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No garage huh? Interesting psyop to publish “historic” photos before any history is made. Series A stage startups with 10m equity funding: “fake it till you make it.” PE stage resurrectup with 13b debt hole: “larp it till you warp it”
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Just leaving Twitter HQ code review
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There’s an analogy to be made here to major wars since the U.S. civil war. The wars were always won by the side with the inexorable manufacturing engine going. But the narrative remained centered around brave and charismatic “good” soldiers winning specific glorious battles.
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Manufacturing engine = bleeding-edge tech + financial game rules The US Civil War was decided by European investors not buying cotton futures and north having the technologically higher value textile machinery base WW2 was won in Detroit, fueled by war bonds, lend-lease etc
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This is a kremlinology bait. It’s tempting to try and guess visas from faces, and sort forced/real smiles etc. That’s the point. So long as you’re obsessively analyzing such photos, whether with sympathy or hostility, attention is being misdirected from what’s not in the photos.
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I don’t blame him from trying. He has to attract enough genuinely talented missionary idealists among the scaramuccis, bannons, millers, and visa-serfs to give this a real shot. And protect any islands of clean-sheet startupish energy from the siege of 15 years of history.
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The interesting thing with software is that manufacturing capital base is not heavy hydraulic presses and factories but people. Detroit in 1940 had to spin up lots of new factories and raw material flows. Labor was less of a bottleneck. People could be trained up fast.
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In sw, it’s always a core of irreplaceable artisan geniuses building mysterious/puzzling bits, small armies of good, hard-to-backfill people around them, building less mysterious/puzzling bits, and vast crowds of fungible drones doing what sw still can’t: moderation, tagging…
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In dictators handbook terms, these are the essential, influential, and interchangeable parts of the “ software factory” (the labor IS the capital, not the hardware) Twitter’s lost thousands fairly randomly, including presumably enough essentials and influentials to be in crisis.
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Forget visa status. Can you guess from this photo which of these people is which group? I can’t. It’s not actually a bad time to be fighting a talent war. The industry’s laif off 10x as many people as twitter, in all 3 categories. It’s a buyer’s market.
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I’d guess Twitter needs to replace at least a dozen “essentials” and maybe 100-200 “influentials.” The interchangeables (70-90%?) can be ignored. Can be replaced or automated (a lot of biz-process bureaucracy and moderation is going to get automated everywhere in this downturn).
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The influentials backfilling I think will be fine. Even with the terrible optics that this photo is attempting to counterprogram, enough people will be desperate or just morbidly curious enough. This photo is designed to recruit them. It’s like a college brochure stock photo.
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It’s the essentials that are the problem. They will bring opinionated design ideas that will disruptively alter the DNA of twitter’s core. They will generally be industry veterans (don’t forget this is a big, scaled, live-ops company), often with fuck-you money already banked.
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They will have no good reason to put up with bs. They will be in roles with exposure to Wrath of Elon or any pitbull CEO he installs to deliver “hardcore intense long hours” leadership. Any equity participation for a future exit is a higher-risk bet than unencumbered new startup.
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All this while the user base is *also* churning hard, and in that case, the highly engaged “influentials” user base churning the most (there are probably no “essentials” among users clearly if even POTUSes can be booted). It’s social media equivalent of CNN morphing into Fox.
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I read this while I was doing a study at Xerox ~2009 on whether there was a meaningful print-on-demand newspaper market. Talked to a bunch of veteran journalists, pro publica and knight people, Meyer, and others. But print was already in Silents/boomers endgame.
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5 possible outcomes here 1. Standard playbook PE turnaround. Shrink but get profitable in same business, pay off investment slowly 2. Meh lumpenapp (X-app= wechat+PayPal, compete with substack/YouTube/tiktok) 3. Creative leap 4. Early face-saving divestment 5. Slow death
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I guess one reason I’m sticking around is I’m 48 and GenX. I’d rather retire than try to reinvent myself on TikTok. Getting people like me to stick around isn’t worth much. We’re near-future AARP, being groomed to vote for President Ivanka while ranting on twitter in 2040.
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GenZ is already mostly elsewhere. I guess you could chase them with post-tiktok video offerings.
Getting Old 30 Rock GIF
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I now think of my own willingness to adopt or stick around a product as a bad sign. Sorry Farcaster; fact that I’m on but my 18y old nephew is not is a yellow flag It’s not that my life is over, but it’s past the point where riding tech waves is the key to what’s left of it
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