# Special: DAOing a Twitter Board Seat | Where It Happens

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th-TUnDCtuA
Duration: 20 min
Language: English
Words: 3691
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/Th-TUnDCtuA

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[0:00] welcome back to the where it happens podcast where we give you a seat at the table for the future of business i'm here with greg we've got a special episode for you today welcome we're going to be talking about twitter the ceo change what it means and maybe a little web 3 angle to go create some change of twitter looking forward to it stay tuned you're going to love it i hate banking most banking products suck so when i was starting all these new businesses and going on this new adventure i turn to mercury mercury is banking four founders by founders they make everything so easy and a beautiful

[0:38] elegant design there's free wires virtual and physical debit cards they even have a raising platform where they will connect you with other investors out in the ecosystem have you tried mercury i have and let's be honest when you log into traditional banking websites and apps it's hideous when i go into mercury it's like a walk in the park so i love using it feels fresh and i can't use anything else you should definitely check it out at mercury.com it will completely change the game for your banking experience i guarantee it capchase is the financing solution for fast-growing startups their main product capchase grow allows you to tap into

[1:20] future revenue today so that you can reinvest in your business and scale more quickly there's not a lot of paperwork and it's easy to set up and get started on you don't have to waste time with fundraising and there's no dilution ever to get started today go to capchase.com room capcha scales with you allows you to grow faster go get it today so from time to time we are going to have to do just because of some pressing thing that has happened a special episode just jump on 15 20 25 minutes max and just go jam on something that has just recently happened that we feel like we need to

[1:57] talk about because it's very pressing and it matters you're all trying to figure it out we're trying to figure it out so we're just gonna jump on and jam today is one of those times and it's gonna be the first time we do it but we're going to be talking about twitter ceo change new ceo big news um perrog agarwal agarwal yeah getting announced yeah jack stepped down he was the founder and ceo right and then he he left i think right then he came back interim ceo and then ceo again yeah and then he was ceoing two publicly traded companies square and twitter which is

[2:34] like pretty odd i don't know if there's anyone else who does that and then all of a sudden we wake up and this former cto parag agarwal yep is now the ceo and i know you have spent a lot of time thinking about twitter um you were on cnbc you know last week um talking about it so curious what you think about it um yeah yeah i've been following this for a while so i think it's a really interesting situation you have basically like you need to to understand this move and to understand what it means for the business and for the stock i think you

[3:15] need to kind of go back in time a little bit so obviously you mentioned it jack was founder and ceo left came back was running this alongside square has a lot more control over square so that's one piece of contact square i think he has majority voting control a lot more equity value sitting in it twitter has become yeah it's been around for a really long time can we talk about that for a second yeah so like does jack even care about like is he does he care about the equity value because i don't think he i think he cares about the control i think the

[3:46] i think to him like if you go if you look at what jack cares about now it's like web theory and crypto and bitcoin specifically yeah and i just feel like he probably just didn't want to run a social networking website app anymore yeah and it's become increasingly a political headache right yeah so twitter has become more and more cumbersome it's not probably like the fun early stage startup tech company that it once was square still has that very entrepreneurial aspect they're doing a lot of cool things in bitcoin they're doing a lot of cool things in web 3 and crypto so i agree with you i

[4:18] mean i think it's become a headache so there's probably some piece of it that's motivated by that he really did want to step down but i think the really interesting thing to talk about here is like the impact of the activist investor that has been involved so elliott management came in i think it was like in 2020 basically put out a letter saying jack had to step down had to focus on square they should let someone just focus on twitter because it is weird running two big public companies as ceo they felt like it was being mismanaged as a result so they came in they said

[4:50] that the compromise that twitter reached with these guys um it was silver lake and elliott management was take two board seats we'll focus more on growth we'll focus more on revenue optimization and basically that was kind of like a a truce um at the time fast forward to today you're in a world where twitter really hasn't made a ton of progress on the revenue optimization especially around direct response advertising so for people that don't know in the social networking world facebook snap all these other players direct response advertising is like the highest profit ad platform you can have and that's all about generating a direct response so

[5:29] that's like you get an ad you click click on it to buy whatever the thing is it requires really good targeting and it's really good profit margins twitter has historically had a just abysmal ad stack and really very poor direct response advertising um split so for most platforms it's like i think 80 20 direct response versus brand advertising twitter is like the opposite it's 20 direct response and they've never been able to make a platform that is better for direct response advertising although to their um like i will say that twitter does monetize better than snap and discord on a per user per user basis yeah yeah

[6:08] so that we've got to give them some credit yeah well and they've improved they've improved to some extent i'm actually i mean you saw me i talked about it on tmc i'm actually bullish on what the long term is i know you're not quite as bullish on on twitter but my view around all of this is what happened was he kept getting pressure now suddenly he's like stepping down there's some rumors floating around you know ben thompson talked about it in his newsletter today there's some rumors floating around that basically like some of the board or somebody leaked it to cnbc who broke the news at like just

[6:38] before market open stock spiked at the market open like up ten percent or something like that then it got announced two hours later that paragraph while the cto who's been around for all of the challenges that twitter had was taking on the ceo role and the stock closed down two percent so there was this massive swing and then today again it's down several points and so clearly the market is not responding very well to what the future looks like because i think the hope was that the future for twitter was going to look very different than the past that they were going to focus a lot more on you know driving

[7:10] direct response driving more signal through the platform increasing the revenue uh potential driving more growth and i think the general response now is that maybe that's not going to happen and maybe there's an environment where you know we're not going to see that in the same way i think i gotta say i was surprised that um like perrag was was the choice i actually thought it was gonna be kavon who's the chief product officer who stand for classmate of mine oh i didn't realize that yeah yeah do you know him personally no i don't know him very well personally but yeah yeah i know i know him well and he he's he's

[7:47] awesome and he's a great product person um [Music] interesting that they chose someone technical to be the ceo that was just kind of an interesting it is interesting and i think it's part of the market response right the product side is their huge potential angle because twitter for me like if you imagine what the bold case for twitter looks like like how does twitter become a 200 stock or 150 stock it's by being the super app of the knowledge creator economy the information creator economy it is today the central point of discovery for anyone that's in that world of knowledge creators it's the place where you're generating the most

[8:25] discovery for new people coming in it's where you're engaging the most and then you're using it to funnel people into your paid things but now twitter is starting to roll out products where you can start to monetize with a review newsletter you can do the super follows the twitter blue like you can create more engaging content keep people on the platform longer form things and so the product angle what you just brought up of like kvon running more things is pretty interesting for them as a as a play because as you have better products as you have more engaging products what that does on the revenue side is it

[8:55] allows more signal to be drawn out of the platform which enables advertisers to actually target more effectively that drives up direct response and suddenly you're able to actually monetize the users more there's more engaging content which means there's more user growth and so that's a pretty exciting thing too twitter is just so frustrating for me because i'm like it's two to three product features away from being like a 200 billion dollar company right and when you open up the app yes they like okay they launch spaces they launch super follows they launch blue but it's like these are actually i'll give them credit on spaces like that actually was really well

[9:32] executed but the app basically feels the same yeah like it basically is the same app and when you think of like you know instagram facebook even um companies like that like they're tick tock like they're constantly innovating so i just i can't be i'm not really bullish you know if we're saying am i bearish or bullish like i love twitter yeah there's like it's so obvious what they could be doing they could be like professional social networking kind of vibe like more more towards like a linkedin uh experience they could i know they're doing some web 3 stuff but they could be like really really taking a bet there um

[10:15] but i just i mean i if i just look at the last 10 years and just see what they've shipped they're just the velocity isn't there but now the velocity sort of is there right it definitely for the first nine i don't know about that ten years you have twitter blue i do have twitter blue and like would you what do you think of that product um i like the ability to undo tweets it doesn't feel like a huge advancement i like the ad-free reading that comes with it um through articles but beyond that i mean it's not a huge advancement but i think a lot of people

[10:42] are using it i got to change the color of my app icon that was the other video i mean dropped i i honestly look at twitter blue and i'm like is are you serious like is this a joke like but it doesn't matter like it's to me it's less about what they've actually launched and more about the fact that they're actually launching things that's that's where my head is at i'm like at least they're showing can we raise the bar for twitter like can we can we raise the bar for twitter like our bar is so low for this for this company no other company we would have this bar

[11:18] this this low yeah um i totally agree with you this is like it's reminding me of this framework uh ben thompson just talked about it and it's an old market in jerusalem framework which is so good around this which is like the whole product market fit framework and andreessen had talked about way back in the day how there was like two eras of a company there's before product market fit and after product market fit and ben thompson i thought talked about it really well when he said basically twitter in some sense like hit product market fit too quickly and then had no incentive to continue grinding away at it to find new nuances

[11:54] and make changes quickly and so it hit this struggle point of like it literally was the perfect product from the get-go and especially for that era they hit it so quickly and people loved it so much the like micro blogging for breaking news quick things that they never had that grind of like having to keep innovating and adapting compared to a snap who like had some product market fit but hadn't really figured out the business and kept innovating very very quickly because they had this constant urge to continue to find new product market fit and new segments twitter never had that so suddenly it lost its

[12:26] entrepreneurial urge very early in its trajectory and now it's trying to restart it and it's pretty difficult to do as you're as you're saying yeah it's difficult to do and in a regard it requires organizational change like it requires like you know new people new energy and i don't know enough about what's going on inside twitter you know if they have the right people and i don't know if this cto is gonna be you know the person for it um if he's product oriented and he's got that energy then like i may be a little bit bullish to neutral but if he is not product oriented

[13:12] um no i don't think so i mean i'm kind of i'm kind of i'm kind of in the neutral to bearish on twitter right now stock is what 40. well let's let's close out with that on this so make your prediction of the future one year from today so today is november 30th one year from today the stock is currently trading at 43.55 as we sit here um basically over the life of the stock it's where it was when it went public like i think it went probably at like 40 and it's at 43. it kind of had the huge trough donald trump breathed some life

[13:44] back into it it spiked hit 60 plus in uh you know earlier part of 2021 now it's down at 43. one year from today and five years from today where do you have the stock and why one year not financial advice not financial advice one year from today it's trading at 43.59 right now yeah 43.58 all right i give it 58.43 one year from now okay so you know it gets a bump okay but i think it gets a bump because social gets a bump not because twitter is you know releasing tons of stuff um so lags behind the stock performance of snap and facebook i think facebook outperforms okay uh

[14:28] twitter okay and then five years from now i think it's exact it's exactly where we are today it's like 43 57 or whatever like twitter is one of those companies that i think just ends up um kind of coasting you know and unless unless this guy is is the savior um but yeah that's my gut on it okay you uh i'm gonna go on the other end of the spectrum here i've got twitter a hundred plus a year from now again not financial advice a hundred plus i think there's 100 upside from here um and five years from now i've got it at 200. so do you think it i think this one

[15:15] or underperformed facebook or meta i think it i think it outperforms all of the other social platforms okay that's my hot take um i i think there's so much untapped potential here and people want it to be amazing people haven't left in all the 10 years of this product being pretty bad and not innovating people are there and now all of a sudden they're starting to be glimmers of it being slightly more engaging and people are hyped on it not the stock yet but the business i actually think like i think there's a separation of business and stock here and i think the business is gonna start showing a bunch of potential

[15:48] and the stock might follow and so like that that's why i think it's gonna be i think it's gonna be a 200 billion dollar company what's the market cap right now let's look market cap today is 34 billion dollars i think this could be a 200 billion dollar company if only she's ridiculous if only we can create a twitter dow yeah and buy the company make a community owned and actually run this ship like it should be run the ship like it should be run then i think you're right we could create a dow to buy a board seat so that we would have how much is it

[16:21] i don't know i wonder i wonder if we formed a dow and made enough noise around it if we could convince them to give us a board seat as the dow as a community right like why interesting why is it think about this why is it that the community the twitter community doesn't have a seat on the board it's almost ridiculous it's kind of a fascinating idea why don't we actually we should go into the community after this and i want to talk about this packy mccormick hit me up my boy after you see this drop let's talk about doing this we uh we form a dow to take a i know he's a

[16:55] twitter bull too by the way because i've talked to him about this before but um we we form a dow to go take a twitter board seat and we position it to them we go talk to brett taylor the new chairman of the board who's a stanford grad by the way and um someone i think very highly of we get us get at least get a seat in the room and have a discussion with them of the community should own one of the board seats totally and we form a dow raise enough money to go do it and we take a board seat to drive twitter in the right direction i mean if

[17:23] constitution doubt could raise 40 million in a week could we raise 400 million in a month do you think i don't even know if we need 400 million we might be able to do it with a lot less and and convince them that it's worth doing and we can show enough support by raising some amount of money to go do it and go take the board seat and see if we can create some change around the product all right i think it's pretty interesting cool all right all right twitter dao we are going to buy a twitter board seat um that's the takeaway from today i really enjoyed

[17:52] doing this for a special episode and i hope you learned something from it if you're interested in getting involved in the twitter board seat dao hit us up in the community trwih.com to join and we look forward to seeing you there see ya capchase is the financing solution for fast growing startups their main product capchase grow allows you to tap into future revenue today so that you can reinvest in your business and scale more quickly there's not a lot of paperwork and it's easy to set up and get started on you don't have to waste time with fundraising and there's no dilution ever to get started today go to captrace.com

[18:30] room capcha scales with you allows you to grow faster go get it today i hate banking most banking products suck so when i was starting all these new businesses and going on this new adventure i turned to mercury mercury is banking four founders by founders they make everything so easy and a beautiful elegant design there's free wires virtual and physical debit cards they even have a raising platform where they will connect you with other investors out in the ecosystem have you tried mercury i have and let's be honest when you log into traditional banking websites and apps it's hideous when i go into mercury it's like a walk

[19:13] in the park so i love using it feels fresh and i can't use anything else you should definitely check it out at mercury.com it will completely change the game for your banking experience i guarantee it join our free community at trwih.com

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