I wanted to write this a couple of weeks ago but stuff like Google leaks, Agile, privacy issues, and podcast prep took precedence.
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Every few months, someone I know starts a chat, “So and so started a new thing. It’s going to be huge. Because, So and so’s last thing was a monster.”
That’s when I ask, “How many people can you think of you hit it big… twice?” It’s the “twice” that trips people up. Without looking at your phone… without asking an AI to ‘splain it… rattle off a few who started more than one thing.
[I’ll wait]
Sans aided recall, I came up with: Elon Musk, Walt Disney, Michael Loeb, Steve Jobs, and Jack Dorsey. Certainly, that’s not an exhaustive list. That Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, and so many others are not there, tells you just how tough it is.
Not that I need to rattle off reasons why a multibillionaire didn’t do it again, but there are reasons. You successfully start company A, enjoy it, and stick around. Why move to company B? Or they got so rich why bother? Or, Billism #42, “Most people can’t explain their first success. There’s a story. But luck played a bigger part than most people realize or care to admit.” It’s irrational to think folks can roll a 3.14 again on a zocchihedron.
The multipl-ee successful gob smack me.
Jack Dorsey built Twitter. I’m going to give him even more credit for conceiving of how we socialize online. It’s easy to forget that when Twitter launched in 2005 social media was MySpace. Before that we had GeoCities. Dorsey didn’t say it, but I believe early Twitter existed to send text messages from computers to phones and vice versa. That explains why the character limit matched the length of an SMS. Grandiose social graphs, networking, real-time communications, and link sharing would take years longer. Dorsey started Twitter and Square (now Cube), a mobile payments system.
Mike Solana interviewed Jack Dorsey for Pirate Wires. It’s an insightful read. I’m going to annotate it.
Mike asked Dorsey about Blue Sky. Which is a great place to start. Blue Sky looks like Twitter. Except it’s built on a different foundation. Twitter was built to be a company. Companies like/want/need to control things so they can do corporate things — like collect data, generate revenue, turn a profit, and get investors.
Federations
Blue Sky is part of a broader “federated” movement. The idea is that no one person or group should control the curation process. Dorsey gets this because he was at the helm of Twitter’s curation process. His choices could literally move the world in different directions. It’s a Herculean responsibility. No, sorry, an Atlassian one.
Federated social means a person or group who hosts an instance of, in this case, Blue Sky can decide the curation protocols. That lets users choose a host that conforms to their curation preferences.
Good. In theory. In practice, not so much. These days, Blue Sky has a board, investors, a centralized curation model, and no Jack Dorsey. He left the platform and deleted his account because, Blue Sky is “literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that's truly decentralized. It’s another app.”
I’m not shocked. “Everything new is old again,” Me, many months ago. To provide a service for free, you either need donors or a business model. Since there’s no need for this free service (see, Dorsey, Jack, above), you need a business model. You need… data, ads, and profits to get investors. So, we end up right back where we started.
Good on Dorsey for figuring this out. Tho, I am troubled that he used $14M of Twitter’s money to fund Blue Sky without getting any equity for Twitter’s investors and for setting in motion a competitor to the public company he was running. And, didn’t disclose much of it. While, he also personally funded a second decentralized platform called Nostr.
Ad-ver-censorship
Neither Blue Sky not Nostr solved the curation problem.
Which is part of the bigger censorship problem. We learned this week that Google whitelists (and darklists) sites. We may just be starting to see the scope of censorship that springs from an oligopolistic ad-supported media landscape.
Dorsey explained this brilliantly. If you’re in ad-supported media, those ‘graphs are a must-read.
He said, Google and Facebook are the “Only players that matter.” Everyone else — Twitter, Snap, etc. — need advertisers like Disney to do them a favor. Yeah, that’s what he said. So, if you’re any site downstream from Twitter/X, Snap, and anyone else not named Google or Facebook trying to sell ads, just stop and think about that.
Which brings us to control. He who controls ads controls what we see. “If a brand like P&G or Unilever doesn't like what's happening on the platform, and they threaten to pull the budget, which accounts for like 20% of your revenue? You have no choice, and... you have no choice.” Which leads to this. Dorsey said he said he had to censor Donald Trump because it was right for business even though it was wrong for the world.
That’s why Dorsey believes that advertising is a “core sin.” He says you need to build payments and commerce. Which, coincidentally, are things Elon Musk is doing with Twitter right now. Dorsey is right. Again, in theory. In practice, he’s built a payments business worth $9B, but it’s nothing like what you’d build on top of a social network.
Poppycock
Being private, Dorsey said, lets you do things faster. He says you can ignore ad revenue and build these other services. He says he sees Twitter/X developing more features more quickly with fewer people because… AI. To most of this, I say, “Poppycock.”
If you want to build things faster you build things faster. You suck layers of bureaucracy out of the organization. You foster doing over talking. Musk is a private-company, startup guy. Who just happens to run one of most highly valued public companies. And, no. AI isn’t the reason Musk jettisoned people or why devs at today’s Twitter code faster. He’s made building new features fast a priority.
And, no. Private companies can’t just punt on ad or any other revenue. Without that they are dependent on investors. Those people will want to see growth before handing you more and more money.
Listen
Building a winning business is complex. It’s exceedingly unlikely to happen at scale. That’s why, when I get a chance to read a very candid, thoughtful recap from someone who’s done it… TWICE.. it’s definitely worth the read.
