Well, if you were wondering why an unnamed hedge fund would be ready to pony up big dollars for a chance to invest in Snapchat, then here is your answer. The New York magazine says that Wall Street is obsessed with the Los Angeles-based social-photo-sharing platform.
After becoming popular with high school students last fall, the app has recently begun drawing in a set of young, privacy-conscious financiers. In an industry where a stray Facebook photo of a drunken escapade can get a junior banker fired on the spot, Snapchat’s disappearing photos have made it a useful tool for Wall Street’s party crowd. It’s impossible to measure the Snapchat activity of bankers or any other subset of users, given that the app produces no real public metrics. But interviews with a number of Wall Street workers suggests that Snapchat is quickly becoming the go-to social network for corporate underlings who want to keep their public profiles strictly professional, yet can’t resist the appeal of a controlled social media environment that lets them run wild.
More than Snapchat, it seems Wall Street (like many young people) is wary of Facebook and the social norm around that service. Still, the popularity of Snapchat must be driving Wall Street security chiefs bat-shit crazy — what? yet another hole to plug in their always leaking information ship!
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