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Comment by samfisher83 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this is what Twitter is. It Generates a couple billion in revenue. Instead of trying to grow how about shrinking the costs. If a company can consistently generate a billion dollar in cash flow that is pretty good. They don't need to have 4000 employees. Maybe they need to go down to 2000,1000 or 500. Maybe you won't be able to get the best talent, but I am sure you can find some people to run it.

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Isn't it possible that when you hire 1000 bright engineers to build something like Twitter to scale, they build a bunch of crap and unneeded complexity that makes it difficult to get lean?

It's also worth noting that a huge percentage of those employees are ad people who are sorta necessary for their current revenue model.

I agree, people have wildly different perceptions from me, and I think their perceptions are tied to stock performance, instead of the fundamentals of whats going on here.

They have created a money printing machine in the middle of San Francisco.

They have 4,000 employees creating continual dilution in the stock and dumping it onto your mom's 401k every single day, and the market still retains a 17 billion market cap. That is printing money pretty freaking well!

Twitter is a success story, in this light, and will have even rosier fundamentals when if it has 1/10th the market cap and 1/3rd the employees.

> Twitter is a success story, in this light, and will have even rosier fundamentals when if it has 1/10th the market cap and 1/3rd the employees.

And what would a 90% loss in Twitter stock do to tech stocks in general?

Would that be enough to cause another bubble to burst?

It would be no different from the story of one venture capital firm marking down the valuation of some other portfolio company.

Also King and Zynga have had performance like that. At the end of the day we are just talking about several billion dollars in valuation.

The S&P500 returns 1 trillion to shareholders annually. If capital interest in the tech sector is really that fickle, then there's no need to kick the can.

San Francisco is begging to return to the "good ole' days" where there was no industry

Sounds like a net positive

Twitter seems like a particularly high profile stock, one of the few known to people who don't play with the latest apps and sites.

Who ever mentioned King or Zynga on a TV show or newspaper?

> Twitter seems like a particularly high profile stock, one of the few known to people who don't play with the latest apps and sites.

> Who ever mentioned King or Zynga on a TV show or newspaper?

Judging from Google News (and just picking 2009 for this exercise), lots of people wrote about Zynga in newspapers (especially the NY Times and USA Today.)

If it turns out that a 17 billion dollar company is the pinnacle of irrational exuberance, when it remains a successful company at 3 billion dollars - for example - then the capital enthusiasm for "tech 2.0" was never really there.

A reality though is that 17 billion is a drop in the bucket in US equities and you are overestimating the relevance of Twitter's market cap problems.

I don't mean "irrational exuberance", I mean irrational pricing.

If Twitter is overvalued by 10x, some models for valuing established tech companies are way off.

well if they had figured it out, the road to 100 million market cap would be a quick one. Just competing views on speculation getting the existing market premium.

That's why someone like Google just seems like a good fit for Twitter. Existing ad sales mechanism and super strong infrastructure seems like it would offer up a lot of opportunities to trim down.

> That's why someone like Google just seems like a good fit for Twitter

Someone else in a different thread mentioned that Twitter isn't exactly in great books with various world governments who are friendly, or at least neutral with Google currently. Is Twitter's revenue worth the additional risk of regulatory scrutiny/antagonism to Google?

Counterpoint: it's a toxic brand which would afford Google diminishing opportunities to get ads in front of a relative savvy, niche audience -- the kind who don't click on, or pay attention to, ads.

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