Chapter 994 Snapchat

"Yes, Snapchat is about to launch a chat function. According to surveys, Snapchat is currently the most popular among young people, especially high school students, and user loyalty is extremely high..."

After arriving in New York, Barron talked to Ivanta about another project invested by IC Capital, a social application called Snapchat.

Maybe when it comes to Snapchat, many people don’t know much about it, but everyone should have used the "burn after reading" application, and Snapchat was the first social application to launch the "burn after reading" function - it is a social application based on the "burn after reading" function. A photo sharing social application that allows users to send pictures, videos and other content and set a certain viewing time. Once the set time is exceeded, the content will be automatically deleted.

Snapchat was founded in 2011. At that time, Woaw, Twitter and LinkedIn had almost completely dominated the social media field. Other social applications, including Google's own Google+ and its investment in Whatsapp, did not perform well.

Evan Spiegel, one of the founders of Snapchat, was studying product design at Stanford University at the time. He believed that most social media services lacked a way for friends to communicate privately - social media such as Woaw and Twitter provided An unprecedented platform for sharing and connecting, but interactions on these platforms lack the intimacy of real-world interactions.

Under such circumstances, in July 2011, Evan Spiegel and his classmates launched the application, which was still named Picaboo, on the Appstore.

In fact, as for the Snapchat app, because Barron had never used it in his previous life, it was not him who initially reminded Ivanta to invest. It was Ivanta who heard her secretary Heda once. ·Kahn mentioned that her sister, who is in high school, was recently addicted to a social networking application. After she immediately conducted an investigation, she decided to invest...

That was already 2013, so IC Capital missed out on Snapchat’s seed round.

But in February of that year, after Ivanta personally interviewed several founders of Snapchat, Snapchat’s Series A financing was finalized.

In this financing, IC Capital valued Snapchat at US$60 million, invested US$15 million in it, and obtained 25% of Snapchat’s shares.

Since then, Snapchat has grown at an astonishing rate.

Snapchat users send more than 60 million photos every day, and more than 5 billion photos in total.

Incredibly, Snapchat’s operations team at the time still only had five full-time employees.

Shortly after closing its Series A round of funding, Snapchat hired five more employees, bringing the company's total to 10 employees.

Also with the support of IC Capital's resources, Snapchat's popularity began to soar. Through Ivanta's control of media, mobile operating systems and other resources, Snapchat was vigorously promoted.

Next, IC Capital also served as the main investor and continued to participate in the series B and C rounds of financing conducted by Snapchat in 2013, which also brought its shareholding in Snapchat to close to 40%, making it the largest investor in Snapchat. Investors - The reason why they can obtain such a large shareholding is also related to the huge resources that IC Capital can provide to Snapchat.

You must know that as of now, only in the social field, IC Capital is already one of the major shareholders of Woaw. It has also invested in Twitter and Linkin. The most well-known applications in the social media field are all associated with this investment company.

So their investment in Snapchat itself brought traffic and received strong media coverage. As a result, Snapchat was regarded as a "rising star". This has made Snapchat have a lot less road to travel. You must know that in IC Before the capital investment, and after the investment, Snapchat's development speed was completely different.

Although Snapchat currently has no clear plans for monetization, it already has more than 30 million daily active users. These users upload more than 400 million photos on Snapchat every day, which even exceeds the number of photos uploaded by users to Snapchat every day. Woaw the number of photos.

“Snapchat’s users in the 18-24 age range account for 45% of the total users. This proportion is much ahead of all other social applications. This is completely different from Woaw’s main user group, although both Google and Woaw The highest bid for acquiring Snapchat has exceeded US$3 billion, but the founding team of Snapchat also understands their advantages and prefers to develop independently. "

Although IC Capital is also the major shareholder of Woaw, YouTube was acquired by Woaw after IC Capital took the lead in investing.

However, Ivanta still respects the founder's opinions more and will not put pressure on the other party in terms of acquisitions.

Barron also agreed with this. The reason why Snapchat can develop rapidly is that their "game play" attracts young people. Just as Ivanta said, in the age range of 18-24, Snapchat users account for 45% of the total users, while the corresponding proportions of Woaw, Twitter and Google+ are 16%, 19% and 15% respectively...

Relatively speaking, young people prefer very "cool" games.

However, although Barron ignored Snapchat at first, now after Ivanta mentioned it, he also remembered that the company's market value once reached 30 billion US dollars after it went public, but its subsequent development was not very ideal, and its market value later fell to more than 8 billion US dollars.

Of course, if Woaw still acquires Snapchat at a price of about 3 billion US dollars, it will also be a good deal.

But Barron does not think that after acquiring Instagram, after owning Woaw, WoawChat and Instagram, three "celebrity social applications" that occupy a considerable market share, if Woaw acquires Snapchat again, it will be tolerated by American regulators.

Not to mention that they have already started to lay out the short video field.

Therefore, it is also a good choice for IC Capital to invest in Snapchat and appropriately reduce its holdings after its listing to obtain sufficient profits.

...

Not surprisingly, after Barron came to New York, Ivanta mentioned to him that her father invited Barron to meet at home.

This work is compiled and uploaded by Liujiu Book Bar~~

In this regard, Barron naturally understood the other party's mind, which was nothing more than a great interest in the election two years later.

However, although Barron would also give him strong support, he did not want to put such things too obviously in the open. After all, his own identity is a British duke. If he is too deeply involved in such things, even if Britain is a close ally of the United States, it is very easy to arouse doubts and even have a counterproductive effect.

Of course, it is not important to just attend family gatherings and talk about these things privately.

But at that time, Barron will not stand on the platform in person, let alone be as high-profile as Musk later-at least Musk is a serious American.

Anyway, even if Ivanta, as his daughter, came forward, and she managed most of Barron's resources in the United States, she would be able to provide great assistance at that time.

At that time, it was successful. Now that it has resources that are many times stronger, there should be no great possibility of failure.