According to TechCrunch, Twitter is poised to raise another $50-million – a move that will give it a $1-billion valuation. Given Twitter still has about $30-million in the bank and about 50 employees, why does Twitter need another $50-million othen than giving itself another five years of burn. Here are some ideas:
1. It’s going to hire an army of salespeople after finally deciding to embrace the reality that advertising will generate lots of revenue and, as a result, provide it with a business model.
2. Twitter will go on a spending spree, picking up all the cool and popular services such as Tweetdeck, TwitPic, Mr. Tweet and StockTwits. Howard Lindzon will become a Twitter employee, demand too many stock options, and be restructured.
3. It will aggressively move into the enterprise market, which will require Twitter to build a large consulting organization to meet demand and do customization work. In the process, Twitter will hammer Yammer.
4. Twitter will make another major investment in its infrastructure to handle strong growth. As well, it will make a make investment in technology such as anti-spam.
5. Biz Stone, Ev Williams and Jack Dorsey will give themselves huge raises to reflect their status as the rock stars of social media. They’ll use some of their Twitter Dollars to buy second-hand corporate jets from Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
6. Twitter will buy TechCrunch to move into the content business and, as important, guarantee itself even more coverage.
Any other suggestions?
5 Comments
I think we’re just beginning to see the value from Twitter and it’s such a big space that there will be room for more than a single player even as Facebook, Google, and others evolve. More thoughts here – http://bit.ly/J0Ep1, but to me this makes sense as a high risk, high reward bet by investors.
In terms of what they’ll do with the investment, one can only assume that it will include expansion of the capabilities of their service, improvement of the stability of the platform (which is desperately needed), and implementation of whatever model they’re choosing to drive towards in terms of growing a revenue stream.
Thanks for the insight. I'm particularly interested to see another service emerges to compete directly against Twitter, or whether other social media platforms evolve to go head-to-head.
I like "Twitter will hammer Yammer". It just rolls off the tongue.
Infrastructure totally. Spam system I don't see as something that needs a real large investment (but it would be nice).
Number 2 sounds likely as well, if you were going into the enterprise market would you sell them on Twitter, then tell them to use a bunch of 3rd party unsecure/untrusted services to handle all the rich media interactions and mobile access? Probably not. They would probably want it to all be branded "Twitter".
Such a informative news i have come to know about the twitter and it is great for the project of twitter to have the $50 millions of amount to spend in the growth of the twitter plans….
I think Twitter will just keep on doing what it's already doing: exploring a valuable path … although it doesn't quite know what that path is or where it leads. Nothing new with this route not nothing wrong with it!