Twitter

“I think the more thoughtful place to do a sort of a cold outreach is on LinkedIn. But please don't link it, you know, ask to link to me just with the canned, you know, I'd like to connect with you, but I think a lot of deal flow both on Twitter and LinkedIn wh…”

“Well, those Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Twitter were all through acquisitions. Scan was a company that was acquired by Snapchat. Snappy TV was acquired by Twitter, and Nozzle was acquired by LinkedIn. So that's how we have positions those companies.”

“I think Periscope, they have a advantage in regards to growth with, you know, being able to piggyback off of Twitter and using, having such a strong relationship with them, and now actually being acquired by them, but I think that they both can win, but at thi…”

“But I'm using Twitter as like the handshake moment, and then I can actually follow up with content and requests for sharing that content or feedback or speaking at an event we throw, et cetera. So it's really good for influencer building.”

“You should share other people's content and mention them by name, you should share interesting things like quotes and yes, content that you found that aren't yours, and you should share your own stuff. So treat that like a little microcosm of a media outlet an…”

“People on their third, fourth swing at bat can do really well, whether it's Evan Williams with Twitter. He did he did Odeo and then blogger before that, but Twitter obviously was his third time up at bat. So I love founders when they're at the third time at ba…”

“I had passed on investing in Twitter and I passed on investing in Zingo, which are two of my very good friends.”

“Via Twitter. I'm quite active on there, and it's usually a better way to catch my attention than sending an email.”

“There's a lot of great content on Twitter, and about Pro football and sports in general, and as someone who's very into Twitter, it's easy for me to curate you know, a timeline or lists of people who have smart things to say about football beyond the kind of b…”

“I remember when we first started talking to Ryan from product time, one of the things that we had done was this network analysis with our data. I had sat down with our data scientists and started mapping out the networks of this on Twitter. Because it's so pub…”

“The difference between Facebook and Twitter is a bi-directional arrow, basically. So if the follow versus friend model actually creates these totally different ecosystems, it's kind of like DNA replicating, and it turns into a different type of organism. Well,…”

“Matt is Director of Seed Investments at Betaworks, who have invested in the likes of Tumblr, Airbnb, Groupon, and Twitter, and have internally built startups such as Chartbeat, Bitly, and Socialflow.”

“The good news is the companies are not conflicting in any way, so there's no chance of him having some kind of awkward situation where he feels he's on the fence because he sort of has two different companies to deliver value to.”

“And so the intimate dinners with other VCs, and the events, and the summit series, and the conferences, and the stuff that requires either being on a plane, or being outside of my home, I tend to Personally, just limit, or if not limit, be really, really, real…”

“One small, small difference that most people don't do is they usually share articles, but they rarely tag the author. And so just one small thing, I would share like maybe 10 articles a day, and I would always tag the author just to give them a hat tip and be …”

“I don't know how he can do it. I don't know. I just don't know how anyone can run two companies, especially two massive prominent companies as a single person.”

“It's probably one of the most important products in my life. Actually without Twitter, I don't even know where I'd be, which is kind of a weird statement to make, but it's such a serendipity machine and has allowed me to meet a lot of people, and of course it'…”

“A lot of them, so what I see a lot of is like VCs where the firm has a Twitter account, and I don't think that's very effective. Because I think for entrepreneurs, right, your relationship is with the investor, the specific person that you're going to be worki…”

“All the big companies from the West Coast have set up product offices here over the past five years, and I think that that might on one hand prevent the emergence of a standalone New York A monster, but it also brings more talent here, and so you've seen what …”

“This technology will, through artificial intelligence, will allow those companies to be able to communicate on those platforms using, ah, transactional cards, which will be really exciting. So you could actually transact right there in Twitter and Facebook Mes…”

“And our hypothesis is, is that crowdfunding will have a very similar narrative arc to blogging to where, you know, 1213 years ago, blogging was this thing that had a lot of hand waving, had a lot of it was on the tips of you know, journalist tongues of the, yo…”

“Any company that goes public, it's, it, for the founders, the entrepreneurs, the leaders in that company, for the entire company, it's kind of like it all starts over again. It resets to zero. Now you've got to prove the world that prove the world wrong all ov…”

“And so they were willing to make Crashlytics free. They were willing to help us grow our team significantly so that we could build adjacent products, which we ultimately did and became a suite known as fabric.”

“Our team had not only has tripled, but only one person has left in that time.”

“Twitter on average acquires one to two companies a month. They have for years.”

“Which I believe is used on over a billion devices today, and they were ultimately acquired for two hundred and fifty nine million dollars by Twitter.”

“What I would have done in retrospect is sought some commitment to continue to report to that person for X period of time. I don't think it's fair or actually good to say, Hey, I want to indefinitely report to this person. You want to move around as the company…”

“But the truth is it's going to be really hard to scale another consumer app in the mobile shop. I mean, it's just mature. It's a mature market. And the big players that have a monopoly like Facebook and Twitter are not opening their platforms anymore.”

“And then, you know, I honestly got kicked out of Twitter. You know, I in some of the turmoil of Twitter, they were restructuring the product team and asked me not to go to work the next day.”

“Most people cannot figure out how to get their Twitter tuned. I call it tuning your Twitter feed in the same way that I have. And so I really think what they can do to make Twitter much, much easier is help people tune it much more broadly.”

“So many other publications are having their great reporters spend their time on less than great stories. Again, on these stories that are real-time, regurgitation, written because, you know, they're trending on Twitter, and God forbid a publication doesn't hav…”

“This is a very unique distribution platform where things like retweets and things like that can take a piece of content or information and spread it in a way that no other platform, you know, could do or at the time, certainly, and even today, I don't think ot…”

“There was less than 250,000 daily active users.”

“If you look at all of our big wins from Oculus to Twitter to Tumblr to Cruise, like all of these companies were, at the day that we invested, were very hard to actually model the exact market size of that company,”

“We made investments in Zynga, Twitter, Indeed, and Etsy within about a six month period. In our 2004 fund, each of those returned the fund.”

“We actually power that button. We power the gift button inside of Twitter. We power the gift button in Facebook. We power gifts in Slack.”

“What worked at 30 broke again at, you know, 75, which broke again at 150, which broke again at like 500. So, you're in this kind of constant reorganization of teams and reorganization of principles and alignment and kind of priorities.”

“You know who I always love is Mark Schuster. He's like, so when we first, first started getting going in, in Twitter, 2008, nine, he was crushing it then. He's now crushing it on Snapchat and doing really interesting stuff.”

“After that, we did a bunch of different projects, about 14 or so acquisitions in about 14 months.”

“The thing we saw very early on was in the consumer world, we were all moving to networks. This idea that cloud was going to be about the same applications as we had on our desktop, but delivered through the browser was breaking down and we saw a whole new gene…”

“Evan Spiegel in, in starting Snapchat or Uber and Twitter and all these companies that tend to have an impact on society. Or Facebook, they start out as little passion projects. They don't start out as missions to kind of change the world.”

“I don't think, like, Bitcoin or Ethereum is on the order of magnitude of that heart of a problem. Like, I think scaling YouTube was probably way harder, or scaling Twitter or something like that was probably way harder than the kind of things we need to do to …”

“Today, Uber or Airbnb want to be profitable, or Twitter wants to be massively profitable. If they were to cut their spending 10, 20%, all of a sudden those companies look massively profitable. The only reason they're losing money is because they've chosen to c…”

“And if people DM you or try to DM you or at you on Twitter and want to send you a business plan, say yes. You know, it's not that hard.”

“And we went from no mobile products and no mobile engineers to 80% of our usage was on mobile.”

“And when I left about five years later, we went from no revenue to two billion dollars in revenue.”

“The incentive structures are a Twitter. You can score a lot of points by attacking someone, calling someone out, you know, starting a war essentially, but if you put something kind of insightful or kind up, you're not going to get a lot of points, and so if yo…”

“If we had taken the time to think carefully about who our customer base should be, you know, we could have built technologies like Skype, like Twitter as opposed to just continuing to build technology, selling to Orange or Singular or Nextel or AT&T, the custo…”

“The second thing is that if you are launching a token and you're a private company, you should be ready to stop extracting any revenue from your network. So however you were extracting revenue from the network, whether this was advertising or paid subscription…”

“Even a product like Facebook is one of the most impressive companies and products of all time. It doesn't really have as much of a brand persona as a Twitter does, and I think it's because of all those little, little things.”

“And it's amazing to me that over all these years, they still own that use case. No one's even come close to disrupting them for the Twitter use case.”

“When he joined, they had less than 20 employees and one million users”

“Focus and prioritization becomes a big challenge, and I think when you grow very quickly and you are fortunate enough to raise a lot of capital, it can sometimes make you lazy in how you make those hard decisions.”

“So one of the things I did when we opened international offices was I would send a couple of my folks from my leadership team in San Francisco to open the office and stay there for a One to two years as we built that office out and brought in local leaders and…”

“For us, for example, the channel that was our very biggest driver back in 2013, Twitter, mobile acquisition has become probably number 10 on the list right now.”

“When I sold my last startup, or my second to last startup to Twitter, we sold in part because we were really excited about Twitter, and we thought we could have a lot of impact there, and I thought my team would be really happy there. But we also sold in part …”

“The newest customers of Twitter, it seems just want the news. You know, they just want to see what's going on. And so in some ways, Twitter's onboarding was like the perfect onboarding for maybe a hundred and fifty million people. And then the newest cohort of…”

“First round offered Twitter their first term sheet months before Union Square led their round. We offered Dropbox their first term sheet, and I'd say we lost both of those due to sticking to price.”

“So, we offered Twitter a term sheet at a five million pre-money valuation. We were an investor in Odeo, Eb Prior companies. So I think I was user Twitter user number 275. We were right there. We offered five. Fred came in at 20 a few months later, and to make …”

“Today's dominant platforms, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, they don't really offer a path for folks like that. Folks like that feel like, oh, I'm embarrassed. I'm not going to post my thing on Instagram. Like, no one's going to like it.”

“Whereas, I know me personally, if I spend 20 minutes scrolling through Twitter, I come out of the end of that experience just feeling worse, worse about myself, worse about the world. I do feel all the more compelled to look at Twitter again, because it's very…”

“First of all, I deleted off of my phone every app or thing that I would unconsciously open and refresh. And that included every bit of social media and news platform. So I don't read them on my phone. And further, I stopped reading them during the week. So I s…”

“So I can imagine five years from now, people building the next, not just MVPs, but entire software products on top of Webflow, like the next Airbnb, whatever that idea is, the next Twitter, the next product hunt, all of it.”

“We grew to over two million users in our first couple months with zero money spent on paid acquisition, and we got acquired by Twitter just 14 months after founding the company.”

“And I've actually like solicited my entire Twitter audience at times. Like, Hey, can you send me a snapshot of your home screen? I'd like to see what you're using, you know? And then I just run pattern recognition across thousands or hundreds of home screens. …”

“Prior to Digits, Wayne and Jeff co-founded Crashlytics, which was acquired by Twitter for a nine-figure sum in January, and then acquired from Twitter by Google in 2017.”

“Just over 12 months after launch, we hit three hundred million MAUs, and then Twitter acquired us.”

“I think if you take some of the companies, Twitter, or almost any of them, Uber in particular, Lyft, and you move those to Kansas City, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, New York, they would have been so much more successful, so much more quickly.”

“So first I would say if people on Twitter would disagree with you, you're probably right.”

“I hope that venture funding becomes less of a closed circle, and actually that these networks become less important, and that access to this life-changing financial tool is democratized for many more people who didn't have the incredible luck That Jana and I h…”

“Super fans of all these products, you know, the cult members of these cults, will show up and overwhelmingly recommend their tool, and I know Superhuman, for instance, benefited a lot from that, and it looks lately like Rome Research is really benefiting from …”

“There's being mean on Twitter or attacking someone on Twitter, and I think that's very different from taking a principled political stand or just sharing maybe a contrarian opinion. My experience has been, when I do things like that, which I do often. I will g…”

“Being good at Twitter is a competitive advantage even though it sounds kind of silly. So, you know, a lot of organic growth flows through the conversations taking place on Twitter, and that's largely because that early core customer of a collaboration startup …”

“If your underlying algorithm is maximizing for engagement, you're not going to be able to, like, turn up the, like, don't make bad content dial in the algorithm and have, like, a permanent fix for that.”

“I think these platforms are a unbelievable negative for how people consume news for all the obvious reasons”

“When we got into YC, I was like, okay, I need to like cut back On Twitter and just be heads down, but it was kind of fun to share what was happening. So it was just like an honest outgrowth of my personality that I thought it was fun to share stuff as things w…”

“And we've seen sort of that current that was really in existence under the former Soviet Union move to what we call democratic countries. But instead of that being influenced from kind of the state, it's been influenced from companies and from other people and…”

“I mean, I had to delete my Twitter app from my phone recently, because I was getting not just trolls who didn't know me, but people who did, who make it their life's goal every day to put me down and to take away from what I'm doing, even though it's so obviou…”

“Evan basically made the company what it is. Without Evan, there would be no Twitter as a company.”

“There was a committee of the board that was trying to find somebody else, and they weren't able to find anyone better than Jack.”

“When we were doing Twitter, somebody early on said, Twitter is the Seinfeld of the internet. It's a website about nothing, and the first thing I thought was, wow, Seinfeld's a hit show, and I put it as a testimonial on the rotating testimonials I put on the we…”

“I kind of barged in like a bull in a china shop. I was advised that, you know, you're under a magnifying glass. You should really you know, be careful. And I thought to myself, oh yeah, I know what that's like. Don't worry about me. Yeah. We've been in under a…”

“Future biz will get current biz out of whatever jam he's getting himself into. And I guess it was kind of an excuse to do crazy things because I did sort of say out loud that, well, no matter what I do here, if it doesn't work, my future self will figure out h…”

“What I did when I came in is, is Jack and I hammered out a purpose statement for Twitter. The answer to the question, why do we exist? Because before that, if we asked around at the company, you know, what's the purpose of Twitter's existence? People would say…”

“The company was not doing well. I mean, sort of ethically, it was the company itself was shrinking. It was a, there was a brain drain and there was also the user base was shrinking. There wasn't revenue or profit. And nobody felt like Twitter was a special pla…”

“Yeah, I think we might have been fortunate back in those days to have made a really poor investment decision, missed one of our biggest of all time, with Twitter. When we were all early users, we had an opportunity to invest at first round, and didn't, primari…”

“Worst thing you can do is pull out Twitter, like, before you go to bed, like, there's very few things that are worse in your life, and, like, Twitter is just, like, an advertisement of all the people that have done things that you haven't done.”

“And what ended up happening is we started to get 70,000 more signups per week because the solution we implemented was a good enough solution to work. And at the time that meant like, gosh, 20, 30% more signups per week, just from a small team of four people im…”

“Now I feel like the new meta for investors is to build a personal brand on Twitter. And the way you do that is the tweet storms. That's a classic example of a optimal status seeking tactic within Twitter that has been adopted by the universe of players.”

“My second investment was Twitter, and that one was funny because Evan Williams was, I'd already been working with the company and helping him out, but Evan went and circled up investors for the round, and he's like, hey, I've got you down for 25 K, 25 K, good,…”

“It was like, 70, 75%, because at the end of the day, in the world of venture, we're all happy to meet each other, because everybody's looking for deal flow, right?”

“Last June I had 2500 followers, right? Like 10 years. 2500 people. I went from 2500, I think I just crossed 50,000, like yesterday.”

“You know, Twitter really persisted with making people build their own timelines, even past the moment where people weren't joining Twitter to follow people. They were just joining Twitter for news, and then they were faced with this prospect of having to culti…”

“It's actually twenty-twenty. I didn't start sharing things on Twitter until May of twenty-twenty. I had like a few hundred followers at the time”

“I also think like focus on a niche in the early days, like find a hundred people who love it and it could be building cohesion between product design teams and customer support teams and just tweet about that, but make them love you.”

“The first 100,000 took, I don't know, eight, nine months. And then I think I've grown a 100,000 in the last. 45 days or 50 days.”

“Snap and Twitter, from what I understand, both hired their first PM to explore monetization on the platform.”

“And at the time, that meant, gosh, 20, 30% more signups per week, just from a small team of four people implementing a really hacky solution.”

“I changed my mind, actually, about Twitter. Like, I previously, obviously, still liked the product, like, but I felt like, oh my god, if only this could change, and that could change, and I just feel like they're on a roll. I love the product momentum. Part of…”

“I would say most of my best investments did not, and those have not seen the same level of pre-seed inflation, but they have seen enough that can break the seed model.”

“And so one of the things we've started doing and maybe there are better ways of doing it, but this is just like the way we've adjusted doing it is after the pro after we have the live product review, we have a debrief as a leadership team. 15 minute debrief wh…”

“Whereas like, if you bring that out to Twitter scale, most projects, even the simplest projects at Twitter could potentially have dozens of people working on them. And then complex projects have hundreds of people, right?”

“So in terms of like the what we have product reviews on a week or I host product reviews on a weekly basis. And the reason I say I is like cascading down our product organization. Some of our product leads have their own cadences around product reviews as well…”

“I sold some Twitter, but still hold the majority of that holdings from then.”

“The first three companies I invested in, in my entire life as an investor were Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.”

“Saving my money in my twenties And then deciding to spend all of it in a one year period on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr based on at that .10 years of very hard work, diligence of saving and not wasting my money and looking for the opportunity to strike.”

“After we have the live product review, we have a debrief as a leadership team, a fifteen-minute debrief, where we try and, amongst ourselves, say, alright, we just talked about a lot of stuff. What's the most useful feedback we can, like, clarify and write dow…”

“So my hope in 20, twice having it over the next five years is that the web is a lot more creative, a lot weirder that people have a lot more control over it versus just being another profile on Twitter or Facebook and more fun.”

“For a long time, you know, Twitter was that company for me. It's always been my white whale. I love the product, but I always felt it could have been a lot more than it was. And so I've, I always, you know, look side-eye at Twitter as the one that, that got aw…”

“As I was joining Spark, Bijan Sabat at Spark led Twitter series B and that investment catapulted us into the upper echelon of VC firms.”

“Twitter tends to hit best early in the morning or late at night.”

“Fun fact, I believed in the importance of channel diversification so much with TwentyVC. Until I had 50,000 followers on Twitter, I used to DM each new follower and ask them to follow a different channel.”

“Usually the most vocal people are not the masses. So you get like the Twitter people who are like, you screwed this up and you have to do this way and you need to do it that way. But then when you actually run the deeper analysis, there's like three people tha…”

“I'll give you three, actually. Peter Fenton, David Rosenblatt, and Carl Bass. Peter and David are on our board at Twitter. Carl's on the board at Planet. Because every single one of them, they are available whenever you need them. They're dedicated. They're ju…”

“Someone from the State Department reached out, and this is a public story, so I'm not saying anything that can't be said. Someone from the State Department reached out and said, wait, wait, you can't go down at, you know, two a.m. Pacific. That's the middle of…”

“I would say the vast majority of organizations, ok, and I'm talking from Facebook and Twitter, all the way down to, ah, GPs. They would be well served, right, to be much smaller, to be essentialists in the people that they have. Because it's very likely that y…”

“I think it's one of the reasons why you know, anybody with a Reasonably sized Twitter following probably gets a at least job interest, if not a job offer from Andreessen, right? Like they recognize that sort of micro celebrity appeal of being able to hire anyb…”

“I looked at the seeds, and I looked at those that haven't really worked, and all of those that haven't really worked have often been head of product at Twitter, head of product at Twitch, head of product at amazing company, the hottest of hot seed rounds with …”

“And also like these funds are really big and slow. So they're not going to be able to like move and prosecute the things in the same way that they say on Twitter.”

“I've noticed Twitter adds very little value in company building, unfortunately.”

“I do think it's harder to find good deals, and I think it is true, and I think people are a little bit full of it on the Twitter, right, and on the social media”

“I don't feel different about TikTok than I feel about Twitter or Facebook for that matter. These systems need to become programmable. If they're not programmable, we're being programmed by them.”

“Yeah, no, I mean, look, I mean, that's tough noogies for you, but you're still one of the world's richest people, and you still could basically give any debt provider an out, and you could still basically just take a bunch of your wealth and sort of say, look,…”

“Because the blue checkmark, it completely confounded two things. It confounded the identity thing with the importance thing, and the importance thing, I think, was complete BS, always. Like who's supposed to say who's important, who's not important. It should …”

“I still believe that there's an opportunity today, even after all the damage that has been done both by the prior regime and by the current one, I still think it's not too late because Twitter is Hard to kill. It's a network of networks.”

“The guys on product hunt or Twitter, They don't, right? And you can relearn, like, 10 times. No one will ever notice.”

“And so they're my single worst investments. Those are my worst ones when they've spun out of any great company and they've raised five to seven. Because they're inherently slower because they're used to the processes of Twitter, of Facebook, the HR, the polici…”

“There's a very clear reason why the order of founding went from Twitter first, to Instagram, to Snapchat, to TikTok. And it is because mobile as infrastructure and bandwidth in its earliest stages, supported the lowest packet size, text. And then next compress…”

“Feeds are very head heavy in general, and so is text. So basically that's to say that you have to assume that Twitter and other feed products in general tend to have most of the content is consumed by a small number, sorry, most of the content consumed is prod…”

“I remember in 2007, a journalist asked me about Twitter and they interviewed me and they sourced their questions on Twitter in 2007, I think. I think maybe in early 2007 at Davos or something. And I said, huh, interesting, but couldn't see the potential of it.”

“There's no downturn in seed whatsoever. No matter what, Twitter's wrong. Twitter, seed is more vibrant than ever, and we can talk about why, and seed is also split up more than ever.”

“If, again, you put me in a time machine five years from now, my gut is I come out and it, yes, the answer is yes. Just because this guy does things well and sometimes it takes a while, right? And there's going to be a lot of experimentation. It's going to be a…”

“Yeah, I chose, they're flat. I think Twitter's flat, two fifty million.”

“I would say threads does not work. Maybe it teases along at five million DAU with hardcore small numbers. And I would say Twitter has modest growth to Two 75, 300 with election spikes.”

“Well, I mean, it's hard to not say Twitter right now from a vulnerability perspective.”

“Most of my tweets are just tweets directly to me. Like, they're reminders and advice to me. I am giving advice to myself on the internet, and it just so happens that 315,000 people have followed me because they think it applies to them as well.”

“A lot of my tweets are made by my team. They're reposts from either my newsletter or, you know, written from a interview like this or something along those lines.”

“I'm a lot more nuanced. I'm a lot more moderate on so many different opinions, but look, that is not how you build a brand.”

“So what you see on Twitter is me having very strong beliefs, contrarian beliefs, unique viewpoints, but honestly, they're very loosely held.”

“Monday morning, there were 15,000 customers on Twitter of the Central Bank of Brazil saying, you cannot do this.”

“And so I sold some of my Twitter stock at a billion dollar valuation. I regret that. I, that was a failure of imagination on my part.”

“You're seeing Reddit, Twitter, et cetera, shut off APIs, put in more strict rate limits, et cetera. And so the whole world is starting to lock down data, which was counter to the trends over the past 20 years, when everything was being pushed more and more ope…”

“And this was one of the biggest challenges Twitter faced internally back in the day was just complete indecision from leadership.”

“So the product managers who were super data-driven started designing and building features for the average user, because that's what the data told them. And they actually believed that there was something such as an average Twitter user. It's such a huge mista…”

“Particularly at Twitter, we need to get stats, SIG data, which always took two to three weeks.”

“Agree or disagree with some of Elon's decisions, but he is moving quickly in a direction. That is way better than sort of standing still.”

“Twitter was a podcasting startup. Slack was a game. YouTube was a dating website.”

“So he's talked about this a little bit, but I think Mark spends time on X or Twitter and, you know, gets a lot of what's, what's going on in the moment. And then he reads some really old, old books, right? Like stuff that's maybe out of print and hard to find …”

“I think companies are going to unbloat and we're going to distribute programmers, right? Like there's, we've got a global, you know, lack of procreation happening. We're going to have less and less people who can build technology where we need it. Like we need…”

“If you're Fred Wilson doing, you know, consumer internet in 2005, you'll hear, you know, you heard the reason that, that Twitter picked him, you know, when it was a competitive deal at the series A was that he was using the product.”

“In some ways, actually, you kind of want to choose founders who are excited about smaller problems, because it tells you that they're not just falling in love with what they saw on Twitter or social media, that there's actually something they care about.”

“Oh, a multitude of times. I mean, I probably had at least, you know, sort of six, you know you know Singerman, you know, sort of one-on-ones where he has to be like telling what the fuck.”

“One thing I used to do is I went through this phase where every time I met a founder that I really liked, I would go through their Twitter. I'd figure out something they really liked, let's say some TV show, and then I'd go in cameo and I would find the actres…”

“I don't think we had freedom of speech before Elon bought Twitter.”

“And I guess in a lot of ways I'm happy I didn't because I don't think I could, I would have enjoyed that part of it at all.”

“We almost bought one. You probably remember we almost bought Twitter.”

“With deep regret, I would say substantially worse.”

“Elon has a conviction that he, what he believes is true is absolutely true even when all of the evidence is against his belief, right? And so that allows him to do, I can see that we can colonize Mars, and here we go. Right? And that creates, you know, SpaceX,…”

“Twitter was a little over 300 X and gets all the credit for Lyft, that was like about two, 205 X what else? Applied. Applied is probably encroaching on a hundred X in the first check. Twitch got close, but not quite there. It got to 94 X.”

“Like, I don't think that Elon is going to be able to do what he did with, say, Twitter, and fire a bunch of people and, you know, change all the rules.”

“I would have probably said instead of whatever he said about nine billion, I would have said, yeah, I'm going to take Twitter public at 420 dollars a share.”

“If they do what Twitter did, if they reduce themselves to 20%, and build an amazing product, and are willing to break all their pricing models and revenues and change all of that, then they will survive.”

“There's superficial happiness and there's deep happiness. There's cheap dopamine and there's expensive dopamine. You know, stock goes up, cheap dopamine, you know, like jump on Twitter, read that you're smart, you know you know, cheap dopamine. Then there's li…”

“Crypto lives and breathes and grows on social. So the people that I will find on Discord or Reddit and Twitter are very different from the people I will find on Meta and Instagram and or Search.”

“One of the first things he did was he took design Twitter, he visualized it as a graph, and then figured out which people designers are following the most, and then went to those designers to get feedback on Figma and get them excited about Figma. And that was…”

“For the first 50,000 Twitter followers I got, I personally DM'd everyone, and I suggested that they follow our newsletter as well.”

“I think it's Clubhouse of our era, and so they have brilliant channel market fit, which is they crush it on Twitter for very specific clips. When you look at any of their view rates, very little. When you look at their retention on engagement rates, fuck all.”

“The most underappreciated growth channel I see is organic LinkedIn. On Twitter, you're competing against the best writers in the world. You're competing against Harry Stebbings running a short. Bill Ackman. Like, it's really tough. On LinkedIn, you're competin…”

“I get like three or four grand from Twitter a month.”

“I just started buying Twitter shares and Alibaba stock from Jack Ma's family office, and then holy shit, it worked.”

“So every now and then, if something is important enough, like maybe there's some big new product is actually really cool, or there's some really, really interesting new research paper. It'll be like big enough that even though I'm not monitoring Twitter every …”

“Once you optimize for clicks, the most click-baity content starts rising up to the top. You get lots of racy content, lots of girls in bikinis, lots of listicles about 10 horrifying skin diseases, and so on.”

“So like Twitter. As a user, I think it's a great product. Phenomenal. It's a shit investment. I would not like to be in it as a business.”

“For the second time in the last five years, he totally wanted as board chairman of Twitter, where he jammed that down Elon's throat for forty four billion dollars despite his opposition, and he won here today because he unraveled the mess and set it all up for…”

“The way we think about it at 11 Labs, it's like, what channels really naturally resonate with the founders, and do they get really excited by? And so for us, Matty is fantastic in person, at large speaking events, at Fireside Chats, and so that's what he reall…”

“For the first 50,000 Twitter followers I got, I personally DM'd everyone, and I suggested that they follow our newsletter as well.”

“I think it's Clubhouse of our era. And so they have brilliant channel market fit, which is they crush it on Twitter for very specific clips. When you look at any of their view rates, very little. When you look at their retention on engagement rates, fuck all.”

“The most underappreciated growth channel I see is organic LinkedIn. On Twitter, you're competing against the best writers in the world. You're competing against Harry Stebbings running shorts. Yeah, Bill Ackman. Like, it's really tough. On LinkedIn, you're com…”

“I find that there is an increasing level of hating the successful, hating the rich. I see it on Twitter. I think in Europe it's even worse, but it's come to America, unfortunately.”

“We did that investment less than 30 days from the time I met the team and the time we closed, and it turned out to be a watershed investment for the company”

“Twitter could have been infinitely a more interesting company, but VCs got involved and created politics, and they fired Jack Dorsey early, and I don't know if that was right or wrong, but they created issues, and the company was pretty messed up.”

“When I invested in Twitter in 2009 there was 30 something people, no revenue.”

“Would I prefer, on a standalone foundation model, lab bet, would you prefer to own Entropic than X.AI plus Cursor plus the Frankenstein of Twitter? Yeah, you would, but at least it's a full-stack story now.”

“Which why I think VCs don't have the best, I think, information landscape, because a lot of them just live on, on Twitter, but the world is much larger than that.”

“Twitter's, Twitter's just, growth has fallen off, it's shrunk 50% since he bought it.”

“There was this broad perception on Twitter that was much more exaggerated than what actually happened within the business.”

“So we believe that Suno has, you know, I'm using this term loosely, but unlimited upside potential. You know, if you look back at the history of media on the internet, and you think about the generational platforms that truly democratized a medium, right? YouT…”

“As three inveterate Twitter junkies here, we know what the action is, and it ain't on threads, okay?”

“They had two bidders going for them at the time. And that was very, very interested in them at around, I'll say within 20% of that number, and, ah, one of them was Twitter, and the other one was TikTok, the founder of ByteDance, and founder just, you know, he …”