[matthewdgreen]

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.

[gkoberger]

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.

[matthewdgreen]

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.

[adra]

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.

[gowld]

> Clubhouse was a kinda cool social network that came out at exactly the right time during COVID.

Alternatively, is was a COVID-specific fad with a doomed user experience / network model that never expanded beyond the SV cultural bubble.

[Prbeek]

Their IOS first app and invite only launch alienated many potential users and gave an opening to Twitter to launch spaces with a huge audience.

[nikanj]

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."

[segasaturn]

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.

[fsckboy]

Despite it's origins, ivory tower means, in the sense of being out of touch with common people, academia. It does not mean being out of touch because rich or nobility.

[rchaud]

No surprise then that it became a hotbed of hustlebros and MLM salespeople within months.

[chemmail]

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.

[satvikpendem]

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.

[rchaud]

That's $4b in Twitter stock though. What would that even have been worth now, assuming they remained public?

[HWR_14]

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?

[samwillis]

It looks like the share price in April 2021 was on the nose the same price Elon paid.

So the investors and founders would have converted $4B in Twitter stock to cash almost 1:1, that's not bad.

[stronglikedan]

More, since Twitter is better, more lean, and more popular than ever.