throwaway724

This also happened with a piece of shit OTC Facebook app developer called SNAP Interactive when Snapchat was going IPO. I met their CEO at a conference in NYC, and he literally had business cards printed out touting how high their market cap got during this and their subsequent message board pumping.

None of those things strike as 1) important or 2) indicative of a high-performing product development team given their size. But we can agree to disagree!

I really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What exactly are these people doing all day? I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. And they continue to ignore the drumbeat of user asking for an edit button, and are completely unable to come up with any kind of reasonable solution to the abuse or bot problems.

I don't know Kayvon personally, but what exactly is wrong with Twitter that it's so bad and slow at product development? This should be #5000 on their list of things to do.

I really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What exactly are these people doing all day?

I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. And they continue to ignore the drumbeat of user asking for an edit button, and are completely unable to come up with any kind of reasonable solution to the abuse or bot problems.

I don't know Kayvon personally, but what exactly is wrong with Twitter that it's so bad and slow at product development?

I'm increasingly of the opinion that technology like this will never see broad regulatory approval. I just can't see an argument where any agency will be comfortable with acceptable losses, and I don't see any endgame in which this technology does not result in an infinitesimal, but non-zero amount of fatal errors.

Sure. But in my experience, the amount in which investors posture that they're contrarian and look for unconventional opportunities versus how much they actually do is quite notably different.

Companies who raise $75mm don't lay off massive chunks of their workforce because they found product-market fit.

Justin raised $75mm because he's Justin, and for all VCs posture like they're contrarian risk-takers, they're absolutely not and would have invested in shit in a box if Justin said it was his.

Ehhhhhhhh. Auren ran one of the shadiest companies in recent history (Rapleaf) and he's discussing Thiel, who in my opinion was completely in the wrong w/r/t Gawker and is incredibly thin skinned and petty for someone who talks about the things that he does.

The core point is correct: you want (for lack of better phrasing) "out of the box" thinkers in your leadership roles, particularly in the early stages. But I would take either of those two as a model with the biggest grain of salt possible; you can be courageous and out of the box without being insanely unethical or a vampire-like dick, respectively.

Plenty of current athletes with lots of money to burn as well. I can count on one hand how many cases I've seen an athlete actually be value-add; in most cases they're the dumbest of dumb money who vastly overrate the influencer value of their social network.

Great, but how does that impact you? How are you going to edge companies who are much larger than you, for the finite number of skins allowed in each state? What's your plan for working with the regulators, including the necessary amount of lobbying and retail adjacency you need?

Just saying "Well, we can eventually become a paid host of these games" isn't enough and you haven't done that; just because it's now legal in a singular state doesn't mean that just anyone will be able to get licensed and regulated.