Snap expects layoffs to save $34M a year

So SNAP lays off another 7% of their workforce to save $34M a year whilst their CEO pockets $638M in compensation (3rd highest CEO payout ever) before they're remotely close to profitability. Not sure if company-wide layoffs and paying their CEO more are going to achieve their growth/profitability aspirations.

This is why the 10/20/30/40 vesting schedule which companies like Snap have is so problematic. Snap is laying people off and are saying that they expect to save a large amount of costs related to stock based compensation because of it (given they are a business I don't blame them for this line of thinking). However, from the laid off employee perspective this is pretty bad: 1) they worked hard to get Snap to this point but didn't get an equitable share of the rewards given backvested stocks 2) some of them might have just ended year 2 or year 3 of their tenure at snap and the big pay off was about to come and just like that they were laid off. Worse, being laid off destroys your negotiating position as you are trying to get a compensation package from your next company. An equitable 25/25/25/25 vesting schedule would have dealt with this much more fairly from the employee's standpoint.

I did some accidental market research on Snap with my girlfriend&#x27;s 9 year-old cousin this weekend.<p>She had tons of snaps, but informed me that they were almost all blank images. She and her friends send each other these blank images to maintain &#x27;streaks,&#x27; which count the number of continuous days that two people have messaged each other.<p>So attached to these streaks were the cousin and her friends that if the 24 hour mark was approaching and the cousin hadn&#x27;t sent a blank message to her longest streak, the counterparty would log-in to the cousin&#x27;s snapchat and send _herself_ a message, to make sure the streak continued.<p>My cousin said that the blowup in (blank) picture messages had slowed the app to a crawl, leading her not to use it anymore, aside of course for streaks.<p>Not the kind of of daily-active-users that advertisers crave. I&#x27;m 28; never heard of streaks before this.

Someone should let them know not to keep having layoff rounds periodically. It is better to have one deep round and that&#x27;s it. What they are doing creates so much uncertainty, anxiety, and kills employee morale.

Or.. they could save a couple of hundred million a year by moving off of GCE&#x2F;AWS into their own infrastructure... ( they have an insane $500M commit for both of these cloud providers.. higher than the $400M that all of google spent on infra in 2012 )<p>It&#x27;s amazing that at their scale, they are still mostly in GCE. They are easily an order of magnitude larger than netflix, and at least netflix is smart enough to have built their own CDN.

34 Million a year for 220 employees? I know that includes office space, equipment, and benefits, but that still seems like a lot to me.<p>Edit: I must have had a brain fart when I wrote this, because I was thinking over a million per employee. Now it seems too low.

how many hundreds of millions did they give the CEO again?

I really hope Snap&#x27;s struggles as a public company don&#x27;t effect other &quot;Unicorns&quot; going public. Judging from Spotify&#x27;s weird IPO filing I think other companies are getting spooked.

Why so many people to start with? Seems like they hired a ton of people.

as a former TMT investor i have learned that when hot tech companies go from focusing on topline growth to bottomline savings it is never a good thing. classic &quot;look over here!&quot;