I had an amazing day at Upfront’s Summit in Los Angeles.

Mark Suster has put hundreds of venture capitalists and limited partners together to network and share. I am so glad I came. I got to see so many friends and make some new ones. Mark and his team have done an incredible job.

I organize conferences so I know how hard it is to put one together.

The content was also fantastic.

To open the show today Dick Costolo was interviewed and shared a regret about his tenure at Twitter:

Growth is a bitch.

Like money and power, people will do almost anything find it, get it, hoard it and keep it.

Rules that curb abuse, slow growth. Period.

Twitter did not want to mess with growth and I doubt I could have won an executive or board battle at the height of Twitter’s growth with my views on abuse.

Personally, I rarely get abused/harassed on Twitter. Twitter invented the ‘block’ button which is like a shield. But, the digital trolls know how to beat the system. They come in wave after wave after wave and if you are a target, life on Twitter can be miserable.

Twitter knows it so it was nice to hear Dick say that they know it and should have done more.

At Stocktwits, I have been insistent on ‘zero tolerance’. If we see abuse we step in. It’s impossible to stop digital abuse, especially in real time, but you have to be have hard lines and you can’t give the trolls an inch.

The whole ‘free speech’ defense used by the abusers is nonsense, especially on a pseudononymous platform.

Private digital platforms (non government owned) are a privilege, not a right.

I am optimistic that we are the darkest days of digital abuse and the other side of it should be magical.