Twitter is a great example of fairly talentless people with large egos somehow finding success, and mistakenly thinking it is due to their merits. If Dorsey was going to make a good social network, it would have happened 5-8 years ago. It’s a lot like Etsy - someone had drive, funding and concepts to make a project at the right time. However, they were not actually good at running a business and had no idea what the hell they were doing socially or societally.

You know that Jack Dorsey also founded another successful company in Square, right? Pretty hard to argue that he lucked into both of those things.

I get your point, but seriously, go read Nick Bilton's book about the early history or Twitter. From the time of Odeo to Jack coming back, none of the people in charge of this company or the board had a consistent idea of what they were building, an appropriate roadmap to get there, or how to monetize effectively relative to other social networks. This happened for years.

Square is amazing, but a B2B, modern Point-of-Sales for SMBs is an entirely different beast than a free, B2C social network. Jack can be great at one, and terrible at the other, at the same time. These are not related.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to argue here. The simple fact is the guy created two deca-corn companies. That basically completely invalidates any ex-post arguments by some author about the quality of his management. What I mean by that is that if a thing succeeds spectacularly, maybe you should question your premises before questioning its methodology. The process that appears to you to be disorganized and aimless produced Twitter. It obviously did something right.

I don't know what I'm talking about, but judging from the fact that Ev Williams founded or co-founded Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, perhaps he was the real visionary behind the idea. That's three different "write stuff online and share it" startups. He clearly understands social media and blogging and micro-blogging. Maybe Jack is more of the 'biz guy'?

From what I’ve read, Ev deserves more credit.

My take on the founding of twitter is that you had a bunch of people and no clear leadership, and that different people had different opinions of what twitter should be. That ambiguity has undermined the platform from day one, no focus, no clear mission, no clear plan on how to spend their money.

Right, considering that Twitter in the early days was considered to be some sort of free SMS replacement that happened to show some messages publicly.

Jack Dorsey was hardly the brains behinds Twitter, he came back to run it, and he’s done a bad job.

Not really. Once he had VCs attention he could do what he wanted as he wasn't exactly starting from zero.

Because money is all that's needed for a successful company?

Funding, attention from VCs in terms of advice and contacts is an incredible asset and makes a whole world of difference.

I’m sorry but this is ridiculous.

You realize Square is a thriving, $31B public company at the time of this comment?

Starting a company is one thing. Creating the phenomenon that is Square is quite another.

It's not that ridiculous if you've ever listened to or read anything Jack Dorsey has had to say.

Let me get this straight: You think that the hard part of creating a billion dollar company is getting attention from VCs?

Yes, that’s right. Personal faith from funders is a significant contributor to getting funding, which is important for success.

It's a contributor to funding sure, but that's not what I asked.

The issue is, would a random person off the street be able to take VC seed money and turn it into a billion dollar business? The answer is obviously no. And they definitely wouldn't be able to do it twice.

A random person of the street? No. Somebody who did it once already and has all the experience and contacts? Far more likely. I would say the first time is a lot harder.

But that’s not the point... apparently you’re saying he deserves his success by merit. My opinion is that there are plenty of people of equal merits who didn’t start one of the top 3 social networks. I would attribute much of the success of Twitter and Facebook to chance.

> But that’s not the point... apparently you’re saying he deserves his success by merit. My opinion is that there are plenty of people of equal merits who didn’t start one of the top 3 social networks. I would attribute much of the success of Twitter and Facebook to chance.

How do you know? What evidence do you have of these imaginary other's merit?

It's pretty much one and the same until you go public.

What? So, you think that if you hand a million dollars in VC funding to any idiot off the street, they could create the next Square or Twitter?

It's not what I said but it's fairly obvious that money is like steroids. You can't turn a donkey into a race horse but any semi-competent person can be successful with enough cash injection and network to get good advice.

> You can't turn a donkey into a race horse but any semi-competent person can be successful with enough cash injection and network to get good advice.

You've obviously never actually started a company. Talk to me when you have. People with money flame out every day. A huge percentage of companies that do receive VC funding fail. Way, way more than half. An infinitesimal fraction of companies VCs invest in go on to be worth more than a billion dollars. An even smaller fraction of those go on to be worth more than 10 billion dollars. Jack Dorsey created two of them. There are only a handful of people on earth who have done that. And when I say a handful, I mean like you can literally count them on your hands.

If you are correct which you may well be then I can only conclude that he is very dishonest in how he portrays himself via his public persona.

There is an alternative explanation https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/australianz/speechless-mel...

Doesn't this run counter to even conventional wisdom about VC? 25-30% of all VC-backed startups liquidate all assets, and 75% return only the original investment.

https://www.inc.com/john-mcdermott/report-3-out-of-4-venture...

That is a consequence of two things. 1) the all or nothing approach to business that VC backed startups take and 2) the lack of quality network for many founders. It's why I specifically mentioned network for good advice. If you look at the patterns emerging from silicon valley with the PayPal mafia and even YC itself there is a clear advantage to be had from A) access to immense amounts of cash coupled with B) a network of people who have been there and done that. I find it very hard to believe that white upper middle class males are remarkable for their genius intellect as successful founder profiles would have you believe if looked at in isolation. From a purely critical perspective there is a wide range of intellect levels on display amongst unicorn founders.

So, again, to be clear, you believe that a person with access to:

A) A "network", i.e. is friends with talented people

And has access to:

B) "Immense amounts of cash". How much cash? 1 million? 10? 100?

Can easily earn a 10x-100x return on that money? You think turning 10 million into 100 million is easy? Do you know how many people are trying to do that? Do you have any idea how difficult that is even with access to a network and cash?

Money is extremely cheap. The biggest problem in silicon valley right now isn't access to capital - it's that there's too much capital chasing too few good ideas. VCs are desperate for something worth investing in, precisely because of how hard it is to create a good company.

You think it's not?

Erm...seriously? You believe that the hardest part of starting a billion dollar company is getting...funding? You think billion dollar companies primarily don't exist because nobody is funding them? It's hard for me to believe that you actually think that.

Give me a few billion and the ears of every venture capitalist and who knows, I might just make the most of my amazing natural talents.

I think it is more a case of being everything to everyone, and one size fits all just plain sux.

IMHO there is no Twitter problem, but there are specific Twitter niche problems. Twitter is trying to solve the problems of people who want to follow a sport with those who want to lead a culture war in the same way and with the same perspectives and expected outcomes. They are not just very different problem spaces, but fundamentally different cultures, with different expectations and rules, and making either group live with a compromise between their cultures leaves everyone unhappy.

Reddit sidesteps this to a degree, with subreddits, by everything being less personal, and with moderation of sub reddits. Twitter, being account based rather than topic based, can't manage that. Twitter is just Twitter - a singular entity used in non-singular ways and criticised as a singular entity from very specific and singular perspectives.

How do you fix that? No idea. My hope is that Machine learning can give us better filtering, because the problem with Twitter is that people are not brands, so if I follow a basketball coach, and he has a bugbear about an issue that annoys me, I either lose all of his tweets, or put up with off topic rants.

But then, thinking about it, I'm not sure if that is a bug or Twitter's key feature. Maybe Twitter only works because the poor filtering forces people to see what they don't want to, and that drives usage and, in a perverse way, a desire to use twitter. That's a dark timeline.

> Twitter is a prime example of A/B testing gone wrong.

A better way to express this is that if what you're trying to OPTIMIZE is wrong you're going to make an optimally poor product.

They're starting with really poor initial assumptions that things like more pageviews is always a good thing

Maybe you hate the idea of it becoming an interest-based network, and maybe I hate it, and maybe everybody on this site hates it, but we are a very very small speck of a subset of Twitter's active userbase.

They recently created (maybe not completely rolled out yet?) bookmarks, which work the way favourites did back in the day (but they are private).