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Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

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Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#81

Post by fuzzix »

001sky wrote: post #55
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How was Twitter changing the world, and how is it not anymore...? Twitter was a utility. Now it's ABC. It could have changed the world in the way that, you know, the web changed the world. But instead it's changing the world in the way that cable news changes the world. That's what's so bizarre about Ev Williams to me. He's so damn talented but he doesn't give a shit about anything but the flip. It's true of so man…

Just playing devils advocate - but who wants to be a utility?

Playing the actual devil here, who doesn't?

Everybody needs you, low maintenance + reasonable income space on the Monopoly board.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#82

Post by MatthewPhillips »

001sky wrote: post #55
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How was Twitter changing the world, and how is it not anymore...? Twitter was a utility. Now it's ABC. It could have changed the world in the way that, you know, the web changed the world. But instead it's changing the world in the way that cable news changes the world. That's what's so bizarre about Ev Williams to me. He's so damn talented but he doesn't give a shit about anything but the flip. It's true of so man…

Just playing devils advocate - but who wants to be a utility?

I gave an example; Tim Berners-Lee.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#83

Post by Evbn »

sureshv wrote: post #77
cdelsolar wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And that TV audience for NHL is 20x MLS.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#84

Post by defen »

beagle3 wrote: post #62
smacktoward wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea if Twitter is over-funded or not, but App.net has yet to have to service anywhere near the level of simultaneous traffic that Twitter deals with daily. App.net services 20,000 users ( http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/09/07/off-slow-start-... ); Twitter services 140 million ( https://business.twitter.com/en/basics/what-is-twitter/ ). Twitter went through severe growing pains to reach the point whe…

> Twitter went through severe growing pains to reach the point where it could handle that much traffic; there's no reason to believe App.net won't have to go through similar issues if/as it grows. Actually, there is: app.net could just observe what twitter did. And twitter didn't have to go through it either; There's discussions going on about that since 2008 when their uptime suffered outage after outage; here's som…

If you think you could have replicated Twitter with 300K of hardware and software 2 years ago, surely it would be even cheaper now. Why wouldn't you go to Twitter and offer to do it for them? Even if they paid you three million dollars it would give them massive savings in headcount and operational costs.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#85

Post by jdbernard »

smacktoward wrote: post #64
OzzyB wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) No, but I know that the difference between $50M and $500M+ would change my outlook in terms of who I need to satisfy dramatically. 2) Don't like App.net? Pick Reddit vs Digg, same case. One managed to "get by" with a core team, the other took a ton of money, hired a bunch of folks, made a bunch of promises, and tried to shoehorn their original vision, the one that got them established in the first place, into some…

The wrinkle in #2 is that once you decide to take conventional venture funding (as opposed to bootstrapping, or fundraising through angels, incubators, etc.), you really don't have the option to just be a small, sustainable business anymore. VCs don't want to invest in small, sustainable businesses, they want to invest in aggressive plays that have the potential to blow up into something huge. According to TechCrunch…

> Taking in that sort of money raises the stakes dramatically. Nobody loans you a billion dollars to build a $50 million/year business.

That was OzzyB's original point: Twitter should not have taken big VC money. They took too much money. From his first post:

> someone promised the moon to a bunch of financiers and now they have to deliver above and beyond of what Twitter could have been, or should have just been.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#86

Post by [deleted] »

code177 wrote: post #63
rblion wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parallel is both were trying to do something considered 'impossible' and doing it on the grandest scale possible. John Hammond wanted to clone extinct animals, Mark wanted to create a network for millions of people. Both projects are incredibly complex with a lot of variables and the consequences of miscalculation could be disastrous. Chaos is the underlying theme of it all...

To be fair to John Hammond, I'm not sure creating a (albeit massive) social networking service is in the same league as reverse engineering 65+ million year old, fragmented DNA strands, then bringing the dinosaurs not only to term, but healthy adulthood, and finally housing them in a multi-billion dollar facility on a leased island. Facebook has roughly 4x as much source code as Jurassic Park did, and probably can't…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#87

Post by fusiongyro »

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?

Sounds to me like the ultimate a posteriori argument.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#89

Post by 001sky »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #82
001sky wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just playing devils advocate - but who wants to be a utility?

I gave an example; Tim Berners-Lee.

I think thats a valid example/counterexample.

But to rephrase slightly, is that the exception that proves the rule?

[nb - I don't disagree with your point, but what is missing to encourage more things in this direction? Wikipedia is another utility example, but again is so rare]

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