181–190 of 191 posts
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> It's only losing money because of stock grants. That's like saying "We're only losing money because we have to pay our staff"
They do pay their staff. Unfortunately the stock compensation was based on the … highly optimistic … story they told around the IPO about growing to be as large as Google or Facebook. Why spend prudently when you're about to be stupid-rich?
So to recap, Twitter exploded onto the scene in 2007, the "fail whale" appeared a lot, developers made all sorts of wonderful programs hooked into Twitter, the fail whale disappeared, Twitter started to destroy the app ecosystem, App.net launched to great fanfare in response to Twitter's knuckleheaded anti-developer stance, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber arrived and knocked all the nerds out of the top spots on Twi…
I think we would all be better served if the blockchain could be replicated and tweaked to become a new public publishing platform that is the equivalent of Twitter today. Access to the blockchain would then become a function of clients who follow the established spec/protocol, analogous to browsers and the web today. There are a couple of startups that are already pursuing the idea, but I think that this could only…
This seems like a entirely inappropriate application for blockchains. There are other more suitable P2P constructs we could create using similar ideas (which predated bitcoin) instead of jumping on a bandwagon.
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Who is in line for a buyout before other investors and at what multiplier? That information is usually not public and can be more important than what percentage of ownership a particular investor has.
They are a public company, with a single class of shareholder. They can all choose to buy or sell via the public market. Your comments would make some sense if they were pre-IPO.
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>Didn't USV invest in Twitter? They sure did. Fred Wilson (USV partner) has talked about it (Twitter as a portfolio company of USV) many times on his blog avc.com . >Did they cash out after IPO? Not sure.
Well otherwise what does it mean if they have a tiny part of an $18B company?
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Also App.net charged money for use.
Did it? I remember registering lots of accounts just when it launched because I had a column in tweetdeck with a search that was something like "app.net/invite-code/" (all invite codes URLs started with the same pattern) so every time someone posted an invite URL I got a notification and I could register a new account ;^}
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This is my first time hearing of App.net. (This is something that happens for me regularly -- I "discover" something only by its shutdown notice making the HN front page...).
You realize that when App.net launched, it was on the front page of HN and with much discussion (relatively speaking)? Given your account's age, you were here . In 2010, Bitcoin made the HN front page and you could get 5 BTC for signing up for an email list; 3 years later 1 BTC was worth over $1k.
Whenever stuff like this happens, I always wonder how many people, like me, hadn't heard of some service or product, and I wonder how many of them would have used it if they had. Would it have been enough to save the company from going under? Was it a marketing problem? I dunno, that's just the kind of strange places my mind tends to encounter in its errings.
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I don't mean to pick on you, but this is getting tiring for me. When you say 'marketing' you mean advertising and promotion, because product definition is part of marketing. Sizing up the market and determining what to build is marketing (inbound), advertising and promotion is also marketing (outbound). I realize these definitions have been in flux, but I'm talking traditional MBA definitions. I feel a lot nuance is…
> I don't mean to pick on you, but this is getting tiring for me. When you say 'marketing' you mean advertising and promotion, because product definition is part of marketing. Well, you shouldn't judge me so fast. I have an MBA with marketing and I have been working on marketing for some time in my life. So I am aware what a marketing plan involves, and promotion is a small portion of it. I cannot suppose the founder…