[chrissnell]

I think you're very conservative on that estimate. We run an infrastructure on dedicated leased hardware (Rackspace). Our infrastructure costs are a fraction of what the equivalent public cloud footprint costs. With technologies like Kubernetes and CoreOS, our private cloud practically runs itself. We focus on apps and the developer pipeline, much like we would do if we were on GCP/GKE. We have approximately 60 dedicated servers. We're almost at the scale where it makes sense to leave leased baremetal for colocation. For a company like Snap, it's hard to believe that they couldn't save a few hundred million by building their own footprint in leased datacenter space.

The days of needing massive ops teams to run on owned and colocated hardware are long gone.

[charlesdm]

For a company that has always been handed (basically free) money at obscene valuations, why would you assume they care about two billion? Maybe it's just as simple as that?

It's an excellent argument as to why I will not be purchasing this stock.

[late2part]

Agreed. I've become immured to paint the least rosy picture that makes the point.