
Snapchat: another example of the hubris of privilege and systematic bias in tech - samiur1204
http://blog.samiurr.com/snapchat-another-example-of-the-hubris-of-privilege
======
russelluresti
The problem with posts like these is that you assume you know what's going on
in the head of another person. That's a dangerous game to play.

Also, just because someone makes a decision that's different from the decision
you would have made doesn't mean their decision was the "wrong" decision. You
would have taken the money, I would have taken the money, and I'm sure a lot
of others would have taken the money. However, choosing not to take the money
isn't the "wrong" choice, it's just a different choice. And, given that he had
all the information about the deal (or at the very least more information than
the rest of us), I'd say calling his decision wrong when you hardly have any
information on it at all is its own form hypocritical hubris.

Anyway, morals of the story are (1) different !== wrong and (2) it's best not
to judge the actions of others, especially when you're lacking the details.

PS. I am so judging you.

PPS. I am also fine with being a hypocrite.

~~~
samiur1204
OP here. Completely agree that "wrong" is a subjective and relative measure.
It depends on what one's priorities are: utility to the world or personal
profit or whatever else. I did make an assumption about Evan's intentions and
thought-process, but his action remains the same. He passed up taking cash for
Snapchat, an app that has no real value in my personal opinion. He also passed
up the opportunity, in my opinion, to take that cash and create something of
real value. I may be wrong to come to those conclusions, but they are my
opinions. I suppose you can call it hubris to post my opinion on the internet,
as it is obviously comparable to turning down billions of dollars for a
useless product.

~~~
russelluresti
I posted a reply here before HN crashed but it seems to not have been brought
back when HN came back up.

Here's the gist: it's not that posting an opinion online is hubris, it's what
your opinion entails and is based on. You have no facts about the deal, and no
qualifications to speak on good business acquisitions. You call the product
"worthless" while teams of people at Facebook and Google seem to value it very
highly. I'm going to have to assume that the people FB and Google hire are all
very intelligent and capable at their jobs, and they see value in purchasing
the company (which is why they made the offer). You, however, with no
information have decided they're all morons and you know better because
SnapChat is "worthless". That, my friend, is indeed hubris. You assume that
you know more than everyone else who has far more intimate knowledge of the
company and product.

Here's the moral of the story: just because something seems "worthless" to you
doesn't mean that it has no worth to anyone else. If other highly trained and
educated people say it's worth quite a bit of money, then, perhaps, you should
re-evaluate your viewpoint.

------
skwirl
The Snapchat founder is incompetent because of his race, gender, and socio-
economic status. Got it.

~~~
samiur1204
If that's the takeaway you got from my post, then I'm sorry: I was not able to
articulate myself well.

There's no doubt that he's talented and gifted. And it's possible that I'm
absolutely wrong and Evan and Snapchat are planning some amazing features. But
I highly doubt that, and I would propose that it would be more pragmatic to
take the cash offered and do something more meaningful.

~~~
skwirl
That money isn't coming out of thin air. Why is the onus not on Facebook or
Google to use the $3 billion and $4 billion they were going to use to buy
Snapchat on something more meaningful? Why is it Spiegel's responsibility?
Especially if he didn't ask for the offers in the first place?

~~~
bentcorner
Completely agree. Whenever I see articles about how "[founder] rejects offer
from Google/FB/Apple for [$X]" and the resulting criticism that the founder
must be shortsighted, I never see any discussion on the other side fo the
fence. Why on earth does Google or Facebook think Snapchat is worth any money?
_Somebody_ over there does, do they have the same mentality as Spiegel?

------
vellum
_Evan Spiegel is just another talented but arrogant, unaware-of-his-own-
privilege guy._

To his credit, he's aware of it:

 _I bring this up because I want to acknowledge inequality. At Stanford, and
in Silicon Valley, we perpetuate the myth of meritocracy. We believe that the
harder we work, the more we will achieve. The more effort that we take to
craft ourselves, and our brands, the more opportunities we will create for
ourselves.

But in Cape Town, and in America, and across the world - This is not true. I
am a young, white, educated male. I got really, really lucky. And life isn’t
fair. So if life isn’t fair - It’s not about working harder; it’s about
working the system._

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/135235429/Design-Yourself-
Conferen...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/135235429/Design-Yourself-Conference-
Opening-Keynote-by-Evan-Spiegel-CEO-of-Snapchat)

------
wvenable
I assume that Snapchat has had more offers to buy it than just Facebook and
Google. Probably many hundreds offers starting at a few thousand, to a few
hundred thousand, to a million. When do you stop and sell out? Is there a
right time? I might have considered it at a billion but apparently that would
have been a mere 25% of what I could get for it.

The rest of the article is idiotic: "Evan is only 23 years old, a straight
white male, and _chances are_ , has never been denied anything in his life."
_Chances are_ I can make up anything I want about someone's life to fit
whatever narrative I'm trying to express.

------
jordo37
I dislike this article because it uses the auspices of privilege and bias to
talk about one guy being essentially a fool in the writer's eyes. Privilege
and bias are not the reasons I point to for anyone refusing a seemingly good
offer. Evan might know things we as outsiders do not, he might be selfish, he
might foolish but that seems to me to have little to do with his race, his sex
or his socioeconomic background.

------
electic
Guess Google was incompetent for not selling to Yahoo and aiming big. Glad we
got this cleared up.

~~~
samiur1204
Surely you must admit that there is a massive difference between the potential
of Google and Snapchat.

~~~
sov
Hindsight is 20/20\. What was Google when Yahoo turned them over?

~~~
bashinator
At the time, I was still aware that it was a much better search engine than
anything Yahoo had.

~~~
wahnfrieden
What was the perceived worth of search engines as a general concept back then
though? That's the relevant question, not which search was best.

~~~
bashinator
It was immediately obvious that search engines were worthwhile - that's
actually the origin of Yahoo's name - "Yahoo, I can finally find stuff on the
www!" Before search engines started getting really good, we relied on stuff
like web rings and other indexes of sites.

~~~
wahnfrieden
Were they making money though, just from the search side of things? Yahoo
expanded into being a "media company" and portal as a way to generate revenue
- search was just one way to get people in the door. Sorry, that's what I
meant by worth (financial worth).

------
od2m
I think not selling for a clearly outrageous valuation tells us something else
is at play here. I suspect, this is this mans life's work and he doesn't wish
to sell it.

When you find your life's work (as I have), you will understand.

Until then, your assumptions that your priorities are more important or valid
than his shows your own ignorance, not his.

------
omonra
I think the author is missing one important bit - most of modern world (or at
least the people who built modern technology companies) is created by people
like that - middle/upper class white males who know they could take risks
because if things don't work out, they still are ok.

Would Gates or Zuckerberg drop out of Harvard if they were the first in their
family to attend college with immigrant parents demanding to know why they're
not a doctor/lawyer - probably not.

PS I'd also like people to stop using the formulaic 'straight white male' as
if one's sexual proclivities make any difference here. Ie someone writing
about a field where this matters (say pro sports or fashion industry to pick
opposite examples) - fine, talk about it. Otherwise please stop regurgitating
same PC keyword over and over.

------
jds375
I really don't think his background/race/gender is much to blame. I think it's
more of him being overly idealistic and letting all of his success go to his
head. It's great that he thinks that Snapchat has the potential to go onto be
something worth more than 4 billion, but he needs to be realistic. Snapchat is
just a social utility app. I don't see an obvious path for revenue generation
and growth without some sort of acquisitions/merger deal. Hopefully he has
some good plans for Snapchat's future.

------
bobosha
_" It is filled with Evan Spiegels, brash young white men who have the world
at their feet and have never known the problems of others. This is partly "_

This statement is inaccurate at best, more than 1/2 of start-ups in the valley
and 25% nationwide are by immigrants (overwhelmingly Asian). So to say it is
"filled by white men" is to ignore that a growing bulk of founders are
foreign-born and non-white.

~~~
samiur1204
Good thing you responded to a statement that admittedly lacked data with a
statement that also lacked any real data except some statistics pulled out of
the derriere. Here's a real study done that found that 87% of VC-backed
startup founders are white, and 89% of VC-backed startup founders are male:
[http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/data-race-
gen...](http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/data-race-gender-
silicon-valley-venture-capital-diversity)

~~~
bobosha
Actually, before attacking someone you need to do bit more research:
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/10/15/how-
india...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/10/15/how-indians-
defied-gravity-and-achieved-success-in-silicon-valley/)

Also look up Anna Lee Saxenian's work.
[http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~anno/Papers/Americas_new...](http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~anno/Papers/Americas_new_immigrant_entrepreneurs_II.pdf)

------
drifting
"Evan Spiegel showed his arrogance to the world by turning down the offers..."
So because someone will not sell his/her company, that means the person is
arrogant. Wow. Speaking of arrogance...

------
wellboy
Why would you sell your company for $4B, when you're growing by 15% a month or
whatever and are very likely to be worth >$10B by the end of the year and
quite likely to be worth $20B the year after??

~~~
glimmung
That $4B is about potential, not scale. Growing by 15% does not increase the
value by 15%!

~~~
wellboy
Correct, that's why I wrote $10B and not $4B * 1.15^12 = $21B.

------
gretful
"Renaissance Engineer" <\- samiur is another arrogant asshat, upset that his
pet project (and I'm only guessing samiur is a guy) isn't worth $4B to Google.

------
skizm
I am really confused. I thought snapchap "turned down" the money because they
wanted to see next quarter's numbers before opening a conversation about an
acquisition. They didn't say "no we're not selling", they said something along
the lines of "talk to us in 6 months". I can't find the source but that was my
initial impression when I read the first article on this topic.

------
greenlakejake
To me the take away is that he doesn't care that his company exposed the
private information of the company's users.

------
cantastoria
So if Evan Speigels had been female, black and poor (i.e. not privileged) he
would have taken the money and that would have been the right thing to do? Why
because people without privilege are incapable of being stupid or greedy?

------
AlwaysBCoding
I think you're expecting a lot out of someone who is 23.

~~~
samiur1204
That maybe so, but so are the people who invested in Snapchat. By the way, I
am 23 myself. I'm not saying that everyone at 23 needs to be mature with their
thinking of the world, but we should at least promote the ones that are.

------
lotso
>Evan Spiegel is just another talented but arrogant, unaware-of-his-own-
privilege guy.

From a profile on Spiegel in LA Weekly:

"John Spiegel strove to make sure his children understood that their life was
privileged. Every Christmas, he would take them to hand out food at Head Start
centers. Through their church, All Saints Episcopal in Beverly Hills, they
traveled to Mexico to build houses for the poor"

"He laid out his case in a letter to his father on Feb. 12, 2008. He began by
thanking his father for working so hard to afford "such an amazing lifestyle,"
assuring him that he understood how privileged they were. "We live in a
bubble," Evan wrote."

"But where he is a real outlier is in his attitude toward his own success. One
of the cherished ideas of the tech world is that success is based on talent
and hard work, and that everyone has an equal chance. But Spiegel, who grew up
in a wealthy family, has little use for what he calls "the myth of
meritocracy." Where others see success as a function of effort, he sees it as
luck."

[http://www.laweekly.com/2013-10-17/news/snapchat-evan-
spiege...](http://www.laweekly.com/2013-10-17/news/snapchat-evan-
spiegel/full/)

I would say these statements fly directly into the face of your
characterization of Spiegel.

>I would be hard-pressed to find someone who thought Snapchat was actually
useful to the world. Popular, yes, and fun too, but not particularly useful.
Certainly not $4 billion useful. To turn down that amount of money means that
Evan sees Snapchat as his primary priority. With $4 billion, Evan could easily
fund multiple new startups that are doing meaningful work to change the world
(or at least make money!).

Couldn't you dismiss Facebook and Twitter with the same criticism? Who
determines what is useful to the world? Enhancing communication isn't the same
as curing cancer, but I think you could argue there is some benefit from
connecting people?

I'm not sure where you get that his refusal to accept a buyout makes him more
out of touch. Do you think Zuck should have sold out at 1 billion to Yahoo so
he could go build and invest in other companies? Isn't there a Zuckerburg
quote where he said if he sold Facebook, he would go out and build the same
company again? Also isn't it plausible to believe that Instagram sold out too
early?

So why are you faulting a guy for thinking that his billion dollar company
(which comes around very rarely) is his main goal right now? He probably
recognizes that this is his one shot at becoming a tech icon, is it absurd to
swing for the fences?

