Evan Spiegel on the Lessons Learned From Snap’s IPO
The Snap co-founder was speaking at the WSJ CEO Council that brings together senior business leaders to discuss global issues affecting their industries
Lessons Learned From Snap’s IPO
Evan Spiegel, the co-founder and chief executive of Snap Inc., told an audience at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council that consumers were starting to understand how the online advertising market works and that understanding is beginning to drive them toward demanding more privacy.
Privacy has been a top concern among regulators in Europe, but it has also started to become an issue around the world, including in the U.S. Mr. Spiegel said users “will want to use services that are more protective of privacy.” He said consumers are starting to “understand how internet advertising works and how their data flows through different parties. So, increasingly, consumers are going to be thoughtful about the services they are using.”
Another debate raging on both sides of the Atlantic: Are the giants of Silicon Valley, like Facebook Inc., Google’s Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., too big and should they be broken up? Chris Hughes, who helped Mark Zuckerberg create Facebook, made a splash last week calling for a Facebook breakup and invoking the historical breakups of Standard Oil and AT&T.
Mr. Spiegel said that in the U.S., concern over size has mostly been about prices and the consumer impact. Taking Amazon as an example, he said, bigger hasn’t translated into higher prices for consumers. So, he said, it is “hard to make the case” that size is becoming an issue.
Mr. Spiegel was also asked about Snap’s IPO in 2017, in the shadow of Uber Technologies Inc.’s public offering last week. He said he would now do “a bunch” of things differently in his own market debut. He said a big change Snap has made since the public offering was issuing quarterly guidance. “We’ve learned public markets appreciate this,” he said.