It’s a fun day if you are a shareholder of Twitter.
Asses were kicked. Names were taken. Hashtags were abused. A horrible ticker symbol was chosen $TWTR.
I mean Chris Sacca…wow. Evan Williams…booyah.
It’s no secret that I have sold almost all my shares. Just one of at least 100 assets I have sold too early in the last 12 months. I will keep making these mistakes as I ‘Get Off’ (like my blog says) and I won’t be as wealthy as I should have been. I take comfort in knowing that my kids just need loving, common sense, an iPhone and maybe my network. Max would likely piss any big bucks away in a candy scheme of his.
While everyone pours over the numbers, two stood out to me.
1. The $400 million in accumulated deficits is just so small for a Company with this global footprint and brand. You remember what Global Crossing paid for some wire on the floor of some ocean? How about all those CLEC’s?
2. Twitter needs a shitpile of cash and the faster the better. The ecosystem and API was their R&D pipeline for the first big stage of growth. That has mostly dried up. It’s up to the team now and acquisitions for the rest of the growth. That is just harder.
Hanging your valuation hat on any one metric or combination of metrics is just silly when a company has one of the great communication products of all time, is viral and global.
As for my remaining shares, I will take my certificates and hold them until the mobile product really disappoints. I think it’s getting way better.
Fun times.
I think the mobile product is excellent. It’s very fluid on all mobile platforms and it really just does what it needs to do with nothing superfluous. It doesn’t surprise me that 65% of advertising revenue is coming from mobile, nor does it scare me.
Twitter is a mobile-first product, it always has been. The experience is so much better on mobile. I personally can’t stand the web interface. Something about having to click each time to show new tweets really irks me, I think it is much better with a live update as you can get on products such as their Mac desktop app, which I think is also a great use of the Twitter platform. However, it seems that they are putting development of that product on the backburner. It has not been updated in a while and does not even have promoted tweets as far as I know.
I find it funny that all the talk has been about Facebook recently “figuring out” mobile. Twitter knows mobile. They need to figure out the desktop. I happen to think that Facebook currently sits in this awkward place where it does not excel on either the desktop site or the mobile app, because they are trying too hard to make both work at the same time and as a result have sacrificed both.
But hey, what do I know?