211–220 of 372 posts
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How do you even grow like that? The current staff during that spike must have spent most of their time interviewing people.
That spike is misleading because the chart jumps from "Jan '11" to "Dec '13", 23 months. The other columns are all 12 months apart.
Twitter lost the trust of many users and are now suffering the consequences. It was once supposed to be the place for the freedom of speech and truth and is now just another arm of the left-leaning politicians in the US. So many conservative/libertarian political figures and personalities have been permanently banned from Twitter in the last year for only posting an opinion that it can no longer be chalked up to circ…
I've always sort of had this question that continues to feel naive - but I'm not sure I know the answer: why do so many companies feel like they have to grow perpetually? Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter, knowing its limits and making a stable profit? Instead it's more users, more VC money, more staff... constantly burning as quickly as possible. There's a ceiling on every business; it's all bound to com…
People have answered this before, and what it boils down to is: because they took VC money, and then went public. If you bootstrap a business from nothing and grow it on its own, then sustainable growth and stable profit is fine. But Twitter got VC and IPO money with a promise that it would have Facebook-like growth in return. I think the analogy I saw used was that they promised investors a Porsche and instead deliv…
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The issue is one simple item: "When you take someone's money, their priorities are now your priorities" If you can bootstrap your business with 30k and make a 20k profit every month, then why do you need 1 million dollars from investors? When you take the money, it's just a golden handcuff and ties you to that person for the future. If your business lasts longer than 20 years, that may as well be an additional marria…
Because your competitor can raise those million dollars, and eventually your 20k profit per month becomes 20k loss per month. You can build all your imaginary arguments about magical businesses that make 20k profit per month while being self-sustained with holocracy, cruelty free, authentic, organic etc. etc. But the reality is that doing big things at bigger scale requires huge capital. If you are willing to pass up…
Because maybe that holds for B2B businesses where no-one outside of the industry knows you exist, but for any B2C startup the reality is that there are a ton of people with connections and stupid money (or pre-funded teams looking to "pivot") that will throw lots of resources into competing with you. These teams tend towards self-delusion (over-estimating market size, pretending that it is a world-changing product, imagining it as a stepping-stone to world domination) because this is necessary for them to raise capital.
Lots of people romanticise lifestyle businesses, but it is miserable competing against funded businesses when your competitors have free money. I have done it twice and one of the worst feelings you can have as a founder is when you've spent a year building a business and your customers start complaining because your service is more expensive than your funded competition. It is psychologically taxing.
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Me too. Hi. If an entrepreneur is worried about "Work Life Balance", I think he/she is in the wrong business.
I see this meme repeated a lot here on HN. Personally I wildly disagree, as I believe sufficient time away from work makes you make the right decisions. Basically I believe that the "work smarter, not harder" meme, while cliché, automatically happens if you invest time in leisure and sleep. But I don't know! I truly wonder how many businesses have been run into the ground because of a kamikaze attitude to working hou…
Stats don't even matter, because at that level of financial independence, it's a personal choice whether you spend time with your family or pursue another business opportunity.
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Me too. Hi. If an entrepreneur is worried about "Work Life Balance", I think he/she is in the wrong business.
I see this meme repeated a lot here on HN. Personally I wildly disagree, as I believe sufficient time away from work makes you make the right decisions. Basically I believe that the "work smarter, not harder" meme, while cliché, automatically happens if you invest time in leisure and sleep. But I don't know! I truly wonder how many businesses have been run into the ground because of a kamikaze attitude to working hou…
Twitter should have a tweet quota and charge people who tweet too much. People who chase hashtags and reply with reaction gifs have turned it into low-brow garbage.
I'm pretty sure tweet count is used as a growth metric somewhere, so it's not gonna happen.
No offense to the people I know working at Twitter, but these cuts aren't deep enough to stem the losses. While Twitter revenue grew $664M, $1,403M to $2,218M over the past three years, it is going to be a lot flatter than that at the end of this year - and despite that growth they've consistently been losing about $500M p.a ($645M, $577M and $521M respectively) 3,800 people work there - and equivalent cuts last year…
Woah, they only have 3800 employees and spend 2.7Bn/yr? That's 700k per employee. What's all that money for?
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Similar story, we should be friends :) Care to comment on the work/life balance you have?
Well I work hard, but I live a very good life. I enjoy my work (well most of it as I am not too keen on accounting and taxes). I get to work and live in a very nice (if expensive) part of the world so I have nothing to complain about. I can say it took me a long time to get to where I am now and I had quite a few detours along the way. I wrote up the history of my business a while back if anyone is interested [1]. Bo…
Not enough angels but lots of devils..