thrownaway

Well-said. I worked at a place that had layoffs awhile back and it was a real bummer, in part because of the layoffs, but also because management lied about the reasons for them and the health of the company at the subsequent all-hands. Once management switches to "lie openly and often" mode all the interpersonal behavior incentives change. Like you said, it becomes reasonable to be skeptical and distrustful...

It seems hard to argue that we outsiders know better that the "twitter-as-a-developer-platform" vision would have turned into a business much larger than what Twitter is now vs. the people on the actual board reviewing the finances. That seems to be what you're arguing. It seems that the people with all the numbers in front of them decided the returns would be better if they ditched the devs and sold brand ads. I'm just saying that's likely logical from the POV of VCs and their LPs.

You seem to be backing up what I was saying. The VC's LPs want huge returns. The VCs also want huge returns. The Twitter board chose the path it did to create those returns.

I know that's a very comforting line of thought but it rings a bit false. Without the funds from the LPs backing the VCs there would have been no Twitter and no ecosystem of apps to begin with.

I agree it sucks that Twitter shafted its developers, but the LPs wanted to get paid. They don't get into VC to back charities. The VCs are just repping their LPs when they do this stuff.

Good catch. Just deactivated that and a bunch of others. I set up a bunch of Twitter bots one night. Not my finest moment.

Thank you for the encouragement. What you wrote out here, is what I've been doing for the last year or so. I had some good friends tell me to just man up and figure out how to make what I thought would help sell my stuff. So I did. Were it not for this grant money, I'd keep on trucking along making incremental improvements to my business. Maybe in a year I'd get up to 9-10k/month. I suspect it's quite do-able.

But with this funding, there's an opportunity to do something grander while still running my little business on the side. That's new territory for me.

I've added my contact info to the top post at the end. Thanks.

Thanks! I'll give it a look.

I'm upvoting you for asking good questions.

-Not vaporware. I have a prototype I've been using to sell my own products. That's how I make $5k/month right now. The problem is that there's no way anyone other than me could use the code I cobbled together to do what I do. Heck, it's a pain for me for me to do it. I have to edit a few text files and swap some arrays around each time I make a sale.

-Team. This is a good point. Had I applied to something like Y-Combinator they would have said to come back when I have some technical founders. The organization providing this grant does not have that sort of dev-centric culture however, so they did not ask this.

That's really as detailed as I feel comfortable getting. I've changed a few details in my post to further protect folks, but the facts are more or less as they're stated.