I find it interesting that the CEO of Twitter has two jobs. It's really in line with our future of a "sharing economy" where one job isn't enough to survive. It'd be funnier if it was Travis Kalanick (Uber CEO) but this is pretty good too.
Now joking aside, why the heck do investors allow the CEO to have a second job? If I were an investor at either of those companies I'd be pretty pissed off. Unless there's some magical synergy that can be had between them (and for the record I don't think there is), this is bad news on both ends.
>Add on the fact that much of the board is new, with little financial stake in the company. It’s possible they are loyal to CEO Jack Dorsey, who essentially appointed them, and don’t have the financial incentive to push change the way older, more frustrated investors might.
The problem is that doesn't mean he can run both at the same time nor does it mean he's the correct long-term steward of both simply because he was there first.
It really falls on the respective boards to keep the situation honest, but nobody wants to be on the board that fired Steve Jobs again.
https://medium.com/@jack/twitter-q416-earnings-call-4574b01e...
I honestly don't see how they are growing in influence and impact. I'd say that if it weren't for POTUS tweets, most people wouldn't even notice any change on Twitter's impact.
I don't know how you take advantage of that to pay your bazillion engineers though
Their new card design (ie, design of the ads) apparently is a magnet for unintentional clicks. Around 90-95% of clicks for my last campaign were accidental.* The crazy thing is that their support team knows about the problem yet they still charge you for those clicks as though they are legitimate, AND they still let people create ads in that format. I've since taken my (clients') advertising dollars elsewhere. No wonder their ad revenue has gone down.
*I can only assume they were accidental because Twitter showed, say, 100 clicks, and Google Analytics showed just 3 visits. Yet Twitter support insisted the clicks were legitimate. That means people clicked the ad (unintentionally) and, upon realizing it's loading a new page, left the page before it finished loading.
The income from operational activities is growing a lot (The news usually don't comment this), really good numbers, but as also the expenses. Selling/General/Admin. Expenses doubled, I suppose they are trying to find a way to make money, and they are doing it, but the expenses needs to stop growing. It also seems years ago they borrowed a lot of money to invest on firm, now they are paying constantly.
Impossible to know if this will be a good company to invest or not, but it is still very risky, as major disruptive IT companies.
https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWTR&fstype=ii&ei=1X...
Facebook is facing similar pressures. Their valuation still seems to assume they've got a lot of growth potential, but what if this circle can't be squared? It isn't hard to imagine the possibility that not only has Facebook more-or-less grown as much as it can, give or take some stragglers, but that it may even have grown more than it can sustain, in which case it is grossly overvalued.
Could easily replace "Twitter" in this quote with a scary number of other public tech company names where investor indifference is going on.
I don't know all the reasons why we read this same fucking article every 3 months. I do think passivity in public markets and the rigged proxy voting schemes are letting bad things go on for too long. There is a fiduciary responsibility here. How long should a company and it's management get before you pull the plug and replace them. Maybe the next guy or girl will be worse than Jack. Who knows. But that doesn't mean he should have stayed this long.
Maybe we should learn from the President. 8 years max for CEOs. For better or worse. CEOs are people and other people can do the job. Get out. Stay on the board if you miss it.
The issue is just that's it's a very bloated company. I still question why Twitter isn't just like 100 people in a basement somewhere. Their revenue isn't great but it's also not terrible--it's their costs (which is mostly people related) that's complete out of whack. In my interactions with the company they always felt very bloated relative to what they do.
Interesting idea. Has this ever been discussed on HN before?
What happens, however, when it doesn't live up to its benefactor's expectations?
Don't do anything and die a slow spectacular death.
Add more features and have their app to start competing with Snap, Facebook, WhatsApp, Medium... except I don't think they can pull this up.
I think the first choice is the best, get rid of Jack while at it, sure no Bozo CEO, but Jack needs to pick either Twitter or Square.
That would still leave them with close to 1000 employees. I wouldn't call that lean. They can cut deeper than that.
Twitter fills a niche.. it's not growing, but a pretty big one nonetheless. It's like classmates.com yahoo.com and other sites that are large, stagnant, but exist anyway because they fill a niche, have good advertising revenue, and have a lot of users.
Do we know of any companies in tech (apart from Apple) who got big, stopped growing and managed to turn it around? Will it be an amazing purchase that saves them (like Apple did)?
This is something that makes this industry look bad. Criticism is suppressed.
