Just three months ago Carnegie Mellon University’s Vivek Wadhwa told CNBC that “Twitter is toast.”
Twitter’s world looks very different now.
After all buying interest in the company dried up, Twitter reported earnings that beat estimates and reinforced the faith of its longtime shareholders.
“The world needs Twitter,” said Bijan Sabet, co-founder and general partner at Spark Capital. The Boston-based venture capitalist was an early Twitter investor, and held a board seat until 2011. He’s also a personal shareholder.
Over the past two months companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Disneyand Google have been mentioned as potential buyers of Twitter.
“I’d like to see Twitter remain independent and build something durable because they have the brand, the user base and the impact on the world to do it,” said Sabet. He has a long-term view on the stock, unfazed by news about layoffs and strategic shifts.
A maturing platform
Twitter is a 10-year old company going through a critical existential crisis.
“They made a mistake by trying to compete with Facebook,” said Henry Blodget, Business Insider CEO. Implying the management failed to understand their own unique product proposition.
“I saw the Cubs win and Twitter went crazy. I saw the debates and Twitter went crazy,” said Sabet, echoing the sentiment.
But on Thursday, after its third-quarter earnings release, CEO Jack Dorsey finally said it.
“We’re focused on building the most useful, open and comprehensive news network on the planet, our product is already revolutionary and we’re working on improving it every single day. We’re making hundreds of small changes as quickly as we can that will continue to compound for more usage.”
Product changes
“With small evolutionary, not revolutionary tweaks they can be great,” believes Blodget.
Twitter reiterated its focus on making tweeting easier and also streamlining the news feed experience, so users get content that’s most relevant to them.
“Trolls” that use the platform to anonymously abuse and insult users, mostly high-profile Twitter influencers, are another problem.
“It is very important that Twitter is a safe place for people to interact with the news,” said company board member Bret Taylor.
Business evolution
Twitter’s evolving into a live news and video streaming platform that, unlike Netflix or Amazon Prime, has zero content costs.
“You can make a great business out of that,” said Blodget who sees potential earnings of $500 million to $1 billion over the next two years.
“”They own something nobody else owns,” said Blodget, outlining how neither LinkedIn nor Facebook fulfill the need Twitter does. “Twitter needs to accept who it is, double down on it and make it great
source”cnbc”
