At a time when most international tech companies are looking to get a pie of the Indian market, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel believes that his app is only for ‘rich people’.
The details of the poor remarks were revealed in a lawsuit by filed by an ex-employee named Anthony Pompliano, Variety reported.
According to the lawsuit, the incident happened 2015 when Pompliano was expressing his concerns that the app was not making a mark in the overseas market. Abruptly cutting him off, Spiegel said “this app is only for rich people. I don’t want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain.”
Pampliano has sued Snapchat for presenting inflated metrics about user data to the investors while going for an IPO.
“Snapchat was inflating its registration completion rate, which it claimed was about 87 percent. In fact, it was less than 40 percent. The company was also claiming to retain 40 percent of its users after seven days when in fact the figure was closer to 20 percent,” he claimed.
Pompliano, who was hired away from Facebook to increase the user base of Snapchat, was sacked barely three weeks after he joined the company.
The comments have invoked angry reactions from Indian users with some even threatening to quit the social platform.
New #Snapchat #sign up screen pic.twitter.com/URU4R8lgH5— Vishal Acharya (@PinkGlitzKid) April 15, 2017
" Snapchat is 4 rich people, India is too poor to consider expansion " - CEO Evan Spiegel* Rates it poor & uninstalls Snap Chat *
— Ankit Chaudhary (@entrepreneur987) April 15, 2017
#Snapchat I will use Internet explorer on Windows 98 but never use #Snapchat— pratik godhani (@pgodhani) April 15, 2017
Uninstall #Snapchat people. We are too poor to use it.!— Piyush Singh (@piyush_speaks) April 15, 2017
@evanspiegel consider the end of #snapchat after ur statements like India being poor without #india u stand nowhere #facebook is killing you— K A P I L (@kapilsingh) April 15, 2017
Founded in 2011, Snapchat was originally called Picaboo. Facebook had offered to acquire the company for USD 3 billion in November 2013 but the proposal was rejected by its founders.
Before going public in March 2017, it had raised a funding of USD 2.62 billion from investors such as Yahoo, Fidelity Investments, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Alibaba, and others.
The full documents of the lawsuit are given below:Snapchat unredacted lawsuit by gmaddaus on Scribd
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