Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…Yup. I think this gets at the heart of what Snapchat is trying to say, which is “we’re a camera company.” To be a bull on Snapchat right now, you have to believe that they are going to basically pivot the market into a dimension that Facebook can’t compete with them on and they are doing that, like they have Lenses. Facebook and Instagram can’t match them on that. The technology is fundamentally better and different with Snapchat. But, when you start thinking where does that play out, does that lead us into augmented reality, well of course Facebook has Oculus. But I would also say they have stumbled a bit. So it is a much more even playing field there. But I think that’s the bet you have to make if you’re going to bet on Snapchat right now. That they’re going to outrun Facebook into this new paradigm. Yeah. Perhaps one of the things or actually the criteria that we evaluate if an IPO was successful or not, which actually we won’t be able to fully do on this episode since it’s so recent but what did that capital infusion, in this case the $3. 4 billion that they raised from selling those shares, what does that capital infusion allow the company to do that they wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise? Like did they effectively use IPO’ing as a vehicle to raise capital to go do something new as a company? Maybe it’s to do new hardware stuff. Maybe it’s to figure out what that next frontier is. Well, they’ve already shown they think of themselves as a hardware company.…

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