I still think it's impossible to run two companies that both require so much attention, given their stage.
Yes Jobs had Apple and Pixar, and Musk has Tesla and SpaceX. But both Pixar and SpaceX don't really require day-to-day CEO attention, they follow long term plans (movies, rockets). That's really different from Square and Twitter, which are both, in their own ways, in a kind of trouble.
I'd love to be proven wrong though -- so good luck, Jack!
Jobs didn't run Pixar. He was a principal investor and Chairman of the Board, negotiating a few milestones like the sale to Disney, but most of his focus was on NeXT and then Apple. Ed Catmull and John Lasseter ran Pixar's day-to-day ops.
Creativity, Inc. by Catmull covers all this. It paints a better portrait of Jobs than Isaacson's Jobs biography. Plus, you get to read about the history of computer graphics and Toy Story.
On a sidenote, I found Creativity Inc., to be a fantastic book about how to build a company. I find it very insightful.
I love this particular chapter where he discusses about how you feel like you don't "belong" in that role of a leader within your own company, imagining that the leader is supposed to have some perceived aggressive characteristics of your ideal leader.
But all along, you may have been the right person to make sense of everything happening in that group and it is very important to let go of those inhibitions and just focus on the job to be done. As long as we have a group that is passionate and motivated to do the job and focused on customers, you are doing alright.
It was beautifully narrated by him and I loved it. It is something you experience as a startup founder, bringing along smarter folks into the group and be humbled by everyday experiences.
> SpaceX [doesn't] really require day-to-day CEO attention
Really? What's special about SpaceX that it doesn't require a full-time CEO? I'd imagine, considering the scope of their task and the scale of their ambition, it'd require more hands-on time than most.
I'm not the GP, but I think its' not a very full-time role because movement is slow and progressive. They have the next 18 months of what the company is going to do locked down and defined. I would also suspect they have strong 2nd level exec leadership to handle day to day. Elon only needs to get involved on big strategic decisions and crises, plus routine periodic budget and financial assessments.
I'm sure he's still working more than 40 hours a week across all of his companies, but I don't think he needs to be in the room for every major meeting.
From what I've read in the Musk biography and elsewhere, he is involved in really really low level decisions, to the point that he's been labelled a "nano-manager." Surely he's not involved in absolutely every decision, but by all accounts he is much, much closer to the details than you would expect a CEO to be. Especially when it comes to design/ engineering details.
Musk lives in LA and takes his private jet up to San Jose every week to work at Tesla (then back to LA to work at SpaceX).
If anything, Musk has two full time jobs (priorities: 1. SpaceX; 2. Tesla; 3. everything else) and actually does 80-100 hours per week of work. He's not out creating vanity designer clothing lines in his spare time.
You can't create world class products or companies while maintaing a silly "because i'm so special i'll only work 6 hours a day, 4 days a week, 1 week a month" mindset.
Is there any reason that Musk couldn't colocate SpaceX and Tesla in Freemont instead of SpaceX being located in Hawthorne? What's the benefit of SpaceX being in the LA area?
Los Angeles has a very large aerospace industry and long history in it. Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and SpaceX all have a large presence in Los Angeles's South Bay. It's not as large as it was during the "cold war" but a lot of skilled employees still live in the area.
Also, that part of LA (hawthorne, el segundo), has a history of aviation and rocketry companies, so it has better facilities and a larger built-in talent pool too.
They do co-locate some operations (tesla designer lives in the SpaceX office, not the tesla office), but it makes sense for Tesla, as a consumer brand, to be located in the most densely concentrated location of multimillionaires and billionaires in the world.
Los Angeles in general is pretty supportive of aviation. Not just adjacent to LAX, where you'll find SpaceX and Raytheon, but throughout the North from Pasadena into the West valley.
The trend has been decreasing for a long time, but amazingly there are still a lot of activity in aerospace. Most of the big names have left and their campuses turned into shopping malls, but there are still a lot of small specialty shops working on prototype parts.
There have been lots of articles mentioning Dorsey taking sewing classes, sketching classes, going sailing, etc while running Twitter. (And in moments that outsiders consider crises, and employees were working longer hours to hit deadlines). The 6/4/1 is an exaggeration, but still...
Dorsey often tried to act as if he were in control, posturing that his actions were all part of a bigger plan, but employees saw him frequently pacing in frustration around South Park. He also habitually left around 6 p.m. for drawing classes, hot yoga sessions and a course at a local fashion school. (He wanted to learn to make an A-line skirt and, eventually, jeans.)
Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 - October 5, 2011) was one of the three founding fathers of Pixar Animation Studios. A business magnate and inventor, he was the former CEO of Apple Inc. and Pixar Animation Studios.
"Mr. Jobs is a co-founder of Pixar and has served as its Chairman
since March 1991, as its Chief Executive Officer since February 1986 and in
the Office of the President since February 1995. He has been a director of Pixar
since February 1986 and served as Chairman from February 1986 to November 1988."
Yep, he "purchased" it. What became know as Pixar was indeed the people at the Computer Graphics Division at LucasFilm. They are the ones I call founder.
My understanding was that he purchased Pixar from Lucas for $10mm when Lucas didn't think that there was going to be a very lucrative animation business.
This was told to me by employees of ILM when I was building the letterman digital arts center.
I think it is because Pixar wasn't originally an animation studio. In particular they didn't intend to produce movies themselves. When they became one, he was a founder.
No, they were a part of a company that was almost a studio in of itself. The people that started that division with Lucas, that was eventually purchased by Jobs, wanted to make movies from the beginning. It was their stated goal at the time and they repeat the claim today. It was Jobs that had other ideas for the company, people, and technology before Toy Story came to be.
I keep wondering if this is going to be like Marissa Mayer joining Yahoo - much fanfare, some movement, but at the end of the day she's been unable to significantly move the needle. I just wonder if Twitter fundamentally isn't as scalable an idea/product as Facebook et al. It's obviously Jack's job to make it that - but what if the basic form of Twitter just isn't as compelling, no matter how you change it or dress it up?
Then his job is find something else for Twitter to make. Facebook has launched a lot of experimental apps like Paper, Rooms, Slingshot, Messenger. And they bought Instagram which is very successful. Under Costolo Twitter bought vine and periscope, but they haven't tried to experiment with new app ideas internally.
If they went back to their roots as a messaging API for other apps, they would not have to build new apps. Become the messaging backbone for the Internet. That's plenty of scale to go after.
Pretty sure that's the basis of removing the 140 char limit for DMs. Some people are way more likely to use Twitter than an 'SMS' type messenger that wants phone numbers that they don't know.
In what world is Paper, Rooms, or Slingshot even remotely successful?
And obviously the messaging service attached to an already massive social network would be compelling, that's not really an "experimental app" by any definition.
In that case, we'll give you: News Feed, Pages, Groups, Messenger, Events, the Platform, and Connect, which have all been pivotal to Facebook's success (I guess more than one of these has been the first time email was dethroned as unquestionable medium for doing some thing or another).
Almost certainly. Twitter's user base is not growing, and their product basically hasn't changed in 5 years. They have a valuable brand, but they need to figure out how to fundamentally improve the ease of use of the whole thing and make a decent value proposition. Photos, messages, videos, search... make the app not suck.
Snapchat and Instagram are very quickly taking over the celebrity/new/sports one-to-many angle from Twitter. Once celebrities depart, Twitter will have only news, and that's not enough most likely.
One of the big challenges is that Twitter is largely geared towards people looking to engage on topical issues in a public forum. If you're an expert in a particular area and consistently engage with other experts in a public forum where the occasional random user chimes in then Twitter has a value proposition for you. I mean it's right there in the platform... people "follow" you, they're not your "friend" or "linked" to you. You need to say something that people are interested in following.
The problem is that most Internet users don't fit into this bucket. They have things to discuss and share with a small group of family/friends but beyond that don't have much to say, to the broader world. These are the users that flock to Facebook, Snapchat, et al.
Until Twitter finds a way to engage the everyday average Internet user then they'll struggle to grow or create a meaningful value proposition (the $$$ is in advertising to the masses, not the engaged thought leaders).
The data on users indicates Twitter has likely peaked in terms of attracting these engaged users (data also indicates a lot of these "active accounts" are fake / bots / spam). Until that changes Twitter will be in trouble as it has no viable long term business model.
I understand the significance of the poem, but if I'm going into Stride Rite to buy some new shoes for a baby, chances are I'm not going to want them to have been worn before.
> they need to figure out how to fundamentally improve the ease of use of the whole thing
I've frequently heard this theory, that Twitter's problem is that it's too complicated. I don't buy it. It has a simpler UI than Facebook or Snapchat, and it's not significantly more complicated than Instagram or Vine or Periscope or any other media sharing platform.
If you personally enjoy Twitter and derive value from it, it's easy to believe that people who don't get into Twitter just don't understand it it. My experience is that many people sign up, send their first tweet, and then say, "OK, I get it, and I have no use for this." I've helped my friends follow news sources and celebrities they like, but then they look at the wall of Tweets and say, "OK, I get it, but I don't want to read things in this format." It's not about ease-of-use for them, it's about the basic value proposition of tweeting and the Twitter feed.
I feel like it took me a few years to get my "Following" list to where I really liked my stream. Took a lot of patience of adding people every week for what seemed like forever.
when people say "ease of use" that's what i think about
Reddit has a list of default subs to get people started. A lot just keep the main list, but some continue to add and subtract as their tastes change. Is that what you are proposing?
Here's the problem. Twitter has to decide whether it is A) algorithmic (facebook style, they show you content they think you'll like an optimize it by the time you are engaged with it), B) curated - someone else decides what you may like and it is suggested C) you organize it yourself.
Lots of people at Twitter are all about (C), and have ideas how to improve it. However, management has never really been hot on it, and prefers (A) because it is easier to "measure" and optimize for. If (C) was done well, and allowed users a good way to find content they though was interesting, it would be super helpful.
Another problem is that Twitter still sucks for media. Michael Sippey, then head of product, was against anything but text. He was out within a year. Text is hard to create (well), but photos are very easy- snap, apply a filter and bam, billions of food photos on Instagram. One of the appeals of Snapchat and Instagram are that they allow you to broadcast photos/video very easily. In essence, they are a better Twitter for 99% of the population.
As a non-twitter-using software engineer, when I land on a twitter page, I still find it fairly intimidating and requiring special knowledge. For example, why is there a dot before the @ in your example? (I actually know the answer to that because I looked it up once, but it's totally not obvious.) What's with all the slashes in numbered lists?
Because of the character limit, people use a lot of abbreviations and shorthand that I can usually figure out with some puzzling, but I shouldn't have to do that.
I still see url-shortener urls all over on twitter, when I should just see regular urls.
These may be minor points, but it adds up to giving off the feeling that there's an in-crowd and I'm not invited. It is much better than it was a few years ago, though, so maybe it'll get there.
(I'm not even getting into the difficulty of actually following a conversation on twitter! Reverse-chronological order plus the lack of linking replies to their parent messages make it nearly impossible, but that's a well-known issue.)
I agree that the @ at the beginning or the @ in the middle is a problem.
here is my opinion Jack if you are reading.
Every tweet needs some extra field when you are creating them.
* to: field like email. A list of people or "everybody"
* body: 140 characters.
* tags: relevant tags so that your tween can be found by non followers interested in a specific topic.
* url: seperate url so as not to use up your 140 chars. Nobody wants to use a link shortener.
If you're an active twitter user, you likely know how it works. But otherwise, the @ mentions etc. are not very simple w/o somebody teaching you. And even after that, it can seem difficult.
Realtime news and straight-from-the-horse's mouth access to celebrities is fundamentally a good opportunity that no one does better than Twitter right now. The question is whether they'll have the decisiveness to make it a better experience for a broader audience without alienating the core that generates the best content.
On Media Watch (Australia) last week they discussed how savvy politicians now use social to speak directly to the public, cutting the middle man out of the equation. The middle man being traditional news media.
I think facebook is less appropriate for this kind of celebrity broadcast.
I find it frustrating to watch twitter flail around because I can see this epic opportunity hanging right in front of them. I really hope they can take that small step and make twitter something truly epic.
I'm not a huge fan of the CEO of two companies thing, but Jack has been interim CEO for 3 months. At least if they changed their position on this they've got the evidence that he can handle both roles.
Twitter does not need to gain new users - it needs to reactivate old users. The statistic I cannot get past is that they have lost one billion users. That is a much different problem than most companies are dealing with.
It correlates to a domain for a site I'm in the process of building. I haven't registered the brand's trademark yet, so I'm unable to claim the Twitter username based on that criteria. Seems like the only route they provide for this kind of thing.
The algorithm would probably contain a dummy variable representing isYoungerThanXDays where X is the median number of time it takes to create a new account after it has been banned.
I doubt accounts that are Y days old vs. Z years old have different probabilities of being spammers.
Probably quite a few, but no matter what an inactive account is -- spam, a novelty account, or an actual inactive person -- if you have 3 times as many inactive accounts as active accounts, there is something awry.
Twitter is not like Facebook or Instagram or What's App. Most of the daily users are not actually logged in users, they consume the information in other ways like Google searches, widgets on news articles or entertainment websites. Facebook and every other app don't have this ability, everything is locked up because of privacy settings so the only people that ever see it are the people you allow. So, even if you're not a logged in Twitter user you still can see the ads and be monetized. Tell me the same for any other popular app out there.
Instagram accounts aren't private by default, and posts can be embedded in other web pages (e.g. a lot of clickbait "journalism" does this), though it does not have a friendly logged-out interface like Twitter.
It wasn't written for the janitor at Twitter, rather it was for people outside Twitter who want to think about what might be coming next. Yes, it is obvious. The idea was taken straight out of Facebook. I thought people would benefit from seeing what it would look like in action. As developers it's easy for us to imagine it, but even we need to mock things up to get a look at it, to help think better about it.
i think my main point is that the display mechanism must be the least of the concerns with respect to introducing > 140 characters. that is to say- I don't believe anyone thinks it's an aesthetic impossibility.
it seems fruitless to dictate "how" without being part of the "why and why not" discussions.
my favorite part of tweetstorms is the compartmentalization of ideas and arguments. if a point in the story is 50 chars, its 50 chars with a break point. if its 100, let it be 100. making the story one string feel like reading long text, whereas breaking it down feels more comfortable to me.
but this is all subjective, and that website's design is pretty sleek :)
This is an interesting point - my first thought was isn't this solved with paragraphs, that can obviously be variable lengths? But what about favourites and retweets - I disagree with you that it's easier to read parts as separate tweets than paragraphs would be, but the UI to retweet or favourite a paragraph seems awkward and I think those functions on parts of a tweet storm are important.
That also raises the question of whether a paragraph should be restricted to 140 characters (assuming that's the see more limit) so it doesn't create a see more tweet itself when retweeted, not sure whether that matters.
The entire concept of Twitter still makes no sense regardless of how many people are using it. It's coasting on momentum at this point and might give out any second.
Their core strength is on the Individual -> Broadcast communication angle. Facebook tried to pick it up, but their mental model is still firmly Individual -> Group & Individual -> Individual.
Twitter's "Follow" function being the core method of interaction, and defaulting to public feeds that you can easily interact with is actually fairly different even from a blog or say tumblr, whose core method of interacting is content-first. The balance of power (you can tweet, I can tweet back, I can retweet you, you can retweet me—and they all look the same and have the same weight in the UI) is the main advantage, and if they can play that well then they have a chance.
Pulling up that link in Safari on mobile really demonstrates how bad the UI/UX is. There is no obvious way to see anything other than the first tweet in the series:
“It’s exhilarating for him,” one long-time confidante said. “He draws energy from how to think about both companies.”
Whether by coincidence or design, Dorsey’s comeback closely resembles the Steve Jobs Narrative — a modern myth Silicon Valley entrepreneurs hold up as a map to absolution. (1)
I'm going with "by design." His ego risks the futures of both companies, unfortunately. Surprised the Twitter board caved on allowing a part-time CEO.
I hope Jack realizes that Twitter is not a great tool to chat with friends / neighborhood / family, but an incredible tool to reach people who are away from you, social and geographical.
They need to focus on how easy it is to approach a movie star, your favorite player and musician you like. How easy it is to show that you like a brand or you love a new TV show. And talk about some major events that are happening around you.
For people who have no idea what it is, they just see it as a tool to talk to someone. And most of the time, you do not have any feedback on what you wrote. In fact, you may not have any idea how many people have read what you have written.
So I think if they focused on showing how Twitter is great for expanding the boundaries of what you want to talk and make easy to see feedback from people about what you have spoken, they can attract more people.
Jokes aside, I think Jack is the man for the job. He has proven capable in square. I hope he does the same with Twitter. The company needs to take advantages of the huge market share it has.
I disagree. He's proven capable as a fundraiser at Square. Square is far from a success, thus far. That being said, I'm not sure anyone could have made Square a success from the P&L perspective--the payments space is just damn crowded.
Slightly off-topic, but I recently interviewed at Square, and I also have some long-time contacts there. I can honestly say they have some of the most brilliant engineering minds I have encountered working there. Whether it's a trickle-down effect from Dorsey or otherwise, they have succeeded in recruiting and retaining many extremely talented individuals.
I am curious if anyone has recent anecdotes in regards to the engineering talent at Twitter (aside from the talent that came in with Periscope).
Twitter has incredible value as a tool to break realtime news and events. The problem is, it buried in a veneer of fruitless and redundant tweets that nobody wants to dig through. If they can figure out how to surface the value 'there's gold in them hills!'
I can't see this working out. Dorsey probably is the best candidate for CEO of Twitter, and I think there are some very low-hanging fruit to pick when it comes to solving Twitter's product issues (I disagree with Startup L Jackson - Twitter's product is not fucking fine). The market reaction has been positive - TWTR opened up 3.15% just now.
However, Square is a different story altogether. Square Wallet was a damp squib, and Square's facing competition both from established players like Intuit and more recent entrants to the market, like iZettle. Leading Square and bringing it to market seems like a full-time job to me, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's IPO valuation takes a hit because it lacks a full-time CEO.
I have friends at Square and they seem to think it's great. From what they've said the last few months have been better for them as well with Jack as interim CEO of Twitter. Maybe he needs this to be really driven? Time will tell but I think you're right, it won't hurt Twitter as much as it might hurt Square.
TWTR the stock was down when the news leaked last week, and has gradually regained that ground. In general, though, I've lost 30% of the value of my Twitter stock since Jack's first earnings call. It will take a lot of up days to recover those losses.
Would love to see twtr become a platform for a myriad of third-party apps. Wouldn't it be great to place a market order by messaging @bats "buy $TWTR 10,000 30.00". Or order a limo with @uber "2 people in one hour to jfk airport"?
> Or order a limo with @uber "2 people in one hour to jfk airport"?
Why would typing out a generic request to a several square mile area without any identifying information be better than a GPS enabled app with real time communications, mapping, and integrated payment?
I see this kind of comment all the time (eg that ridiculous "magic" SMS startup) and always wonder how otherwise rational, linear thinkers develop this delusion.
You describe a tech problem, and not a really intractable one.
It already has "real time communications (as, yknow, the main purpose of the service)", it can already do GPS coords, and expect payment integration soon.
I'd love to see Twitter become a "command line of the web". Add voice integration on top of it via siri/google/etc, and it come become the plaintext glue between a lot of services.
What we have here is a pub/sub message transmission layer that just happens to be used by a lot of people for personal communication. Having machines use that for other things is something that's already been experimented with - using it as a de-facto API layer is a logical step.
But this is nonsensical. As far as I can see there are two parties to this hypothetical transaction, me the smartphone owner, and Uber the company. I open the Uber app and use it.
Why do I want to insert Twitter in the middle of this transaction? What problem is it that you're trying to solve?
The problem that you need a unique app to interact with every single service out there. How do you feel about random websites pushing you onto their application and then neglecting the web experience? It's fragmentation city.
This is the same problem, but for services (in the people doing things for other people sense) rather than hypertext.
Think of it as a glue layer that gets you around the need to have 50 different apps installed for 50 different services.
> The problem that you need a unique app to interact with every single service out there.
This is not an actual problem. And to the extent that it is 140 characters of text doesn't come close to fixing it. And in the unlikely event that it did why wouldn't SMS do the same thing without having to bring some random third party company into the mix and have both parties at their mercy for zero value added?
While I think Twitter doing this is a bad idea (since Twitter stuff is public), Magic has been absolutely amazing for me. It frees up a ton of time for me. I've never used it for getting an Uber (that's what the Uber app is for), but I have used it for offloading a ton of complicated or menial tasks.
And it depends on what's at hand. If your phone is basically a Twitter machine, maybe. This will be more easily accomplished by talking to Siri or Google Now.
I would really like to hear your reasoning why typing is such requests would make sense for an average user instead of using an dedicated app which automatically supplies the vital information (current price, gps coordinates, etc.)
I agree - Twitter is the de facto messaging platform. Taking the idea a bit further, Twitter could be used instead of SQS and other messaging solutions / protocols. That'd be pretty cool. Twitter could be the way the IoT communicate with their AI overlords.
Twitter is so common in tech industry circles - so many announcements , debates, and moments happen there weekly that I would think it's essential if you care about that stuff.
Truth is there is no canonical place to get the pulse of what's going on in the tech world: each of Reddit, HN, Twitter, or various aggregation sites have their filter and regulars. But Twitter seems to have the widest net.
Twitter is the best broadcasting platform. The true challenges are to control spam level and be able to display enough ads to monetise it.
I'm a late adopter of twitter but if you know how to use it is a great tool: follow less than 20 accounts, info is still possible to digest and the number of ads is not enough to annoy you.
This isn't true. I think you need to expand your horizons beyond the tech world :) I suspect if you ask someone outside of the tech world in the US, they'll tell you Facebook. Outside of the US: WhatsApp.
I think using twitter as a platform for ordering things etc. would be something he could do to make money. They should open it up to developers and charge them for cool apps.
Imagine, you are famous man! Orders are bad idea, here's why: to send for 1m subscribers that you are going to sell your pants from 1998 tour sounds interesting, but you do have just one pair of pant to sell.
Who had the most significant role in getting Twitter results prominent placement in Google desktop results? That seems like a mutually beneficial development.
Google used to have twitter results a long time ago. Then Google got a little pissy and decided they wanted to be The Only Social On The Internet and killed Twitter priority indexing (e.g. receiving the firehose). It was probably the most ineffectual attempted flexing of monopoly power in the history of monopoly abuse.
Now that Google realized they can't be good at everything (really, are they good at much besides a few focused things?), they're open to integration and collaboration on their not-so-competitive-advantages again.
I think this will be good for Twitter. Jack will be able to make big identity and design decisions over the next few years with less pushback from the employees and users than any non-founder CEO. He's already begun by declaring that tweets will extend beyond 140 chars, and the response has been apprehension instead of outright rejection. And for Twitter to remain competitive with Facebook, even as Facebook builds Notes and live-streaming video to cater journalists, Twitter is going to need to make many of these decisions.
People are worried that Jack will be too busy between Twitter and Square, but what they don't know is that the dude's been completely spaced out for the last 4 years, making the same motivational presentation about his Dad's pizza shop to anyone that will listen. Nobody at Twitter talks to Jack anymore, even the most Senior people.
Seriously though, are you an employee at Twitter or Square, or are you basing this statement on the fact that you (presumably someone who doesn't see what's going on within Twitter and Square) only see Jack in interviews, and he tells the same story?
I mean, I'm by no means a big time CEO, but the only contact people outside my company have with what's going on internally are interviews. And when I give interviews I tell the same story probably almost identically, word for word. Why? Because that's the story. It doesn't change interview to interview. You have one story, one vision, one mission, and you talk about it to anyone who asks. That's not surprising.
Internally, if you're not an employee or talking to employees (ideally executives), you pretty much have zero idea what the CEO does day to day.
I worked at Square when it was relatively small (<100 people) and Jack seemed to only be around for weekly presentations. But! That seems to be normal for CEOs? It's not like their job is actually to play pingpong with software developers all day.
How much they are around matters much less than whether or not they have set a clear strategy for the company, whether their direct reports have the autonomy and ability to execute on their pieces of the strategy, whether they have built and maintain a culture that keeps the organization productive, and if they are available to their direct reports when needed.
If all those things are true, then they can be in the office as much or little as they want. If one or more of those are missing, then the CEO has work to do.
In my experience at startups, especially as they get past 100 employees or so, if you see the CEO around the office a lot, something is probably wrong. The CEOs where I've worked have usually been off talking to investors, potential partners, large customers, etc. Sure, they show up for all-hands meetings, and they're in the office for a couple weeks at a time sometimes, but at least half their job is externally-facing, explaining the company to the world.
There was a great article a while back [on founding and rise of Twitter and Dorsey's bio] that did not paint him in a good light: "All is fair in love and Twitter" [0]
As one former Twitter employee has said, “The greatest product Jack Dorsey ever made was Jack Dorsey.”
Nick Bilton's "Hatching Twitter" painted a pretty bad picture about him also - I was surprised - I thought it was going to be a puff piece before I read it.
To the people whose only contact with a company are via PR and customer relations, of course it seems like that's all he does. That's the only side you see. Does anyone making comments like this have any idea what happens internally?
People with a vested interest in twitter seem to be thrilled. And they are the ones defending twitter in this discussion. Neutral outsiders are much more apprehensive. Take that how you will... could be that they know more than us, as you imply. Could be bias. Time will tell.
I've actually heard that he's making long-needed changes on the product side of things since he's been back, so the employees I talk to at least believe that he will help in more than just "the narrative." Of course, those were people with a lot of stock in the company, so they're not impartial; I fear there are very few knowledgable, impartial sources in this one.
making the same motivational presentation about his Dad's pizza shop to anyone that will listen
Well then, consistency. And do we not all tell the same stories, live the same lives daily, do the same work daily, solve the same problems. It's all rewind and repeat, and I would not be upset at anyone who does this.
Nobody at Twitter talks to Jack anymore
Gosh, there are 4000 people at Twitter. One could hardly maintain a true working relationship with 1% of the workforce.
What if you created a website that no matter how hard you try, you can never make enough money to justify it's insane valuation? You hire the guy that created it. If that fails years down the road, hire a blonde.
I'm short Twitter. The fact of the matter is it that Twitter should never have become a multibillion-dollar company. There is no barrier to entry into this space---any competent web developer could make a non-scaling Twitter in an afternoon---except network effects, and those have proved weak due to poor user experience, particularly for new users.
Twitter should have treated itself like a utility, and focused less on the online advertising race-to-the-bottom that it is sure to lose due to the aforementioned poor user experience and negative sentiment about the platform's future; this announcement is only going to continue to contribute to poor impressions.
The other monetization directions they have played around with---namely selling access to researchers and advertisers, and certifying identities of accounts for celebrities and brands---are a much better fit for the platform, and would have sustained a fast-moving company of 50 hotshot engineers. But the constant pressure to get bigger and bigger has served Twitter poorly. I'm sad to say that I think it will be a ghost town in a few years.
lol if it's so easy, I implore you to create a Twitter competitor... and to make your challenge easier, instead of it being worth $20 billion, we'll lower the bar to, say, $150 million. It's already been done..every major web 2.0 success has many clones that all tried but failed to gain the necessary momentum and marketshare to become as successful as Twitter or Dropbox, for example. Even Evernote, despite all the attention and funding it has gotten, is stuck in the ruts. Yes, the coding part can be replicated, but getting the users and traction is the hardest part.
kylebgorman posted that comment 2 hours ago, he must be half way done building his Twitter-but-better by now. I'm on the edge of my seat, I can tell you.
You got to have balls of steel to short a company like Twitter. I would rather short oil, gas, or commodity companies . Facebook stock, for example, is up 200% since 2012, leaving a lot of shorts burned in the process who thought it was overvalued.
Its a credible claim. Social media apps are a fairly basic kind of CRUD app, and if you forego the complex layers of privacy settings and permissions, monetization schemes, and scalability issues you end up with what amounts to a weekend project for an experienced developer.
Now, social media apps are worthless without the aforementioned features that would have to be omitted to get it done in a weekend, so obviously there's some hyperbole going on with statements like that. However, on a fundamental level its correct. The technical requirements of building a social media app are small/easy and within the scope of what a startup on a shoestring budget could manage if they felt like it was a good business opportunity.
The issues start to pile up only much later down the road. Maintaining scalability after you cross some critical threshold of traffic gets hard, but you don't have to think about that until you're at or near the threshold anyway. Not a lot of barrier in getting started.
I agree that if you strip out all the complexities behind what you see on the screen, then yes someone can definitely build a bootstrap-y clone in a weekend.
What do you mean? I fully believe that a competent developer could sit down and make something like Twitter in a weekend. Especially since the concept and what to do with it is already on display for them to copy.
Now, to create a Twitter clone in a weekend when there's no Twitter to go by? Nope.
If you boil down the entirety of Twitter into just a CRUD app that allows you to post 140 characters at a time, then yes, you can make that in a weekend.
Well, how about recommended posts / people to follow (ML)? Sponsored posts with a buy button (3rd part integration)? Growth and metrics (data analytics)? A software product is never just about pixels on the screen; and trivializing the engineering effort behind it is insulting to Twitter employees, some of whom are brilliant engineers I know.
You could create something that looks like Twitter, but you couldn't create Twitter. Ignoring the network effects and scale that Twitter has is ignoring its primary value.
It's hard for me to get that from what you wrote. It seemed that your point was more that the existence of Twitter means it's easy to reproduce it, but before Twitter, it was difficult to envision a site like Twitter.
My counterpoint is that it's not actually the idea that's interesting, it's the fact that they've convinced lots of people to use it, and have built a system powerful enough to support that scale.
lol - so which features are you going to exclude? Is your weekend-twitter-app going to support a feed, favoriting / reteweeting only to your followers / dming only between followers / ability to block / filter / rate-limit users who tweet-spam / mobile app / push notifications / e-mails to new users who sign-up / and various other necessary features an app usually has before it even launches a MVP?
I have to say that for Facebook as well. When the IPFS picks up, we'll have a distributed clone of twitter and facebook that runs on such architecture.
There would be no desire or need for advertisement or money making or tracking people when there are no owners, no benefactors but the people using it.
The end is nigh for traditional SV unicorns that offer no barrier to entry in a distributed and anonymous internet.
I first read this as "Twitter names Jack Donaghy Chief Executive" and thought I was in for a good laugh. Now I'm disappointed. :/
Edit: To be clear, I thought Twitter was just expressing a good sense of humor, and I was disappointed in that I was expecting something humorous but didn't find that.
Yes Jobs had Apple and Pixar, and Musk has Tesla and SpaceX. But both Pixar and SpaceX don't really require day-to-day CEO attention, they follow long term plans (movies, rockets). That's really different from Square and Twitter, which are both, in their own ways, in a kind of trouble.
I'd love to be proven wrong though -- so good luck, Jack!