[bkm]

Sad to hear. In an alternate timeline they would have accepted the $4B+ Twitter offer and had a nice exit along the way.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/07/twitter-said-to-have-held-...

The hard truth is software can't be patented and Twitter could copy the concept verbatim without paying them a penny.

[xwdv]

Every time I hear of another founder passing on a multi-billion dollar offer, I think back to Tom from MySpace and how he sold MySpace off for a lot of money and went on to live happily ever after. Smartest guy in the social media game.

[boeingUH60]

Wait till you hear about Jan Koum, who took over $10 billion from selling WhatsApp to Facebook and has become a prominent collector of mansions, superyachts, and rare Porsches [3].

1- https://www.dirt.com/gallery/moguls/tech/jan-koum-house-beve...

2- https://www.superyachtfan.com/yacht/moonrise/owner/

3- https://www.thedrive.com/news/26322/these-are-the-10-drool-w...

[benzible]

This is a viral "feelgood" story that keeps circulating but MySpace was a project within an existing company, eUniverse, later InterMix. Tom and Chris DeWolfe were employees of InterMix, not founders. Intermix was acquired by News Corp. for $580M. Not sure how much equity Tom ended up with. It certainly could have been enough to allow for a "normal" early retirement but I'm not even sure about that. I had some dealings with Brad Greenspan, the CEO of Intermix, after the MySpace sale. Presumably he had far more equity than Tom or Chris, and let's just say that he did not behave like someone who was financially secure.

[sixQuarks]

Mark Cuban did even better with broadcast.com. sold it for billions right at the beginning of the dotcom boom, bought a basketball team.

there was also a guy who sold a browser to Apple for over $100 million.

[matthewdgreen]

Hard to believe that Twitter was willing to offer $4B for a service they managed to recreate themselves for (presumably) a tiny fraction of that cost. Makes you wonder if all the AI panic right now is going to end up going the same way.

[gkoberger]

They weren't buying the technology, they were buying the community + creators on the platform.

This has nothing to do with AI at all. Clubhouse was a kinda cool social network that came out at exactly the right time during COVID. AI is something we've been working towards since the 50s, and over the next few years will change absolutely everything.

[chemmail]

Clubhouse is literally just software that artificially limited things to be popular by: 1. Limited users 2. Limited to iPhones. 3. Having no history or recording of conversations.

[satvikpendem]

I saw the $100 million series B for Pinecone and thought something similar, since vector databases are becoming more easily commodified, with Postgres already getting pgvector and pgANN.

[rchaud]

That's $4b in Twitter stock though. What would that even have been worth now, assuming they remained public?

[sosodev]

The owners would have gotten a nice exit. The employees would have probably ended up laid off anyway, right?

edit: actually looking at some posted salaries it seems some employees were given quite a lot of equity

[gkoberger]

At that time, I don't think so. It was an incredibly small team back then, and the CEO of Twitter at the time was Jack. It likely would have remained (somewhat) independent, at least in the short term, similar to Vine and Instagram. And given equity, I assume almost all employees would have become millionaires.

[dylan604]

Definitely under the new management team

[rvz]

There was no chance that Twitter (who already had periscope) would accept a $4B+ deal to buy Clubhouse.

In fact, it was very predictable as I said here before the acquisition talks that Twitter would push on with using Spaces instead of buying Clubhouse. [0]

The hard truth was that Clubhouse launched too slowly and even Twitter Spaces launched faster than Clubhouse to release their Android app. [1]

The invite system, slow release of the Android app caused them to lose steam to Twitter and Discord during the social audio race of 2021 at the time. [2]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26044382

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26705535

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26659374

[Prbeek]

Who launches an IOS first app in 2023? You are telling android users that they are not important

[nemo44x]

Never say no to your first billion. It's the hardest billion to make.

[nprateem]

Greed