Snap Inc.

OpenAI

Snap Inc.

Snap's revenue comes almost entirely from advertising. Brands pay to run ads between Stories, in the Discover section, and through sponsored AR Lenses and Filters.

The ad business is powered by the time users spend on the platform — over 40 minutes per day for the average user under 25.

Snapchat+ is a subscription product launched in 2022 at $3.99/month, offering exclusive features like custom app icons, Story rewatch indicators, and priority support. It hit 12 million subscribers by 2024 — meaningful but still a small fraction of total revenue.

Snap also sells hardware — Spectacles (AR glasses) — but this has been more of an R&D investment than a revenue driver. Hardware revenue is negligible.

The long-term bet is that AR glasses become the next computing platform, and Snap wants to be the one building the operating system for your face.

OpenAI

OpenAI makes money primarily through API access and subscriptions. The API charges developers per token (roughly per word) for using GPT models in their applications.

ChatGPT Plus costs $20/month for individual users, ChatGPT Team is $25-30/user/month, and ChatGPT Enterprise is custom-priced. Microsoft pays OpenAI licensing fees and also resells OpenAI models through Azure OpenAI Service.

OpenAI's annualised revenue ran past $13 billion during 2025 and kept climbing from there, which is the kind of growth curve that normally only exists in a pitch deck.

Snap Inc.

The origin story of Snapchat involves a Stanford fraternity, a disputed idea, and a lawsuit. In April 2011, Reggie Brown pitched the concept of disappearing photos to Evan Spiegel in their Kappa Sigma fraternity house.

Spiegel loved it and brought in Bobby Murphy, a math and computer science major, to build it. The app launched as "Picaboo" in July 2011.

The initial reception was rough — barely anyone downloaded it. Spiegel's mother was one of the first users.

They rebranded to "Snapchat" in September 2011 and slowly gained traction among high school and college students who wanted to share photos without them living on the internet forever. The disappearing message format felt risky, intimate, and fun — the opposite of Facebook's permanent timeline.

Then came the co-founder drama. Reggie Brown claims he originated the core concept.

Spiegel and Murphy dispute this. Brown was pushed out of the company in 2012.

He filed a lawsuit in 2013 claiming intellectual property rights and breach of contract. The case settled in 2014 for $157.5 million — making Brown perhaps the most expensive person ever kicked out of a fraternity project.

Spiegel and Murphy continued building.

OpenAI

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a nonprofit AI research lab. The founding donors — including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Jessica Livingston — pledged $1 billion with a mission to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) that would benefit all of humanity.

The idea was that AI was too important and too dangerous to leave in the hands of Google alone.

Sam Altman became chairman while Greg Brockman (former CTO of Stripe) became president. Ilya Sutskever, one of the most respected AI researchers alive, left Google Brain to become chief scientist.

The early team was stacked with world-class researchers who published their work openly — hence "Open" AI.

But AI research turned out to be staggeringly expensive. Training large models required millions of dollars in compute.

In 2019, OpenAI created a "capped-profit" subsidiary — investors could earn up to 100x their money, but profits beyond that would flow to the nonprofit. Microsoft invested $1 billion.

The mission was still to save humanity. The method now involved making a lot of money first.

Snap Inc.

Snapchat grew through word of mouth among teenagers and college students. The app spread through high schools like wildfire — kids told each other about it specifically because their parents weren't on it.

The anti-Facebook positioning was powerful: Snapchat was where you could be real, messy, and unfiltered because nothing was permanent.

International expansion drove the next wave. Snapchat invested heavily in localized content, Discover partnerships with local publishers, and market-specific features.

India became one of the fastest-growing markets after they launched Snapchat in Hindi and other local languages.

Augmented reality became the moat. Snap invested billions in AR technology, making the camera the centerpiece of the app.

AR Lenses went from silly face filters to genuinely useful tools — trying on sunglasses, previewing furniture in your room, translating signs in real time. By making the camera "smart," Snap differentiated from text-based social networks and positioned itself for the AR glasses future.

OpenAI

ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 was the growth strategy — it just wasn't planned that way. The team expected a modest research preview.

Instead, ChatGPT hit 1 million users in 5 days and 100 million monthly active users in 2 months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The product went viral because it felt like magic — for the first time, anyone could have a natural conversation with a machine that seemed to understand them.

The Microsoft partnership provided distribution at massive scale. Microsoft integrated OpenAI models into Bing, Office 365 (Copilot), GitHub (Copilot), and Azure.

Overnight, hundreds of millions of Microsoft users had access to OpenAI technology. Microsoft's $13 billion investment was the largest AI bet in history and gave OpenAI nearly unlimited compute.

The API created an ecosystem. Thousands of startups built products on top of OpenAI's models — from customer service bots to coding assistants to content generators.

Each API customer locked themselves into OpenAI's ecosystem, creating switching costs and recurring revenue.

Snap Inc.

Meta (Facebook/Instagram) is the permanent existential threat. When Spiegel turned down Zuckerberg's $3 billion offer in 2013, Zuckerberg responded by copying every single Snapchat feature — Stories on Instagram, disappearing messages on Messenger, AR filters on Facebook.

Instagram Stories alone now has over 500 million daily users, dwarfing Snapchat. Every feature Snap invents, Meta copies within months and deploys to a user base 5x larger.

TikTok redefined short-form content and stole attention from every other social platform. Snapchat launched Spotlight to compete, but TikTok's algorithmic feed and creator ecosystem are years ahead.

Young users who once spent hours on Snapchat now split that time with TikTok.

Monetization lags behind competitors. Snap's average revenue per user is significantly lower than Meta's or TikTok's.

Advertisers often treat Snapchat as an afterthought — they build campaigns for Instagram and TikTok first, then maybe run them on Snap. The company has been unprofitable for most of its public life, with only recent quarters showing operational improvement.

OpenAI

The board crisis of November 2023 nearly destroyed the company. The nonprofit board fired Sam Altman as CEO on a Friday, citing a loss of confidence.

Within 48 hours, 95% of employees threatened to quit and follow Altman to Microsoft. By Tuesday, Altman was reinstated and the board was restructured.

The incident exposed the fundamental tension between OpenAI's nonprofit governance and its for-profit ambitions — a tension it finally addressed in late 2025 by restructuring the business as a public benefit corporation sitting under the original nonprofit.

The cost of training frontier models is eye-watering. Each new GPT generation costs hundreds of millions to train.

OpenAI is reportedly spending over $7 billion annually on compute. The company is burning through cash faster than almost any startup in history, which is why it keeps raising at higher and higher valuations.

If revenue growth slows before costs stabilize, the math gets ugly.

Safety concerns are not going away. Multiple prominent researchers have left OpenAI over disagreements about the pace of development versus safety research.

Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist who was central to the board's decision to fire Altman, left in 2024 to start a safety-focused AI lab. The public debate about whether OpenAI is moving too fast — and whether its safety commitments are genuine — grows louder with every capability improvement.

Snap Inc.

Snapchat — the core messaging and social media app with 850+ million monthly active users, known for disappearing messages, Stories, and the Snap Map. Snap Lenses & Filters — augmented reality effects that overlay digital content on the real world through the camera.

Over 3.5 billion Lenses have been created by the community. Stories — Snapchat invented the Stories format in 2013 (24-hour disappearing photo/video collections).

Every major social platform copied it. Snap Map — a real-time map showing friends' locations and local events.

Used by hundreds of millions and particularly popular with Gen Z. Spotlight — Snap's TikTok competitor: a feed of short-form vertical videos from the community, with creators earning a share of revenue.

OpenAI

ChatGPT is the consumer chatbot — the product that made AI mainstream overnight. The flagship GPT models are multimodal, handling text, images, and audio in one system.

The OpenAI API lets developers integrate GPT into any application. DALL-E generates images from text descriptions.

Whisper transcribes and translates audio. Sora generates videos from text prompts.

GPT Store lets users create and share custom GPT agents. ChatGPT Enterprise gives businesses a private, secure version of ChatGPT with admin controls and no data training.

Snap Inc.

Benchmark led the Series A — one of the most legendary early-stage investments in tech history. Lightspeed Venture Partners invested early.

Tencent bought a 12% stake, giving Snap a strategic investor from the world's largest gaming company. Alibaba, General Atlantic, and Fidelity participated in later rounds.

The March 2017 IPO raised $3.4 billion at a $24 billion valuation — Spiegel was 26 years old.

OpenAI

Microsoft ($13B), Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Tiger Global, SoftBank, a16z