The Not-So-Celebratory Reaction to Snap’s I.P.O. in Its Home Town
The area Snap chose as its headquarters is a particularly dug-in area that is intensely protective of its gritty, diverse identity. The members-only vibe has not done anything to endear it to locals. CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY PATRICK T. FALLON / BLOOMBERG / GETTY
I have a funny memento of the Snap, Inc., C.E.O., Evan Spiegel: a six-inch-high bright-pink-tufted truffula tree—you know, the precious resource exploited to near-extinction by the Once-ler in Dr. Seuss’s environmental catastrophe parable “The Lorax”—which sits on the shelf in my son’s room. I bought it three years ago from an artisan on the Venice Beach boardwalk, while taking a walk with Spiegel. We met at his office, on Market Street. He wore a sleek gray suit in the sun, cutting through the exercisers and recreators like a hot knife; we talked, off the record, about letterpress printing and the parties he threw as a teen-ager. He stopped to chat with a few people he knew or who knew him—his old trainer, someone from his high school—and showed me the ramshackle blue house (the former MTV beach house) that was Snapchat’s original office. For Spiegel, who grew up in the Los Angeles neighborhood of the Pacific Palisades and was still living at his father’s house there when I met him, being in the flow of the boardwalk’s heavy foot traffic was good for product development. He told USA Today, “We can come out and talk to Snapchatters all year along, and that’s really important.” At just twenty-three, Spiegel had already turned down a three-billion-dollar acquisition offer from Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, causing Forbes to write that he was “the brashest tech wunderkind since, well, Zuckerberg.”
On Thursday, Snap, Inc., as the company is now called, débuted on the New York Stock Exchange; by day’s end the stock was up forty-four per cent, and the company, which has yet to make a profit, was worth thirty-three billion dollars—a comparable valuation, according to CNBC, to Marriott and Target. On Market Street, doors were closed, white blinds were drawn, and security guards stood sentry. But that was just business as usual at Snap. Since expanding rapidly into a number of commercial and mixed-use spaces around the beachfront, with a particular concentration of leases on Market Street, the company has retreated from its open, incubator phase to face the public with the blank stare of its featureless logo. Market Street, once a jumble of restaurants and artists’ studios, has become a ghost town, vibrant and accessible only to those who can enter buildings with corporate I.D.s and eat for free. (Snap has contracted with a number of local restaurants to offer food to Snap employees and has its own private commissaries as well.)
For several years now, Venice, a swiftly gentrifying neighborhood where I have lived for the past five years, has been the heart of “Silicon Beach,” the SoCal answer to Palo Alto. (I fervently hope for a season of “Silicon Valley” set here, with brogrammers in the line up at the Breakwater, bitter skaters, Abbot Kinney pour-overs, and Google employees at Gold’s Gym. Spiegel would preside over it, a millennial demigod, with his fiancée, the Victoria’s Secret model Miranda Kerr.) The area Snap chose as its headquarters is a particularly dug-in segment of an area that is generally intensively protective of its gritty, diverse identity. The members-only vibe (Do you have your squiggly earpiece? Your laminated badge? I’m sorry, can I help you?) has not done anything to endear it to locals. Snap employees get yelled at by random strangers, as do people who merely look as if they could be Snap employees. Normal rules of technocracy—everything private, special, secret, privileged—read differently in a place where young people wear snakes around their necks and charge strangers to take their pictures. While Snap’s I.P.O. marked the arrival of Silicon Beach—it was the largest I.P.O. in L.A.’s history—it also sounded the death knell for those who fear that the changes are irreversible.
But civic hope is resilient, and on Thursday, while Spiegel was presumably celebrating in New York, a group called the Alliance for the Preservation of Venice occupied the corner of Market and Pacific, protesting for a second day with an array of signs: “Insane Public Offenders”; “It’s Venice. Snap out of it”; “Evan Spiegel, #trumpofvenice.” Mark Rago, who started the alliance, was there, wearing a T-shirt that said “Venice Dogz Not For Sale” and had a picture of a ghost in a ranger hat (like those worn by the Snap security guards) crossed out. “They’re moving into this beachside community like a military occupation, and they’re being bullies about it,” he said, handing me a long list of local properties that he said were being leased by Snap, which his group had assembled by shadowing the company’s employees. “They treat you like you don’t belong. If we don’t stop them five years from now this will be known as Snapville.” A passing car honked. “Fuck Snapchat!” the driver called. “Get the fuck out!” Propped against a parking meter in front of a Snap building that used to be a tavern called Nikki’s was a sign that read “R.I.P. Nikki’s Hello Dickheads.” Several Snap employees stood there, too, not making eye contact with the protesters, somewhere between mildly disapproving and amused.
Snap’s tenancy in Venice is an awkward form of urbanism. On paper, it sounds good (and has the support of politicians): innovative, locally grown business achieves wild success and grows organically to occupy numerous buildings along a formerly derelict waterfront. In practice, it feels like the bleaching of a coral reef, and has opponents calling for the company to build itself a corporate park in the suburbs. Most of Snap’s eighteen hundred employees work in Venice; many live in the neighborhood, too. (It’s been speculated that, with the I.P.O. enriching employees, many more will buy there, putting more pressure on a housing market that is already very tight.) With Market Street all but taken over and the company continuing to expand, Snap has sought additional space in loft buildings, mixed-use spaces, and large commercial zones, including some forty thousand square feet on Venice Boulevard and hundreds of thousands more at the Santa Monica Airport. Snap, customarily quiet, issued a concise statement that felt like a bone for the dogz. “We don’t just have our headquarters here; many of us also call Venice home,” it said. “We’ve been very grateful to be a part of this creative community for over the last four years and we’ve worked closely with local schools and nonprofits to be a good neighbor. No one could have anticipated how quickly we’ve grown, and we have already begun focusing our future growth outside of Venice.” It wasn’t quite the response to #evictsnapchat the protesters had been hoping for, but at least it was something.
What will happen, though, if Snap pulls out of Market Street and the surrounding area altogether, opting instead for the more familiar corporate park or large central campus? The neighborhood would truly be gutted then, and few businesses would have the capacity to come in and pay the rents that have become market rate. Local nonprofits that have benefitted from Snap’s largesse—and the many more that likely will with a new foundation announced as part of the I.P.O.—might lose the company’s attention. Beachside restaurants would suffer. The security guards might be out of their jobs. Spiegel and his co-founder Bobby Murphy are measured and careful when it comes to how they plan to grow Snap, which they now describe as a camera company, but when it comes to real estate they have followed the Once-ler’s paradigm:
I meant no harm. I most truly did not.
But I had to grow bigger. So bigger I got.
I biggered my factory. I biggered my roads.
I biggered my wagons. I biggered the loads
of the Thneeds I shipped out. I was shipping them forth
to the South! To the East! To the West! To the North!
I went right on biggering . . . selling more Thneeds.
And I biggered my money, which everyone needs.
