Ben Gilbert: observation

Transcript context

…Well, whether it’s AR or, you know, I don’t know yet how we’re going to characterize this wave but it is, well, I think Snap says it really well. It’s the camera wave. It is when a camera becomes about inserting technology into the world around you. Yeah. That's interesting. Most of my tech themes we’ve covered, a lot of like winner-take-all network effects and the ability to copy well, cord cutting, moving from TV to mobile ephemerality, how it’s the anti-Facebook, you can really be yourself. But the one that we haven’t really touched yet is that the viral coefficient of Snapchat is different than the more successful social experiences like Facebook. To me, a big risk factor is that their key product pro is also potentially their key business con where on Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter, like it’s a follower grab. I am directly incentivized to have a wider audience because the way that you use those platforms is to try to get as much engagement as you can on those platforms. Like it’s called social media because it’s truly media. It’s you speaking to an audience. People engage with you but it’s more media than communication. With Snapchat being more communication, and the way I use Snapchat is there’s like 5 to 10 friends that I snap with at all and that happens in kind of a power law distributed way where like maybe that’s not exactly the right mathematical distribution but like there is one person that I snap with the most than a few other people that are kind of, then the rest of those 10 are not that much. So the reason why I think their product has such high engagement but like the issues that we’re talking about are in growth, or the fact that the product itself lends itself really well to engaging a bunch with a very small set of users which isn’t great for growing into new markets. So as we start to think about the network effect here, like the fact that there’s a ton of people in North America using it and some people in other markets using it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to catch on in Belarus because there’s nobody in Belarus that has somebody that wants to snap them somewhere else because it’s all about these small pockets. It’s interesting. You’re seeing apps like Snow which I believe… is Snow part of line, I think?…

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