Snap Inc.

Zoom

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.

Zoom

Zoom uses a freemium model. Free accounts get unlimited one-on-one meetings and 40-minute group meetings.

Paid plans start at $13.33/month per user for Pro (meetings up to 30 hours), $18.33/month for Business, and custom pricing for Enterprise. Zoom also charges for add-ons — Zoom Phone (cloud phone system), Zoom Rooms (conference room hardware), and Zoom Contact Center.

The free tier is the hook. The 40-minute limit on group calls creates just enough friction to push power users to pay.

And once one person in a company pays, the whole team follows because nobody wants to be the one whose meetings keep getting cut off.

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.

Zoom

Eric Yuan grew up in Tai'an, a mining city in Shandong province, China. In the mid-1990s he was in his twenties and inspired by the internet boom happening in America.

He applied for a US visa. He was rejected.

He applied again. Rejected again.

Eight times in total over about two years before he was finally approved in 1997. He moved to Silicon Valley with barely any English and joined WebEx as one of its first engineers.

Yuan spent 14 years at WebEx, eventually becoming VP of Engineering. Cisco acquired WebEx in 2007 for $3.2 billion.

Yuan watched Cisco slowly bloat the product with enterprise features while the core video quality deteriorated. He kept telling Cisco leadership they needed to rebuild the product from scratch.

They kept saying no.

In 2011, Yuan quit and took 40 WebEx engineers with him. He founded Zoom Video Communications with a simple thesis: video meetings should just work.

No downloads. No lag.

No "can you hear me?" No IT department required. He built the product that Cisco refused to build.

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.

Zoom

Zoom grew on one thing: it worked. In a world where every video call started with five minutes of technical issues, Zoom calls just connected.

That reliability was the entire marketing strategy for the first five years.

The freemium model did the rest. Teachers, coaches, therapists, book clubs, and small teams all started on the free tier.

When they hit the 40-minute limit, enough of them converted to paid. And every free meeting was essentially a demo — everyone in the meeting saw how good Zoom was.

Yuan obsessed over simplicity. While competitors like WebEx and GoToMeeting required downloads, plugins, and IT involvement, Zoom worked in the browser with one click.

The learning curve was essentially zero. Your grandmother could figure it out.

That turned out to be extremely important when a pandemic suddenly required your grandmother to figure it out.

Then COVID happened. In March 2020, the world shut down.

Every meeting — work, school, family, doctor, church, happy hour — moved to video. Zoom was already the easiest option.

Daily participants exploded from 10 million to 300 million in four months. The stock went from $70 to $588.

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.

Zoom

The post-pandemic hangover has been severe. Zoom's stock peaked at $588 in October 2020 and crashed to under $70 by 2022 — an 88% drop.

The company went from the most exciting tech stock on the planet to a cautionary tale about pandemic valuations. Revenue growth slowed from 300%+ to single digits as people returned to offices and competitors caught up.

Security and "Zoombombing" were early crises. In early 2020, as millions of new users flooded in, trolls discovered they could join open Zoom meetings and share offensive content.

Schools, churches, and AA meetings were disrupted. It turned out Zoom's encryption wasn't truly end-to-end as advertised.

Yuan had to halt all feature development for 90 days and focus exclusively on security fixes. It was a near-death reputational crisis.

Competition from Microsoft Teams and Google Meet intensified. Both companies bundled video calling for free into products that hundreds of millions of people already used.

Microsoft Teams integrated directly into Office 365. Google Meet was built into Gmail.

Zoom had to compete against free products from two of the richest companies on Earth.

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.

Zoom

Zoom Meetings is the core — video calls that actually work. Zoom Webinars handles large-scale events with up to 50,000 attendees.

Zoom Phone is a full cloud-based phone system replacing traditional office phones. Zoom Rooms turns physical conference rooms into one-click video meeting spaces.

Zoom Contact Center competes with established call center software. Zoom Team Chat is their Slack/Teams competitor.

Zoom Whiteboard is a collaborative digital canvas. Zoom Revenue Accelerator uses AI to analyze sales calls.

And Zoom AI Companion summarizes meetings and drafts messages.

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.

Zoom

Sequoia Capital, Emergence Capital, Horizons Ventures (Li Ka-shing), Qualcomm Ventures