
Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled - prostoalex
https://www.wsj.com/articles/evan-spiegels-imperious-style-made-snapchat-a-successuntil-users-fled-11545588892
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twblalock
Here's the money quote:

> Nearly all senior executives who worked with him before the IPO are gone,
> and more than 10 senior employees have departed in the past year.

If you want to retain good people, you need to give them real input and
control.

Senior managers were trying to prevent a disaster and Spiegel did not listen
to them -- but even if every decision he made had turned out to be correct,
his leadership style still would have alienated many of them to the point they
would have wanted to leave. These are successful people who have no problem
finding other opportunities.

~~~
e9
I don’t think he wanted to retain them. Pretty sure his logic was that the
company is grown up and it needs new leadership.

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vikingcaffiene
Speigal is yet another disciple of the Steve Jobs school of management. The
idea that if you are an asshole to everyone and care a lot about fonts, you’ll
repeat the success of Apple. It’s a toxic notion of startup culture and it
needs to die.

~~~
simongr3dal
But on some level it worked for Steve Jobs, arguably it worked two times. What
are the differences that made it work out for Jobs, but didn’t make it work
out for Evan Spiegel to the same degree?

~~~
scarejunba
Jobs was right more often and despite everything, people still wanted to work
with him. I guess the answer is “you can be an asshole if you’re a once-in-a-
generation product developer with charisma”. Otherwise, stick to the tried and
tested ways of using a team as a lever.

Perhaps in twenty years we will hear about “awful conditions at Tesla but I
knew we were changing the world” or some such.

~~~
ksec
How about “You can be an asshole if you’re a once-in-many-generations product
genius with charisma”.

I have yet to see a SINGLE sign of Evan any where close to Steve Jobs quality.
Evan may be good, but he is not a genius like Steve. The only one praising are
his VC which during Pre IPO era were constantly spamming twitter about how
good his Keynote and unseen since Steve passed away.

~~~
scarejunba
Yeah, I’m fine with that. Essentially, Steve Jobs was exceptional so everyone
tolerated exceptionally shitty behaviour from him. If you’re not exceptional,
nothing useful is going to come of acting the same way.

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turndown
I will never understand the desire to radically change an interface on any
product <10 years old. Especially Snap's, as I don't remember anyone
complaining about the interface. Instead, why not make your app use less
battery power and improve the camera's functionality? Those types of
improvement are universally appreciated, yet the least likely to be
implemented.

~~~
twblalock
Snap, and also Twitter, are in a bit of a bind. They can't change anything
without alienating some of their most passionate users, but if they change
nothing they will stagnate and cede all of the possible benefits of innovation
to their competitors. A company that lets its competitors come up with all the
new ideas is probably not going to survive very long.

It's understandable that Snap wanted to improve its design. On principle there
is nothing wrong with that, but that's not what they actually did because the
CEO ignored a lot of warnings that the changes were not improvements.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Twitter’s problems aren’t confusing: fix the abuse problem and add an edit
button.

~~~
icelancer
> fix the abuse problem

This has been a problem for about 30 years online, so good luck with all that.

> add an edit button

User tweets out something nice. 10k retweets. Then changes it to something
political.

~~~
xref
HN both has an edit button and is not susceptible to your hypothetical. these
are solvable problems.

~~~
zapzupnz
HN also has a stricter set of community guidelines (which aren't in themselves
all that strict to start with), more heavily moderated, and a generally well-
educated, mature-minded user base that is generally appreciative of these two
elements.

~~~
dgellow
And way less users.

~~~
zapzupnz
Yep, way fewer users. And what spam accounts exist get squashed pretty
quickly. If HN ever releases statistics on the number of users, I'm sure they
have more dignity than to include spam and bot accounts — which is, I'm sure,
the majority of Twitter accounts.

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stevewodil
Full article: [https://outline.com/SztunV](https://outline.com/SztunV)

~~~
mohi13
not working..showing almost empty page

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stevewodil
Working for me. Do you have JS disabled or something weird?

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odonnellryan
Snapchat is really bad at doing the one thing I want it to do well: take
pictures. It takes awful pictures most of the time. Applies some kind of
super-harsh filter that I don't get with my camera?

~~~
ClassyJacket
They deliberately give you a bad quality photo and I don't know why. Snapchat
takes a screenshot. It doesn't use the camera API on your phone as it should.
So it doesn't get _any_ of the processing which is integral to taking good
photos on phones. Apple should reject it from the App Store for doing this,
but for some reason they let them do it, as well as Instagram and Facebook.

~~~
verall
Well it's almost certainly going to be faster (thumb to save latency) to run
the camera in video mode and then snatch a frame when the user hits the button
than the normal preview-stillshot way the phone takes pics natively.

Cell phone OEMs differentiate with camera quality and so some run some pretty
heavy post processing to make images come out okay.

Snap probably cares more about quickly taking picture and the filters.

~~~
ClassyJacket
Why is the latency of concern in Snapchat but not anywhere else? The native
camera app isn't slow on modern phones.

~~~
verall
Latency is a concern on the native apps too, but as tradeoffs go, cell OEMs
care about mag/site reviews and "it takes a little longer to take a capture"
buried deep in the text will be worth much less than better-looking example
photos in the side by side.

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bigfartchili
This feels like what happened to digg.

Reddit did their redesign right. Many people hated it and they gave the option
to go to the old reddit immediately after the new version was released.

~~~
sowhatquestion
Honest question: what's so bad about the reddit redesign?

~~~
manigandham
It's very slow and unresponsive. Any time saved with not having to reload the
page is wasted several times over in the clunky UI, and the lags in loading
data still remain.

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rmason
Really wonder if articles like these are produced by people shorting the
stock.

I think the guy is a genius but he made a very bad mistake with the redesign
and is clearly paying for it. There were some very interesting people
producing content for entrepreneurs on there but they're all gone for now.

I've gone from daily to monthly use. But I keep checking in because I'm really
convinced that they can still pull a rabbit out of the hat.

~~~
yroc92
> Really wonder if articles like these are produced by people shorting the
> stock.

Everything is about money, so I always assume that to be the case for all
these kinds of articles. Regardless, I’m pretty sure snap will be gone in a
couple years. No way they can stand up to Facebook imo.

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jazzyk
Mr. Spiegel, you are no Steve Jobs.

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rokhayakebe
This may be a good time to buy Snap. I remember FB being worth $33B some time
after going public.

~~~
adventured
$294 million operating loss on $297 million in revenue for their latest
quarter.

Snap's operating picture is an accountant's nightmare.

By the time Facebook was five years old, fiscal 2009, they generated a $229m
profit on $777m in sales. They turned profitable in the second half of their
fourth year. Why? Relative financial discipline. Snap has taken the opposite
approach, wild financial irresponsibility (no doubt encouraged by the fairly
bubbly funding environment they got to enjoy).

By the time Facebook went public, they had been profitable for over three
years. They generated a $1b profit on $3.7b in sales in 2011, the year prior
to the IPO. The situation could hardly be any more different from Snap at IPO
or today.

~~~
bob_theslob646
While I agree with your statement, I think you are giving "financial
discipline" way too much weight.

As you probably know Facebook( Instagram) did copy " stories" from Snapchat.
When your competitor effectively steals your secret sauce, what do you do? I
believe that is why they went with their radical UI design change.( In order
to retain users, which backfired)

I am not justifying the cash burn that snap had, just saying that competitors
definitely were a factor in them not being financial disciplined.

Another major negative was from the get go with that their shares listed are
non voting which was a major turn off to wall street which got them
blackballed from being included in the SP500.(Has nothing to do with running a
company or financial discipline, but definitely a negative when large
institutions cannot invest in you because of strict bylaws.)

