But what if the best path for Twitter, as a service, is for Twitter the company to abandon that dream? What if becoming a $25 billion, $50 billion or $100 billion world-swallowing Internet giant just isn’t in the cards for a niche service like Twitter?
Perhaps there’s more promise in a future as an independent but private company; as a small and sustainable division of some larger tech or media conglomerate; or even as a venture that operates more like a nonprofit foundation.
.. Instead of aiming for something like Facebook, Twitter could mold itself on some other template for success. It could become a venture like Wikipedia, run by a nonprofit that depends on donations, or a business like The New York Times Company, a publicly traded enterprise controlled by a family that has a preference for journalistic ambition.
.. But because Twitter is an accessible, real-time network that has become the nerve center of the world’s journalists, politicians, activists and agitants, it has, for better or worse, demonstrated an unrivaled capacity to influence real things in the real world.
Consider the Arab Spring, #blacklivesmatter or “Make America Great Again.”
“Twitter has created space for the amplification of the voice of marginalized people in ways that we have not seen before,” said DeRay McKesson, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. “It has redefined our understanding of the public sphere to be more inclusive and more accessible and to have substantive impact on real-world events.”
How Larry Page’s Obsessions Became Google’s Business
People who have worked with Mr. Page say that he tries to guard his calendar, avoiding back-to-back meetings and leaving time to read, research and see new technologies that interest him.
.. Leslie Dewan, a nuclear engineer who founded a company that is trying to generate cheap electricity from nuclear waste, also had a brief conversation with Mr. Page at the Solve For X conference.
She said he questioned her on things like modular manufacturing and how to find the right employees.
“He doesn’t have a nuclear background, but he knew the right questions to ask,” said Dr. Dewan, chief executive of Transatomic Power. “‘Have you thought about approaching the manufacturing in this way?’ ‘Have you thought about the vertical integration of the company in this way?’ ‘Have you thought about training the work force this way?’ They weren’t nuclear physics questions, but they were extremely thoughtful ways to think about how we could structure the business.”
Sweaty January and how gyms make money
- The retail shop has more people per square foot, doesn’t it, even in a snapshot?
- Now here comes the real killer — the people in the gym are likely to be staying for at least an hour per visit, while the majority of the people in the shop will wander in, buy something and leave over a period of no more than twenty minutes. The footfall has to be measured on a per hour basis, and, on this basis, gymnasia are amazingly inefficient in terms of the usage of space.
But they are so inefficient in terms of generating the customer turnover that it’s really difficult to make the fixed cost economics work, because the amount you’d need to charge per ‘sale’ would end up being beyond the means of most of the users. Unless … unless you could push the purchases per visit much higher than 100 per cent, by having people paying for the gymnasium services while not actually using them. Hence, Sweaty January.
People inside the Valley are pitching their growth tactics, not ideas
“success goes to the fastest, not the first” [Link] [Tweet]
Having sat in countless pitches around the world, this particular idea is the least understood outside of Silicon Valley.
While everyone outside the Valley pitches their app/idea/concept, people inside the Valley are pitching their growth tactics.
How do we share that concept with more founders and investors outside of the major tech hubs?