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There’s a three-minute joke about Snap Inc. that Chief Executive Evan Spiegel wants you to hear.
It goes like this: Annual shareholder meeting.
The first such event for Snapchat’s parent company lasted less than three minutes from beginning to end, and consisted entirely of a company lawyer reading a script on a recording. There were no questions from Snap SNAP, +2.58% investors, and the company had a single point of business to discuss: electing Poppy Thorpe to the board of directors to replace the widely reported departure of venture capitalist Mitch Lasky.
The lawyer spent more than 10% of the meeting reminding shareholders why Snap was not holding a more traditional event: Spiegel and other Snap executives own 96.4% of the voting rights in the company. It took roughly 15 seconds for the attorney to read the controlling share count. And he had to do it twice.
Speigel and co-founder Bobby Murphy, who serves as Snap’s Chief Technology Officer, control the company due to a dual-class share structure that gives no voting rights to the common stock available to investors. While many Silicon Valley businesses have created multiple stock tiers to ensure founders stay in control, Snap’s capital structure is more extreme.
To wrap up the meeting the company lawyer invited all of the company’s shareholders to tune in for its second-quarter financial results on Tuesday after the market close.
“We invite all stockholders to listen in on that discussion via a link on our website,” the lawyer said.
Presumably, that conference call will be a tad longer than Snap’s “meeting” on Thursday.
Snap stock rose 2.2% in late afternoon trading Thursday. Snap shares have fallen 13% this year, as the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.49% has gained 5.7%.
Snap did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.