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Based on their last 10-Q filing, I would estimate that - ~500 in operations (data centers, sysops, related managers) - ~1000 in R&D (developers, designers, re

Based on their last 10-Q filing, I would estimate that - ~500 in operations (data centers, sysops, related managers) - ~1000 in R&D (developers, designers, researchers, and related managers) - ~1000 in Sales and Marketing - ~500 in general & administrative (finance, legal, H&R, IT support, management, misc) If you compare to e.g. Google, this sounds pretty similar split.

criddell 9y ago
Every one of those numbers sounds an order of magnitude too big to me. Is it wrong to compare Twitter at 3000 people with Instagram at 20?
- dirtyaura 9y ago
  Yes, I think it is wrong to compare them directly. I think Twitter has room to cut employee count, but not by order of magnitude. Instagram had 20 at the time of acquisition, I bet it's much bigger now. They had a single product, no ad tech platforms, no working business model. Twitter has multiple products and several (acquired, partly failed) ad platforms. Also Instagram were able to build on top of modern cloud technologies and scalable infrastructure services like AWS. Twitter was launched same year that AWS, so I think Twitter has paid a price by building it's own infrastructure. Instagram likely used a lot of outsourced people too to run all non-core things. Both Instagram and Whatsapp were clearly amazing, well-functioning technology teams to be able to execute with such small teams, but they were still very early in developing their revenue engines. I think employee count and costs are not Twitter's biggest problem per se. They still have quite good financial situation, $4B in cash and equivalents, IIRC. The problem is that they haven't found a working ad model. Performance marketing has made both Google and Facebook the revenue engines that business has never seen before. Twitter could still do something similar but on the smaller scale.

criddell 9y ago

Every one of those numbers sounds an order of magnitude too big to me. Is it wrong to compare Twitter at 3000 people with Instagram at 20?

dirtyaura 9y ago
Yes, I think it is wrong to compare them directly. I think Twitter has room to cut employee count, but not by order of magnitude. Instagram had 20 at the time of acquisition, I bet it's much bigger now. They had a single product, no ad tech platforms, no working business model. Twitter has multiple products and several (acquired, partly failed) ad platforms. Also Instagram were able to build on top of modern cloud technologies and scalable infrastructure services like AWS. Twitter was launched same year that AWS, so I think Twitter has paid a price by building it's own infrastructure. Instagram likely used a lot of outsourced people too to run all non-core things. Both Instagram and Whatsapp were clearly amazing, well-functioning technology teams to be able to execute with such small teams, but they were still very early in developing their revenue engines. I think employee count and costs are not Twitter's biggest problem per se. They still have quite good financial situation, $4B in cash and equivalents, IIRC. The problem is that they haven't found a working ad model. Performance marketing has made both Google and Facebook the revenue engines that business has never seen before. Twitter could still do something similar but on the smaller scale.