'He had no ad or media background': Ad industry executives react to Snapchat losing chief strategy officer Imran Khan

Imran Khan Snap IPO

Snap's chief strategy chief Imran Khan is leaving, the company said Monday.
Ad executives say that they while Khan steering Snap to an IPO was commendable, he was never a good fit in a strategy role.
He was also not as hands-on as they'd have liked him to be and shares a part of the blame for allowing Snapchat's disastrous redesign to go through, execs say.

Snap's chief strategy chief Imran Khan is leaving, the company said Monday, becoming the latest executive to depart its top ranks.

And even though he leaves a big hole for founder and CEO Evan Spiegel to fill —advertising executives aren't particularly sorry to see Khan go.

Khan was necessary for Snap's IPO — but invisible after

Khan, 41, joined Snap in early 2015, with a mandate to expand its business and revenue and steer it toward an initial public offering.

He was the perfect person for the latter job, having been hired from Credit Suisse where he was head of global internet investment banking — and was best known for his leading role on the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group's IPO in 2014.

"When you look at what he’s been able to accomplish while there, it’s pretty incredible," said Ethan Agarwal, founder and CEO of Aaptiv, a small business that has worked with Snap. "The guy brought Snap from pre-revenue to over a billion-dollar run rate, helped grow it from 100 to 3,000 employees, and essentially brought a company running on Quickbooks to IPO."

But while he succeeded in charting the company's path to an IPO, insiders and outsiders apparently never saw him as an advertising guy.

"Internally and externally, folks never thought Imran was a good fit in that strategy role — he had no ad or media background," an advertising executive who wished to remain anonymous told Business Insider. "It made a lot of sense for him to help get Snap to IPO, and considerably less sense after that."

"He was needed because Evan wasn’t a business person, and Wall Street needed an experienced adult to take them public," said another executive. "He was more a factor when he first joined. Once the company went public he was invisible."

Ad executives say that Khan wasn't as hands-on as they'd have liked

That's not to say he didn't try. Khan helped Snap build a strong base for its ad business, tried to forge deeper relationships with Madison Avenue and helped the company transition to selling ads programatically

But some executives said that Khan wasn't as hands-on as they'd have liked him to be.

"He was never about ads and we hardly saw him," said an executive. "He never really came to our agency, or attended meetings around Snap and our usage of it."

Others, however say that although he never claimed to be an ad guy, he was accommodating.

"Any time I texted him saying that I wanted to catch up, he'd say I'll see you tomorrow," said a third ad executive. "I have a lot of respect for him."

Snapchat

Snap's disastrous redesign was a strategic misstep

Snap rolled out the biggest ever redesign in its history last December — a move that was wildly unpopular among users and set its stock plunging. While it was eventually reversed, the damage was permanent.

According to Aaron Perez, director of digital and social strategy at ad agency Glow, Khan shares a part for the blame for allowing the redesign to go through. He called it "a strategic misstep."

"That move demonstrated that he was out of touch with culture and how users want to engage with the platform," he said. "When the redesign happened, it shook several core users off the app and made advertisers even more wary of investing in the platform."

There is no denying that the company has struggled — both commercially and in terms of users and usage — relative to earlier optimistic expectations that were widely held, said Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser.

"While user and usage trends are Evan Spiegel's responsibility, commercial matters are Khan's," he said. "Of course, if usage trends were meaningfully better it's possible the business would have been better."

Khan's departure makes Snap more vulnerable than ever — but all may not be lost

Khan's final day on the job has not been set, and he will help in the transition of his duties and responsibilities, Snap said, clarifying that his departure did not stem from any disagreement relating to accounting, strategy, management, operations, policies, or practices.

"Imran has been a great partner building our business," Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in an SEC filing. "We appreciate all of his hard work and wish him the best."

Still, Khan's exit does not come at a good time for Snap, with the company reeling from its first-ever quarterly decline in daily users as a public company last quarter, and its shares dropping more than 30% since the beginning of the year.

"As the stock has fallen, stock-based compensation is less valuable to employees who might have been counting on a higher stock price to justify why they were staying with the company," said Pivotal's Wieser. "[This is a] particularly big risk for Snap given how much they were using stock for compensation and may contribute to more departure risks."

But others said that Snap's voluntary exit may set the stage for someone with a more traditional ad background to take the reins and help turn the company around. In fact, Snap just hired WarnerMedia's former chief marketing officer to run its sales.

"I would actually say this is a sign of righting the ship," said an executive. "Not it sinking."

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