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Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

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Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#71

Post by photorized »

gavinlynch wrote: post #31
OzzyB wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the problem with Twitter is they took too much money. You don't need to have $1Billion dollars in financing to offer a service like this -- this is what the likes of app.net are teaching us. A $50million Twitter could have "easily" sustained it's vision/objective without having to cannibalise it's entire ecosystem. However someone promised the moon to a bunch of financiers and now they have to deliver above…

1) How do you know how much money it takes or does not take for Twitter to offer it's service? 2) Don't you think it's a little early to compare app.net and twitter? App.net is in it's infancy and is nowhere near the product twitter is 3) What could Twitter have been exactly? How did closing a few API's off prevent it from getting there? 4) Have you ever imagined that perhaps your vision for Twitter and Twitter's vis…

Re: "how do you know how much money it takes ..."

I don't know how much it takes Twitter (even though it should be relatively easy to find out), but I do have an idea how much it should take.

Twitter presentations suggest 70 million messages per day. 800 tweets per second:

http://www.slideshare.net/raffikrikorian/twitter-by-the-numb...

It's not that much, actually. Some of us have processed 50-70 million transactions per day on a much smaller infrastructure (25..40 AWS boxes) - quite often designed and deployed just days prior to the massive traffic spike, with fancy features like real-time fraud checking etc.

It's not that hard to do what Twitter does. At least, with the amount of financial backing that they have, I don't expect them to be failing in a spactacular fashion periodically.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#72

Post by stevencorona »

001sky wrote: post #69
stevencorona wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woa woa, 140 employees? You mean over 1000 now. Source: http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-1000-employees...

Thanks, this is a good catch. I pulled the data from techcrunch (they were out of date, added reference above). General direction of the comment is distilled, still as follows: 1) valuation is 7x invested capital 2) The invested capital is large, requires large exit 3) This is going to put pressure on the team ($10-15B exit?) 4) Thats a requires lot of $$/head for the team to bring in

Not to mention well over 100mil/yr in salaries alone (prob more like 150-170mil with benefits, taxes, and generally high salaries in SF, glassdoor shows avg salary 120-130k)

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#73

Post by quanticle »

pitchups wrote: post #57
potatolicious wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You don't need to have $1Billion dollars in financing to offer a service like this" Sometimes you do. We've seen a dramatic amount of "overfunding" of social media startups, and I have a theory why. When your business model doesn't involve well, actually making money at its core, you end up in a position where you have to staff up massively so you can pursue an enormously vast range of monetization strategies in t…

So in other words, they needed $1 Billion dollars in order to have enough money to make money from the $1 Billion dollars?

It's like a rocket. Most of the fuel in a rocket goes towards lifting the rest of the fuel. Likewise, Twitter needs that level of investment to scale to the point where it can make a return on that level of investment.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#74

Post by potatolicious »

pitchups wrote: post #57
potatolicious wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You don't need to have $1Billion dollars in financing to offer a service like this" Sometimes you do. We've seen a dramatic amount of "overfunding" of social media startups, and I have a theory why. When your business model doesn't involve well, actually making money at its core, you end up in a position where you have to staff up massively so you can pursue an enormously vast range of monetization strategies in t…

So in other words, they needed $1 Billion dollars in order to have enough money to make money from the $1 Billion dollars?

Yeah, it's pretty perverse. I sometimes wonder how many AirBnb's and Squares we could've gotten for the price of Twitter.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#75

Post by 001sky »

quanticle wrote: post #73
pitchups wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in other words, they needed $1 Billion dollars in order to have enough money to make money from the $1 Billion dollars?

It's like a rocket. Most of the fuel in a rocket goes towards lifting the rest of the fuel. Likewise, Twitter needs that level of investment to scale to the point where it can make a return on that level of investment.

This is a good analogy. But with 800m raised in 2011, arguably when they were close "escape velocity" already, its also a fair point to wonder if destiny could have been any different with less $$$ weighing them down.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#76

Post by ericd »

photorized wrote: post #71
gavinlynch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) How do you know how much money it takes or does not take for Twitter to offer it's service? 2) Don't you think it's a little early to compare app.net and twitter? App.net is in it's infancy and is nowhere near the product twitter is 3) What could Twitter have been exactly? How did closing a few API's off prevent it from getting there? 4) Have you ever imagined that perhaps your vision for Twitter and Twitter's vis…

Re: "how do you know how much money it takes ..." I don't know how much it takes Twitter (even though it should be relatively easy to find out), but I do have an idea how much it should take. Twitter presentations suggest 70 million messages per day. 800 tweets per second: http://www.slideshare.net/raffikrikorian/twitter-by-the-numb... It's not that much, actually. Some of us have processed 50-70 million transactions…

The reason for the mismatch is that it's not 70 million transactions a day. It's potentially 70 million times the average number of people that access each tweet, which is probably more like 100+, plus all the polling that twitter applications do even when there are no new tweets, as well as all the ancillary stuff that's required to run something like this (spam filtering, API servers, etc).

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#77

Post by sureshv »

cdelsolar wrote: post #60
joejohnson wrote: post #36

From the comments on Google+: "Very true. Along the same lines, Google+ is the Major League Soccer of social networks. Other countries have very successful soccer leagues that happened organically. The US tried to manufacture a soccer league, and it spent a ton of money in doing so. It so happens that the most talented athletes in the country prefer sports that are already popular. The most interesting people in the…

Third, actually: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1290390-nba-and-nhl-get-t...

That's an absurd report considering that NBA/NHL arenas hold about 18-20k people max while most MLS games are played in Football stadiums that can hold 65k+. The fact that MLS still barely wins in attendance per game is pretty sad.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#78

Post by gumbo »

Who remenber Color raising 41M for craps? I remember back then someone saying: "They invested in the team, that still make me laugh. They funded smart people, now they have enought cash to build something that will make money". I'm looking forward to seing this.

Twitter is such a disapointment for me and i'm looking forward too to see their first profitable year.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#79

Post by shadowmatter »

potatolicious wrote: post #44
shadowmatter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a faction of engineers who want to work on interesting (which can be hard) problems, and those who want to work on interesting products. I believe this is demonstrated clearly by the jobs pages for both Apple and Google. From Apple: * Every detail matters… It matters all of the time. That’s how we do things at Apple. The result is some of the best-loved products in the world. * Simplicity isn’t simple…

> "I think there's a faction of engineers who want to work on interesting (which can be hard) problems, and those who want to work on interesting products." In my experience this only describes 10% of the programmer population. The rest don't really want either, they just like the benefits and the paycheck. They also don't work at Twitter, Google, or Apple, not many do anyhow. Actually, I don't think the distinction…

Agree that this only matters to 10% of the population. And yes, I'm totally oversimplifying it by creating only two categories. As to whether the distinction really exists, I personally believe that it does -- and the best anecdote I have is looking back on my reasons to leave Google. When I joined I wanted to work on hard/interesting problems, and when I left I wanted to work on interesting/impactful products.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#80

Post by mbreese »

nhangen wrote: post #56
mbreese wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A different question is, who would want to buy them? Twitter, who should know their network better than everyone else, is still trying to figure out how to best monetize it. Who would want to take that task on? In the old days, I'd guess Yahoo! would be in the running, but since they have a history of buying popular sites and then letting them wither, I hope Meyer isn't going to fall for that again.

Twitter would be a great acquisition for a media property.

AOL/Time Warner, part deux?
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