No matter where Twitter ends its first day of trading – or its first year or decade for that matter – it deserves the hype.
Forget valuation, which is a red herring anyway. Forget the questions about business models, revenue projections, talk of bubbles and complaints about 140 characters. Twitter's emergence as a public company is worthy of a moment to sit back and see the magic of the free markets in this nation and the uniqueness of our American entrepreneurial experience.
Haters gonna hate, and Twitter has faced its share of opprobrium over the years. The idea of 140 characters was too limiting, too much a sign of the decay of our culture, where we sacrifice good grammar and usage for text-like chatter that gets no one anything but a wrap on the knuckles from the nun who taught us in second grade. Strunk and White are turning over in their graves.
Twitter also faced questions about revenue models. Sure, Rihanna and Miley love you, but how do you book revenue on them loving you? And how do you make profit from that revenue in a way that doesn't drive away your user base? Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey were derided as terrible managers with their heads more in the clouds than in the books.
Yes, seldom is heard an encouraging word about Twitter. That negative buzz has only gotten louder as Twitter approached its bell-ringing at the corner of Broad and Wall. Twitter, according to thousands of tweets from the financial chatterati, isn't worth the price.
Maybe or maybe not. But Twitter needs to be celebrated by entrepreneurs everywhere. This is what hundreds of companies in Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, Silicon Gulch and anywhere in between want to be when they grow up. Little girls dress as Cinderella because they want to be Princess Kate. Twitter's rise is Cinderella for geeks and innovators and risk-takers. Events like today's market debut are what entrepreneurs dream about, even if, during waking hours, they give lip service to just wanting to solve people's problems or save sea lions. Deep down, they want success and wealth, and that's OK.
Twitter didn't solve a problem. No one lamented how difficult it was to communicate in 140-character constraints. Instead, it started a revolution in communication, allowed us to share information more efficiently and made us call a pound sign a hashtag.
And, while we hear that so few people use it, so the IPO isn't worth the money, we forget that, well, so many people use it. For Christ's sake, @Pontifex is saving souls with it. (And posting selfies, for which the aforementioned second-grade nuns would probably make him kneel on No. 2 pencils for an hour as penance.)
Anyone who has ever started a company knows how hard it is to reach a day like this. You have an idea, build code around it, discard the code you built, throw out one of your founding partners, give up, then come back and write new code. And all that happens before your first venture round.
Forget valuation, which is a red herring anyway. Forget the questions about business models, revenue projections, talk of bubbles and complaints about 140 characters. Twitter's emergence as a public company is worthy of a moment to sit back and see the magic of the free markets in this nation and the uniqueness of our American entrepreneurial experience.
Haters gonna hate, and Twitter has faced its share of opprobrium over the years. The idea of 140 characters was too limiting, too much a sign of the decay of our culture, where we sacrifice good grammar and usage for text-like chatter that gets no one anything but a wrap on the knuckles from the nun who taught us in second grade. Strunk and White are turning over in their graves.
Twitter also faced questions about revenue models. Sure, Rihanna and Miley love you, but how do you book revenue on them loving you? And how do you make profit from that revenue in a way that doesn't drive away your user base? Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey were derided as terrible managers with their heads more in the clouds than in the books.
Yes, seldom is heard an encouraging word about Twitter. That negative buzz has only gotten louder as Twitter approached its bell-ringing at the corner of Broad and Wall. Twitter, according to thousands of tweets from the financial chatterati, isn't worth the price.
Maybe or maybe not. But Twitter needs to be celebrated by entrepreneurs everywhere. This is what hundreds of companies in Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, Silicon Gulch and anywhere in between want to be when they grow up. Little girls dress as Cinderella because they want to be Princess Kate. Twitter's rise is Cinderella for geeks and innovators and risk-takers. Events like today's market debut are what entrepreneurs dream about, even if, during waking hours, they give lip service to just wanting to solve people's problems or save sea lions. Deep down, they want success and wealth, and that's OK.
Twitter didn't solve a problem. No one lamented how difficult it was to communicate in 140-character constraints. Instead, it started a revolution in communication, allowed us to share information more efficiently and made us call a pound sign a hashtag.
And, while we hear that so few people use it, so the IPO isn't worth the money, we forget that, well, so many people use it. For Christ's sake, @Pontifex is saving souls with it. (And posting selfies, for which the aforementioned second-grade nuns would probably make him kneel on No. 2 pencils for an hour as penance.)
Anyone who has ever started a company knows how hard it is to reach a day like this. You have an idea, build code around it, discard the code you built, throw out one of your founding partners, give up, then come back and write new code. And all that happens before your first venture round.
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