Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
28 published records
01 / uncertainty
“The other surprise and this actually, I'm really surprised that this has not gotten a lot of press. There’s this thing, I don’t know if you saw this, Ben.”
02 / belief
“What a baller move to say like hey, we’re going to sell, what is it, like 19 percent of this company and we think at this price point that even with no ability to have any influence even if all of you get together on the future of this company, it’s still going to be oversubscribed.”
03 / belief
“The chairman of the board is, I believe, is it Michael Lynton I think who was the Sony entertainment CEO.”
04 / evaluation
“Before we move into tech themes, and this is right on the border of what would have happened otherwise in tech themes, was this the right way for Snap to go out and did it get them the right investors. So what I mean by that is Snap is company that even more so than any of these other tech companies is going to potentially have a real tough time with these quarterly earnings and if they got themselves a bunch of retail investors that were short-term and excited for the pop and got in because there was all this excitement and demand, and they didn’t get this long-term investors… like here’s the counter example.”
05 / belief
“I think what another interesting question is, what if it’s not Twitter but what if it’s Fox or what if it’s a television media company that Snapchat would buy.”
06 / belief
“Like Carl Icahn has done this with Apple and I think with eBay to advocate for a buyback or a distribution.”
07 / belief
“I don’t have them offhand but I think Snap had even after the huge amount of money they just raised in the private markets like less than a year ago, they had just about a billion dollars in cash on-hand and they burned free cashflow of almost I believe $700 million last year.”
08 / belief
“We graded the Facebook IPO and I think we gave it two grades – a grade for the actual IPO itself and then a grade for how that event influenced the trajectory of the company over time.”
09 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. I don’t think they got there. See, they’re the Cavs or the Warriors or maybe it’s the team that will dethrone one of them.”
10 / commitment
“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.”
11 / uncertainty
“I almost feel silly for giving it an A. Like there’s just so much variance and so much we don’t know.”
12 / belief
“I think actually now they’re selling it’s not just the vending machines with Spectacles.”
13 / belief
“To close on that, I think when they say they’re a camera company, the world has moved to a place now where a camera is not just a physical thing.”
14 / belief
“I think if there is one lesson from the whole, all of Snapchat’s story thus far is exactly that.”
15 / belief
“I think that’s right. We’ve rattled on that but really quickly to cover and then wrap up on narratives, there are two other aspects to the sort of press narrative about Snapchat right now.”
16 / belief
“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.”
17 / belief
“Interesting that that has been a total non-narrative in the IPO. I think I saw like one news story about him.”
18 / belief
“Then there’s the narrative that pops up around it in the media, in the investor community, in the tech community, everybody reacting to what’s happening. So we thought, we distilled what we think are kind of the three most important points of both the narrative that Snap has been trying to tell over the past month and the narrative that the media and the investor press has been telling.”
19 / evaluation
“Anyway, so the point of all this, we’ve spent a long time on this section, and listeners, let us know what you think of it, but I think what’s just so fascinating about this event and this company is you can paint it as Snapchat has very effectively as this is the future and this is the most compelling, most interesting company to hit the public markets since Facebook and that we are riding a very different wave than Facebook.”
20 / evaluation
“I mean we ended our last Snapchat episode with… you know, I was arguing that we’re asking the question should Facebook have offered more to try and buy Snapchat back in 2013. And I argued no because just this division in the culture of Snapchat and their vision of their product is just anathema to what Facebook is.”
21 / prediction
“Imagine like there’s a battle in a canyon and there’s the incumbent that’s got 100,00 soldiers that are all blocking the middle of the canyon, is there something where like Snapchat can get up on the side of the canyon and tiptoe along and even like Waltz past all them and they can’t do anything about it because they can’t get up the canyon.”
22 / observation
“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.”
23 / evaluation
“Because the cloud cost, it’s not like those are fixed and that it will be amortized by all these users coming on.”
24 / preference
“Like they don’t want to be priced on any of that. They want you to believe that they’ve done these incredible innovative things, transforming what we think of as a camera and what we use cameras for.”
25 / prediction
“I think the thing that you have to believe is that Snapchat can figure out a thing to do that gets a whole bunch of new daily active users, that Facebook is not in the position to copy, that having that existing network and those existing products doesn’t give them the leverage to keep building these roadblocks for Snapchat.”
26 / evaluation
“Like if I feel like they’re set up for success and they’re not way ahead of their skiz in terms of the… well, actually I guess they’re related because the fact that they’ve got a market cap that is so ahead of revenue is totally tied into this.”
27 / observation
“That's such a good point and I think… man, thinking about this this way, I think nothing better encapsulates the time in which we’re living in tech where an IPO prospectus and process looks like a seed deck and a seed process.”
28 / evaluation
“Augmented reality thus far and virtual reality have been these really clunky things that nobody wants that cost a lot of money that it's unclear what you do with them, you know.”