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Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

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Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#81
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not actually a response to my statement, even though it may be true. You're just providing an excuse to downvote without bothering to engage in discussion as to why to downvote. I want to hear the reasons for the downvote. 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…

Back up the bus - I didn't downvote. I start a new HN account well before I ever get that invested. 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.

> His tone and lack of content other than an unsubstantiated opinion are why there was no interesting discussion.

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.

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#82
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back up the bus - I didn't downvote. I start a new HN account well before I ever get that invested. 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.

> His tone and lack of content other than an unsubstantiated opinion are why there was no interesting discussion. 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 ob…

He also has his involvement in Square, Inc.

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#83
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do 4,100 employees even do at Twitter? It's not that complicated.

The backend systems for Twitter - advertising, data analysis, spam prevention, infrastructure etc is vastly more complex what you see in a feed of 140 characters. 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…

> spam prevention

Yes, plenty on spam prevention, but seemingly little on bot prevention. Without the bots, there'd be so many less MAUs.

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#85

Twitter's product is broken in more ways than I care to recount. End users and developers are constantly complaining about it - and they're the power users who see the value in it! Everybody else is "meh" about Twitter despite the potential. 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 si…

All the trendy people have already moved off of Twitter to FB

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).

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#86
post #6

Twitter has an incredibly powerful brand and appeal. How many companies can say they triggered revolutions? 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…

Really hope it doesn't fade into a glorified RSS feed

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.

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#87
post #48
post #2

> And, by nearly every metric, he had achieved remarkable success. Under his tenure, the company had grown from 300 employees to around 4,100. 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.

What do 4,100 employees even do at Twitter? It's not that complicated.

Twitter has some legitimately hard tech problems. At MesosCon last week (which I was at in person), they stated that their largest Mesos cluster was over 30,000 physical nodes. Believe it or not, handling the hundreds of millions of tweets (or more!) per minute they handle at peak load is an unbelievably difficult technology and platform problem. This takes a team of really smart people to manage.

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.

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