This Week in Startups - Emergency Pod! Twitter is reportedly building a paid subscription called “Twitter Blue” | E1216

Episode Date: May 18, 2021

Jason shares insights on the Twitter Blue leak (1:40) then breaks down recent product innovations, Twitter's 2021 acquisition spree, and what it all means (15:05). Check out the pod notes: https://bitly.com/e1216notes

It's an emergency pod. Twitter has its groove back. They've bought six companies, and they're launching a subscription service. Stick with us. You probably keep hearing about Stock 2 compliance, and you think, hmm, this is really relevant to me. Well, if you're targeting any large enterprise as a customer, there are all sorts of data privacy and security measures that you need to have buttoned up to close those deals.

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Secureframe.com slash offer slash twist. Emergency podcast today, we have to talk about Twitter. They seem to have fixed the product log jam. They have announced a bunch of new products. We're going to talk about that today. They've acquired six companies in the past year and revenue is surging. And it seems engagement is back and their shipping product. everything is going in the right direction for Twitter. After a couple of years of basically

being sideways, they basically got their groove back. And so here is the big news. Twitter is reportedly launching a subscription service called Twitter Blue, clever name, although that will confuse people. People are going to think they're going to get their blue check mark with it. Maybe they will. Who knows? That will start at $3 a month, $29 or $36 a year. That's really, really cheap. typically people start with a low price and then increase it, as you saw with Netflix and obviously Amazon Prime. Those things have gotten more expensive every year, not less. Twitter did $3.7 billion in revenue in 2020 with 7% year-over-year growth. That's actually not huge growth, but it's growth. And for a brand that was incredibly influential in terms of

media, politics, the arts and sports, and almost every major topic in the world, really Twitter underperformed in terms of growth and revenue. And it feels like they've now turned that around. And innovation solves all problems. And what we've seen from Twitter in the last year is massive innovation in the form of shipping products. Where a company starts is often predictive of where they end up. And Twitter started with a very simple product and very slow innovation. They didn't like to change the product because

it was simple and elegant. That might have been a mistake. If you look at something like Facebook and Instagram and other products, they constantly add new features, rip features out, and they're constantly innovating. So it seems like Twitter has realized this, and specifically Jack,

and he has started to really elevate the product offering back in May of 2007. This is almost 14 years ago. My gosh, time is flying. I posted a series of blogs on my personal blog at calicanus.com, And the first one was I would pay for Twitter.com. Literally 14 years ago, I said I would pay for this. And I was proposing in that blog post a hundred year premium offering three times what they're charging for this Twitter blue product, this rumored Twitter blue product. And that it would give you a dedicated server independent and would be faster, some more features and better speed.

And this was because there was a really acute problem in the early days of Twitter. it would take a long time to post your message and it was slow and it crashed. A year later, in May of 2008, I posted Twitter Pro. One year later, same request. Take my money for less downtime. And here's the quote, I still think there's a huge market. Perhaps 1 to 5% of Twitter base that would pay for a professional account. If 1% of 10 million users, because that's how many they had at the time,

would pay $20 a month or $250 a year. You're looking at $100,000 paid users at $250 a year each. That's $25 million in revenue. probably too high of a number in terms of the price per user and obviously too low of a number in terms of where they actually wound up. In Q1, Twitter had $199 million monetizable daily active users. Yeah, so MDAU is monetizable daily active users. Most people say daily active users.

I think what they're doing here, Twitter, when they say monetizable daily active users is taking out bots and people maybe who would never pay. If one to five percent of those paid $250 a year, that would be. 2 million to 10 million users and that would be 500 million to 2.5 billion a year. And so that would be approximately, you know, at 5% 250 a year, that would be 67% of their 2020 revenue. Now, that price is too high. That might work actually, that would be cheap for professional accounts. So if you were a journalist, if you were a CEO, if you had a corporate account, those numbers actually would be quite reasonable because people already pay for things like buffer, where they

pay for analytical tools, et cetera. And they obviously have people on staff who are getting paid well to staff their Twitter accounts. So 250 a year for a professional Twitter account is not that big of a deal. If one to five percent of those same users on Twitter pay this, you know, alleged $29 price, $36 a year, that'd be $72 million to $360 million a year. What's interesting about that number is it would be 100% profit. I mean, you might have some fees if they allowed it through the App Store and gave a 30% cut to somebody like Apple or Google. But essentially, you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, and it would probably become 10%, 20% of their revenue.

Of course, you'd lose some ads on the margins, but the truth is, Twitter has been known to not show ads to the most important accounts. In other words, if you've got over 100,000 followers, you're probably going to not see so many ads, or at least that's the rumor. In January of 2008, I gave Twitter, or I speculated, this is before Twitter had revenue turned on, that they would have three wildly lucrative businesses in feed advertising, which is obviously how they generate revenue today, subscriptions, and SMS advertising, because at the time, SMS was a big piece of the Twitter experience. In fact, Twitter started as an SMS service. Most people don't know that. Obviously, that's been deprecated.

So two out of three ain't bad. It only took them 13 years, but here we are. Back in my March of 2009, I asked Twitter if they would take $250,000 from me. It was a sincere offer, by the way, to become a default user. And that would make me featured. And I thought it would result in 5,000 or 10,000 people following an account today. And I had a product called Mahalo Answers at the time, which was kind of like Cora. But with a virtual currency in it, I kid you not. It had Mahalo dollars where people would get these dollars and then they could cash them out for other products and even gift cards. So it was, you know, before, cryptocurrency, we had a concept of virtual currencies. It was a precursor and I owned at questions

and at answers. So I was like, oh, if we get at questions, we could do, we could promote that product or service. I should have kept that going because it obviously is valuable. And here is some quotes from that article. Of course, I was only half bluffing with this move. I was 90% sure Twitter wouldn't take my money and I wouldn't have to pony up the $250,000 check. However, if they did call my bluff and cashed it the 250, I actually would have gotten what I wanted. Two to 10 million Twitter follows and the ability to drive one to two million visits

to Mahalo a month from Twitter because at the time, that would be an expected click rate, you know, five, 10, 20%. That's obviously changed dramatically as the number of debt accounts on Twitter has increased. My plan was to post the top five most absolutely fascinating questions a day

for Mahalo answers and, you know, do that to the Act Questions account, which I still own to this day. The point is that Twitter has the ability to unleash a direct marketing business the likes of which the world has never seen. I predict they will, and when they do, they will make the Twitter naysayers look like the donkeys they really are. Note, you ever notice the folks who have the most to say about making money or the ones who've

never made any? Exactly. Wow, I used to be a little spicy in my writing there. Full contact blogging. Twitter is a giant open email box that we all hang out in every day. The power of Twitter is yet to be fully understood in the same way email and the web weren't fully understood. That's actually pretty prescient. I give myself some credit for that. And that's a nice metaphor, actually, the open email box. So back to the present day. Rumors of the paid version for Twitter heated up in 2020 as this product velocity increased. And Twitter decided to address this in Q2 in a shareholder letter in July.

And this is the quote from that letter. We are also in the early stages of exploring additional potential revenue product opportunities to complement our advertising business. These may include subscriptions and other approaches. In that Q2 2020 earnings call, CEO Jack Dorsey, received. responded to a question about offering a paid version. Here's a 90-second clip, and I'll give my feedback on the other side. So first and from us, we have a really high bar for when we would ask consumers to pay for aspects of Twitter. This is a start, and we're in the very, very early phases of exploring.

As you mentioned, there have been a number of ideas over the years. We have focused the of our attention on increasing revenue durability, meaning that we have multiple lines of revenue to pull from. Most importantly, we want to make sure that any new line of revenue is complementary to our advertising business. We do think there's a world where a subscription is complementary. We think there's a world where commerce is complementary. You can imagine work around helping people manage paywalls as well, that we believe is

complementary. So that's what we're looking for. We have a small team who's exploring our options. Obviously, we're hiring for those teams. Given the work that we've done now and finished on our ad server, given the progression of our roadmap on map, and given the increased speed we're moving at in terms of our development of velocity, we're now at a place where we can explore other ideas, and you will likely see some tests this year. And, you know, as we're, you know, as we build anything, we want to, you know, work with the people that we're serving and make sure that we have a phenomenal experience before we share it. But right now, our number one priority is making sure that our map, roadmap is strong and moving fast. And that brings us to a greater

performance roadmap as well. All right. There you have folks from the man himself. Paywall obviously means some number of tweets or even videos, audio, or perhaps even newsletters could be behind a paywall and your Twitter account would become the single source of people subscribing to you because we all know that our Twitter handle is what we use to authenticate into many other services and our Twitter following is what drives as content creators, a lot of our engagement on other platforms like Clubhouse or Substack. In fact, Substack and Clubhouse built their graph largely off of journalists and influencers and CEOs and venture capitalists and artists logging into those services, finding,

their friends on them instantly. And now Twitter has to say, wait a second, maybe we should own those businesses. And in fact, we'll get into that. They have. The Twitter blue scoop,

which I'll unpack for a moment here, this was reported on Twitter by an app researcher named Jane Wong. She is Wong M. Jane, W-O-N-G-M-J-A-N-E. And she released this on May 15th on Saturday. And she said the initial features will include the ability

to bookmark tweets into collections. That sounds a lot like moments, so maybe, you know, which is a product they removed. But I kind of like that product. It was kind of neat. In a leaked screenshot, it says take your Twitter experiences to the next level with exclusive features, collections, save and organize your favorite tweets and collections so they're easier to find later. So the idea here would be, you know, they have lists.

They never really finished lists. They never made that a great product. That was a huge missed opportunity. I think lists should become something that Twitter makes as part of this or advanced lists. There's so many different things you could do with advanced lists. And maybe when you hit the star or bookmark, you could then save these tweets, even if they get deleted or republish them. Pretty interesting. And the screenshot of collections and bookmarks and actions looks as you would expect it. You add and remove a tweet to a collection. It does a little pop up and you put it in there.

No big deal. Maybe they'll have an undo tweet button with a timer, kind of like undo send and email. If you use Superhuman, which we're investors in, when you send your email, it holds it for 10 seconds. You get a little thing on the bottom that says undo on any action, whether you're archiving, deleting, or even sending, composing, and then sending. And that's pretty nice to have that. There's a leaked gift of, in fact, the undo tweet. It says your tweet was sent and there's an undo button. And when you look at that gift, it's kind of like a little status bar that fills up.

You know, if you click it, you can then undo your tweet. And so I guess Twitter is going to make you pay to have that feature. And clutter-free news reading, better news aggregation is also mentioned here. And when we get to the acquisition section, one of the companies we invested in, which I don't have inside information on, might be part of this vision. We'll see. It remains to be seen. But they are planning perhaps multiple tiers here with more premium features for higher tiers.

So 299, 699, and, you know, 2999 might be. what they do here, just like when you buy any SaaS software. According to Wong, this Twitter blue screenshot is a work in progress and not final. Things like the name pricing features, etc. may change ahead of official launch, but I'm sure the features that will grow as time grows. So who knows how she got this information, but she obviously has somebody who leaked it to her. I'm assuming she did not dumpster dive for these in the trash bins behind the Twitter headquarters because it's closed due to a pandemic, and I'm assuming she didn't hack their system. So let's take a look at some of the acquisitions and the velocity. They put somebody in charge,

the Periscope co-founder, Kvon Bakepur, who is going to be on this podcast soon, maybe next week or two weeks. He's K-A-Y-V-Z on Twitter. He's pretty awesome. He's the head of consumer products. And he joined in 2015 after they bought Periscope before it launched, which was a great product. And then he became the head of product in a June 2018 reorg by Jack. Periscope was officially sunset and shut down just on March 31st of this year. And like I said, KVone's coming on the podcast. But let's look at the product velocity here. They launched spaces back in November 2020. I was lucky enough to be part of that. They can be started by anyone now with over 600 followers. It's a direct competitor to Clubhouse. I would argue it's better than Clubhouse because you can

be on Twitter and share tweets while this is playing like in a minimized tray at the bottom of the app, which is really cool because what most people are doing on Clubhouse is leaving. Clubhouse and opening Twitter. And, you know, reading tweets while talking on Clubhouse is now in one specific space. And you don't have to rebuild your followers. And you get to just everybody who's on Twitter automatically sees you hanging out there. Now, it's not working on the web yet. It's not working on iPad. So there's a lot of growth left for Twitter spaces. I think Twitter spaces will have many more users in Clubhouse ultimately. Superfollows. This was announced on February 25th. and it's going to let users own money from followers who pay them for exclusive content,

e-commerce deals for other perks. You know, this will be kind of like Patreon. We actually shut our Patreon down recently because many of you didn't know about it. We're trying to get you to go over Patreon. Maybe we'll relaunch that. We'll see, but we'll probably relaunch that natively on Apple and Spotify, which are offering ad-free subscriptions, which I think 1% of you will probably take advantage of. But you never know.

Maybe we'll do some content here. We generally don't like to charge our users. have great advertisers and partners. So this isn't as relevant for us, but you could see it being relevant for the only fans crowd or the substack crowd or certain content that is not advertiser-friendly. And you could see other influencers making money from this. So the idea here would be you get subscriber-only newsletters,

access to different communities that you wouldn't have access to or deals and discounts, that kind of stuff. The standard cohort of things on Patreon. And this means you don't, again, have to leave Twitter. So if you want to hold a space, you want to do a newsletter, you want to have an audio space, a newsletter, a Patreon. You're basically building substack Patreon and spaces into Twitter where your graph is and where everybody's spending time.

And that really is going to make a difference because people switching apps is a cost, people having to download apps, having to create a Patreon account, this is all nonsense and takes too much time. If everything is in one app, it's much, much more like it is in China where you have singular apps that have many features in them. YouTube added a premium membership you might have become aware of. So when you have on a lot of YouTube channels, you'll see subscribe and join. Join means you pay.

Subscribe means you get it for free. So again, Patreon. I'm short Patreon because why would anybody go start a Patreon if it's built in YouTubers. There's no reason to start a Patreon. And a podcaster now with Apple and Spotify offering subscriptions and with Twitter offering subscriptions? Really, why would you even need to go there? And that's not a dick to Patreon. It's an interesting service and they obviously pioneered it. But it does show exactly, you know, how your startup can become a feature of another one. Channels can add exquisite videos, members only content,

yada, yada, tip jar, I just turned this on. I just got an alert about it. I'm going to donate all my tips to charity. But this lets you connect your Twitter handle to things like the cash app, which obviously Jack owns as part of Square. Patreon PayPal Venmo, Ban Camp and some other services and Twitter takes no cut, which is a really interesting concept. So they're undercutting other people.

And I think the tip jar could become a really powerful concept. I watch a number of online YouTube live shows, Nix fan TV, Scott Adams, his morning show at 7 a.m. And I see people give $5, $10, $25 to these live streams.

And then it's got a really neat thing. on YouTube, I recently gave a $50 tip to my friend CP of the franchise who does Knicks fan TV because it's so entertaining. I just thought, I'll just throw him 50 bucks and he can buy a bottle of Chardonnay. Because after the Knicks game, I like to watch his post game commentary. It's like buy the fans for the fans. So I give him the 50 bucks and didn't realize this, but my $50 tip with my name stayed up on the screen for 30 minutes, I think. And if you put like a $10 tip, it stays up for 10 minutes, $5 stays up for five minutes, you get the idea. So you kind of get this really nice recognition by doing this.

Obviously, this exists in other places. And tipping super big in China. Du Yin is how it's pronounced, I believe, owned by BytDance, collected 1.7 billion in tipping revenue in the first half of 2020, according to my notes here. Other services like Twitch have tipping for a long time. You all know that. So let's look at the acquisitions because the acquisitions do tell a story. Twitter stock has obviously done well.

and some incomplete deals, it was reported they were in talks with Discord and Clubhouse. Those deals fell through, according to sources. Clubhouse may have raised that $4 billion. That might have been a preemptive funding by Andreessen Horowitz and others because they got a serious offer. So I would say maybe Twitter offered them $2 or $3 billion for Clubhouse, which is insane. But, you know, such as the industry, when something breaks out and gets escape velocity, it becomes worth a lot. We can talk about that on another episode.

the venture capital has probably said, hey, here's $100 million. You can each take $10, $20 million off the table. We'll buy some shares from the founders to keep you in the game as an independent company. That'll probably turn out to be a mistake. If they got an offer of $3 or $4 billion, you know, usually I'd say go long. But in this situation where everybody's building Clubhouse into Slack, it's being built into LinkedIn. It's being built into Facebook. You know, everybody's basically announced that they're going to build this in as a feature.

I think Clubhouse is going to be, you know, ultimately worth less than the $4 billion. and it's worth today. That's just my personal belief. And I'm not saying that to ride the founders or anything or because I wasn't able to invest in it. It's just that I've never seen the replication of a product like this this quick. And in fact, most people say the clubhouse copied it from Discord. I don't know if that's actually true, but many people have told me that that that was where the inspiration was. But they did buy Breaker, which was a podcasting app that was very interesting. Breaker relied on the Twitter feed, the Twitter social graph, to tell you what your friends were listening to in terms of podcasts. It was really well done.

done. It wasn't my default player. My default player is the Apple one and the, an overcast, because I like the power user features. In Overcast, and I like Apple's UI, sometimes I'll use Spotify, but, you know, I'm just kind of been trained to use the other two. They all seem to have parity. And so I believe what they're going to do with this podcast player breaker is they're going to combine the concept of spaces with podcasting inside of Twitter and then let you pay for it. So that's probably the grand plan. You do a Twitter space, you record it, and then it's available for pay on the replay. So free live, pay on the replay. At least that's what I would do. They bought Oway No back in January of 2021 for an undisclosed amount. It's a full-service creative agency

that previously worked with Twitter. And the why in the aqua hire here is to accelerate the quality and execution of Twitter's product experience, according to the chief design officer, Dantleet Davis. So who knows? that is about. It could just be talent. This, you know, founder wrote a funny tweet now, comma, about that edit button jack. So obviously maybe he's going to be designing, you know, all these new features and creating the Twitter singularity in the content space. They bought Drive Scale back in January 25th for an undisclosed amount. And that's a server company that optimized computing storage and network fabric. Again, that was an aqua hire to accelerate

their app development. That happens all the time in the industry. Company runs out of money. it didn't get to scale. Investors are, you know, kind of ready to sell it. The team is ready to go work somewhere else. The big one, I think, one of the big ones is review, R-E-V-U-E, which is a substack killer, and it allows you to do newsletter subscription services. So people who write tweet storms now get prompted, hey, check out review. And so I think this is going to be quite material.

I would consider putting, you know, an email newsletter onto Twitter if it made it easier to manage because I'm constantly having Twitter users and I'm forwarding them over to MailChimp or whatever or a type form. They acquired reshuffle back in March of 2021. It's an API integration platform and they called it a strategic aqua hard and they're going to shut down reshuffle and add those people to Twitter's API team. Twitter has had a love-hate relationship with the API. They gave everybody API access. People abused it. People created mass confusion by creating Twitter clients. They redid that. They shut it down. They deprecated apps. access, now they want to do a 2.0 API.

It's just a very hard thing to do because when you have these APIs, you create competitors like Clubhouse and substack, etc. And then you may want to go into that business and now they've siphoned off your users and you basically have enabled downstream competitors, which is why Zuckerberg doesn't have APIs anymore. And a company we invested in Scroll was just acquired a couple of weeks ago. and I think it's really interesting. Scroll was a subscription service

that basically allowed users to read news and buy a subscription across many sites. And this is, you know, one of the, either the siren song of founders or the Holy Grail. And I think this will be part of Twitter Blue. I think when you subscribe to Twitter Blue,

maybe for, you know, $8 a month, you'll get to read news stories natively inside of Twitter just like Apple News, which I recently paid for as part of my family plans. Now, everybody in the family, when they go to Google News, gets to read it. I really love this family plan stuff because I might not pay for Apple News otherwise, but if I'm like, eh, it's going to be split between two, three, four, five people, okay, kind of makes sense.

Or, you know, I cloud is, you know, I get the two terabyte. Okay, now, you know, I got three kids. We're dividing the cost, you know, across five people. Just starts to work really well. And I think it's super powerful. And so you can follow Try Scroll on Twitter. And it gives them, you know, basically, it just takes a lot of clutter out

and it makes things really easy. You take out the ads and I think this ad-free experience is going to be really neat when you're on Twitter and able to just very simply read news stories clean, fast, just like Apple News, maybe even preloaded. The news will be preloaded and cashed the top news.

And so you look at that, you know, acquisition spray from Breaker all the way down to scroll. That's six acquisitions in the first five months of the year. It's a pretty acquisitive year. So they have really aggressive projections. They want to grow a double revenue by 20, 23, you know, doubling revenue in three or four years. You divide that into 72, the rule of 72. They have to be 15, 20 percent growth every year. And, you know, they were at 7 percent. So that's 10 years to double revenue. So now they've set a much more ambitious goal. That means they're going to need to have

either more advertising, twice as much advertising, charge twice as much for it, have twice as many users, or have another revenue stream that contributes to this. So they're obviously doing all of those things and getting aggressive. They set a goal to double development velocity by the end of 2023. I think they're getting there already. They really want to do that to drive the monetizable daily active users or revenue, right? And, you know, $199 is nice. but they're well behind other platforms. Facebook has about 14 times as many daily users, and Facebook's quarterly revenue is 25 times that of Twitter.

So that's pretty aggressive. Twitter is aiming to grow their monetizable daily active users to just $350 million. So they've got to add $115 million. I think that's possible with a lot of these subscription products because, you know, if you have Patreon-only fans, you know, paid YouTube. you as a content creator are then going to ask people to come to some location to engage.

That location was only fans, Twitch, Clubhouse, Substack, Patreon. Now you're going to tell them to come to Twitter. I'm going to say, go to Twitter.com slash Jason and subscribe. Or somebody like Lizzo might say go to Twitter.com slash Lizzo and subscribe and see my, you know, you know, me doing acoustic versions of my songs at home, whatever, she does like some cool stuff on TikTok like that. Will she'll sing and interact with fans.

So really interesting to see this aggressive. And, you know, Twitter had a stagnant share price for a long time. They IPOed in 2013 under Dick Costello, who is now an investor, a great guy. And they were at a $31 billion market calf. After a brief surge, so $60 a share, Twitter dropped back to $40 and traded flat until 2015. Then it dipped to $30 a share.

And this was, you know, I think pretty rattling for a lot of Twitter insiders and shareholders. A lot of them sold their shares back then. And Twitter traded down and bottomed out of $14 a share in 2017. Jack in 2018 reorganized and the market started to respond. A lot of people like Professor Galloway were saying, you know, Jack should be fired, I believe. And then Twitter got to $40 a share for the first time since it's IPO, trade flat. And then they peaked in February of this year at 7. $77 after this aggressive projections were released, and now they're at $51 to share

in a $40 billion market cap. For it to be at $40 billion is really disappointing in a way because their influence is much higher. If you look at their revenue by year, 2012-300, 2013, they doubled to $600. 2014, they two and a half times to $1.4 billion, or almost two and a half times. Then from 2014 to 2015, they go from 1.4 to 2.2. it's a 50% growth, not bad. And then here we go. The brakes start to pump. 2015 to 2016, only to 2.5. 2017, they go down to 2.4. But then Trump gets elected. And we have a

storing economy. And the product maybe starts getting a little bit better. But I would say Trump and the storing economy, you know, really boost interest in Twitter. And they go 2.4 to 3 billion in 2018 to 3.4 billion in 2019 to 3.7 billion in 2020. Those are nice jumps. But But again, you're talking about high single digits, low, double digits. And so this is also dovetails because it's only advertising. And advertising is fickle during a great economy or surging usage. You get more ads. In a down market, you get crushed, which is why people who were dependent on advertising,

like the New York Times, built their subscription businesses over the last couple of years. So they don't have to worry about these wild swings. Well, now we have Apple saying we're going to let users opt out or force them to opt in to being tracked. This is making advertising on mobile phones with the most elite group of people. iPhone users, basically it's anchoring a lot of it. And we're going to go back to a CPM model, perhaps, charging per 1,000 impressions, but it's not going to be as highly targeted. 96% of users opted out of ad tracking, according to the Flurry Analytics, which is owned by Verizon, which just got out of the content and advertising business. They literally sold AOL Yahoo to a hedge fund.

And we might see some other things like bring your own algorithm, which Jack talked about, that he might want to let people bring their own way of sorting after the whole Section 230 hearings back in the day. So will Twitter, what will Twitter's revenue be in 2020? Can they double it? I think they can. I think they could double it. Yeah. I could see them acquiring more companies with revenue. I could see this vision coming true.

I can see them falling short. Sure. It's going to be an aggressive goal. I could also see them exceeding it. and they seem to have the right team in place. They seem to be making great acquisitions. And they seem a little more bold and aggressive. And the company's always been passive.

They've always been afraid to change what's working. And this is a lesson for founders. You know, you really do want to be careful to not change the core user interface because that can confuse people and really upset them. Look at Amazon. It's ugly. Craigslist, ugly, eBay, ugly. And then if you try to make them, you know, elegant and new, people get really upset.

And they go, why did you change it? I can't find stuff. There is something when you're doing transactions or you're building a CMS or any kind of web service to consistency and not moving stuff around. But that means you could have somebody disrupt you. And it's fantastic to see Twitter really getting better at. product and increasing the velocity and being bold. Congratulations to the team at Twitter. I think you're doing a great job. As a power Twitter user and somebody who loves the platform and obviously

has been talking about it incessantly for, you know, going on two decades now, I really love the changes and I wish you the best to the Twitter team. It's really impressive work. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye. This week in startups is brought to you by Secure Frame helps hundreds of Companies get enterprise ready by streamlining SOC2 compliance in weeks, not months. Get $2,000 off your first year by going to secureframe.com slash offer slash twist.