Five years after the launch of Snapchat, Snap is planning to go public. The company filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange today, picking the ticker symbol “SNAP.” The company hopes to raise $3 billion and says it has 158 million daily active users. The IPO would reportedly value the company above $20 billion.

The company says its advertising business is growing quickly. It reported $58.7 million in revenue for 2015, and grew that to $404.5 million in 2016. Along with that strong revenue growth, however, its losses also swelled. Snapchat lost $372.9 million in 2015 and $514.6 million this past year, more than its total revenue.

Based on the information from the filing, we see that co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, each own roughly 22.2% of the company prior to its IPO, though this number will change once Snap goes public. For comparison, Mark Zuckerberg owned 28.2% of Facebook at the time of its IPO filing.

If you calculate their total shares times the share price of the last private round ($15.36, due to a stock split), this means each founder owns about $3.5 billion of the company, Hari Raghavan from Equidate points out. Using the same method, we see that Benchmark and Lightspeed Venture Partners own about $2 billion and $1.3 billion, respectively.

Snap previously authorized a new class of shares that would help founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy retain control of the company. According to the filing, each co-founder presently holds 44.3% of voting rights. Benchmark holds just 2.7% and Lightspeed has 1.8%.

And now we can see another reason: Spiegel’s investors have given him a huge incentive to go public. Once Snap finishes its IPO, the company will give him another 3 percent of its shares.

If Snap goes out at a value of $25 billion, those shares will be worth $750 million; assuming the company gets a “pop” in valuation when it actually starts trading the shares will be worth even more.

A $750 million bonus is a very nice pay day for a normal person, but Spiegel isn’t a normal person: Even without the bonus, his 22% stake in Snap would be worth about $5.5 billion. Adding in the extra shares will get him to about $6.25 billion.

Snapchat admitted in its IPO filing’s risk factors that “We face significant competition in almost every aspect of our business both domestically and internationally,” listing many companies including Facebook and Instagram. Then it noted, “For example, Instagram, a subsidiary of Facebook, recently introduced a “stories” feature that largely mimics our Stories feature and may be directly competitive.”

The average daily user opens Snapchat 18 times a day and uses it for 25 to 30 minutes, with 60 percent of them creating Snaps and/or using its chat feature daily.

One person who will not share in their glory is Reggie Brown, who went to Stanford with both men and claimed he came up with Snapchat's core idea of disappearing photos.

Brown filed a lawsuit against Spiegel and Murphy in 2013 after he was forced out of the company and not given equity. On Thursday, Snap disclosed for the first time that it paid a total of $157.5 million to settle with Brown.

As part of the settlement, Snap said it agreed to pay Brown a total of $157.5 million in cash, $50 million of which was paid in 2014 and $107.5 million of which was paid in 2016. The settlement ended up being much less than the more than $500 million Brown originally asked for.

Snap Inc., plans to spend $400 million a year on Google Cloud services over the next five years, according to documents filed

"When we say 'kind,'” Snap explains, "we mean the type of kindness that compels you to let someone know that they have something stuck in their teeth even though it’s a little awkward. We care deeply about kindness because we want to create a space that helps to give our team the courage to create. We think our team feels comfortable creating new things because they are surrounded by the kindness of their peers and know they have our support."

"One of the ways we reinforce the importance of listening is by practicing it with each other. We have created a bi-weekly “Council” program for our team that encourages team members to express themselves and listen to others. We believe that this type of sharing teaches and reminds our team to listen and learn from those around them."

"Another thing that makes our team special is the ability to adapt. We’ve learned over time how important it is to hire people who are not only experienced, but also adaptable. We focus on understanding adaptability as part of the interview process and we evaluate it by understanding the life decisions that have brought each team member to our company."

Instagram CEO on Stories: Snapchat deserves all the credit

The one thing you never hear in Silicon Valley is an entrepreneur admit they copied someone else. et there in the headquarters of Facebook, the world’s most prolific product cloner, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom surprised me.

techcrunch.com|Josh Constine

He’d just walked me through the demo of Instagram Stories, a pixel for pixel photocopy of Snapchat Stories. The products look so similar I couldn’t help but chuckle as he progressed through the slide deck about a feature he said would probably look familiar.

Still, everyone in our interview room knew there was no avoiding the Snapchat question, so I just put it bluntly. “Let’s talk about the big thing. Snapchat pioneered a lot of this format. Whole parts of the concept, the implementation, down to the details…”

“Totally,” Systrom interrupted me. “They deserve all the credit.”

I was flabbergasted.

Facebook had blatantly copied Snapchat before with failed products like Poke and Slingshot. It had ripped off entire startups like TimeHop, which Facebook recreated as On This Day, or features like Twitter’s hashtags and trending topics. And when asked where the ideas came from, the company’s executives always said something like “we see behaviors from our community and we try to build on top of them” or “I don’t spend too much time looking at what other people are doing or not doing.”

“When you are an innovator, that’s awesome. Just like Instagram deserves all the credit for bringing filters to the forefront. This isn’t about who invented something. This is about a format, and how you take it to a network and put your own spin on it.

Facebook invented feed, LinkedIn took on feed, Twitter took on feed, Instagram took on feed, and they all feel very different now and they serve very different purposes. But no one looks down at someone for adopting something that is so obviously great for presenting a certain type of information.

Innovation happens in the Valley, and people invent formats, and that’s great. And then what you see is those formats proliferate. So @ usernames were invented on Twitter. Hashtags were invented on Twitter. Instagram has those. Filtered photos were not invented on Instagram.

Gmail was not the first email client. Google Maps was certainly not the first map. The iPhone was definitely not the first phone. The question is what do you do with that format? What do you do with that idea? Do you build on it? Do you add new things? Are you trying to bring it in a new direction?

Inside Evan Spiegel's very private Snapchat Story

It's Evan Spiegel's world — we're all just snapping in it

www.recode.net|Kurt Wagner

Before Evan Spiegel was Evan Spiegel, there were times he wanted to fit in.

Like in June 2012, when Spiegel walked across a makeshift stage erected inside Stanford University’s football stadium to collect a diploma he hadn’t actually earned.

Spiegel, then 22, was still a few credits short of graduating with his degree in product design. Stanford let him walk at its graduation ceremony with the assumption that he’d eventually finish his schoolwork.

His friends were all graduating, and his family was in town for the ceremony. Missing that moment would have been embarrassing.

Spiegel never ended up graduating. Now, he says, he wishes he hadn’t pretended that he did.

"It reminded me that oftentimes we do all sorts of silly things to avoid appearing different," Spiegel told USC’s business school graduates last May. "Conforming happens so naturally that we can forget how powerful it is. But the thing that makes us human are those times we listen to the whispers of our soul and allow ourselves to be pulled in another direction."

Evan Spiegel no longer conforms, and he doesn’t have to: He runs — and controls — Snapchat.

As he started to enter celebrity status in 2013, reporters mined those documents and surfaced with details that laid out a privileged life: As a teenager, Spiegel had a $250 weekly allowance. When his father wouldn’t buy him the new BMW he requested, he moved in with his mother out of protest. She leased him the $75,000 car. He’s not used to being told "no."

"We no longer have to capture the ‘real world’ and recreate it online," Spiegel explained during a speech he gave at a conference in early 2014. "We simply live and communicate at the same time."

Facebook tried and failed twice to replicate Snapchat’s disappearing photos product. (It also famously tried to buy Spiegel’s startup for $3 billion back in late 2012.) Both Twitter and Instagram replicated the Snapchat Stories format but to little effect.

But unlike Zuckerberg, Spiegel knows little code. He leaves his impact through vision and design. And that speaks again to what makes Spiegel different. Many of his ideas — most of which are raw and unorthodox — probably wouldn’t pass the smell test at larger companies like Facebook or Google.