Snap, the company that owns Snapchat, is not having a good time. Two weeks ago it announced that it is laying off 20% of its workforce worldwide and the closure of several projects, among which Pixy stands out, its drone for taking selfies that had achieved great expectations but was very difficult to obtain in the market. .
Snap wants to kill a growing rival to Snapchat, despite owning it
Another of the most notorious closures has been that of the social map app Zenly, whose logo is a three-color ice cream (in the image). Snap had bought this startup, headquartered in Paris, in 2017, and now five years later it closes it by swerving and leaving even its workers stunned, since the social network has more than 40 million users worldwide. world.
But it is that in addition, the 73 employees of Zenly – who will now be fired – received last July, from the owners of Snap, a package of shares of the company as a reward for their work and results.
What happens is that these actions became effective a year after being delivered, so presumably they will not mean a single additional euro for Zenly workers, who will only receive their severance pay when the French regulators approve the closure. of the company and its total dismantling.
Until this occurs, it can take several months. In the meantime, Zenly employees will still have to go to the office and working as if nothing had happened, despite the intention of closure expressed by the owners of Snapchat, who have also rejected any attempt to purchase the app by other companies, which would mean that it would continue to be active and would remain on staff To their workers.
Employees don’t really understand Snap’s decision or why they bought an app and now shut it down, wasting thousands of hours of work by dozens of engineers, and not even considering selling to another company. It is also not understood why the complete redesign of the application was worked on earlier this year.
The truth is that Snap bought Zenly as soon as this French app began to take off internationally and was preparing to land in the United States. It was about eliminating a potential competitor that, today, it is very strong in Russia, Japan and other Asian countries. Even so, it has 15 million daily users and about 40 million active users per month, figures that are very far from the more than 350 million active users that Snapchat has, so it would not overshadow it.
