The price of Snapchat's fallen stock makes it difficult to retain talent. Bobby Lo, founder and CEO of the mobile search application Vurb that Snap Inc. acquired for $ 114.5 million two years ago, is leaving daily operations at the company. That means that he cut him early in his four-year retention package allocation schedule, which was probably influenced by Snapchat falling to new levels of stock prices. Snap is trading around $ 9.15 today, compared to its IPO price of $ 17 and first day close of $ 24.
That's more than 7 percent since yesterday after the BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield gave Snap a sales rating of $ 5. Tired of Snapchat's excuses to lose numbers and are no longer willing to give the administration time to discover monetization. "Greenfield is known as one of the leading social media analysts, so people take it seriously when they say:" We have been disappointed with the evolution of the SNAP product (as users have) and I see no reason to believe that this changes. "
Vurb is a good example of this, the application allows users to make plans with friends to visit local places, allowing them to group restaurants, movie theaters and more into decks It took more than a year after the acquisition in October of 2016 for the technology to be integrated into Snapchat in the form of context cards in the search, but Snap never seemed to realize how to make his audience Anxious content teenager cares about Vurb's usefulness Snap could have created powerful offline meeting tools, but never did, and Snap Map's lackluster adoption overshadowed the company's path to local businesses.
Now Lo tells TechCrunch his departure, "Building the experiences at Snap has been a wonderful culmination of my seven-year journey with Vurb. My transition to an advisor at Snap allows me to continue to support incredible people as I direct my time back to startups, starting with investment and advising on founders. "
It was soon to embrace the monolithic application style promoted by WeChat In China, being increasingly influential in the states, Snap confirmed the exit by trying to minimize it.A spokesman tells me: "Bobby became an advisor this summer and we appreciate his continued contributions to Snap."
Since Snap is known For supporting their stock purchase schedules, Lo might be leaving more than half of their hold, share at the table.That decision should worry investors.As a solo founder, Lo already took a large part of the acquisition price that it includes $ 21 million in cash and $ 83 million in shares, so with the company's stock price so low, it could have had little incentive to stay.
Snapchat context cards created from the technology acquired from Vurb
Since last July, Snap has lost a ton of talent, including senior vice president of engineering Tim Sehn, the former employee Chloe Drimal, vice president of HR and legal Robyn Thomas and vice president of securities and facilities Martin Lev, CFO Drew Vollero, vice president of product Tom Conrad, co-founder of TimeHop Jonathan Wegener, team leader Spectacles Mark Randall, manager of advertising technology Sriram Krishnan , sales manager Jeff Lucas and just last week, his COO Imran Khan. [19659002] With the count of users decreasing, the constant competition of Facebook and Instagram, and the fleeing talent, it is difficult to see a bright future for Snap. Unless CEO Evan Spiegel, without the help of his deceased lieutenants, can propose a new and innovative product that is not easy to copy, we could be looking at the downward spiral of ephemeral application. At what point should Snap consider selling to Google, Apple, Tencent, Disney or whoever faces the social network in difficulty?