Google’s advertising expertise and connections could boost Snap’s ad revenue. Machine vision and image recognition algorithms from Google Search could unlock information about what’s in everyone’s Snaps. Snap would gain a deep-pocketed parent that could provide extra capital to make acquisitions and build out its R&D-heavy augmented reality technology. It could also reap data about people’s social graphs, where they spend time and what topics they care about, allowing it to improve its ad targeting and measurement. Google would get a top social property to make up for its Google+, Buzz and Wave flops. Joining forces could be beneficial to both companies. But in August, Instagram’s soon to be wildly successful Stories clone launched, which has diverted growth, mind share and advertisers from Snap ever since. Google chairman Eric Schmidt was an adviser to Spiegel, Snap runs Google’s office software suite and Snapchat has committed to spending $2 billion on Google Cloud hosting over the next five years.Īt the time of the May 2016 choice to go with raising money instead of being acquired, Snap looked unchallenged in the full-screen Stories social media game. The organizations have long been buddy-buddy. Google’s growth-stage investment fund CapitalG ended up investing in Snap after the 2016 talks went nowhere, contributing to the round valuing the “camera company” at $20 billion. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel (left) and his advisor and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt (right) It’s standard for startups to explore alternative paths before taking significant funding rounds or going public. Google declined to comment to Business Insider and Snap told TechCrunch “these rumors are false.” It’s possible that Google’s interest was very preliminary, and likely never rose to Snap’s higher ranks. The uptick comes after weeks of decline due to lockup expiration finally allowing insiders to sell stock, and strong growth for Facebook’s Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status clones of Snapchat. News of Google’s interest helped Snap’s share price climb around 2.3 percent today. That’s despite the startup’s market cap slipping to around $15 billion after soaring as high as $30 billion when it IPO’d in May. That offer was apparently an open secret inside Snap, and was on the table after the IPO, too.īut Snap’s notoriously independent CEO Evan Spiegel has apparently showed no interest in selling out to Google or anyone else. The search giant held informal talks with Snap and floated an offer of $30 billion in 2016 before Snap’s last funding round, and just before its IPO this year, according to Business Insider’s Alex Heath. ![]() The firm in question in Yufeng Capital, based in Shanghai, and unless Yu invested in Cadre personally the distinction is a curious one, as is the correction.Nerdy Google has failed at social time and time again, so it considered buying teen sensation Snapchat. An online correction said David Yu, co-founder of a private-equity firm with Ma, invested in the company. Of note, the print version of the article said Jack Ma had invested in Cadre, a company Jared Kushner co-founded. … Recommended reading: The New Yorker details the dangerously unprepared way the son-in-law of the President of the United States has been conducting foreign policy. Only Kalanick speaks this way, and kudos to Wakabayashi for recording it. Wednesday Wakabayashi quoted Kalanick saying Google (GOOGL) became “unpumped” with Uber as it invested in self-driving cars. Tuesday he focused on Kalanick’s use of the expression “jam sesh,” for jam session, or a time for entrepreneurs (not musicians) to sit around brainstorming on business ideas (not playing music). ![]() Briefly … I love how Daisuke Wakabayashi of The New York Times is providing a running commentary on the way Travis Kalanick speaks in his testimony at the Waymo-Uber trial in San Francisco.
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