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Comment by ttam | Hacker News Reader

indeed, it's incredible how twitter is in such disarray

and from the outside, the parallels to yahoo's strategy of the early 2000s are so striking - is it a product company or a media company?

* twitter (the product) has been so slow to improve and fix its issues (minor bugs, spam, harassment/bullying, etc)

* it seems to be going for media deals with the upcoming sports streaming

* vine and periscope started out nice but flamed out after snapchat's stories took over the world

I'm curious to know what's causing all this: are they paralyzed by bureaucracy? did internal politics fighting take over? Any throwaways want to comment?

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I think that there investors wanted $10bn from the IPO, they wanted it because they could (and did) get it, but this meant that Twitter needed to heavily monitize and therefore hire and army of folks to sell adverts and so on.

I think that in 2009 Twitter had ~300 employees. Now it's ~4000, I think it actually needs ~500 (based on the products and a realistic need to create revenue). At that scale it will be worth ~$2bn, which would not inspire the current shareholders, so this cannot happen. But at that scale it would be a profitable and sustainable company, and it would last for the next 50 years.

This is one of the essential problems of financialization: companies are able to grow extremely fast, but they can not stay viable if they ever stop growing.

Twitter could be a perfectly fine company where a few hundred employees serve a few hundred million users, but there is not enough profit to be made in that, so it won't happen.

> but they can not stay viable if they ever stop growing

Lots of fine low-growth companies regularly paying their dividends. You can't promise lots of growth, pump up your valuation, fail to deliver and then expect to keep that valuation.

Single anecdote, but someone who started there a few years ago reported huge chunks of people basically just playing ping pong waiting for IPO+lockout period. They expressed a lot of frustration about it to me.

Don't know if a failure in entry level management like that tells you much more, but it didn't sound like a good sign for a company still on the wrong side of the profit equation.

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