Every time I hear of another founder passing on a multi-billion dollar offer, I think back to Tom from MySpace and how he sold MySpace off for a lot of money and went on to live happily ever after. Smartest guy in the social media game.
Wait till you hear about Jan Koum, who took over $10 billion from selling WhatsApp to Facebook and has become a prominent collector of mansions, superyachts, and rare Porsches [3].
Whatsapps whole schtick from the beginning was something "you pay us $1 pr year and we provide you a top tier messaging service without ads and without analyzing you data or your social graph or anything".
I was enthusiastic about it, and possibly even more enthusiastic about it as I finally got my first invoice (yes, they didn't start billing right away, but they were very open about their plans, unlike Telegram who always just said something like "it isn't that expensive anyway, someone is shouldering it and we have a plan").
It had a nominal $1 per year fee, but in most of the world (like here in India, where it's now practically a utility), they never charged anything because even a trivial sum like that would have caused a ton of friction. That's why it became so popular.
This is a viral "feelgood" story that keeps circulating but MySpace was a project within an existing company, eUniverse, later InterMix. Tom and Chris DeWolfe were employees of InterMix, not founders. Intermix was acquired by News Corp. for $580M. Not sure how much equity Tom ended up with. It certainly could have been enough to allow for a "normal" early retirement but I'm not even sure about that. I had some dealings with Brad Greenspan, the CEO of Intermix, after the MySpace sale. Presumably he had far more equity than Tom or Chris, and let's just say that he did not behave like someone who was financially secure.
According to a complaint about the sell price made by Greenspan at the time [1], he owned about 10% of Intermix. If he’s not financially secure, I think that speaks mostly about his actions after the sale.
Hard to believe that Twitter was willing to offer $4B for a service they managed to recreate themselves for (presumably) a tiny fraction of that cost. Makes you wonder if all the AI panic right now is going to end up going the same way.
They weren't buying the technology, they were buying the community + creators on the platform.
This has nothing to do with AI at all. Clubhouse was a kinda cool social network that came out at exactly the right time during COVID. AI is something we've been working towards since the 50s, and over the next few years will change absolutely everything.
Twitter already had a large community and set of creators while Clubhouse really didn't. Moreover, most of the Clubhouse users already had Twitter accounts and just switched their audio conversations to Twitter Spaces once that product became available.
I think at this point it's obvious that Clubhouse was not worth $4B (10% of Twitter's final sale price!), so no point in arguing about that. The interesting question is: what combination of bad judgement and groupthink made anyone think it was in the first place.
In a world of fast and loose cash, people find justifications for spending fast and loose. I don't think it requires too much more than that. Crypto firms running on good will and hype managed to get billions of $ (in crypo-bucks) to dump their money, much of which is completely gone. You could argue overvalued, but in the world of pets.com, this is far from the worst example of outsized speculation.
The invite-only launch was a selling point. "It's a exclusive service, but if you score an invite, you might have a casual chat with a bunch of billionaires and SV bigwigs."
This may be surprising to people in Palo Alto but 99.9% of regular working people have nothing to say to billionaires and SV influencers, outside of maybe some profanities. There's no way a product with that as the premise would have had a future outside of its ivory tower niche.
Clubhouse is literally just software that artificially limited things to be popular by:
1. Limited users
2. Limited to iPhones.
3. Having no history or recording of conversations.
I saw the $100 million series B for Pinecone and thought something similar, since vector databases are becoming more easily commodified, with Postgres already getting pgvector and pgANN.
It would have converted to approximately 3.3 billion USD when Elon bought Twitter. However, even if twitter wasn't purchased and no one sold while it sunk to $17/share (which is about the average of estimates people were making when Elon finalized buying it), it still would be over a billion dollars as an exit. Do you think Clubhouse is a unicorn now?
At that time, I don't think so. It was an incredibly small team back then, and the CEO of Twitter at the time was Jack. It likely would have remained (somewhat) independent, at least in the short term, similar to Vine and Instagram. And given equity, I assume almost all employees would have become millionaires.
There was no chance that Twitter (who already had periscope) would accept a $4B+ deal to buy Clubhouse.
In fact, it was very predictable as I said here before the acquisition talks that Twitter would push on with using Spaces instead of buying Clubhouse. [0]
The hard truth was that Clubhouse launched too slowly and even Twitter Spaces launched faster than Clubhouse to release their Android app. [1]
The invite system, slow release of the Android app caused them to lose steam to Twitter and Discord during the social audio race of 2021 at the time. [2]
Everyone (who wants to make money from their app)? I own an Android and I'd still launch an iOS app first because the vast majority of mobile revenue comes from iOS, not Android. At the very most I'd use Flutter to launch on both platforms at once but I'd still prioritize the iOS side.
If you use a cross platform framework, sure, but if you only have resources for one platform (or where cross platform is not suitable for whatever reason), I'd pick launching on iOS first any day of the week.
counterpoint: you can outsource android i.e. pay a high quality dev shop to clone your iOS app and adapt it nicely for Android. I've done this several times, to great effect.
They are plenty important, but they're not rich. iPhones are not the majority of the market by any stretch, but they do form a majority of the phones well-off people use.
I know you and your coder friends use Android despite having plenty of money, but the general public sees Androids as the budget option.