Prompt Cast
The History and Challenges of Twitter: From Standup Comedy to a Billion Dollar Company
TLDR Twitter's unique and difficult-to-build graph made it resilient to competition, leading to rapid revenue growth. However, challenges with platform integration and competition from Instagram hindered Twitter's growth, and the company struggled with issues such as content moderation and managing its impact on society.
Timestamped Summary
00:00
The episode is about the history of Twitter and its potential to have owned Instagram instead of Facebook.
05:53
Dick Costolo started his career in standup comedy before transitioning back to tech in the early 90s, where he started several companies including Feedburner, which managed syndication feeds for publishers and inserted ads into feeds for monetization purposes.
11:25
Dick Costolo joined Twitter as COO in 2009 and the first revenue deal at Twitter was a data deal with Google, but they knew they needed a more scalable strategy for monetization.
16:56
Twitter decided to pursue an advertising strategy and developed a native ad format that could be injected into the feed, which ended up being used in other platforms like Facebook and Pinterest.
22:47
Twitter's revenue went from zero to over $2 billion in five to six years, making it one of the fastest-growing companies in terms of revenue, despite starting from a challenger position against companies like Facebook.
28:03
Twitter had to migrate off of Ruby and refactor their back end multiple times to keep up with demand, and they had to own the user experience in order to build a successful advertising business.
33:39
Twitter struggled to build out its platform and compete with other applications, such as Instagram, which eventually led to Instagram's decision to sell to Facebook for a billion dollars.
39:12
Twitter's ability to integrate with Instagram was hindered when Instagram decided to only allow links to their photos on Twitter, and the social graph feature that helped users find friends to follow on Instagram through Twitter's API was also disabled, ultimately leading to Twitter's decision to shut off access to their own API for other platforms.
44:36
Twitter's advantage over Facebook was its ability to syndicate content and reach a wider audience, but this advantage was not pursued aggressively after Dick Costolo left the company.
50:22
Twitter's IPO was a success, with the stock price opening at $26 per share and demand for the stock reaching $13 to $47 million.
56:23
Twitter's stock price doubled while the CEO was away, but he warned employees that the stock's performance was disassociated from the company's internal goals and they needed to be mentally tough when the stock inevitably went down.
01:01:59
Twitter's graph is unique and difficult to build, making it resilient to competition, unlike networks like Facebook and WhatsApp that are easier to rehydrate and therefore less resilient.
01:07:31
Dick Costolo reflects on the surprising and unexpected moments during his time as CEO of Twitter, including receiving a call from the White House and realizing the impact and importance of the platform, while also acknowledging the constant challenges and self-inflicted wounds that come with managing a company like Twitter.
01:12:49
Dick Costolo reflects on the challenges of communicating with third-party developers and the importance of owning the user experience, as well as the difficulties of balancing HR issues and strategic priorities as a CEO. He also discusses the challenges of moderating content on Twitter and the need for platforms to be more aggressive in addressing hate speech and threats of violence.
01:18:00
Dick Costolo reflects on the challenges of managing the impact of Twitter on society, giving himself a C for his efforts as CEO but praising the company's recent progress in removing alt-right accounts and moderating content, giving them an A for the past year.
Categories:
Technology
Business
