
Snap CEO Named a Chief Business Officer, Then Changed His Mind - kronion
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-29/snap-ceo-hired-a-chief-business-officer-then-changed-his-mind
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whoisjuan
I'm going to be devil's advocate here but the CEO (especially of a troubled
company like Snap) needs to take the best decisions for the company and
stretch solvency and viability for as long as possible. Of course, it's
unpopular to promote someone, then rescind that offer and hire someone else.
But in this case, the tradeoff seems reasonable. Hiring a well connected,
veteran exec who comes from a company known for its operational excellence
seems like the right decision. It appears that this was a poor timing issue.

Maybe the handling of the situation was unprofessional and I bet there are
ways to avoid these fake start promotion situations, but I think at this stage
you gotta play your cards. Either you save face and do the politically correct
decision (promoting a good employee, but ultimately an employee with no new
insights or inputs) or you take a risk for the company knowing that you're
about to make a decision that could be decisive for the company's future but
that may have an impact on the impressions people have about your decision-
making abilities.

Given that Snap is running out of cash and cred, I think it makes sense to do
the latter. It also seems that Snap may be looking for a buyer pretty soon and
some of their recent moves indicate that they are trying to create a story on
why Snap would be a good an asset for Amazon.

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steve19
That's a charitable way to look at it. A less charitable way would be the CEO
is shooting from the hip and doesn't have a clue what the company needs.

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superfrank
> A less charitable way would be the CEO is shooting from the hip and doesn't
> have a clue what the company needs.

\- He continued backing the redesign long after it was clear the public hated
it

\- He continued to push spectacles and insist they were a "camera" company,
long after the market showed there was no demand from it.

\- In the last 5 years he's gone from insisting that snap is a "social media
company", to "a camera company", to "the fastest way for people to connect".

In my mind, he seems like he's pretty out of touch with what the public wants
from Snapchat and is just bouncing from one idea to another hoping to get
lucky again.

I feel like he was a college kid who built an app that he wanted, but as he's
aged he no longer identifies with Snap's user base. He's trying to push his
idea of what Snap should be (because that worked originally) as opposed to
asking users what they want.

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harryh
_just bouncing from one idea to another hoping to get lucky again._

Welcome to the world of social software!

I'm not convinced that anyone really knows what people want in this market.

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mbesto
Hey, but he's a product genius no?

[https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=evan+spiegel+%22pro...](https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=evan+spiegel+%22product%22+genius&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiww72SvqzeAhVKiqwKHT94Az0Q5t4CMAB6BAgJEAc&biw=1253&bih=1307)

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hendzen
SNAP IPO should herald the death of dual share class listings. They sold
billions in equity to the public, but gave the shares 0 voting rights. So now
investors have no recourse to push for changes at the board level.

~~~
zxcvvcxz
How about Buyer Beware?

There's nothing illegitimate about raising money without selling voting
rights. You want voting rights, want to play active investor? Buy another
stock.

~~~
hendzen
You want to raise money without voting rights? Sell bonds.

~~~
umanwizard
Sure, you can do that too. The comment you're replying to is arguing that all
these options are legitimate, and buyers are adults who can buy something that
matches their investment theses.

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lechiffre10
Evan thinks he's steve jobs. Lost god knows how many users of Snapchat because
he felt compelled to completely redesign the app himself and looks like he off
course when Instagram started copying Snapchat's features. A lot of these
companies that aren't profitable rush to become public without a proper
business model and end up getting crushed ( eg: HMNY company of movie pass)
It's no surprise that Snapchat is doing so poorly and lots of us could have
called this ahead of time. I really don't see this company being around in 2-3
years.

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capkutay
Seems like every wanna be Steve Jobs completely misses the point of what made
Steve Jobs great, but then use all the bad parts about his personality to
justify doing horrible, stupid, crazy things.

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partiallypro
Jobs was a genius late in life (sans on his own health,) but he also helped
run Apple into the ground after early success. People tend to forget that.

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antpol
Jobs never changed his vision - build stylish easy to use appliances of the
future. What drove Next down was the same philosophy that made Mac lineup so
popular mid 00s when the technology finally caught up to Jobs vision

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partiallypro
I was more thinking about shortly before Jobs was fired from Apple in the
mid-80s.

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sonnyblarney
It's obviously inappropriate, but not beyond what a young executive might do.
Startups need to move quickly, changing your mind after 2 days is normal, it's
just the politics (and optics) that are affected.

It's kind of a rookie move ... but in a way, maybe it's the rookies advantage.

Evan _can_ get away with doing this because he's young.

Consider that an older exec would have not changed his mind out of fear of
'looking bad' even if it were not the right thing for the company.

This isn't good, but it's not a big deal at all.

Of course this assumes he mad the right decision in the end ...

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nwsm
It's not about being young, it's about being inexperienced. You can make a
parallel to Trump, whose supporters give him a lot of leeway on
"inappropriate" decisions because he's not a politician.

Being inexperienced isn't a good excuse for being a bad CEO (please give any
evidence you have of him being an effective one). Realizing two days after you
make an important public decision that you should have made a different one is
a failure, regardless of if you got it right the second time.

Founding a company doesn't mean you should be CEO.

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sonnyblarney
Yes I agree with all of that, but founding a company does give you incredible
impetus.

Because Snap is a consumer facing company - we hear about this all the time.

Tons of startups do stuff like this - we just don't hear about it.

AirBnB, Stripe etc. are all making clumsy decisions daily, even some
occasional big ones - but it's just not newsworthy. Neither is this item
frankly, it's just kind of fluff. Nice to know but not news.

This kind of mistake is well within the entitlements of a Founder/CEO for
example, I'd imagine the board won't have much to say about it. He knows he
kinda screwed this up surely.

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gist
Rather than focus on the bad focus on the good part. He got someone he thought
was better and decided to go with that. From a business perspective and if you
remove the short term way it looks (or his reputation impact) it is a good
move. Of course a writer for a blog or news site doesn't see it that way.
Because of course (to take an extreme) if you just started working at the
local paper and the New York Times offered you a position you'd turn it down,
right?

Back in the day a long long time ago I remember someone who had taken a job at
Sun. Two weeks later he left because Apple came through with an offer and he
really wanted to work for Apple. I thought it was really rude because I would
have never had the guts to do that. I would have felt obligated to stay at the
job that I had because that is the way I was raised. But when you consider
that Sun would have let him go at the drop of a hat if it suited their
business purpose it actually made sense and I learned from that event and
seeing what happened later because he went with Apple.

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pcmoney
I sort of feel like this is par for the course with SNAP. It seems to me to be
a rather scummy company that got lucky despite its original intentions of
encouraging people to send nudes (which is pretty sleazy IMO). The CEO as far
as I can tell has never said or done anything that I would consider noble or
respect worthy. His emails before he was in the public eye really show his
true character. Obviously his word is worth less than nothing. Can’t wait for
the company to die, just bummed that little snot got rich from it.

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dcole2929
I get that there is a widely held belief that startups eventually reach a
point where they need veteran leadership. The kids built the thing but they
need adult supervision in order to become a real company. But I find myself
wondering what the logic is behind hiring a 40 year old to design the strategy
for a company who's primary demographic is in their teens and twenties.
Clearly this is a strategy that has worked before but I'm curious why more
orgs don't try the opposite. If you won't listen to what your customers want
(which Snap has not) why not hire a young executive who more closely aligns
with the demographic your catering to.

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ProfessorLayton
Well, by that logic Nickelodeon should be run by kids, for kids.

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GhostVII
Isn't that just reductio ad absurdum? Of course Nickelodeon shouldn't be run
by kids, but there can be a benefit to having leadership that can empathize
and understand your customer base better.

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ejz
What is Evan doing? _facepalm_

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ypeterholmes
Better question- why is the Board allowing his incompetence to run this
company into the ground?

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ryanmccullagh
Maybe because the board has no control over his decisions -
[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/snap-10-k-annual-report-
show...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/snap-10-k-annual-report-shows-power-
of-ceo-evan-spiegel.html)

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barbecue_sauce
At what point does he realize that his decisions are bad and he needs
supervision?

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rchaud
He is a billionaire married to a VS supermodel. At this point, he's more
likely to squander all his money and make reality TV appearances to make ends
meet, than turn Snap around.

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macintux
The headline is a bit confusing: the CEO wasn't named CBO, he named someone
and then (apparently?) fired her before she took the role.

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dang
We'll squeeze an article in there to make it a bit less confusing.

