Does Snapchat's CEO Need to Go?

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2014/01/03/snapchat-ceo-go/

by goronbjorn • 13 years ago

72 84 13 years ago

finance.fortune.cnn.com

NN88• 13 years ago

its funny how when things go wrong in private companies, how quickly the general public thinks they can weigh in on how someone needs to stay with that entity.

Imagine building something and losing your influence over it to the rest of the world.

toomuchtodo• 13 years ago

Imagine building something and losing your influence over it to the rest of the world.

Happens a lot more often than you'd think.

mhurron• 13 years ago

If you put yourself out there, you probably should expect people to start forming opinions about you.

People are very quick to punish others, this shouldn't be surprising.

ugexe2• 13 years ago

If we are it's product, then yes it should be expected you can lose control over it.

001sky• 13 years ago

Where does media punditry get off on making absolutist calls for heads to "roll"? I mean, imaging if random non-experts had a journalist fired for every failed-prediction or embarrasingly wrong policy analysis penned in an op-ed? There would be no journalists left !

enraged_camel2• 13 years ago

Accuracy is not the point. It's sensationalist and it gets clicks, which generate money for the website. Why would you fire your most profitable content generators (i.e. journalists)? That would be insane.

twelvedigits2• 13 years ago

Journalists provide an important check on politicians and business leaders. Not every journalist is intelligent, but to dismiss journalism as "media punditry" writ large is a gross overstatement.

Specific to this case, I consider Dan Primack to be an informed technology/finance writer whose opinions are well-researched and who is highly plugged-in to the tech sector (which is a sign that others trust his judgment).

RokStdy2• 13 years ago

Um.. That's sort of their job? Why the outrage here? It's not like the story actually calls for Snapchat's CEO's head to really be severed. That might be offensive.

I think the author's point is a good one. If CEO is really so obtuse he should go. If he is being coached to act this way then his coach should be fired[1].

Pretty straight forward business journalism. It's not like the business journalist went on a long diatribe about API security. That would be out of place.

[1]Unless your argument is that in order to criticize a business leader's actions you must outline each of the myriad possible corrective steps between "Do Nothing" and "Terminate".

nostromo• 13 years ago

On one hand you have a CEO that responded slowly to a fairly mild privacy exploit. On the other hand, he created an apparently billion+ dollar company almost overnight. So, I'm going to guess that SnapChat should keep its CEO.

adventured• 13 years ago

Any idea how many disagreeable (and absolutist) things are published or broadcast every day in radio, newspapers, magazines, tabloids, and online?

Why should media punditry be bound to any requirement as to what they express, external to their boss / editor?

They don't get off anywhere in fact, they don't require your permission, as fortunately we still have a mostly intact free press and freedom of speech.

spamizbad• 13 years ago

For a meritocracy to work there must be consequences for both good and bad actions.

A pundit's merit is judged by their page views; not by their correctness. Their salary is based off their readership. If their readership wants to be fed convenient lies that reenforce their world view that's their perogative.

rokhayakebe• 13 years ago

I recently heard Sarah Lacy say they ensure their writers do not know the pageview count.

cortesoft• 13 years ago

And a CEO's merit is judged by their company's market value. Has this hurt their market cap?

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

Thoughtful, nuanced commentary doesn't get as many eyeballs. This is part of the problem from journalist's personal brands becoming part of the news story. When I was growing up I had no idea what any of the people who wrote for the newspaper looked like, or what their names were for all but the very largest stories.

kyro2• 13 years ago

Journalists for the most part are attention-whoring nobodies with no expertise in any particular subject, who hide behind overly aggressive and opinionated words. Watch pundits on any news channel, or read any massively circulated news source and it's pretty clear to confirm what I'm saying. They jiggle their jowls with such empty emotion and intensity.

May be harsh, but I think it's pretty accurate.

jxf• 13 years ago

Equating "journalists" with "pundits" is completely wrong. Sarah Palin, James Carville, et cetera are pundits (among other things), not journalists.

hbags• 13 years ago

Punditry is not journalism. Journalism is not punditry.

That said, I find it morally repugnant that 001sky seems to want to quash the right of either to engage in public speech, simply because said speech calls some entrepreneur's credentials into question. It's fine for any person (be they a research-oriented journalist or a bloviating pundit) to raise these sorts of questions, even if I think their position is weak and a tad ridiculous.

If you, as an entrepreneur, are too weak to handle public scrutiny (including scrutiny from people who are quite unlike yourself), then you should find another line of work.

mbloom1915• 13 years ago

apology? these are two kids from Stanford who made a fun project and it just so happen to take off. Give them a break, their team of less than 5 people could careless what the public thinks!

minimaxir• 13 years ago

Snapchat isn't a "project" anymore. It's a business.

icedog• 13 years ago

It's a business that doesn't have any business.

spada• 13 years ago

that turned down a $3b sale. staggering that this call was made.

antr• 13 years ago

Lawsuits don't care what you are, but they tend to happen to startups and business which have cash on the balance sheet. This is no joke. Investors have a fiduciary duty to their LPs, and even if its the wrong move, a managerial "change" transmits investor diligence to the LPs.

nilkn• 13 years ago

I think this is exactly why there are concerns. People probably don't want a service relaying 400m message daily to be run carelessly.

johnrob• 13 years ago

What's the big deal? In the age of surveillance, all data is public.

enraged_camel2• 13 years ago

Even without surveillance, I have always assumed that if I am putting something on the Internet, it is public.

twelvedigits2• 13 years ago

The majority of Snapchat's userbase is young, often in their teens, and most likely not an engineer, software developer, or technologist.

I highly doubt they think the same way.

I'd also caution against employing such a cavalier attitude toward your users if you're building something that isn't 100% for the tech crowd.

iluvuspartacus• 13 years ago

Tell that to the wife (possibly husband) hiding from her (his) deranged spouse.

Data breaches can have very serious consequences for individuals.

electic• 13 years ago

If you have this issue in your life, using any service is a bad idea. This includes Facebook, Pinterest, anything. When you interact with services you create data and in many ways data exhaust that can be used to locate you or reveal things about your interests, traits, etc.

octatone22• 13 years ago

They simply need to own up to a poor implementation of a useful feature and take protecting user data more seriously.

onedev• 13 years ago

Hah, good one...

When is the last time a company owned up to their mistakes and fixed them like that?

aubreyjohnson• 13 years ago

Sorry is an emotion and this is a business. I don't care about how Snapchat "feels," I care about what they've done to fix the security issues and how successful that effort is.

mathattack• 13 years ago

If someone doesn't accept the blame, perhaps they're less likely to make sure the problem doesn't repeat.

thenmar• 13 years ago

It's a little strange how much vitriol that article contains. It's as if the author is just itching for someone to finally put one of those 20-something entrepreneurs who didn't have to climb the corporate ladder for decades in his place.

jusben1369• 13 years ago

So the more interesting article here is "Do people even care any more?" Is Snapchat's CEO making an educated guess that his users are on the cutting edge of SN users and are already sharing a boat load of information and just don't care that much about the breach? Whenever FB makes any privacy changes there's usually a huge uproar. But not many of those complaining are high schoolers or college kids. Maybe they know their user base better than we think.

j2labs• 13 years ago

It might be because the CEO is basically the same age as his users.

bertil• 13 years ago

It makes sense: I have seen many security professionals complain on the principle, but not one user publicly state they are going to abandon SnapChat for that. These are roughly the generation that threatened to leave when Facebook rearranged buttons.

I'm not sure I got the extend of the issue, but: there is now an accessible database of phone numbers to SnapChat handles, right? I get how large scale hackers might use it (but presumably already have); or how a large marketing operation could use that to associate phones numbers that they have with handles, that are presumably unusable for the moment, unless SnapChat users would accept an friend invitation from a branded account.

However, the kind of spying that worries most SnapChat users should be from close relatives (parents, teachers, exes, cf. danah boyd’s research), people who already have your phone number, and already have seen your handle appear when they installed SnapChat, and were already denied access. That breach doesn’t change that. The social discovery feature functioning as it is was the issue, and that was already widely accepted.

iLoch• 13 years ago

Take a deal and jump ship boys, your idea won't be worth anything in 6 months when the next big thing comes out.

uladzislau• 13 years ago

Probably it's too late already.

jimsilverman2• 13 years ago

i'm shocked by the comments here.

it was a massive and anticipated security flaw. the CEO's reaction was not to fix it, not to apologize, but to arrogantly lie about the severity of the threat.

less than a week after the CEO deemed the attack theoretical, it happened. the CEO's reaction was not to fix it, not to apologize, but to offer an opt-out after the damage had been done.

not sure why snapchat is getting a free pass on this, but it's horrifying.

jkelsey• 13 years ago

I'm not attempting to defend Snapchat here, but it's probably because their primary user base is compromised of teenagers and college kids. I think it's fair to say that people don't value their privacy as much until they get older and experience the world for what it is.

jimsilverman2• 13 years ago

are you an NSA agent?

octatone22• 13 years ago

I think there is a generation who simply care not of privacy.

Crito2• 13 years ago

Is that really true? Why are people using Snapchat then, instead of SMS or even twitter?

It seems to me that the entire premise of Snapchat is that their users care about privacy (even if they are rather naive or uninformed about how privacy works).

code_duck2• 13 years ago

What I can figure out is why more hasn't been made of how the snapchat app doesn't delete viewed photos at all: it stores them in the phone permanently.

http://m.ksl.com/index/story/sid/25106057?mobile_direct=y

http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/partner-zone-infose...

Seems to me like a massive breach of trust which defies the entire claim of the app.

rickhanlonii• 13 years ago

I was confused by this for awhile until I started hanging around a group of people who use SnapChat almost as much as texting. For the most part they share innocuous "here's what I'm doing" type photos. They use SnapChat because it's a really easy to send a photo to everyone on their list at the same time individually when they want to share a photo of what they're doing at that moment, with no feed or wall or comments to maintain later.

Thus, they really don't care if the photos are saved anywhere because they're not concerned with the privacy of their photos--at worst the snaps they share are unflattering. Their main concern is that they don't want to maintain any photos later, they just want to tell each other 'hi, here's what I'm doing' and forget about it.

In other words, to them SnapChat isn't a platform to share photos secretly, it's a platform to share photos momentarily. SnapChat even sells it as this:

The images might be a little grainy, and you may not look your best, but that's the point. It's about the moment, a connection between friends in the present, and not just a pretty picture.

I get it now. I still don't like SnapChat at all (the UI is ugly, the UX is par, and I don't like the attitude of the company), but I see the user appeal and I see why the users SnapChat wants most will continue to use the app even though one of their friends may be keeping that picture they took of their thanksgiving turkey permanently.

tobyjsullivan• 13 years ago

Probably because SnapChat fixed that half a year ago.

samiur1204• 13 years ago

Completely agreed. I wrote an article about precisely this: http://blog.samiurr.com/snapchat-another-example-of-the-hubr...

CodeMage• 13 years ago

Apparently, it's because a lot of HN commenters think that this kind of behavior is okay, because -- and I quote -- "he created an apparently billion+ dollar company almost overnight."

It's the same "high court, low court" inequality dynamics we see in the rest of the society, but this time in disguise of meritocracy.

joyeuse6701• 13 years ago

well, I guess the severity is in the eye of the beholder, or victim. A phone number identifying my name to a screen name isn't a big deal...It's unfortunate, but the world hasn't come to an end, it's not like the hackers were code breakers of the Enigma machine, where thousands would live and die as a result. I for one would call that 'massive' and 'severe'.

metaphorm• 13 years ago

anybody remember tamagotchi? beanie babies? pogs?

snapchat is the pogs of 2013. its already 2014. clock is ticking.

baldajan• 13 years ago

Asking for a person's head every time a mistake is made isn't something a mature person would do. Maybe Dan Primack (the writer) should be fired and replaced by an "adult" that won't make those claims... Now doesn't that sound ridiculous?

adamsrog• 13 years ago

Why is the author so focused on an apology? Does a forced apology really solve anything?

If I were a Snapchat user, I'd primarily be interested in what they're doing to prevent anything of the sort from happening in the future.

aryastark• 13 years ago

You would assume CNNMoney would be more concerned with the CEO's lack of a business plan rather than his lack of apology. Let's get our priorities straight here. I mean, if you're not making money, do you really have a business? Does any of this even matter? If a tree falls in the forest...

It takes a certain type of person to use Snapchat. A person that believes in unicorns. That is, someone that believes you can erase things you send over the internet. I suppose if you believe in that absurdity, then you may also believe in whatever nonsense the CEO might tell you about their enhanced security that will prevent this type of breach from ever occurring again.

Or you could just stop using the damn thing. Vote with your wallet, er, eyeballs.

kyberias• 13 years ago

Does Fortune's Dan Primack need to go?

dreamfactory2• 13 years ago

Seems the journalist and a lot of commenters here are saying that a service like this needs to be regulated so that there are consequences for negligence or carelessness. There's probably something in that, but in the absence of a regulatory framework for social media systems, snapchat surely has no liability or requirement around data security (beyond existing regulations).

Does Snapchat's CEO Need to Go?

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