The company behind Snapchat, the disappearing message service headquartered a stone’s thrown from Los Angeles’ tawdry Venice Beach, has long revelled in its non-Silicon Valley vibe: more streetwise, less overtly techie, and out to spawn fun rather than change the world.
And how better these days to set yourself apart from the Valley tech establishment than race to an initial public offering? Staying private for as long as possible has been the norm for the tech companies based closer to the traditional California tech heartland. By appointing bankers this week and with an eye to selling its shares on Wall Street as early as March, five-year-old Snap (as it was recently renamed) is leaping ahead of companies as long in the tooth as Uber(set up seven years ago), Airbnb(eight), Dropbox(10) and Palantir(13).
The news of Snap’s stock market intentions comes as shares in Twitter— the Valley’s last blockbuster IPO, three years ago — have been bounced around by talk of on-again, off-again takeover discussions. This coincidence feeds an obvious narrative: as one experiment in mobile messaging loses momentum, another is on the rise. Given the vagaries of social media taste and the speed with which new fads take hold, can Snap’s moment in the sun be any more lasting? The comparison is superficially appealing but misleading, although there are certainly some striking similarities between Snap now and Twitter back in 2013. The tweet machine was riding a strong growth curve when it went public. More than 100m of Twitter’s users were visiting daily, and its audience had doubled from a year before. Snap’s disappearing messages have put it on a similar trajectory. It passed 150m daily active users four months ago, up 70 per cent from the year before.