Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Also really interesting with Snapchat – one, kind of as we talked about on the Facebook IP show and then afterward as well. I think it’s great to see a company that is four years old but clearly has achieved scale and is in the process of building a meaningful revenue business and eventually hopefully profits as well. Take this step and do this. They’ve achieved domestic scale. I’m very curious to see how they do internationally as they really start to expand there. Because I think we keep seeing Instagram copy a lot of Snapchat’s functionality and if you’re already an avid Snapchat user, you often are not really compelled by the Instagram features. You’re like kind of I already have my network, my habits. But then if you think about these people that are in countries where Snapchat hasn’t gotten big yet and now the sort of question is will Snapchat ever get big in those countries since Instagram kind of has a lot of that functionality now and they already use Instagram all the time. I’m still bullish because this is one of those sort of seed company bets where you just say “I wouldn’t bet against that person” and, like, I have a lot of faith in their ability to figure that out and that’s what I feel about Evan Spiegel and the kind of leadership at Snapchat. But I think it’s important to note a risk that they’ve achieved domestic scale and we’ll see how they do. It will be a very interesting S1 to read no matter what.…

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