Snapchat Employees Hard At Work Shoveling Bundles Of Money Into Furnace
VENICE BEACH, LOS ANGELES — Wiping sheets of sweat off of his forehead, Snapchat employee Richard Schmidt was hard at work shoveling bundles of money into a furnace as his company declared its intentions to IPO.
One of Snapchat’s greatest assets is its userbase, and the company spends massive amounts of money to find and retain users — through online advertisements, billboards, and shoveling bundles of cash into a furnace.
Mr. Schmidt, whose official job title is “Growth Engineering Lead,” has worked at Snapchat for years and was one of the earliest employees to join. “Back in the early days, we actually had to take wads of dollar bills from the briefcases of cash that our investors gave us and individually light them on fire with matches,” Mr. Schmidt recalled. “We were working out of Evan’s house back then. One time, I tried using the kitchen stove to speed things up, and I almost burned the house down!”
“But we’ve come a long way. Now we actually have a legit operation. Instead of just me, we have a team of people working on how to burn money as quickly as possible,” he said, grunting as he picked up a large box marked “SERIES F” and carried it over to the pile of burning dollar bills. “Evan says after we IPO, we’re gonna have enough dough to buy a big funnel with the furnace at a bottom so we can just put the cash on a conveyor belt and dump it in instead of having to shovel it manually like we do now. I’m thinking of calling it the ‘Growth Funnel.’”
According to IPO filing documents, Snapchat has — shockingly — never turned a profit. In fact, it lost $514.6 million last year alone and declared in one document that, “We have incurred operating losses in the past, expect to incur operating losses in the future, and may never achieve or maintain profitability.” Even worse, filing data shows that user growth has slowed to a crawl in recent months.
But Mr. Schmidt is undeterred. “I’ve been paid up until this point, right? It’s not like Twitter’s turned a profit for the last decade, but they’re still paying people. The people that haven’t been laid off, anyway. I’m sure we’ll figure out some way to make money,” he said as he threw another $100,000 worth of Ben Franklins into the roaring flames.
