Twitter CEO Dick Costolo got the top job about a month and a half ago. Since then, he's been working on the humongous deal the company announced yesterday, a $200 million investment from Kleiner Perkins and others at a $3.7 billion valuation.
Hope Dick knows that was the easy part.
Here's what he has to do next:
Build a team. The noise we're hearing out of Twitter is that former CEO Ev Williams's "people" are eying the door. Already, Ev's product guy, Jason Goldman quit this month. Dick's next big job will be hiring a staff of senior people who can help him figure out a product and business strategy for Twitter going forward – and then execute it.
We suggest Dick follow Facebook's lead and start gobbling up smaller, almost-failed startups in order to hire their excellent people. Twitter already did this with iPhone app-maker Tweetie, earlier this year. We'd suggest the Instagram people next. (But they're probably not interested in selling.)
Develop a strategy for making-money. People at Twitter still don't have any idea how the thing will make money. The current ad products are generating precious little revenue. Fortunately, they've finally settled on what Twitter is. Insiders now view it as a "publishing platform." That means Twitter will probably make money through in-stream advertising – an already launched ad-product that hasn't really been built out to scale yet. By the way, you won't find the word "search" anywhere on Twitter's just-launched business page for a reason; it's not viewed as the ultimate solution anymore.
The good news here for Dick (and his new investors) is that Twitter is huge and getting huger all the time. That's not a bad a place to start building a business. Remember, people were worried about Facebook's revenue a couple years ago, and now there's talk of a $2 billion 2010.
If things don't work out, Twitter can always turn to Google, which is desperate for a social strategy and already tried to buy Twitter for $4 billion.
Want to know how Twitter went from a $7,500 domain to a $3.7 billion company? Here's the story.
Join the conversation about this story »
See Also:
- The Best Tweets About Twitter's CEO News
- Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Won't Sell
- Twitter Is Now Worth Almost TWICE As Much As The New York Times
Twitter To Hire Like Crazy, Finally Build A Real Business
No comments:
Post a Comment