Evan Spiegel, the co-founder and CEO of Snapchat, has revealed he has a plan for an IPO and won’t be entertaining any acquisition offers for the social networking company.
Spiegel famously turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook for Snapchat nearly two years ago, and the company has since gained a $15 billion valuation. Now the CEO, speaking at the Code Conference held in California, has mentioned taking the company public for the first time.
“We need to IPO,” Spiegel told the conference. “We have a plan to do that.”
Spiegel was not giving too much away about the future of Snapchat, and didn’t reveal any timeline for his IPO plans. The 24-year-old did tell the Code conference that the company is attracting nearly 100 million daily active users in developed markets, and 65% of those users are creating content. Facebook, the market leader of social networking, boasted 936 million daily users in March, while Twitter has said that close to half of its 300 million monthly users are active daily.
In recent months Snapchat has begun to monetize those huge user numbers, and has introduced advertising into the service. The Snapchat app allows users to send and receive photos and videos which disappear after a set amount of time.
Spiegel also commented on the current climate of investment in technology, predicting a “correction” is coming and that he has factored that into his plans. He said low interest rates have caused a great deal of the current activity. “People are making riskier investments,” he said. “I think there will be a correction. As for when, we don’t know, but we factor that into our plans. If I knew exactly when, I could make a lot of money.”
Snapchat attracted a $20 million investment from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers last year, and in March Alibaba poured $200 million into the service.