Some serious balls on those people

Will Oremus has a Slate article about someone willing to say no to a lot of money:

Facebook may be losing teens, because they don’t want to post personal status updates on a site that broadcasts everything to their parents, grandparents, teachers, and future college admissions officers.
The messaging app Snapchat, meanwhile, is rapidly gaining teens, because it allows them to send photos and messages that self-destruct after a few seconds. It’s not a huge surprise, then, that Facebook tried to buy Snapchat. The surprise is that, according to The Wall Street Journal, it offered three billion dollars—and Snapchat turned it down. From the WSJ:
Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s 23-year-old co-founder and CEO, will not likely consider an acquisition or an investment at least until early next year, the people briefed on the matter said. They said Spiegel is hoping Snapchat’s numbers— of users and messages— will grow enough by then to justify an even larger valuation, the people said.
Snapchat, it behooves me to point out, makes no money. I don’t mean that it is spending more money than it takes in, like Twitter. It literally does not have any revenue.
That in itself doesn’t mean it lacks value. Plenty of huge tech companies, from Google to Facebook to Twitter, have started out by simply offering a popular service, then figured out how to make billions later on. Instagram was not making revenue when Facebook acquired it for a billion dollars a year and a half ago. Now it is. The thing about Snapchat is that it’s hard to see how it could ever make billions of dollars, given the ephemerality of its messages and its young target demographic. My former colleague Farhad Manjoo put the question to his Twitter followers, asking: “Someone tell me even a halfway plausible way Snapchat can make any money.”  Here are a few of the more imaginative responses:

In-app funny hat purchases
OKCupid-style quizzes before each snap
Sponsored sexts?
Meth.
Puppies
Start a private preschool in NYC

And of course, the obvious:

Save all the pictures/chats, and threaten to post them unless people pay up?

Okay, so let’s admit that “advertising” is plausible. And let’s stipulate that while we’re all laughing at Spiegel today, there’s at least some possibility that he’ll be the one smirking last, Zuckerberg-style, when Snapchat becomes the world’s next social-media giant. But man, it sure seems like the chances are far greater that he’ll someday sit down for an interview with Esquire or Businessweek and reflect ruefully on just how and why, in his exuberant youth, he passed up the sweetest deal any 23-year-old startup founder is likely ever to see.

Matt Yglesias applauds Snapchat's chutzpah in an article for turning down Facebook's offer:

The Wall Street Journal reported today that Snapchat turned down a three-billion-dollar acquisition offer from Facebook. The instant Internet consensus seems to be that Snapchat blundered.
If you're just getting up to speed, the way Snapchat works is that you send a message— text photo, whatever— to a friend or group of friends. But instead of the message being persistent, it "disappears" rather quickly. The young people seem to like it these days, because it's a superior method of sexting to conventional messages that leave yourself open to the risk that nude or semi-nude pictures of yourself will circulate online. It's also used for non-pornographic purposes, though, and it's user base outside of the youth demographic is growing. People think it's silly to turn down the offer, because Snapchat has no revenue and doesn't on the face of it look like a promising ad platform.
I say three cheers to Snapchat!
The company's founders and investors may or may not be making a terrible mistake. But from the sidelines, I think one should almost always root against the acquisition exit. It's boring. It's lame. The bet when you turn down three billion is that there's some chance that in the future your company will be worth thirty billion or three hundred billion, and you want to reach for those stars and dare to dream. Many individual companies have suffered for daring to dream— think of Groupon, which had an offer on the table from Google— but it's hard to imagine the world suffering from that outcome. The reverse process where a good service fails to thrive in a larger corporate ecosystem (think Flickr at Yahoo) by contrast, is all too common. And sometimes you see a clearly threatening acquisition possibility. Apple seems to have seriously considered buying Dropbox at one point, which could have been a great arrangement for both firms, but would have been bad for a world that needs cross-platform services in an universe increasingly dominated by a handful of platform players.
Will Snapchat develop a revenue stream? Will it find more plausible use-cases for its service that let it continue to grow? I don't know. Probably not. Most business ventures fail. But good for them for trying. The founders are smart and young and if it doesn't work out they'll do something else.

Rico says he'll say yes to almost anything for a lot less. (Oh, you know you would, too...)