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Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone Is Returning to the Company (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the lend-a-helping-hand dept.

After leaving Twitter in 2011 to pursue new projects, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has announced that he's returning to the company to "guide company culture." Stone said in a statement: "It's important that everyone understands the whole story of Twitter and each of our roles in that story. I'll shape the experience internally so it's also felt outside the company." TechCrunch reports: About a month ago Stone sold his most recent startup, Jelly, to Pinterest. He said at the time that he wasn't required to stay on with Pinterest, so was available for new opportunities. Stone said he was recently back at Twitter as a "special guest" for an event open to employees, where current CEO and fellow co-founder Jack Dorsey -- another founder who left and then returned -- asked him onstage if he wanted to come back and work at Twitter. After some employee cheers, and a private clarification that Jack was in fact being serious, he accepted. Twitter diehards are reacting positively to the news -- many think that Twitter needs to get back to its roots, and what better way to do it than bringing back a co-founder? The market also seems to be happy. TWTR stock immediately jumped 2 percent on the news, reaching a three-month high of $19.62.

35 comments

  1. stock jumped! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    2 percent is a jump now?

  2. Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Twitter still doesn't make any money.

    1. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, this. It should be the one and only focus of any work going forward... or just straight up lobby Trump to get it government funding.

    2. Re:Great! by lucm · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Wrong. They do make money, just not a lot compared to their market cap. They have a revenue of about $2.5 billions per year and profit of about $100 millions.

      It's tiny compared to the other tech companies, but it's still roughly $3.1 billlions more profit than Uber, or $600 millions more than Snapchat.

      Also now that they gave up on being a "share your feelings" platform and want to focus more on news delivery, and with the various new services they plan on adding (like premium services to let people monitor their brand), they're likely to become profitable over time.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    3. Re:Great! by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      at that rate, it would pay back the investment in like.. 15 years?

      also that could just be messing with the books.

      the thing is, for some reason. running their servers and staff is so fucking expensive it doesn't make any goddamn sense(and never made).

      their previous corporate culture was to burn all investor money and well.. if they are returning to that.. gawds.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    4. Re:Great! by lucm · · Score: 4, Insightful

      at that rate, it would pay back the investment in like.. 15 years?

      There's nothing to pay back. Here's how the system works:

      1) the VC firms put in a few dollars (in the case of Twitter, about $1.5 billions over 4 years)
      2) the company burns through it to build a customer base and create some hype, leading to unrealistic valuation
      3) the company goes public without having made a profit yet, and rakes in a fortune (in the case of Twitter, about $24 billions)
      4) the VC and founders make a killing, everyone else (i.e. employees) gets fucked because they can't cash in their stock options for a year or two and by then it's worth nothing

      That's how the game is played; everyone bets that some other idiots down the road will pay more but at one point someone is left holding the bag.

      In the case of Twitter, all of this is over.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    5. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Your figures don't match reality. For 2016 Twitter had a net income of around -$450 million. Where did you get this nonsense of making $100 million in profit?

    6. Re:Great! by sexconker · · Score: 2

      He used liberal facts.

    7. Re:Great! by Mouldy · · Score: 1

      I've only really just started learning about stocks & that whole side of things I'd previously not paid attention to - so I'm likely off the mark and would welcome any pointers.

      My understanding is that P/E ratio is a key measure of how successful a business is at making more money than it's spending. Twitter does not have a P/E because it's negative (ie, they're losing money). And they've been that way for a very long time (I think, actually, forever).

      So, the only way anyone ever made money out of twitter was doing stock-market trickery of buying a bag of crap stock, convincing (ie, sales, lies, hype, whatever you want to call it) someone it's worth more than you paid for it and selling it to them.

      That entire mechanism of making money is separate from the actual business of twitter. It's got nothing to do with tweets or users, or ads. Twitter's actual business makes no money.

      Now, that someone might get lucky and twitter might actually start selling more ads and making some money; Facebook, for example, IIRC, had a long period of losing money but turned it around. But whether FB can keep that momentum remains to be seen; their P/E has been slowly declining over last few years.

    8. Re:Great! by lucm · · Score: 1

      Unless you buy into the efficient market theory, or unless you look at numbers over a very long period, you can't really use any formula that includes the stock price when you want to know how successful a company is. The stock market can just go crazy and prices can go insanely high. For instance, LinkedIn once had a 1,000 P/E ratio, while Google ratio was 30.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
  3. What culture? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Other than this story, the only time you hear about Twitter is in regard to Trump. That proves Twitter is useless to thinking people. Thinking people care more about the world than they do making America even better.

    1. Re:What culture? by rmdingler · · Score: 2

      Other than this story, the only time you hear about Twitter is in regard to Trump.

      Yes. President Tweety. "I taht I taw a puddy cat! Or I wouldn't have I grabbed it."

      That proves Twitter is useless to thinking people. Thinking people care more about the world than they do making America even better.

      It could be that thinking people are not now, or were questionably ever, in the majority.

      --
      Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

      Ernest Hemingway

  4. Biz Stone? by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 1

    Fake name. A shiny red penny says this is "Billy McFarland" under a new alias.

    1. Re:Biz Stone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dong Bigginton is my name.

    2. Re:Biz Stone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dirk Digler?

  5. Twitter is in a death-spiral, yawn by mfearby · · Score: 4, Interesting

    To Twitter that's a big deal :-) The company is on a death spiral so any hint of life is probably a good thing to the SJW die-hards that still use the thing.

    1. Re: Twitter is in a death-spiral, yawn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's good SJW news, but that doesn't mean the stock should move a cock hairs breath. Everyone knows the cock loving SJWs don't actually spend any money. See, they are either poor white trash or wealthy apologists. Hint: neither group spends any significant dollars. If you think I'm lying just ask the comic cock industry!

    2. Re:Twitter is in a death-spiral, yawn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Guis,just found nice website for pet lovers dating heybuddydate.se

    3. Re:Twitter is in a death-spiral, yawn by Maritz · · Score: 0

      probably a good thing to the SJW die-hards that still use the thing.

      Weird way to refer to the mango-in-chief.

      --
      I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
  6. "Back to their Roots" by DatbeDank · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I wonder if that means no more double standards, freedom of speech for all political leanings, and telling people who can't handle trolls to take a step outside instead of banning them.

    1. Re:"Back to their Roots" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Re: "back to their roots": in that case, I look forward to them becoming an SMS group messaging service again, using short code 40404. And "Biz Stone" certainly fits within 140 characters.

    2. Re:"Back to their Roots" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You think the politically correct crowd will cede control? They'll just strangle harder. It's why they took up these positions of influence: to control others.

      If something dies due to their meddling they just move on. Worst case to them, at least they've destroyed a bastion of wrongthink.

    3. Re:"Back to their Roots" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      retard

    4. Re:"Back to their Roots" by AmiMoJo · · Score: 0

      No. Twitter made $100m profit last year, which is over $100m more than 4chan and 8chan combined. So they are unlikely to swap their profitable business model for one which loses money, even with porn ads and malvertising.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    5. Re:"Back to their Roots" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      o. Twitter made $100m profit last year, which is over $100m more than 4chan and 8chan combined.

      You mean Twitter lost another $48m last year and they had to dip into marketable securities to make up the difference. On top of that their 1Q of 2015 was an 18% improvement on a $180m loss compared to the 1Q of 2014, which continued losses through the year. And they're still struggling to become profitable when you use their actual GAAP measurement, while their non-GAAP aka you're a fucking sucker was only slightly better then the previous year. And they're trending for upwards of -$480m for all 4Q of 2016.

    6. Re:"Back to their Roots" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So if I go to the bank and borrow 250k, I can boast that I made an extra 250k in profit? Wow!

    7. Re:"Back to their Roots" by tehcyder · · Score: 2

      No. Twitter made $100m profit last year, which is over $100m more than 4chan and 8chan combined. So they are unlikely to swap their profitable business model for one which loses money, even with porn ads and malvertising.

      Unless I'm misreading, Twitter made an operating loss of $367m last year.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    8. Re:"Back to their Roots" by AmiMoJo · · Score: 0

      Your link says £367m operating income, i.e. they made money, not lost it. I was actually wrong too, they made more than $100m.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    9. Re:"Back to their Roots" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But the number that you cite in the table is between parenthesis, which implies a negative amount.
      You should compare, for example, the same table for Facebook: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/financials?query=income-statement.

        tehcyder wasn't misreading anything.

    10. Re:"Back to their Roots" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When they put parenthesis around it, that means it is a negative number. They lost that much.

      They were cash-flow positive almost $100m.... because they took on some debt from foreign source for a foreign holding.

      They are fucked.

  7. No no no! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We wanted Biz MARKIE. Not this twit.

    Sincerely,

    The Shareholders

  8. What came after Biz Stone took off... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

    I got finished reading "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" by Antonio Garcia Martinez. This book about Internet advertising took place after Biz Stone took off from Twitter. The author made a three-way trade to sell his company and engineers to Twitter while going off to Facebook. Surprisingly, Twitter and the engineers got the better part of the deal.

  9. Still will disappear in the fall. by PontifexMaximus · · Score: 0

    They have no way to monetize Twitter. They will go away. And for me, seeing that liberal twat Jack Dorsey homeless and broke would make my lifetime.

    --
    Pax Vobiscum
  10. Biz Stone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You're telling me some dumb n-igger named their child "biz" ?

    I think that's the only real news here, is how stupid these n-iggers at twitter actually are