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From the article, "industry insiders have growing doubts about Williams' business judgment and are starting to say the company is his vanity project" This is t

From the article, "industry insiders have growing doubts about Williams' business judgment and are starting to say the company is his vanity project" This is the co-founder of Twitter which is still losing money despite being post-IPO and having a huge user base. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is still a vanity project.

x0x0 10y ago
The difference with twitter is they could fire their way to profitability. 2016: revenue $2.25B; $.9B cost of revenue; R&D $.71B; sales & marketing $.957B; G&A $.29B -> loss from operations ($.367B). Someone could take an axe to those costs and get the company comfortably profitable. 2016 numbers from page 2 of spreadsheet 2016 q4 selected company metrics and financials available: https://investor.twitterinc.com/results.cfm https://investor.twitterinc.com/results.cfm edit: thanks @mastazi
- mastazi 10y ago
  > loss from operations ($367B) I think (and hope) that you missed a dot there :-)
- bigtunacan 10y ago
  While the scale is different I don't see that the underlying issue is. What you are suggesting about making Twitter profitable (which I happen to agree with) seems to be what they are attempting to do at Medium with these layoffs. An aside on the Twitter front though; at this point I'm not sure cost slashing is going to help their stock prices at this point even if they turn a profit as they are already showing declining revenues.
  - x0x0 10y ago
    A prerequisite to the cut-your-way-to-profitability plan is income. There's no evidence Medium had much income.
    - bigtunacan 10y ago
      Can you provide evidence there is no income? They aren't a publicly traded company so I haven't seen their earnings reports...
      - x0x0 10y ago
        It's a personal guess, based on knowledge of the ad market, inferences from their firing decisions, and gossip from some friends who know people there.
- idiot_stick 10y ago
  >Someone could take an axe to those costs and get the company comfortably profitable. Twitter has a celebrity SV CEO. That's his job; what are they waiting for?

x0x0 10y ago

The difference with twitter is they could fire their way to profitability. 2016: revenue $2.25B; $.9B cost of revenue; R&D $.71B; sales & marketing $.957B; G&A $.29B -> loss from operations ($.367B). Someone could take an axe to those costs and get the company comfortably profitable. 2016 numbers from page 2 of spreadsheet 2016 q4 selected company metrics and financials available: https://investor.twitterinc.com/results.cfm https://investor.twitterinc.com/results.cfm edit: thanks @mastazi

mastazi 10y ago
> loss from operations ($367B) I think (and hope) that you missed a dot there :-)
bigtunacan 10y ago
While the scale is different I don't see that the underlying issue is. What you are suggesting about making Twitter profitable (which I happen to agree with) seems to be what they are attempting to do at Medium with these layoffs. An aside on the Twitter front though; at this point I'm not sure cost slashing is going to help their stock prices at this point even if they turn a profit as they are already showing declining revenues.
- x0x0 10y ago
  A prerequisite to the cut-your-way-to-profitability plan is income. There's no evidence Medium had much income.
  - bigtunacan 10y ago
    Can you provide evidence there is no income? They aren't a publicly traded company so I haven't seen their earnings reports...
    - x0x0 10y ago
      It's a personal guess, based on knowledge of the ad market, inferences from their firing decisions, and gossip from some friends who know people there.
idiot_stick 10y ago
>Someone could take an axe to those costs and get the company comfortably profitable. Twitter has a celebrity SV CEO. That's his job; what are they waiting for?