[jasode]

It's interesting to compare the investment amounts into Twitter vs Google. Very different trajectories in how things actually turned out.

(Boy would I love to see the 2011 Powerpoint deck shown to the Twitter investors in Round 7 & and Round 8 that convinced them to sink the additional $400 million & $300 million. It seems like there must have been some wildly optimistic projections in that presentation.)

Twitter Inc:

  - +$1.0 billion from 8 rounds of funding pre-IPO [1]
  - +$1.8 billion raised from IPO [2] (sold 13% of the company)
  - ====
  - +$2.8 billion total

  - -$511 million loss[3] in first post-IPO quarterly report

Google Inc:

  - +~$1 million from angel investors (including Andy Bechtolsheim's famous $100k check)
  - + $25 million from Sequoia, KPCB
  - + $1.9 billion raised from IPO (sold 8% of the company)

  - +$66 million profit[4] in first post-IPO quarterly results (and would have been +$200 million if they didn't pay to settle Yahoo patents)
  - +$$$ millions in growing profits in subsequent years as we all know now

[1] http://upstart.bizjournals.com/money/loot/2013/11/06/twitter...

[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-11-07/twitter-ra...

[3] https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=...

[4] https://investor.google.com/earnings/2004/Q3_google_earnings...

[marcosdumay]

What really can a software company do with a billion dollars of investment nowadays? Where can it spend this much?

[coke12]

It's pretty easy to get numbers that big when you're Twitter's size. Salary and overhead (taxes, rent, food) for 1000 employees is probably on the order of $300-400m/year, and server costs for a high traffic site like Twitter is probably on the order of $100m/year.

[marcosdumay]

Does Twitter have anything near 1000 employees? I wouldn't expect that.

I'd also expect the sever and trafic cost to scale from a "minimal" of around $100k a year in proportion with revenue. That is, I don't see how that's a good target for investiment money.

[perplexes]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10364197

"Twitter has over 4,100 employees in more than 35 offices"

[Nilzor]

...what do they do?

[marcosdumay]

> in more than 35 offices

As a second thought, that makes some sense. Regional offices do localization, sales (with support), and legal adaptation mostly. Any company that wants to sell on several countries need such stuff.

More than a hundred employees for each office looks oversized, but not extremely so.

The only question yet open is if Twitter needed all this infrastructure to become a viable business, of if they could open smaller and grow into that size organically. But well, even if Twitter didn't need it, it's reasonable to imagine that some business would need it.

I guess my question of what a company could spend 1 billion of investment on is answered.