Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photo by ET-ARTWORKS/Thinkstock.
Snapchat has given us the first blockbuster initial public offering of the Trump era. The social app’s parent, Snap Inc., which cheekily describes itself as a “camera company,” filed its initial prospectus last week. Should the IPO go off as planned, Snap could raise up to $3 billion, giving it a valuation of about $20 billion.
The timing has some poetry to it. President Trump may be a Twitter guy, but he’d likely find a kinship in Snap’s product, corporate culture, and mode of corporate governance. And it’s the most Trumpian qualities of Snapchat and its IPO that make them fascinating.
Let’s count. Snapchat’s core business model and its claim on the fickle attention of addled, low-information consumers (read: the youngs) rests on enabling people to send impulsive, often vulgar missives that then disappear. Snapchat users, in other words, exercise their raging id at all hours of the day while avoiding accountability—Trump’s M.O. for years. His greatest trick as a politician might be to make his transgressive tweets and outrageous statements disappear in the minds of his supporters, even when they are captured on tape.
Like Trump, Snap founder Evan Spiegel has his own history of unfortunately recorded locker-room talk—sexist texts and emails sent as a Stanford student, which he has since apologized for. And as it enters the public market, Snap (which has not only its flagship app but its new Spectacles glasses) is also departing from the typical norms surrounding formal, ritualized communication. The Snapchat prospectus is undoubtedly the first in history to contain the words sexting and poop. (“And we eat, sleep, and poop with our smartphones every day,” it reads at one point.)
The company, like our president, relishes confronting the haters and doubters. As the prospectus notes: “When we were just getting started, many people didn’t understand what Snapchat was and said it was just for sexting, even when we knew…