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Comment by bkm | Hacker News Reader

Sad to hear. In an alternate timeline they would have accepted the $4B+ Twitter offer and had a nice exit along the way.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/07/twitter-said-to-have-held-...

The hard truth is software can't be patented and Twitter could copy the concept verbatim without paying them a penny.

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Every time I hear of another founder passing on a multi-billion dollar offer, I think back to Tom from MySpace and how he sold MySpace off for a lot of money and went on to live happily ever after. Smartest guy in the social media game.

Mark Cuban did even better with broadcast.com. sold it for billions right at the beginning of the dotcom boom, bought a basketball team.

there was also a guy who sold a browser to Apple for over $100 million.

Wait till you hear about Jan Koum, who took over $10 billion from selling WhatsApp to Facebook and has become a prominent collector of mansions, superyachts, and rare Porsches [3].

1- https://www.dirt.com/gallery/moguls/tech/jan-koum-house-beve...

2- https://www.superyachtfan.com/yacht/moonrise/owner/

3- https://www.thedrive.com/news/26322/these-are-the-10-drool-w...

Those are some pricey dopamine hits.

He has to live the rest of his life as someone who sold of millions of enthusiastic users to exactly the company we paid them not to become.

Well. I guess he is happy with it. What's worse is I guess most people would take that deal at some point.

What do you mean by “paid them”? I thought WhatsApp was a free service.

Whatsapps whole schtick from the beginning was something "you pay us $1 pr year and we provide you a top tier messaging service without ads and without analyzing you data or your social graph or anything".

I was enthusiastic about it, and possibly even more enthusiastic about it as I finally got my first invoice (yes, they didn't start billing right away, but they were very open about their plans, unlike Telegram who always just said something like "it isn't that expensive anyway, someone is shouldering it and we have a plan").

It had a nominal $1 per year fee, but in most of the world (like here in India, where it's now practically a utility), they never charged anything because even a trivial sum like that would have caused a ton of friction. That's why it became so popular.

You can get bored of anything.

This is a viral "feelgood" story that keeps circulating but MySpace was a project within an existing company, eUniverse, later InterMix. Tom and Chris DeWolfe were employees of InterMix, not founders. Intermix was acquired by News Corp. for $580M. Not sure how much equity Tom ended up with. It certainly could have been enough to allow for a "normal" early retirement but I'm not even sure about that. I had some dealings with Brad Greenspan, the CEO of Intermix, after the MySpace sale. Presumably he had far more equity than Tom or Chris, and let's just say that he did not behave like someone who was financially secure.

The happiness isn’t from the money, it’s from all the friends he made along the way.

According to a complaint about the sell price made by Greenspan at the time [1], he owned about 10% of Intermix. If he’s not financially secure, I think that speaks mostly about his actions after the sale.

https://web.archive.org/web/20051004080642/http://www.freemy...

Hard to believe that Twitter was willing to offer $4B for a service they managed to recreate themselves for (presumably) a tiny fraction of that cost. Makes you wonder if all the AI panic right now is going to end up going the same way.

They weren't buying the technology, they were buying the community + creators on the platform.

This has nothing to do with AI at all. Clubhouse was a kinda cool social network that came out at exactly the right time during COVID. AI is something we've been working towards since the 50s, and over the next few years will change absolutely everything.

Twitter already had a large community and set of creators while Clubhouse really didn't. Moreover, most of the Clubhouse users already had Twitter accounts and just switched their audio conversations to Twitter Spaces once that product became available.

I think at this point it's obvious that Clubhouse was not worth $4B (10% of Twitter's final sale price!), so no point in arguing about that. The interesting question is: what combination of bad judgement and groupthink made anyone think it was in the first place.

In a world of fast and loose cash, people find justifications for spending fast and loose. I don't think it requires too much more than that. Crypto firms running on good will and hype managed to get billions of $ (in crypo-bucks) to dump their money, much of which is completely gone. You could argue overvalued, but in the world of pets.com, this is far from the worst example of outsized speculation.

> Clubhouse was a kinda cool social network that came out at exactly the right time during COVID.

Alternatively, is was a COVID-specific fad with a doomed user experience / network model that never expanded beyond the SV cultural bubble.

Their IOS first app and invite only launch alienated many potential users and gave an opening to Twitter to launch spaces with a huge audience.

The invite-only launch was a selling point. "It's a exclusive service, but if you score an invite, you might have a casual chat with a bunch of billionaires and SV bigwigs."

This may be surprising to people in Palo Alto but 99.9% of regular working people have nothing to say to billionaires and SV influencers, outside of maybe some profanities. There's no way a product with that as the premise would have had a future outside of its ivory tower niche.

Despite it's origins, ivory tower means, in the sense of being out of touch with common people, academia. It does not mean being out of touch because rich or nobility.

No surprise then that it became a hotbed of hustlebros and MLM salespeople within months.

I saw the $100 million series B for Pinecone and thought something similar, since vector databases are becoming more easily commodified, with Postgres already getting pgvector and pgANN.

That's $4b in Twitter stock though. What would that even have been worth now, assuming they remained public?

More, since Twitter is better, more lean, and more popular than ever.

It looks like the share price in April 2021 was on the nose the same price Elon paid.

So the investors and founders would have converted $4B in Twitter stock to cash almost 1:1, that's not bad.

It would have converted to approximately 3.3 billion USD when Elon bought Twitter. However, even if twitter wasn't purchased and no one sold while it sunk to $17/share (which is about the average of estimates people were making when Elon finalized buying it), it still would be over a billion dollars as an exit. Do you think Clubhouse is a unicorn now?

Clubhouse is literally just software that artificially limited things to be popular by: 1. Limited users 2. Limited to iPhones. 3. Having no history or recording of conversations.

The owners would have gotten a nice exit. The employees would have probably ended up laid off anyway, right?

edit: actually looking at some posted salaries it seems some employees were given quite a lot of equity

Definitely under the new management team

At that time, I don't think so. It was an incredibly small team back then, and the CEO of Twitter at the time was Jack. It likely would have remained (somewhat) independent, at least in the short term, similar to Vine and Instagram. And given equity, I assume almost all employees would have become millionaires.

> It likely would have remained (somewhat) independent, at least in the short term, similar to Vine and Instagram.

And then get shut down a few years later in the medium-term, similar to Vine.

That may have been better than what inevitably happens anyway.

There was no chance that Twitter (who already had periscope) would accept a $4B+ deal to buy Clubhouse.

In fact, it was very predictable as I said here before the acquisition talks that Twitter would push on with using Spaces instead of buying Clubhouse. [0]

The hard truth was that Clubhouse launched too slowly and even Twitter Spaces launched faster than Clubhouse to release their Android app. [1]

The invite system, slow release of the Android app caused them to lose steam to Twitter and Discord during the social audio race of 2021 at the time. [2]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26044382

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26705535

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26659374

Who launches an IOS first app in 2023? You are telling android users that they are not important

They are plenty important, but they're not rich. iPhones are not the majority of the market by any stretch, but they do form a majority of the phones well-off people use.

I know you and your coder friends use Android despite having plenty of money, but the general public sees Androids as the budget option.

> iPhones are not the majority of the market by any stretch

It depends on which market you are looking at. In the US market Apple apparently has a 57% share according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/620805/smartphone-sales-....

I don't have links to back this up, but I believe the following two statements are true in US markets, based on my anecdotal industry experiences:

- The majority of mobile apps that only launch on one native platform (but are eventually available on both Android and iOS) launch on iOS first.

- The majority of mobile apps that are only available on one native platform are only available on iOS.

Everyone (who wants to make money from their app)? I own an Android and I'd still launch an iOS app first because the vast majority of mobile revenue comes from iOS, not Android. At the very most I'd use Flutter to launch on both platforms at once but I'd still prioritize the iOS side.

counterpoint: you can outsource android i.e. pay a high quality dev shop to clone your iOS app and adapt it nicely for Android. I've done this several times, to great effect.

Additional counterpoint, I launched my app on both Android and iOS at the same time, didn't even own an iPhone when I released it.

The with tooling available today, there is almost no technical reason not to. Most brands/apps can't afford to create some fake exclusivity.

If you use a cross platform framework, sure, but if you only have resources for one platform (or where cross platform is not suitable for whatever reason), I'd pick launching on iOS first any day of the week.

What app is not cross-platform? Even games are all using Unity now.

Lots of apps aren't cross platform, at least on mobile. Things 3 is a good example that's only on Apple platforms.

Never say no to your first billion. It's the hardest billion to make.

Greed

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