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> The amount raised contained numerical references to marijuana and oral sex: $420.69 million raised from 69 investors. An article published by one of FTX’s inv

> The amount raised contained numerical references to marijuana and oral sex: $420.69 million raised from 69 investors. An article published by one of FTX’s investors, Sequoia, called that fundraising a “meme round,” referring to the embedded jokes. Is Sequoia going to need to rebrand itself after this? Sure does raise some questions about their judgement and professionalism. Hey Investors, we're raising a round of almost half a billion dollars and the theme is...

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
That freakin novel of a fawning profile of SBF on their website sure hasn't aged well.
threeseed 4y ago
Sequoia was also backing Musk's takeover of Twitter. Not sure if they ended up investing. If they did then their record is looking pretty poor right now.
- 0xy 4y ago
  Twitter is at peak MAUs and according to previous financial statements should be cash flow positive after personnel changes. Seems like they invested in a business which was almost immediately switched into a profitable enterprise on an upward trajectory. What am I missing? Or are you making a prediction that is the opposite of available evidence?
  - LeafItAlone 4y ago
    Peak MAU means nothing if they can’t keep investors or get those people to pay (to make up for the advertisers they may be losing). It is likely at peak MAU because a lot of people want to be “in” during what they _think_ is the crash (think of crypto a year ago when it was a peak, but now it’s way down). Current MAU may or may not be reflective of MAU in a month or two since the reason is so weird. The old financial statements are probably meaningless at this point given how much has changed and how many advertisers have reportedly pulled out. Not saying that I think Twitter will “fail” or even that it won’t be profitable. Just saying your metric is likely meaningless and is just a snapshot of a weird time.
    - 0xy 4y ago
      Isn't your metric of "some advertisers pulled out" meaningless? There's actually zero evidence revenue declined at all. Ads still seem to be running, and they have more eyeballs than ever. Someone's paying. If salary expenses are halved, the company is cash flow positive next year. I guess what I'm saying is, I'd rather trust financial statements than CNN articles about how Twitter is supposedly burning to the ground (CNN is a direct competitor and has a conflict of interest).
      - LeafItAlone 4y ago
        You’re right, it is. I am also just basing my “metrics” off rumors and company statements. Which is really all we have at this point.
    - KennyBlanken 4y ago
      Advertisers the "may" be losing? They're canceling their spending in droves if you google the subject...
      - LeafItAlone 4y ago
        They are pausing them. Advertisers have paused spending many times on various platforms and more often than not, return. Time will tell what happens here.
      - misiti3780 4y ago
        Really? https://twitter.com/eglyman/status/1590385689895784448 https://twitter.com/eglyman/status/1590385689895784448
        HDThoreaun 4y ago
        That's from 10 days ago. The Eli Lily account which kicked off the ad exodus was 5 days ago.
        LeafItAlone 4y ago
        “$10B in anonymized, aggregated business transaction volume each year by Ramp customers” 1. That’s basically nothing compared to the big names. 2. This tweet is intentionally using _rates_ but I don’t see absolute values. If I spend $2 vs $1, I’ve doubled my spending, but I also haven’t really spent anything. Last week my coffee spend was about 700% higher than usual! Because I bought a single coffee from a coffee shop instead of making it at home. 3. This sample seems to be just of a very small number of small companies (which are this tryramp’s customers). Again, this is pretty useless on its own. Especially when we have statements that large companies are pausing spending. 4. If big names are pulling out, the ad space may be cheaper (due to less demand) at which point they are giving more to Twitter but Twitter is still taking in less. We don’t know either way, but that tweet gives no real information on its own.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    > What am I missing? The fact that a massive number of high-profile advertisers have announced they've stopped buying ads? > > Audi of America, United Airlines, General Mills, General Motors, Volkswagen, Modelez International (which makes popular products like Oreos), and Omnicon (which manages advertising for brands like McDonalds and Apple) So two of the world's largest automakers, the world's richest computer company, one of the largest food companies in the US, the largest fast food chain in the world....yeah, I'm sure they'll keep right on with that "upward trajectory" with revenue falling like a lead balloon. ...and not just because of a risk of hate speech and other not-brand-safe stuff happening, but because they rightly feel that the company losing half its staff (the half too stupid to leave) has serious implications for almost every aspect of Twitter's operations, including minor little things like cybersecurity. Who's going to be doing pentesting? Who's going to be patching exploits in the mobile clients and website? Who's monitoring for things like bot networks registering fake accounts (remember when Elon was concerned about that?) and pushing tweets full of political, economic, or social misinformation? Dollars to donuts twitter starts having problems with shit like tiktok's endlessly destructive "challenges." Hell, advertisers are probably wondering whether they'll even get a bill or know where to send a check. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/twitter-mayhem-staff-cuts-have-advertisers-bailing-on-the-platform/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/twitter-mayhem-s... That it's not "personnel changes" but thousands of their best employees leaving? (It's not the worst people that leave.) That it took barely 48 hours for Musk to cause a major outage, accidentally killing the services that handled 2FA because he thought "bah, all these silly microservices" That Tesla stock was at ~$380 this year and is now at half that? In less than a month it's gone from $230 to $180.2
    - kromem 4y ago
      Omnicom is a much bigger deal than those two clients. It's the second largest advertising holding company in the world. That's the biggest deal of all the names quoted by a LARGE degree. They have 5,000 different clients.
    - 0xy 4y ago
      >That it's not "personnel changes" but thousands of their best employees leaving? If you pick a random 50% of people from ANY company, only 10-20% of that group are actually high performers. As Musk pointed out, there were several developers laid off who wrote zero lines of code in three months. Sorry, but that's unacceptable and is not indicative of high performance. Top performers may write 1,000 lines of quality code per quarter, but it's never zero. If you're writing docs all day, you're useless. Also consider the leaked Project Veritas videos of a Twitter senior engineer admitting he worked only 4 hours a week. The "top performers" laid off you defend literally work less than 1 day a week.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    Some advertisers have pulled out, and running a break-even business sitting on a war chest is different than running a business that has lots of loans in a high interest rate environment.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    if Musk's personnel changes at Twitter work out, I'm betting other .com's are going to look at the same ideas. "Sign up for hard work or leave" is a pretty compelling way to cut payroll, especially as there is industry-wide antiwork grumbling (meaning, by both workers and management). Of course, if the gamble doesn't work out, it will have been a self inflicted wound.
  - lost_tourist 4y ago
    I think this quarter might look good for twitter with 70-80% of their employees gone but next isn't going to look so great after there is no one to fix bugs and add features.
adam_arthur 4y ago
At the very least it calls into question their due diligence process. I mean how did dozens of big investment firms put money into this thing without even seeing the balance sheet? Which would have immediately exposed them as fraudulent

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago

That freakin novel of a fawning profile of SBF on their website sure hasn't aged well.

threeseed 4y ago

Sequoia was also backing Musk's takeover of Twitter. Not sure if they ended up investing. If they did then their record is looking pretty poor right now.

0xy 4y ago
Twitter is at peak MAUs and according to previous financial statements should be cash flow positive after personnel changes. Seems like they invested in a business which was almost immediately switched into a profitable enterprise on an upward trajectory. What am I missing? Or are you making a prediction that is the opposite of available evidence?
- LeafItAlone 4y ago
  Peak MAU means nothing if they can’t keep investors or get those people to pay (to make up for the advertisers they may be losing). It is likely at peak MAU because a lot of people want to be “in” during what they _think_ is the crash (think of crypto a year ago when it was a peak, but now it’s way down). Current MAU may or may not be reflective of MAU in a month or two since the reason is so weird. The old financial statements are probably meaningless at this point given how much has changed and how many advertisers have reportedly pulled out. Not saying that I think Twitter will “fail” or even that it won’t be profitable. Just saying your metric is likely meaningless and is just a snapshot of a weird time.
  - 0xy 4y ago
    Isn't your metric of "some advertisers pulled out" meaningless? There's actually zero evidence revenue declined at all. Ads still seem to be running, and they have more eyeballs than ever. Someone's paying. If salary expenses are halved, the company is cash flow positive next year. I guess what I'm saying is, I'd rather trust financial statements than CNN articles about how Twitter is supposedly burning to the ground (CNN is a direct competitor and has a conflict of interest).
    - LeafItAlone 4y ago
      You’re right, it is. I am also just basing my “metrics” off rumors and company statements. Which is really all we have at this point.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    Advertisers the "may" be losing? They're canceling their spending in droves if you google the subject...
    - LeafItAlone 4y ago
      They are pausing them. Advertisers have paused spending many times on various platforms and more often than not, return. Time will tell what happens here.
    - misiti3780 4y ago
      Really? https://twitter.com/eglyman/status/1590385689895784448 https://twitter.com/eglyman/status/1590385689895784448
      - HDThoreaun 4y ago
        That's from 10 days ago. The Eli Lily account which kicked off the ad exodus was 5 days ago.
      - LeafItAlone 4y ago
        “$10B in anonymized, aggregated business transaction volume each year by Ramp customers” 1. That’s basically nothing compared to the big names. 2. This tweet is intentionally using _rates_ but I don’t see absolute values. If I spend $2 vs $1, I’ve doubled my spending, but I also haven’t really spent anything. Last week my coffee spend was about 700% higher than usual! Because I bought a single coffee from a coffee shop instead of making it at home. 3. This sample seems to be just of a very small number of small companies (which are this tryramp’s customers). Again, this is pretty useless on its own. Especially when we have statements that large companies are pausing spending. 4. If big names are pulling out, the ad space may be cheaper (due to less demand) at which point they are giving more to Twitter but Twitter is still taking in less. We don’t know either way, but that tweet gives no real information on its own.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  > What am I missing? The fact that a massive number of high-profile advertisers have announced they've stopped buying ads? > > Audi of America, United Airlines, General Mills, General Motors, Volkswagen, Modelez International (which makes popular products like Oreos), and Omnicon (which manages advertising for brands like McDonalds and Apple) So two of the world's largest automakers, the world's richest computer company, one of the largest food companies in the US, the largest fast food chain in the world....yeah, I'm sure they'll keep right on with that "upward trajectory" with revenue falling like a lead balloon. ...and not just because of a risk of hate speech and other not-brand-safe stuff happening, but because they rightly feel that the company losing half its staff (the half too stupid to leave) has serious implications for almost every aspect of Twitter's operations, including minor little things like cybersecurity. Who's going to be doing pentesting? Who's going to be patching exploits in the mobile clients and website? Who's monitoring for things like bot networks registering fake accounts (remember when Elon was concerned about that?) and pushing tweets full of political, economic, or social misinformation? Dollars to donuts twitter starts having problems with shit like tiktok's endlessly destructive "challenges." Hell, advertisers are probably wondering whether they'll even get a bill or know where to send a check. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/twitter-mayhem-staff-cuts-have-advertisers-bailing-on-the-platform/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/twitter-mayhem-s... That it's not "personnel changes" but thousands of their best employees leaving? (It's not the worst people that leave.) That it took barely 48 hours for Musk to cause a major outage, accidentally killing the services that handled 2FA because he thought "bah, all these silly microservices" That Tesla stock was at ~$380 this year and is now at half that? In less than a month it's gone from $230 to $180.2
  - kromem 4y ago
    Omnicom is a much bigger deal than those two clients. It's the second largest advertising holding company in the world. That's the biggest deal of all the names quoted by a LARGE degree. They have 5,000 different clients.
  - 0xy 4y ago
    >That it's not "personnel changes" but thousands of their best employees leaving? If you pick a random 50% of people from ANY company, only 10-20% of that group are actually high performers. As Musk pointed out, there were several developers laid off who wrote zero lines of code in three months. Sorry, but that's unacceptable and is not indicative of high performance. Top performers may write 1,000 lines of quality code per quarter, but it's never zero. If you're writing docs all day, you're useless. Also consider the leaked Project Veritas videos of a Twitter senior engineer admitting he worked only 4 hours a week. The "top performers" laid off you defend literally work less than 1 day a week.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Some advertisers have pulled out, and running a break-even business sitting on a war chest is different than running a business that has lots of loans in a high interest rate environment.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  if Musk's personnel changes at Twitter work out, I'm betting other .com's are going to look at the same ideas. "Sign up for hard work or leave" is a pretty compelling way to cut payroll, especially as there is industry-wide antiwork grumbling (meaning, by both workers and management). Of course, if the gamble doesn't work out, it will have been a self inflicted wound.
- lost_tourist 4y ago
  I think this quarter might look good for twitter with 70-80% of their employees gone but next isn't going to look so great after there is no one to fix bugs and add features.

adam_arthur 4y ago

At the very least it calls into question their due diligence process. I mean how did dozens of big investment firms put money into this thing without even seeing the balance sheet? Which would have immediately exposed them as fraudulent