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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

> The truth is that with modern technology you can build a company that has hundreds of millions of high-volume users and yet is not very expensive to operate.

Investors had to dump more than a billion dollars into Twitter to get it to where it is today.

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And? Aside from the fact that that's not really true, what does it matter? Twitter already IPO'd, the original investors got their money back, now it's just owners. And it doesn't require a team of 4000 to operate twitter. It requires far fewer, and as time goes on twitter will generally just get cheaper to operate.

Twitter can easily bring in enough revenue to keep doing what it's doing indefinitely. And that's totally fine. But it's unlikely they're going to grow by 10x in a few years or pivot drastically. Yet those unrealistic expectations were built into the current stock price.

That shows the company is stagnating.

Google's stock price would not be at where it is now if the company "just" stopped at search. It's everything else they kept pursuing that's allowed the company to reach stratospheric valuation heights relative to its real revenue.

1) Operating is not the same as building, especially if you have to figure things out.

2) Twitter reported half a billion in revenue last quarter.

>Twitter reported half a billion in revenue last quarter

And yet managed to lose 136 million dollars. While revenue is interesting, it just doesn't matter if you can't turn a profit.

How is it even possible for a company like twitter to spend a billion dollar and change in one quarter? That's enough to run a small country complete with golden bathroom for the dictator.

Time to go read about their OPEX I suppose. Anyone got a link to a good write-up?

Half a billion but...

People are expensive, office space in their 30+ offices is expensive, hundreds of thousands of servers are expensive...

How in the world do they have hundreds of thousands of servers!

Twitter is notorious for being ridiculously frivolous[1]. They also pay their employees very very high wages[2], which isn't a bad thing, but I assume that doesn't scale well.

1. http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/06/technology/social/twitter-ca...

2. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Twitter-Staff-Software-Engin...

Uh, most of that money was from the IPO and that was probably done because founders/early investors wanted to cash in. I'd say the vast majority of that funding was not necessary to scale to where they are today.

Really? Wikipedia shows they raised over a billion from investors before IPO (including individual rounds of $800M and $300M.) Of the $800M, half went to cash out.

I'd agree though that at least technically, to deliver the core user product, this money simply wasn't needed. (It might have been needed for advertising or building up contracts, etc.)

It didn't help improve the interface much. For example, on this site the interface shows me quickly who is replying to whom. A billion dollars in and Twitter still can't do this. They tried to be the world's largest chat room and basically came up AOL.

And the UI changes they have made are demonstrably worse, such as their seemingly random threading, constantly losing page scroll position, and repeating earlier tweets.

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