Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey
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Add Jack in to that mix, a guy who who has a lot of passion and intelligence but is split across Square and Walt Disney and I have to say the answer is 'no', betting on him to single handedly save Twitter is a bad bet.
Twitter is doomed. I get that shareholders want to see the value they were promised but short of a miracle I don't see a resurgence. All the trendy people have already moved off of Twitter to FB, Insta or SnapChat (and I'm sure there are others I'm not cool enough to use).
This Google Trend graph tells the story in pictures: https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0b2334%2C%2...
Note that I had to leave FB out because it has ridiculous numbers that make the other values in the chart almost meaningless.
Edit: Square not Stripe
On the other hand, I am followed by a top VC who only follows a few people but is followed by 1/2 million and this "karma" doesn't make any noticeable effect on my twitter account.
There's also far too many bots on Twitter now. Feels like Twitter is going to be a shit load of bots talking to one another when all the real humans leave.
Wait, the trendy people moved to Facebook??? Facebook is the most uncool social media destination I can think of. Are we talking about the same group of people here? It sounds like you have a very unique, shall we say, definition of 'trendy.' When I think trendy, I see people with lumberjack beards, nerd glasses, quiff hairstyles, sleeve tattoos, and fixies. (Though I'd concede that you could be right about migration to SnapChat).
Eurgh. I never understand how the number of employees you have can be a success metric. By that logic, becoming more efficient would be a bad thing.
But (so as not to contradict myself) just having all those people doesn't count as an achievement. It's just a cost of doing business that you want to keep as low as possible.
Plus sales and marketing budgets are huge.
Whether any of these systems or human resource needs are required to be running at that scale is probably the question hitting Jack directly in the face. I think the ballsiest move he could make would be to shrink it all down to core services. But Wall Street would shit itself with that sort of contraction.
Yes, plenty on spam prevention, but seemingly little on bot prevention. Without the bots, there'd be so many less MAUs.
That being said, I'd be shocked if a large number of that headcount weren't marketing and ad sales associates as that is what supposedly keeps the lights on.
Replying to your comment made me wonder: what would a better metric be? The requirements are that it has to be numeric, a single number, and represent the "success" of any company, in all lifecycles (before fit, growth, mature, yellowpages, etc.)
In another scenario, Company C has outsourced most of its operations work, while Company D does it in-house, so Company D has more employees. Again, this tells us nothing about performance.
What's wrong with using net income as a single number?
Yet it's puzzling how much it fails to improve its basic product, 1 year in Dorsey's comeback. On mobile, the search/explore screens are mostly irrelevant. On desktop, they could position themselves as quasi TV channels with live content update.
Yes, they lost the social wars and that's fine. They won the media war: Twitter's mindshare vs its actual engagement rates makes it an amazing opportunity.
Really hope it doesn't fade into a glorified RSS feed and manages to build on the intensity of its content.
United Fruit Company, British Petroleum?
> British Petroleum?
For those not familiar with Iranian history: the first revolution that happened on Twitter was the Green Revolution in Iran (2009)[0][1].
If you trace British Petroleum (BP) all the way back to its roots, it began as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1908. That company's formation was the basis for the series of political upheavals and revolutions that resulted in the current political leadership in Iran today[2], which in turn was the basis for the 2009 Green Revolution.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Iranian_presidential_elec...
[1] Named the 'Green Revolution' in the long Persian tradition of naming their revolutions after colors ('white', 'red', 'green', 'black')
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company#Nati...
What's there to improve? As someone else said here on HN "Twitter should have been an RFC."
The only thing that's broken here is not Twitter, it's the economic system that can't just let a useful invention be, but instead forces it into a fight-or-die, conquer-the-world-or-disappear nuclear arm's race.
Facebook was just fine as a place to keep in touch with friends and invite them to events, Uber is just fine as a Taxi service, Candy Crush was just fine as a silly iPhone game...
I wonder what we'll think of it all in a century, because there's no way this insanity can go on for much longer.
Yet, in the last year, it's become more and more difficult to find the damn list of trending hashtags. Currently, one has to click on the magnifying glass to find it. It should be front and center, and have a top-level tab of its own (next to Home and Moments). Personally, I'd prefer it if every time I opened Twitter, the first thing it showed me was the trending hashtags.
I don't know, that sounds kind of good to me. RSS is a largely unrealised technology. And it's what Twitter was trying to key into at the beginning, back when they really had a vision for what the app would be.
Many companies could still be thriving today (e.g., Yahoo), if not for this destructive aspect of capital in our markets.
Do you prefer a tiny chance of becoming the next Facebook, or a good chance of building a stable business?
Do you prefer to fail 9 companies before finally founding the one that will have "reason defying growth" (or not) rather than build one solid business?
I'd say it depends on your character, but it's important to know what you want rather than blindly following Paul Graham and other VC prophets.
It's almost impossible to change a business model once it is operating at scale, but management tells capital it can happen all the time.
I think of craigslist when I read that. It's just a useful thing that works. Nothing else. I wish there were more things like that.
Perhaps not coincidentally, craigslist is not a public company.
Why not open up new services closely connected to Twitter:
-Video Hosting site - YT and LiveLeak competitor, but without all the noise
-Social Network where Twitter is a core, but social network by itself would be separate product - "wall" could use Twitter feed, this would work perfectly...
-Image hosting company - Imgur competitor
-News distribution and news curation company - its almost already that, worth investing in it
-Social tools company - thats easy...
As long as Twitter would stick to minimalistic design and rule "less is better" it would work and Twitter could become worthy rival to ABC...
Yeah, I can't believe anyone thought that would work. It's like thinking that the recent "you can now type 10 more characters because URLs don't count" thing will save Twitter.
I often wonder if their architecture is stifling them in some way. If I were Jack I'd want to set up a large opt in beta group to trial new features.
http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/16/twitter-is-testing-a-perisc...
Unfortunately for them they're trying to widen their appeal by making it less appealing to their current user base. I think we all know how it ends.
It's not a new tale.
Along those lines you can start taking current stories about "Yahoo" and make them "Twitter" and see the future....
This is odd to me, since from what I see, the people who are most engaged with twitter don't use it for live events at all. They use it for jokes.
I know quite a few people who use it for making jokes about live events. The other day my wife's mocking of the new BBC drama got quoted by the Mail's TV reviewer.
Obviously Jack Dorsey is not very capable and is bad at business execution. There is/was a simple way to increase Twitter revenue and profits: giving small and medium companies a way to pay for entry level access to their API in the same way Google AdWords, etc work. I think there is a lot of money there but they only know about wholeselling to companies/agencies with big budgets.
With a product so boring (IMO) that the only two interesting things about it (again IMO) are the massive hype and the resulting massive scale, just keeping the hype machine running is quite a feat IMO ;-)
(Yeah, when I first saw it I saw massive potential: kind of a giant global event/message bus with a mix of more or less personal text messages, machine2machine communications etc etc. I thought the first thing they would do would be adding channels so you could separate various topics, paid subscriptions for internal company discussions etc etc. Instead they doubled down on efficient distribution of spam and drivel :-/)
100% agree but now the company is in another stage, it is a public company and it is scrutinized with different standards.
A more transparent post would have said something like "Based on my world view, assumptions, and preconceptions, he's bad at business. The common narrative of Dorsey is XYZ. Here's why that's wrong."
Saying "it's obvious" when you're expressing an uncommon opinion doesn't set a good tone for a discussion. Makes it seem like "I'm smart they're dumb I don't need to explain my statement that runs counter to conventional wisdom".
* Not saying it's right, just that this is what the Twitter board / media / insiders / VCs /etc. seem to think.
Just thinking I can downvote and not respond because of the "obvious" problems of the statement is just as bad as your example of saying "it's obvious" about an uncommon opinion is not good for discussion. You're just telling me "it's obvious" why the other guy's "it's obvious" is wrong.
There really wasn't an argument put forth beyond "he's bad at business, can't you see it's obvious". His tone and lack of content other than an unsubstantiated opinion are why there was no interesting discussion.
I never said "it's obvious" in any way shape or form, but I do believe this is my stop. Have a nice day.
It was not unsubstantiated. If I define a good business as a business with profits, this definition has a lot of substance. Jack Dorsey obviously achieved a lot of personal success and money from Twitter, I am not blind about his amazing achievements. Amazing because they are statistically difficult to obtain at this scale. BUT, being a public company is a different stage of the game. As an startup you can be amazing while the finances are hidden but when you are public you need to build a sustainable business and this is not happening.
I don't think Dorsey is as bad as you claim, but this example does reflect an (IMO) systemic problem of treating the CEO of large companies (~N > 50) as a superhero when institutional and foundational changes would really be the hero of the story.
I don't think so. The development ecosystem is (or was) a way to reinforce the platform, it is a kind of partnership where you stimulate Twitter use because you can build or take value on top of it. Many startups or businesses in general look elsewhere for the information that is available on Twitter.
The difference between what I'm saying is that the sheer magnitude of unmonetized Twitter Web users makes whatever small fish monetization increasing Twitter use with their integration look like chump change.
Now, there are several big players such as Periscope, Vine, Meerkat, that could have benefitted Twitter greatly from offering a development ecosystem. But there are two reasons why they wouldn't:
1) Twitter, like Facebook, is big enough - or, more accurately, are expected to be big enough - to be in the "acquirer" phase where they derive more value competing against and acquiring than playing with these popular new services. However, we've seen much of the industry being overvalued and some of us believe a small company can do more, faster, on a technical level than a big company due to bureaucracy, so expectations aren't always matching up to reality.
Vine and Periscope were eventually acquired by Twitter. And Meerkat was forced to pivot.
2) There are cost-benefit analyses that neither you, nor I, are privy to which found developing and maintaining an API by relatively highly-paid employees not worth the benefits seen by its integration by other companies.
> Many startups or businesses in general look elsewhere for the information that is available on Twitter.
Are you sure of this? Businesses and other startups alike still use Twitter for engagement, and there is great information to be pulled from Twitter, assuming they have the ability to act on the metrics available.
Yes. For example, you can't analyze your social graph with their current API limitations. Just moving one degree in the graph hit the limit.
Don't discuss your own votes.
Don't interrupt the actual discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.
I don't think that is what OP meant, rather than please add a comment explaining why it is wrong (instead of downvoting and moving on.)
Also, I noticed from few people who worked there that this company is internally a total unstructured chaos. Nobody knows whats going on.
Of course, he's only a part-time worker so they should pay him less.
;-)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9232419
I'm sure it's come up more than once, and it's a sensible response to clickbaitesque headlines like this one.
The best response to a clickbaitesque headline is a short answer (and No Click!). That's why I wrote "No". Everything else would just feed the trolls. But of course, it's much easier to downvote such a comment than to think about the clickbait itself.
Kind regards,
Twitter is an amazing idea that is not a business. I don't think there is any way to make money with it (at public company scale) without destroying it. I wish him luck...