion of well, we have problem X or we need to do thing Y, and so we should just look at what other people have done on that. Like what did Google do? What did Facebook do? What did Instagram do? That will get you fired right away. The culture they have and that Evan tries to cultivate there is like “I don’t care what other people have done in the past. We’re doing things our way here.” Which I think you really got to admire, it’s what’s gotten Snapchat to where it is. Yeah. I’m going to pull forward my tech trends. But there’s some interesting things there because they’re doing a lot of things mobile first in a way that I wouldn’t have known the current users or the current products weren’t doing mobile first. One of their big sells, and we’ll talk about their revenue model right now, is vertical video advertising. And for the first time, they’re forcing content creation to appear in a way that is the most immersive on your phone. And I think if they’re looking at others, they say, “Okay, well, how do people do add units? So it’s a feed,” or “oh, they repurposed letterbox video,” or they make people turn it sideways. And that wouldn’t be as engaging. I mean it’s a harder path to go this way but I think it’s fair to say product visionary that everything is completely rethought in this absolute level first way. In vertical, yeah.…

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