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Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

So a company that does $2B/year in revenue isn't a real business?

Overvalued, maybe. But that's real cash.

"So a company that does $2B/year in revenue isn't a real business?"

If management consistently can't find a way to make that level of revenue without spending far more each year then yes it's not a real business.

If I bought iPhones at full retail and then sold them for less than I paid I'm sure I could quickly rack up tons of revenue... but this wouldn't be a real business. It's this concept that a lot of 'tech' companies struggle with and why their execs want to focus on 'user growth' and 'revenue' and not normal metrics like 'profit' and 'cost of goods sold.' The later is where it gets real ugly.

Yes, there's a 'ramp up period' where costs outweigh revenue, but Twitter has run out of runway. There's no clear sign of how they'll increase revenues to justify their cost of generating that revenue. They could start a slash-n-burn operation but everyone will just read that as the company going under and people will ditch the platform faster than MySpace.

I think you possess a fundamental misunderstanding of why this is happening.

> If management consistently can't find a way to make that level of revenue without spending far more each year then yes it's not a real business.

Could Twitter fire most of its developers and sustainably turn a profit? Yes, it absolutely could. Hell, I could do that. "Sales people, keep doing the same thing. All this other expensive overhead is gone." But instead the executives choose to invest the company's would-be profits (and a little more) back into the company, in hopes that they will be even bigger later on. And they're still growing (at a rate faster than expenses are), even beating analyst expectations to this point. The stock drops because analysts are concerned this won't continue to be the case (Wall Street is weird).

In a very real way, the only time big tech companies start turning a profit is if they think they are reaching the peak of the revenue they could generate. Until then, it's time for growth. That growth is still very valuable, they're just hot taking profits yet. http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-n...

Hence, if you're looking at every company to determine if it is profitable or not, you probably come away with a very misleading, "The world is doomed" view of the economy. Companies aren't taking their chips down yet, because they're still confident they'll grow.

It seems counter-intuitive, I know, but that's the reality of how companies act, in order to maximize the profits long-term.

For new companies, you are on the money. But twitter has been around for 9 years. It is way past time to draw that line in the sand and turn towards profits. Even ignoring the 9 year history, their user growth curve is flattening, and has been for a year. The second it started to go flat, they should have turned to profits.

"New" is a relative term. I think there's still some gas in the tank, but if there's no growth in the next couple years Twitter will probably be on a permanent downward trend.

"I think you possess a fundamental misunderstanding of why this is happening. Could Twitter fire most of its developers and sustainably turn a profit? Yes, it absolutely could. But instead it chooses to invest its would-be profits (and a little more) back into the company, in hopes that they will be even bigger later on."

Indeed their only real option at this point is likely to start slashing cost and hope it doesn't impact revenue. I don't disagree with you there. However, realistically this is hard to pull off without sending signals that the ship is sinking and everyone should just go elsewhere.

But their net income is around -$600 million annually.

You can have a business that tells people that if they give you a dollar, you'll give them $1.50.

Twitter right now (oversimplified) generates $2 billion in revenue by giving away $3 billion. Of course they could try tightening their financial belts, but that'd probably hurt their growth.

This is an incredibly stupid analogy. Twitter doesn't give it's users money. Twitter doesn't give it's advertisers money. They run a high gross margin business. Your analogy would be a NEGATIVE gross margin business. Their cost base is too high right now given the revenue, but there is no reason to think they need to grow at the same rate. Many profitable companies at one stage ran at a loss.

> they give you a dollar, you'll give them $1.50

Not sure if you know it, but that is clearly not Twitter's business model.

Twitter's costs are mostly fixed, so if it can generate $3B in revenue, it will be profitable.

They could recoup $600M pretty easily.... in employee salaries alone if they relocated out of San Francisco.

Yeah, but it took them many years and massive leverage to achieve that. Also, revenue != profit. As of today, they are drowning in debt, there doesn't seem to be a strategy for turning things around and now investors don't even believe in them.

Twitter's going down :(

Massive leverage? Can you not read a balance sheet? They aren't drowning in debt. They have negative net debt.

I haven't take a look at their last quarter report but I don't think their situation changed from:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-debt-rated-as-junk-14159...

to a healthy one in less than a year.

Can you please provide a link to the balance sheet you saw?

No, I can't. You can go look at the SEC like everyone else who can be bothered to actually have a clue before making comments. This is public information, there is no need to be so lazy as to not even bother looking.

Issuing debt does not mean a company is "drowning in debt". The term "junk" debt does not mean a company is "drowning in debt". If a company has more cash on balance sheet than debt, it's net debt is negative. When they issued this debt they had negative net debt. Now they have negative net debt. They were not, are not and have never been "drowning in debt". Promoting false information about a public company is potentially illegal.

If you owe debt and you are burning through your cash and there is no sign of turning the situation over in the near future, then you are "drowning in debt", IMO, or you will be in a very short time. But that's just me and my "potentially illegal" point of view.

Again, a minute to look at their financials. There is a thing called the "cashflow statement". They are not "burning through cash". Operating cashflow is positive. Some quarters their capex is larger than operating cashflow, sometimes it's less.

So to suggest they are "drowning in debt" only shows no understanding of simple financial matters, and little regard for securities legislation. Not all opinions are valid.

It is a real business. But if you cannot turn a profit on 2 billion dollars of revenue, something is very wrong.

Unless your costs are greater than 2 billion? I mean then you could make 2 billion in revenue and not turn a profit. ( 2 billion - (# greater than 2 billion) ) = (negative #). This is a very basic concept.

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