David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. And the thing you have to wonder is also the thing you would have to believe as an investor to want to do this is does paying a ton for Google to handle their infrastructure and keep that completely outsourced, allow them to try things faster which is the true kind of inherent value of the company is that they can experiment, get things right and roll out really good products quickly. Like do you believe that and do you believe that it’s worth all these computationally expensive things that they’re doing on a per user basis. Because the cloud cost, it’s not like those are fixed and that it will be amortized by all these users coming on. That scales linearly with users, yeah. So number one, I think you have to say is it worth it to be paying that on a per user basis. Number two, should they be paying that premium to keep it outside of the company so they can move. Then so that’s the second part of the press narrative. Then the third part is actually I think, Ben, when you look at how the IPO performed when it priced above the range and then traded up, had the 44% pop yesterday and is trading up again on day two, I think the third part of the world at large narrative is that yes, despite those problems, Snapchat and Evan and Bobby really are fundamental product geniuses and they deserve the credit that they are lavishing on themselves in the IPO. But I think the market has shown over the last two days that they’re willing to give Snapchat a pass for now but they better deliver soon. Yeah, sure. I mean, the frenzy and the excitement that I'm attributing all of the oversubscribing nature of the IPO, the pop and trading, the pop the next day, like we just haven’t had a big IPO in tech since Twitter. I think this is really, you know, this is a great stat. The 15 US-based tech companies that went public in 2016 raised a total of $1.44 billion and Snap raised 3.4. It was the first social media –…

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