[adventured]

With the kind of capital Snapchat can raise today, cost savings on salaries is a trivial part of their competitive advantage.

1,000 people * $100,000 average total employment cost = $100m per year (intentionally rough math). Now shave 20% off of that. It simply isn't meaningful to what they're doing; they raised $685 million in the last six months, saving $20 or $30 million per year doesn't matter.

For Snapchat, for which money is no issue relatively speaking, it's better to have this super rich funding environment. They can out-raise, and out-spend their competition when it comes to talent (and for those they can't do that to, like Google, it's moot anyway).

[chatmasta]

Interesting to see Google included in this comment, since they are currently the only company profiting off of the snapchat user base. Snapchat is built on the google cloud, presumably one of its biggest clients, Google gets a piece of every bit of funding that goes to snapchat. More users -> more growth -> higher cloud costs. Profitable or not, snapchat pays google.