For IVP, Twitter investment came from the gut, and quickly
In late 2008, Institutional Venture Partners general partner Todd Chaffee had never heard of Twitter. Two months later, it was one of the company’s biggest backers.
Speaking at Venture Capital Journal’s Venture Alpha conference Thursday, Chaffee described how a then-junior Institutional Ventures employee, Jules Maltz, came back from a December event organized by the Churchill Club, an organization that holds talks in the San Francisco Bay area. He had heard Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter talk and was impressed, but couldn’t get through the throngs to talk with him afterwards.
Chaffee realized that Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson, whom he knew in part through a shared investment in research company comScore, was a member of Twitter’s board of directors, and called him up. “Yeah, we don’t need any more money,” he recalled Wilson saying. But Chaffee persisted, and Wilson arranged an introduction.
Institutional Ventures met with Williams and Biz Stone, another Twitter co-founder, in January 2009. Chaffee recalled dinner on a Wednesday night, due diligence on Thursday, and a deal coming together that Friday. It closed the following month.
“We understood it wasn’t just a weird social network,” Chaffee said. “We understood it was a platform.” He said ultimately, the decision to invest “came from the gut.”
Twitter has the potential to become a $50 billion company, Chaffee said at the Venture Alpha event.
Twitter’s Costolo: not quite footloose and fancy free
You’d think fast-racing Twitter would keep one eye firmly fixed on the rearview and side mirrors.
With the Internet landscape littered with also-rans — from pets.com to AskJeeves.com to a Facebook-steamrolled MySpace — you’d imagine the one thing overnight Internet microblogging phenomenon Twitter would fear the most would be to get displaced by an up-and-comer with the same alarming speed.
Not so. Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo insists no one at the company he has worked at for less than a year worries about two theoretical guys in a garage dreaming up the next social networking sensation.
“That’s a fun question. The way I think about that is the only thing to prevent us from being successful is us,” said the co-founder and CEO of FeedBurner, a digital content syndication platform that was acquired by Google in the summer of 2007. “This stuff that’s out of my control — I’ve got no hair and I’m too stressed out as is,” said the bespectacled, balding executive who joined Twitter in September.
“We all kind of make it our job to understand what the landscape looks like but we make it a point to reinforce to each other that we’re the people that are going to make Twitter successful, not the success or failure of the competition.”
That’s not to say Costolo and his company are luxuriating in a carefree existence. With more than $100 million raised from the likes of T. Rowe Price, Benchmark Capital and other investment names – granting the four-year old firm an eye-popping $1 billion valuation — tons of hype and the attendant hopes, Costolo is well aware of the need to meet some of those lofty expectations.
“We’ve got things to prove before we get there,” admitted Costolo, an amateur stage performer. “I constantly, constantly, constantly worry about what we need to do to be a self-sustaining business.”
For Sale: The House of Twitter
Movie star homes are big in LA.
In the San Francisco Bay Area though, the celebrity real estate scene is all about Internet bigwigs.
So it wasn’t a total shock when various tech blogs picked up the fact that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has put his 2-bedroom Berkeley hills cottage up for sale.
Stone actually announced the sale himself in a Tweet stating that it was “time to move,” despite his affection for the pad, and a link for prospective buyers to view the official listing.
The mid-century, modern-style cottage, designed by architect William Wurster, is “peaceful and stylistic,” reads the listing, not to mention decidedly more modest than the sprawling estates favored by some Bay Area tech barons.
It’s also much more affordable: Stone is asking $575,000 (a check on Zillow.com states that the 800-square foot property was last sold in January 2006 for $550,000).
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s expected underwear
Even at a difficult moment, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone managed to be witty.
It fell to Stone to write about the hacker who broke in to the company’s computers and stole sensitive business information. His blog on the matter — the official statement from Twitter — was dubbed “Twitter, even more open than we wanted.”
Someone sent a trove of the Twitter documents to the Silicon Valley website TechCrunch. Stone’s blog clarified puzzling statements on TechCrunch that seemed to point toward Google Docs as the problem. Said Stone: “This has nothing to do with any vulnerability in Google Apps which we continue to use.”
That must have come as a welcome relief at Google, which had been trying to explain the robustness of its security even as press agents for obscure security experts sent emails to suggest otherwise, so their clients would get a mention.
Stone said Twitter’s difficulties are an object lesson in the importance of having strong passwords. TechCrunch took some pleasure in asserting that the password for Twitter servers was the word “password.”
So, the public got its first titillating glance at privately held Twitter’s (out of date) cost and revenue numbers, which Stone likened to getting a look at the inside of someone’s underwear drawer, quoting someone else:
“No one’s really going to be surprised about what’s in there.”
Is this ok? TechCrunch publishing stolen (hacked) information on their website. I don’t think it is, they should have warned Twitter about their security flaws, hacking into the system and publishing secret information is a step to far I think.
Tech execs, where would you put a million dollars?
Most top technology executives are used to juggling businesses worth hundred of millions of dollars, yen or euros. But this week at the Reuters Technology Summit, we asked: if we gave you $1 million to invest anywhere — but not in your own company — where would you spend it?
INTERNET / STARTUPS
If you want the quick answer, I would invest it in Twitter. I’m sorry that we weren’t in it. I don’t know where it’s going and it would be a fun ride.
– Tim Draper, managing director of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
I would love to work more with some of these interesting startups like kiva.org that are developing interesting and innovative ways to create micro-lending programs for folks around the world.
I’ve a couple of friends and I would like to invest in their companies, little start-ups. One of them is called Trazzler and the other is called Fluther. One is an innovative travel startup and the other is a service that helps people get answers to questions they need.
I’m not a real big stock guy. Maybe a little Apple, a little Google — companies I use every single day so why not invest in them?
– Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone
It’s stuff in our industry. The most vibrant industry is ours. We’re complaining but the reality is we’re making money. I would literally go after a couple of smaller companies that are up and coming. (Such as) Lala. It’s iTunes without having to download the client. It’s a really neat job. Check it out. You take music on the go. It’s a really nice design.
I would invest in anything to do with cell phones.the hole young generation and pretty much the global population has a cell phone.and people are upgrading to a new cell phone every day.
It’s not easy being Biz
In the adrenalin-fueled world of Internet start-ups, where “Biz” is usually followed by “Dev,” where did Twitter co-founder Biz Stone get his nickname?
After talking to the Reuters Technology Summit of growth rates and future revenue possibilities, the Twitter co-founder chatted with the Reuters San Francisco bureau about his unusual moniker and why it can pose traveling hiccups.
Christopher Isaac Stone said his parents first began calling him Biz when he mispronounced Christopher, saying “Biz-ah-bah” instead.
The name stuck, and by the third grade everyone knew him as Biz.
“I don’t even answer to Christopher anymore,” said the software engineer, who also goes by Isaac.
Stone’s full name appears on his passport, so accidental plane ticket bookings under the name Biz have led to some problems with air travel.
Getting through airports can be like a “social engineering” experiment, with success a matter of seeking out a friendly check-in person, he said.
Wow, this article is well written, insightful and worthy of the Peabody! I will now buy anything for the advertisers because of this author. Thank you Roiders
Counting Twitter users with Wolfram Alpha
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Monday that unless Twitter’s growth rate slowed, by the end of the year its user base would exceed the population of Planet Earth.
Break out those calculators, nerds!
Let’s put Biz’s admittedly tongue-in-cheek statement to the test, using some back-of-the envelope math and the much-hyped, newly launched online knowledge compendium Wolfram Alpha.
Estimates of Twitter’s user base vary widely. Let’s take the frequently cited figure of 10 million, and double it to 20 million, since we’re feeling generous and Oprah is involved.
Biz cited a week-by-week compound growth rate that would exceed the Earth’s population by the end of the year.
We’re in week 21 of 2009 — that leaves 31 more weeks. We plugged the compound growth formula into Wolfram Alpha, and voila!
Twitter would have to grow its users by an astounding 20.5 percent a week to exceed Earth’s population by the end of the year.
Google’s Schmidt: Twitter is poor man’s email
Google CEO Eric Schmidt thinks Twitter’s success is wonderful, but he’s not particularly impressed with the product’s usefulness.***
***
In fact, Schmidt deems Twitter and products of its ilk “poor man’s email systems,’ as he told the crowd at the Morgan Stanley Technology conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.
******
***
Twitter’s text-based messaging service, which limits messages to 140 characters, can’t compare to all the features and storage capabilities of a full-fledged email product, Schmidt said.
******
twitter features may be expanded again to a more modern and well liked in the future
