[undefined3840]

It’s pretty disappointing. Their share price has been completely flat since IPO. I’m surprised shareholders have not revolted against Jack being a part time CEO. Clearly there needs to be some dedicated focus to clean up the app. So much potential to be so much better.

[adventured]

> It’s pretty disappointing. Their share price has been completely flat since IPO. I’m surprised shareholders have not revolted against Jack being a part time CEO.

It's not disappointing, it's amazing that it's worth $24 billion now. A fair value is less than half that, and even at a 50% reduction that'd be at a obscenely generous 30-40 PE.

The premise of the outcome being disappointing supposes that there is anything that could have reasonably been done to meaningfully bolster the share price during that time. As opposed to Twitter in reality being a mature, slow growth, second tier social network (which is what it will always be no matter who is running it).

Dorsey has done a great job fixing the operational disaster that Twitter was previously. The reason the Twitter stock has been flat since the IPO, is because it was comically overvalued at the IPO, not primarily because it has been operated poorly since then. Based on its operating results contrasted with now, Twitter should have been worth a minimum of 3/4 less at its IPO than it was (probably more reasonably it should have been worth ~90% less at IPO, and worth a minimum of 50% less right now).

2015 | revenue $2.2b | op expenses $1.9b | op income -$450m

2018 | revenue $3b | op expenses $1.6b | op income $453m

The disaster that Dorsey inherited, he fixed. Flipping operating income by a positive $900 million in three years. A spectacular outcome for a business doing $3b in sales.

Twitter is still an independent business today solely because of the operational improvements that Dorsey made to push Twitter into sound profitability. If not for that, Twitter would have already been forced into selling itself (which was a common discussion prior to the dramatic improvement in operational results).

Boost sales $800m and drop operating expenses by $300m. That's as good as it is going to get for Twitter as a business conceptually. There is no scenario where it's going to be the next giant social network or a juggernaut like Facebook, there is no high growth scenario waiting to be discovered. The very nature of Twitter guarantees that can never happen, it can't attract enough participants to that style of social broadcast & consumption.

[ghaff]

Yeah. Maybe it's a failure of imagination on my part but it feels like Twitter pretty much is what Twitter is. It's a broadcast medium for people for whom that has value, which is very useful for some of us and not at all useful for many others. People understandably get up in arms when Twitter tries to make the timeline too heavily sponsored. There's no reason to believe subscriptions would work without tanking the user numbers.

Twitter has actually already made changes that make it more useful for its core audience. Increased character counts etc., for example, has allowed Twitter to essentially replace microblogging--or even short-form blogging generally.

[ganzuul]

Twitter, Facebook, and similar might be of interest because of power and knowledge. If you are already super rich then making another billion or two may be less important than say analytics of how some popular uprising goes.

My pet theory is that Imgur is actually what the NSA needs all that diskspace in Utah for. :o)

[echelon]

Vine could have easily beaten TikTok. It was already well positioned.

[rahuldottech]

TikTok didn't even exist back then. It's essentially a Vine replacement + extras.

[fphilipe]

It has always amazed me how one can be a part time CEO, let alone CEO at two companies simultaneously. How would a board even allow that?

[emptybottle]

Part time board

[caymanjim]

CEOs aren't that busy. That's what they hire people for. The most successful people aren't running around like maniacs all the time. They are organized, they delegate, and they focus. How much of your day is spent actually working? How much is spent on pointless meetings, status updates, and busywork? CEOs don't have to waste their time on other peoples' priorities. Board members work far, far less. To them, it's the CEOs that look like they're busy all the time.