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thing to note which is that if you look at the Mau growth of snap it's actually been extremely steady and they've had an incredible March forward and I think that they're roughly around 350 million it's a service that is incrementally every day more relied upon than the day before and it's a service that's providing a set of features that is incrementally more important to a larger and larger group of people so how do you then square that with its stock performance and in my opinion I'll just be really honest with you and I don't know Evan Spiegel and I've never trafficked in Snapchat at all okay but it is the most glaring example of corporate misgovernance that has ever happened on the internet and the reason is when you look at what happened in the IPO it basically created a governance structure where the common shareholder had all voting power taken away so a hundred percent effectively the de facto voting power stayed with the class that was held by the founders and so you you do not have a normal check and balance and it was egregious other companies would have voting programs where it was 20 to 1 and you would sometimes say oh it only should be ten to one or it should be 50 to 1.
this was like a hundred to zero and what you have now is no real feedback loop because there is no person who can own enough equity with enough say to sit across the table from that CEO and say Here's what you're not seeing and here's what you're getting wrong and I think you're always better off by having those kinds of people be able to get a meeting with you in the first place and have a vested interest where you take them seriously but how would you receive a meeting when you're sitting across the table from somebody in the back of mine you're like wow this person has literally no say in what I do after this meeting ends literally none you can't vote I think you can agree you know that um there is a separation between you know the voice of the common shareholder in these companies and and the direction of the companies but I think it obscures what's going on chamath I totally agree with you if you look at usage the number of customers walking into the store um snaps gone from 265 to 360 million dau's Twitter 190 to 240 meta from 1.8 to 2 over the course of the last three years they're all growing more people are walking into the store and using the service the story here is all about pricing how much is each of those users worth I mean apple is the apex predator of this entire Market we wouldn't be having this conversation but for the fact that Apple's changes with idfa literally pickpocketed the industry two billion dollars this year under the auspices of privacy and so if you look at these companies usage up pricing or arpu down okay recently Apple's come under a bunch of pressure so now they're out with scad 4 which is their update to uh the the the ad policy post idfa that allows you to Target advertisers or individuals with 10 000 attributes instead of a hundred attributes so we're gonna see some realignment I expect that the real question is what happens to arpu next year but to me the story here is that the usage and the health of these core platforms is remarkably sticky yeah for all the things we say about Instagram I mean Tick Tock has had explosive growth 30 growth each of the last three years but even the incumbent platforms a really sticky usage this is about how they're monetizing those users and the real story is apple right have you ever owned Snapchat stock no why not um certainly governance is a key component of it but the second thing is like do you have do you have any belief that you could even get a meeting with the CEO and management where they would listen to you appropriately we've certainly got meetings with management before so yes I believe we could whether or not that impacts you know how they build product how they how they run the business you know the influence Etc but again I I think that's not really the problem here but the point I would totally agree with you on Shama we've had 10 years of where the cost of capital was Zero 10 years of hyper growth for these social networks right in each of the last five years Facebook has hired more people in each of the last five years than they had 10 years after the company was founded okay so as we've seen this growth begin to turn over I have seen the companies really slow to react to right-size their behavior that they had over the course of the last decade to put themselves in a position to compete for the next decade so it's one thing just to throw your hands in the air and say well this is all Apple we couldn't do anything about it there's a perception though I mean I'm still stuck on this issue I really think that stock prices tend to ebb and flow based on sort of like friction or momentum and when there's momentum more and more people can easily underwrite it and when there's friction fewer and fewer people can underwrite it and so I think that if you are a CEO of a public company you have to think about how many headwinds do I have and how many Tailwinds do I have all the time and some of them are in your control and some of them are not at least in the case of meta as with Apple and Google they meta is forced to copy the best decisions of these bigger companies why because they were one of those biggest now they may have been the smallest of the biggest but it's going to be very hard for meta eventually to not Converge on those same set of decisions and the most important one is what Brad just alluded to which is that there was a point in 2016 and 2017 where you literally could not give away Apple stock and the big turn of the dial and you know some say it was Carl Icahn who knows was this theoretically this famous dinner that Carl Icahn had with Tim Cook where he laid out a plan and it's like listen you need to start managing costs better managing Opex better return a ton of cash buy back the stock and you'll be a darling and Tim Cook was rewarded and he's he's been rewarded with an incredibly performant company and so you know Google is slowly inching towards that plan Microsoft is in that plan and so the only Big Four Horsemen that hasn't really gotten the script yet is meta but they will it's just we're just debating when and so there's a perception that you know meta will copy what the rest of these big guys do but these other long tail companies the headwinds are just greater and so when you you know don't have a company that can be broadly owned by intelligent thoughtful investors that's a headwind right when you give nobody votes that's a headwind and so that's why you see a company that's continuing to grow impact not being able to translate that into economics and if I were the board of that company that should be a wake-up call because eventually that'll flow into the morale of the employees and the ability to retain and then the ability to invest in the future and I think the simple answer is enough with all these you know gymnastics around control you know if you looked at Elon the most incredible thing from day one was there's common stock you know and his whole thing was like I'm just gonna do the best and you know what if I'm not the best I'm going to be out he literally said he is vote me out vote me out he's never ever played these games so in this funny way control is a symbol of a lack of ability to run the business masterful Mastery of a business you can translate that to being I'm just going to have common stock when Facebook was doing really great and Snapchat was doing great nobody complained about super voting stock okay so I I think that you know my preference would be that I partner with a company where I know the founder whether irrespective of their votes right listens cares and has the mental flexibility to make course Corrections right and the and the reality what I'm trying to point to we have lived through a decade of excess everybody knows all these companies could do exactly the same Revenue exactly the same Revenue with vastly less investment in terms of people Etc right a 20 riff that matter would literally only take them back to where their personnel expense was in 2021 yeah nobody argued in 2021 this is part of the problem Jay Cal everybody so why 10 percent why 10 you've doubled this the number of people working in the business over the last few years right there's nothing magical about ten percent the real question is what is the optimal number of employees to produce the best outcome for our customers and our advertisers and what Bill Gurley has pounded on and we've all talked a lot about there has been in a zero cost of capital world a unilateral March two more more of everything invest in everything hire more people Silicon Valley would do itself a favor these big companies vacuumed up every single engineer in Silicon Valley they ought to return that pool to the startups that are actually inventing the future they don't need this money in place I mean last night I read a report came across Bloomberg the the elon's talking about 75 reduction at Twitter ultimately guys like us who have to buy the stock when these things go public will say nope you want to have these dumb governance games no not for me I'll just go buy something else I'll go buy more Tesla where it's one person one vote why you know so it's hard when the best CEO in the world is like judge me keep me fire me on an equal basis and everybody else is like oh I'm smarter than this guy and so you know what let me make sure that whenever I feel like it I can throw a temper tantrum and take my toys out of the sandbox and let's use a there's analogy here it doesn't work look at look at um Steve Jobs ousted from his own company company made a huge mistake asking him some people argue it was a learning experience for Steve to get better at his job he comes back and he absolutely turns the company around so there's an example thus far you've proven that the two most impactful and important CEOs of the last 50 years had the courage to basically say let my performance do the talking not my protective Nanny control
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