There was a period in late 2020 where I was convinced Clubhouse would leapfrog Twitter as the place where valuable industry-facing conversation and information would be housed.
Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees
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Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees
#22There was a period in late 2020 where I was convinced Clubhouse would leapfrog Twitter as the place where valuable industry-facing conversation and information would be housed.
The problem is that valuable industry conversation and information isn't all that valuable.
A billion monkeys slinging shit at each other is.
Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees
#23Sad 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.
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.
Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees
#25It's a shame, the idea is good, just not defensible against copy cats. I think they missed an opportunity to pivot into voice chat for websites/apps as a service. I see big value in how Discord does ambient voice chat as a feature of a server, and I think that could translate well into smaller communities that live outside Discord in websites/apps. Provide the service in an easy to use slick API/SDK, and handle all t…
There's already a handful of well known companies providing that. It wouldn't surprise me if Clubhouse was built off of one of these APIs already.
Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees
#26Sad 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.
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
Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees
#27Sad 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.
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.
Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees
#28Sad 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.
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.
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...
Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees
#29Layoffs always suck, but one thing that's encouraging to see is that every single tech company is offering a lot of support and very generous severance packages to affected employees, wayyy beyond what is required by law. In other industries in most states the norm is to be escorted out of the building with your last paycheck, that's it.
Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees
#30> Laptops. We will allow everyone who is impacted to keep their company-issued laptops, to help them research and apply for new roles.
Is this common?