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Jack Dorsey: “I grew the company size too quickly”
- theduder99 4y agowow, losing $4 million a day.
- blinkingled 4y agoIs that in addition to the 1B in interest each year?
- StayTrue 4y agoLast year Twitter lost $221M so, yes, much of the $4M daily loss is due to Musk’s leveraged buyout.
- belter 4y agoAnd sold to some dude by $44 Billion... ;-)
- jurassic 4y agoTwitter was not in a financial nosedive until Elon saddled the company with $13B in loans (used to acquire the company) while also tanking revenues by scaring off all the big advertisers who think the platform won't be brand safe in the free speech future. He did that himself. He also gutted engineering teams at Twitter, so their ability to execute quickly on whatever his new vision is seems in jeopardy. I predict Twitter is going to $0 and probably a lot sooner than you might expect.
- donsupreme 4y agoJack: I was too good
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- seibelj 4y agoThey fired half their employees and I just checked the Twitter app and it loaded fine. I guess it still works!
- admax88qqq 4y ago... I too test the happy path once and assume there's no problems.
- seydor 4y agoIt's on Autopilot
- seibelj 4y agoI guess the legendary amount of innovation Twitter has been known for will be reduced
- omgwtfbyobbq 4y agoThings will likely work less well in various ways.
- luckylion 4y agoThe sign-in-or-sign-up nag screen has already stopped appearing as quickly, the end is nigh.
- edgyquant 4y agoI’m betting on the opposite. If it doesn’t completely fail just trying anything is likely an improvement. I’ve never spoken to anyone who liked Twitter. It’s always just a means to an ends
- systemicdanna 4y agoAgreed. He probably didn’t let go many infra people. If some product teams were reduced in size and will become slower at butchering the UI, the user will only benefit.
- suprjami 4y ago
- kaesar14 4y agoYes especially considering it’s pronounced the exact same way.
- poszlem 4y agoThis is BBC. People expect it to use British English and will complain if they don't use it.
- ss108 4y agoExcept this wouldn't amount to the BBC failing to use British English; they are quoting someone else's written text...
- Eupraxias 4y agoFair enough. I'm an American born American who relishes language studies. I prefer British English in most cases. In this case, to me, using [sic] reads as preposterous. I kind of like it, but it's definitely unnecessary, right?
- seydor 4y agoWhy do they use the non-british word 'sic' then?
- Apocryphon 4y agoThe thing is, isn't this an universal phenomenon across the entire tech industry over the past 2-3 years? After the initial pandemic onset panic, company valuations skyrocketed and so did the demand to increase headcount. Isn't everyone at risk, except for those at companies that have already had layoffs?
- adam_arthur 4y agoYes, it was. Times have changed though, the smart ones are getting with the program. The others will have their share price obliterated
- danielmarkbruce 4y agoNot just the past 2-3 years. Many people at google semi-half-joked-not-joked that they could cut half the staff without a single dollar of revenue disappearing back in 2014-2015 time period.
- pyb 4y agoThe question is : why did these companies hire massively in the pandemic era ? It was clear that cautiousness was the best policy. Not in hindsight, but even at the time. Did tech CEOs suffer from a kind of mass hallucination?
- jurassic 4y agoI don't think that's clear at all. Social media is a competitive game and if all your competitors are staffing up, you're going to get left in the dust if you don't do the same. Cheap money was helicoptering from the sky in those days, so why not?
- sf4lifer 4y agoIn the last decade, the (stock and private) markets rewarded growth (not profitability). Operators were not compensated on efficiency or revenue per employee. There was no expectations of dividends or profit. As a matter of fact massive spend for growth drove stock prices higher so that's what everyone did. Jack was complicit in this ultimately bearing responsibility however this was the status quo in the growth at all costs era of tech.
- ChildOfChaos 4y agoSadly seems to be the way of the world in general. Growth at all costs. Heck even if you grow at a smaller percentage of what you grew by the year before the markets get spooked and the headlines of doom begin, even for companies doing insane numbers.
- philshem 4y ago“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” —- Edward Abbey
- rogers65 4y agoNot the way of the world, but the way of the world in a zero interest rate environment. Every tech company hires aggressively in a low interest rate environment for two reasons. 1. Money is cheap 2. Bonds return negative yields so all the money flows into risk assets that grow aggressively. Profits don't matter in this environment. Those that weren't in the workforce prior to 2008 will now learn the importance of profit as interest rates rise to rates we haven't seen in decades.
- beebmam 4y agoShould we expect H-1B visas to stop being renewed?
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y agoIf you look at it dispassionately, it would seem that a lot of colleages would be rightly worried about this happening.
- ergocoder 4y ago"I regret hiring most of you." basically. Not the best wording. He should have said he failed to grow revenue and the macro-economy wasn't as expected.
- ALittleLight 4y agoI think he should've said whatever he believes is the truth. I have no idea if he did or didn't do that though.
- ergocoder 4y ago> I think he should've said whatever he believes is the truth. Not really. If your words would hurt other feelings with no upside, it's better left unsaid. In this case, his words can be interpreted in a bad way easily. The bar for good and unambiguous communication for a 7000-company CEO is very high.
- johanvts 4y agoEven if you believe that premise, it seems there might be a lot of if upside in knowing the truth here.
- ALittleLight 4y agoWe should not be so sensitive as a society that we expect people in powerful and significant positions to conceal truths to protect feelings. Dorsey is, possibly, giving a candid thought on a major American company that he has unique insight into - that's worthwhile. If Dorsey was ranking employees by the pleasantness of their odor or by how attractive he personally found them - I'd agree. No value, even if true, it could hurt feelings and you shouldn't say it. That's not what this is though.
- ergocoder 4y agoI disagree. I expect more from a CEO of a billion dollar company to communicate more precisely.
- sytelus 4y agoThese consequences-free "I take responsibility" among C-suits is becoming too common. if he really felt responsible for screwing up as CEO, he should be splitting the millions he had received in compensation with people who are laid off. Show some action instead of just making appearances.
- concordDance 4y agoThey're already getting three months severance.
- sytelus 4y agoIn this market 3 month severance is not much. Much of the value of these big tech jobs is in unvested stocks that these people will lose entirely (i.e. rewards for most of the work they did during almost half decade) while CEO who screwed up in overhiring walks away with golden parachutes and full vesting. Every big and small tech has now hiring freeze. Many of these people moved to expensive SF area with their entire family.
- rowanG077 4y agoIt's been like this forever. High ranks (be it politically or in business) have little to no real responsibility/accountability.
- ergocoder 4y agoIt's because the employment contract specifies it that way. If the employment contract says "If you fail, you will need to return all of your compensations", then nobody would agree to work for you. Now they agree to work for you under the assumption that they will not return what they've earned... then we want to reverse that retrospectively. The contract was signed years ago, but well we are going to change it now. Please return every penny we paid you. That's kinda fucked up to be honest.
- rowanG077 4y ago
- yakubin 4y agoIt's funny how BBC annotated American/Oxford spellings with "[sic]".
- tptacek 4y agoI mean, I'm sure there's an element of truth to that, but I also wonder whether post-Musk Twitter is just on a different footing and trajectory than public Twitter. Public Twitter had to concern itself with Twitter's competitive position among the other tech media giants. It made sense for them to be doing a bunch of research projects, AI, AI ethics, moonshot platform projects, and product launches that might not pay off for 4+ years but also served as competitive hedges against, I don't know, TikTok or Substack or whatever. Post-Musk Twitter can't really afford to do any of that stuff, at least not on spec. They're running (I think by necessity?) a classic private equity playbook here: figure out the core revenue drivers and strip out everything that isn't directly associated with them. Bring costs sharply down, wait for revenue to stabilize, pay off the loans, and then figure out what to do with a much more "efficient" company? All this just to say: I'm sure they probably did grow Twitter too big. But even accounting for that, private Twitter just has different needs than public Twitter, right? (The layoffs appear to have been done cruelly and capriciously.)
- Y_Y 4y agoHas Musk left already‽
- Godel_unicode 4y agoI assume they meant post Musk acquisition
- mathlover2 4y agoI agree with one point of exception: Saying post-Musk Twitter is using the private equity playbook assumes that Twitter is being handled according to a playbook rather than being done by an incompetent narcissistic sociopath who hyped his way to being a very overvalued) billionaire, bought a company on impulse, and is now has to make more money off Twitter than is likely even possible in order to pay back said loans.
- tptacek 4y agoI don't like him either, but I don't subscribe to the Musk model where he's simply a chaos agent with no regard to consequences of any sort. He didn't want Twitter and got locked into buying it after losing a game of chicken, and now he's scrambling to make some sense of what he's got.
- llimos 4y agoSide-question: Is it normal to write [sic] after an alternative but not wrong spelling of a word? Jack is American, and uses American English, which I guess is against the BBC's style guide, but "I realize [sic]" seems to be going too far?
- Calvin02 4y agoI’d imagine that they have some pedantic readers who’d get upset with the misspelling.
- LordOfWatford 4y agoI reckon the pendants would number less than those who think it unnecessary and verging on xenophobic.
- foxhill 4y agoit's to indicate that the text quote is as-written (which may not necessarily be a _mistake_), and from the perspective of the BBC, "realize" isn't alternative, it's just wrong :)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- unsupp0rted 4y agoI suppose it means "we know you're going to notice this isn't how you'd spell it, and rest assured it's intentional".
- pvg 4y agoYes it is normal. It doesn't necessarily imply the wrongness. It's an unusual spelling in British English and the annotation tells you the spelling is reproduced verbatim rather than someone at BBC mistyping it.
- RaoulP 4y agoSame for "apologize [sic]", in the same paragraph. That's a bizarre decision by the journalist or editor. Will they [sic] every ou vs. o and s vs z? I'd either ignore it, or just change the quote to British English, I assume that's not going too far. edit: apparently it is going too far. Quoting across the Atlantic is a common issue faced by writers, and it seems the consensus is that you always just quote letter-for-letter.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ddmma 4y agoWe got traction but will figure out the profit for later time. That is Twitter’s legacy that is going to change from the foundation. Jack is an idealist
- systemicdanna 4y agoThis strategy did not start with Twitter and won’t end with this acquisition. Tech startups will keep betting on capturing the market first and getting to profit later. Not sure this specific fact makes Jack an idealist.
- ddmma 4y agoThe fact that this was prolonged for a decade seemed like unfinished puzzle. Every founder should have a vision, idealist in good sense, numbers don’t matter sometimes.
- systemicdanna 4y agoFor sure. It is frustrating to watch Twitter struggle so much with introducing meaningful monetization streams. Saying that, things probably seem simpler and more obvious from the outside. Jack is an idealist in a very stubborn way. He sacrificed too much of Twitter’s reputation and neutrality by fighting for questionable causes.
- davesque 4y agoI feel like the whole Musk buyout debacle has shown us once again how lacking all of our emperors are in the wardrobe department. So tell me again why we have to make headlines out of their shower thoughts.
- lob_it 4y agoThe linked article has an interesting "out" for WARN protocols using an "unforeseeable business circumstances" exception, such as the "free get out liability" ace twitter/musk received with advertisers pressing pause. If the irony of that just dawned on someone, you're welcome :) A simple analysis of day 1 to day 3 operations makes that a quick thinking decision. "https://www.fisherphillips.com/news-insights/fair-warning-covid-19-warn-act-class-action-filed-against-hooters.html https://www.fisherphillips.com/news-insights/fair-warning-co...
- moomin 4y agoThis is just the “weird nerds” meme with a very rich weird nerd.
- cma 4y agoWasn't the company a wild success? They sold out at peak bubble pricing. With a slower growing company could they have dumped it off on someone for as much? The large number of employees even made it more enticing for an acquirer with bad timing who figured he could cut his way to profitability.
- systemicdanna 4y agoThis situation for Twitter is closer to winning a lottery than to being a wild success. The fact that they locked in the offer at that price point and then the market crashed is pure luck (with a ton of work from smart lawyers), but it’s not the result of some brilliant long term strategy.
- dadoge 4y agoHot take: Jack is just trying to help Elon not get in any legal trouble by saying this. This very much absolves Elon of wrongdoing in any legal arena Jack has not been the CEO for about a year now, a 50% reduction is hardly due to his choices to expand over a year ago.
- voisin 4y agoHonest question: why does anyone care what Jack Dorsey says anymore?
- flashgordon 4y agoOh hey look everybody Jack took responsibility and apologized. We can all get closure and move on now. How is this cloying ownership and rounds of apologies still a thing? Gaaaaaah this is so infuriating!