David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…Lay it on me. Is because especially with the direction that Snapchat has gone, I was thinking about this when we were talking about the category and I was like, “Oh, it could be like a company within Facebook.” Never would work. These are just two companies that cannot exist together. And so if I’m Mark Zuckerberg and I’m Facebook, we're talking about the reaction within the company on Facebook like okay, he had bid Snapchat up to, I don’t know, $15 billion or $19 billion, WhatsApp territory, and then come back in. And then this guy Evan would come into the company and basically be like “F you everybody! I do things completely differently here. I stand for everything that you are not.” What would that have done? Facebook has been super successful in the 2 ½ years since this time. And I think in a lot of ways really crystallized what Facebook is and what their growth potential is going forward and they’re now, what, like a $300 billion market cap company. I don’t know. Yes, I was thinking about digging in here. I’m trying to think through if Facebook did what I was talking about earlier and flattened it onto the same platform and made it easy for advertisers like Instagram, if to your point, what if they bid it up to $15 billion? Would they in any reasonable time period have gotten $15 billion of advertising revenue out of it? Or would there just have been this implosion beforehand like you say of culture mishmash. A lot of the value that people are attributing to Snapchat right now is because it’s on this unique and different trajectory that’s more like television advertising than direct response.…

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