What would you do if you had a billion dollar company?

This week we announced that Imran Khan, Chief Strategy Officer at Snapchat, will be speaking at our upcoming conference.

I’ve been intrigued with Snapchat since my two daughters first taught me how to use it. I even wrote an entire story on the subject ‘Snapchat, for people who don’t understand Snapchat’. That post resonated well with our audience – it was shared more than 2,600 times and received just shy of a hundred thousand views (until you click on it here… wink wink).

Now that Facebook continues to aggressively copy Snapchat features and build them into both Instagram and WhatsApp, the story gets more interesting every day. As an entrepreneur, it’s fascinating to watch these giants battle it out.

Every startup I know is critical about big business, yet they also strive to become a large company themselves. And most of us are so consumed with surviving through the day and preparing for tomorrow, we don’t have the luxury of considering what we’d do if we actually became billion dollar companies.

How would you compete with Facebook? Would you want to be acquired, or would you compete with them and risk annihilation?

Most entrepreneurs don’t back down from a fight. If you want to live risk-free and avoid confrontations, it’s highly unlikely you’re an entrepreneur. But there are fights that you want stay away from. I, personally, struggle with these questions daily. When do you walk away from a project? When do you go all in and into attack mode? Which threats are opportunities in disguise and which ones should you evade?

I’m sure they’re thinking about these exact same things at Snapchat. And I look forward to Khan talk about this soon.

This is my introduction text for last week’s issue of our TNW Weekly update. You can read the whole newsletter here, or sign up to receive your own copy.