For comparison, Facebook had 3500 employees at the time of their IPO, and it's "just a website." Snapchat is many products: video ad platform, augmented reality selfie app, broadcast platform via sunglasses, photo uploading app, and messaging app.

do we really want to get into this discussion?

whatsapp had what Facebook had ÷ 100.

According to the Forbes story [1][2] on WhatsApp's beginnings, the founders didn't focus on marketing. The app's features alone sold it plenty -- and the fact that the app was sold for real money helped them pay the bills. Furthermore, they intentionally limited the product's early memberbase to avoid scaling too fast for their resources. In other words, if the story is to be believed, they ran a pretty tight shop.

I'd imagine that someone like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc, who makes the product at available $0 and has to devise a monetization scheme later will need to employ a fair amount of "soft skills" staff who can forge relationships with, say, advertisers, and gobs of staff to work on features, stability, capacity to achieve a point where their platforms attract and retain eyeballs. These are the sort of companies where an injection of VC money to rapidly scale is beneficial such that the product can achieve monetizable critical mass, to fill out the part between "2. ???" and "3. PROFIT!"

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-...

[2] without paywall: https://www.quora.com/How-was-WhatsApp-built

Whatsapp was also never profitable either. They almost didn't even bother to make money (the subscription thing is a misnomer since they waived it left and right).

And by their own admission, they intentionally tried to slow user growth.

What I'd like to see - is the employee breakdown.

How many are working on the acutal product/engineering?

I work for a startup (that was bootstrapped I believe) and our sales team is almost half the company (we are just under 100 people right now).

Point being, at Snap's scale - I have a feeling they'll have a lot of Business Development Reps trying to bring in contracts for adverts.

Sales & Marketing expense was $124M, they spent ~$9M on advertising, so ~$115M on sales and marketing, and $183M on R&D (engineering).

So about 61:39, eng:sales, if you were to assume wages were equal, on average.

Yeah, thats what Im interested in too. have to assume there is a significant sales force, especially with their expected sales growth

Since both of you assume that, we'll assume it's true for the moment. In that case, in order to scale their sales, they have to do it by an industry benchmark unless proven otherwise. The industry benchmark is about linear scaling of a sales force.

Actually, a more accurate calculation is much more complex. It's also almost impossible to figure out accurately unless they release certain data - which I guess they won't do.

Good luck with that!

The cost they list for research and development compared to e.g. marketing gives you an idea.

This is also my gripe with Twitter. I just don't understand the necessity of having so many employees as software businesses allow you to build tools to reduce the number of employees you need in a way other businesses can't.

I know it's a very poor parallel, but WhatsApp's sub 50 employee group around the time of acquisition was just so impressive in comparison with the size of some of these businesses. It was just orders of magnitude different. That being said - I agree with ohstopitu - I'd love to see a breakdown of who goes where...

via Linkedin...

Sales Managers, Sales Directors, Senior Sales Mobile Specialist, Sales Finance Manager, Senior Sales Manager, Sales Operations Manager EMEA, Agency Sales UK, Sales Manager Continental Europe etc etc

Account Managers, Account Directors, Agency Account Manager etc etc

I've never spoken to anyone at Facebook on a phone - but have spent a substantial amount of cash on the platform. On Twitter when we setup - there was onboarding, performance checkins etc - the biggest difference though we couldn't get an ROI from the platform (This was 2 years ago though so things may of changed?).

Expanding business without an actual person doing it (inbound marketing) is cheap, but very slow going. Twitter probably has people making deals, helping bigger accounts work on their presence, and things like that.

I'd imagine they have:

- A significant number of engineers to build/run/maintain their application.

- A large(r?) number of sales/business folks to sell filters/advertising/promotion.

- A smaller number of accountants to handle the money.

- A large number of managers to manage the engineers, accountants and business folks.

- A moderate number of HR/recruiters to find more staff.

- A few people to handle various operations stuff (legal teams, people to deal with law enforcement requests and subpoenas etc.)

When you start to get big there's a surprising number of things you need to do.

They just built a hardware product.

Also: all the stuff we haven't seen yet... who knows what they are doing with the vast amount of video data piped to their servers every second.

Being generous, 5 employees for hw + 5 for manufacturing should be more than sufficient for a pair of sunglasses that takes 10 second videos.

That is not how hardware works.

At least 2 EEs, another couple EE techs to fix prototype up boards that come in and prepare development boards for the software work.

You will have a couple people doing just regulatory work. Sign off on BT, USB, batteries, etc.

At least 1 ME, at least 1 industrial designer as well. 1 person in charge of optics.

1 software person to do board bring up, another person who specializes in Bluetooth because Bluetooth is a nightmare and you will have to work around different bugs on iOS and Android. Finally someone to do the actual firmware. You may get away with just 2 people, or you may need more, depending.

Someone had to design the box they come in.

The vending machines likely had a team behind them as well.

Then there is the marketing of the product, the glasses went viral fast, there was a team of people responsible for that.

And once all that is done, now you need a manufacturing team.

If the team was incredibly agile and efficient, maybe 20 people at the bare minimum.

double at least for redundancy to cover holiday/sickness/bus factor

Having worked on an agile HW team, I'll say that the bus factor was a solid 1 all throughout. In fact the bus factor was a whole lot of different 1s!

Did you read what the parent said? That is not how hardware works.

Yes it's easy to build a single device... successfully scaling it to millions of devices is the hard part.

Also: "100x the resolution?" You obviously have no clue.

Why don't you? Otherwise shut up.

> Always the HN expert to wag the finger.

Says the expert with nothing to support your assertive claims.

It works out to be $230k p.a of revenue per employee, which is on par with the better larger SaaS co's like Atlassian and Github .

The employee counts of the later don't get a second look on HN, and they aren't growing at 6x revenue (or whatever it is) like Snap is.

If there was an article like this about those companies, I would absolutely expect this exact "what do all those employees do??" comment. This just seems to be a meme on HN in general at the moment.

It's honestly naive and lazy to view Snap as "just an app company". It uses the same flawed logic as "Facebook is just a website".

Snap is a media platform that comes with all of the overhead of running a global, culturally sensitive media business. There's user generated content at the center, but there are also a lot of partnerships, curation, etc going on too.

Depends what is considered as employees. I believe a lot of people are hired as artists, etc. for small items such as geotags.

That's $10 million per employee (at a $20B valuation). That's not a lot of when you consider they're building a product that will book billions of dollars in advertising revenue.

$400 million USD total revenue in 2016 (from the article) is not exactly "billions of dollars".

But, in general, yes, I think the sales force required to engage advertisers should not be discounted when the first thing going through the head is "but it's just an app!".

Not sure why you're getting downvoted.. they'll clearly have billions of dollars in revenue within the next 3ish years.