The author is right that money can correct a lot of wrongs, and that’s what we will probably see in Twitter for a while. One of the problems with cutting 80% o

The author is right that money can correct a lot of wrongs, and that’s what we will probably see in Twitter for a while. One of the problems with cutting 80% of the workforce even if you know which 20% is useful and manage to only spare them is that competitors exist. You don’t just need people to make sure your product works, but you also need people to make sure your product runs slightly better than every competitor. An existing social graph is a significant moat, but it’s not foolproof. The problem is that if we assume that the 20% useful people can be identified perfectly, then someone else could build a company that has 25% more useful people than the company that just cut 80% of its staff and probably out deliver you for long enough that they’d be able to easily chip into the moat you’ve built fairly quickly. As an aside, the Pareto principle is often misused and isn’t close to being any sort of law. It applies in vastly fewer situations that it doesn’t apply in…try applying the Pareto principle to the floor of any manufacturing facility, for example.