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Why do Facebook's metrics matter when talking about Twitter? Just because Facebook and Twitter are both social networking sites does not mean they are comparabl

Why do Facebook's metrics matter when talking about Twitter? Just because Facebook and Twitter are both social networking sites does not mean they are comparable. Twitter should not have gone public, or at least not at the valuation it did. I think those who invested just wanted to ride Facebook's coattails, assuming that a new "social networking" bubble could be created and investing in any such company would be an easy buck. Surprise! You actually need to evaluate a company's individual merits, rather than expecting that any Silicon Valley IPO is a guaranteed windfall success. And how in the world does Twitter have 4300 employees? The product should be sustainable with less than 10% of that.

_Codemonkeyism 11y ago
"And how in the world does Twitter have 4300 employees? The product should be sustainable with less than 10% of that." Assumption for this comment: many of them are working in engineering. I have thought about this for some years. I have no explaination yet, some hypothesis though. Many CEOs and VCs think engineering is key. CEOs don't know how many engineers they need. So often they have as many as they can afford and are rarely challenged for that. I've seen many companies where I look at a Kanban/Scrum board for the features and think "Hu? This is what they working on?", a lot of features have no impact. Number of features seems to be a function of number of engineers not number of good ideas (with impact). So there is no downward pressure on the number of engineers, work fills the over capacity. This leads to 4300 employees. But far from sure, still wondering about that mystery of high employee numbers of many companies.