Another executive has exited Snap as the company conducts a mass layoff and reorganization.
Peter Sellis, the vice president of business product, left Snap about two weeks ago for the messaging platform Discord where he will be senior vice president of product, according to a person familiar with the matter. Sellis joined Snap almost eight years ago and held various senior positions there, including in revenue and advertising product, most recently focused on longer-term efforts at making the app money through advertising. Snap lost two other top ad executives recently — Jeremi Gorman and Peter Naylor, who just joined Netflix.
A Snap representative confirmed Sellis' departure and praised him for his work but declined to comment further.
Snap is undergoing a major reorganization of priorities in the face of slowing growth, rising social-media competition, and a battered stock price. As part of this, Snap last week laid off more than 1,200 full-time employees in what some workers described as a "messy" scenario. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told remaining workers last week that the reorganization was an opportunity to "prove the haters wrong."
Before Sellis left the company, Snap hired Biswanath Panda as vice president of ads engineering and Lars Hirsch as vice president of ads product, both from Google. It also appointed its engineering head Jerry Hunter as its first chief operating officer; he'll now oversee advertising in addition to product, engineering, and other departments.
A Bloomberg report in March cited unnamed sources saying Discord was interviewing banks to pursue a public listing as soon as this year. It has hired Sellis to further build out its monetization efforts and abilities, a person familiar with the move told Insider. Discord has 150 million daily users, though its growth appears to have slowed in recent months. The app's main source of revenue is its Nitro subscription, offering users an "enhanced" experience for a monthly or annual fee.
A person familiar with the matter told Insider that Discord was unlikely to go public before next year. It has raised more than $1 billion from blue-chip investors including Benchmark, Greylock, Index Ventures, Bessemer, and Accel, according to PitchBook.
Discord hired its first finance chief, Tomasz Marcinkowski, in March 2021, a step that most startups take before filing to go public. In February, it added Leslie Kilgore, the former Netflix chief marketing officer, and Amrita Ahuja, the former chief financial officer at Block, to its board of directors.
A representative for Discord didn't respond to a request for comment.
Are you a Snap or Discord employee, or someone with insight to share? Contact Kali Hays at khays@insider.com, on secure messaging app Signal at 949-280-0267, or through Twitter DM at @hayskali. Reach out using a non-work device
