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Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

blog.clubhouse.com

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Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#61

Post by UncleOxidant »

minimaxir wrote: post #32
stevehawk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wouldn't suppose you could tell me what it's for? I see someone saying that Twitter recreated it.. but that doesn't mean anything to me.. their website is so arrogant as to basically only offer a link to download the app.. because I should just.. "know" what they do?

Clubhouse was a product that had the most perfect launch timing in the past decade: a social gathering app right as the COVID pandemic started. That was it.

Seems like it was really popular for about 3 months. And then it was just annoying.

Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#62

Post by nikanj »

Prbeek wrote: post #56
gowld wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#63

Post by xwdv »

benzible wrote: post #36
xwdv wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 dealin…

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

Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#64

Post by nikanj »

Prbeek wrote: post #58
rvz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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.

Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#65

Post by nikanj »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #61
minimaxir wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clubhouse was a product that had the most perfect launch timing in the past decade: a social gathering app right as the COVID pandemic started. That was it.

Seems like it was really popular for about 3 months. And then it was just annoying.

It was very briefly billed to be the FB killer.

Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#66

Post by nemetroid »

benzible wrote: post #36
xwdv wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 dealin…

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...

Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#67

Post by nprateem »

bkm wrote: post #2

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.

Greed

Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#68

Post by nprateem »

boeingUH60 wrote: post #28
xwdv wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You can get bored of anything.

Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#69

Post by satvikpendem »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #12
bkm wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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.

Re: Founders’ Email to Clubhouse Employees

#70

Post by conductr »

choppaface wrote: post #42

Soooo Clubhouse has raised over $100m . Is it unusually nice that such an early start-up is giving 4 months, acceleration, and more? Yea! A lot of A- and B-stage layoffs have paid far less. But with so much funding, it’s very very hard to see this move as anything other than massive C-level incompetence. Good job trying to make it look like accountability though.

Some times you hit the puck so hard the hockey stick cracks. Not sure it’s fair to call it incompetence but they’re being decent in the acknowledgment of it.
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