Twitter: Would you stay or would you go?
Clarity over culture + collective commitment + opportunity = ?
TLDR: Twitter has an opportunity to change the world, but the spectators aren’t a culture fit.
Last week we talked about long-term problems, and alluded to Elizabeth Holmes’ trial, and the long-awaited accountability in tech. She was since sentenced to more than 11 years in prison. Next up, SBF, but we’ll see how many years that one takes.
Today, it’s about Twitter.
Over the past week, the Twittersphere and TikTok algorithms have been hounding me with divided takes on Elon Musk’s approach to culture and work ethic, calling it a “chainsaw.”
Well no one asked, but I’m going to weigh in anyway.
Comfy tech jobs are awesome.
I know from experience. LinkedIn was the most amazing place to live the most amazing life. Great culture, incredible work-life harmony, benefits very few can compete with, and the opportunity to work on something that impacts hundreds of millions of lives.
Google, Meta, Twitter, you name it, it’s a good life.
The truth is though if you’re inside one of these companies, there’s a good chance you’re maximizing your personal happiness, but maybe not your personal ambition. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, and that’s not to say you can’t accomplish amazing things, or impact the world in a profound way as part of a big tech company, but it is hard to know if it was you or if it was the collective making that difference. Likely the latter.
And then there’s being a founder.
The opposite end of the spectrum of course is leaving the nest and going out on your own to test your mettle. To build something as big as one of those companies, but to do it from zero, and to know unequivocally the greatness you are capable of as a tech nerd.
That experience will exhaust you and test your fortitude without a doubt. We’re talking 12 hours a day minimum for years on end making next to no money relative to your tech job. Calling your family and friends and telling them that you’re going to try to do something amazing with your life and that it might impact your priorities—at least for the next few years.
Most people would choose the comfy tech job, and who would blame them? To each her own, as they say.
Enter Elon. Moving Twitter from big tech back to building.
I’m just going to come out and say it—those bashing Elon’s approach to culture and work ethic are spoiled. In a time when Meta is laying off 11,000, I’m not so sure people should be complaining about their boss asking them into come to work. Instead, they probably should be grateful they have a job in the first place. Sure, maybe your new COVID remote work lifestyle has no place for a more traditional commitment to a company, but those are choices Twitter employees will have to make without any guarantee that another cushy job will scoop them up.
Instead of dwelling on hustle culture in tech vs. the outside world though, I want to talk about the opportunity Twitter employees have in front of them right now as that is really at the crux of whether to stay or go. Unfortunately for them, Elon hasn’t laid out his vision—he’s simply asking for blind trust. So I thought I would share my view of what could be done.
Let’s start with some perspectives I hold.
Digital identity is broken
So are big ad networks
Solving both unlocks revolutionary opportunities across data infrastructure and interoperability that could redefine how the world works
If you are sitting inside of Twitter right now and you don’t see the opportunity ahead of you to be part of something that could completely change the course of human history, you should definitely take the exit package because the commitment required to accomplish what’s possible here is not for the faint of heart.
Will Twitter change the course of human history? Who knows. That’s not the point. The point is that it’s possible. That the non-linear upside of the time invested could amount to something so revolutionary that it would be the core achievement of your lifetime—maybe many lifetimes. Most people’s jobs don’t even have a .000000000000001% chance of that, so if you could move that decimal point to the right a few places and give yourself a few orders of magnitude greater chance of changing the world with the time you have here on earth, you should at a minimum strongly consider it, don’t you think?
Ok, so why do I think the potential is so immense?
Let’s start with digital identity. I don’t know if this is the approach Elon will take, but this will be one of the defining problems of our lifetimes. Our data is siloed across Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Twitter, and a million other services where we need entire billion-dollar companies just to manage our passwords, not to mention our trillion-dollar governments.
Think of all of the core life issues that depend on your passport, driver’s license, social security number, employee identification number, passwords, and so on. Think about it from end to end, from your birth certificate and passport renewals to your DMV experiences all the way to the quality of the ads you see and how impersonalized core elements of your life are—like the nutrients in the food you eat or the medicine that is prescribed to you. What if there were a new identity—a global and perfectly protected one—built for the digital world we live in today, where everything could be personalized to directly improve your health, wealth, and happiness?
Twitter is at a moment, with a very specific leader, who not only understands the importance of verification but knows the potential held within cryptography and blockchain. Paying for blue checkmarks aside, there’s a deeper opportunity in identity verification that would allow us to create a world where the value that’s exchanged between individuals and companies, and even between nations, is limited only by our ability to trust one another and exchange our data. In fact, perhaps in another post we can talk about why nuclear weapons are an antiquated power axis relative to information.
But staying on topic, this is just the very tip of the iceberg. Ad networks are broken too.
If you pull the identity thread, and ask yourself “even if it could be done, how would we do it?” the obvious answer is cryptography, and secure data infrastructures like the blockchain. However, as a public company—like Meta or Google—beholden to shareholders, you live and die by your ad revenue even though advertising business models are completely outdated.
Think about this: how much of every dollar you spend goes to big tech?
Everything and everyone you buy from is baking into their margins the cost of customer acquisition, which means not only is inflation hiking your prices, but the money you’re spending is also being redeployed inefficiently.
In part, it’s going to the marketing department that is buying your data from Google and Meta to test things like consumer sentiment and to sell you things directly too. They pay to retarget you, and to measure multi-touch attribution, and to improve brand favorability across platforms. They pay brands and agencies to develop content and imagery, influencers to promote them on TikTok and Instagram, and they “invest” money into user focus groups and expert consultants. The entire system is built on finding, understanding, and influencing consumers and companies, but it’s wildly inefficient considering you could just as easily volunteer your data and be rewarded for it. And let’s not even open Pandora’s Box on Apple, “cookiepocalypse,” and what the implications are for the industry (one example).
If you aren’t beholden to shareholders for ad revenue though, you aren’t confined to the current system, and instead, you can rebuild it. What if revenues of big tech were paid to it’s users? Here are some examples of the average revenue per user (ARPU) for big tech:
What if, instead us—the users—being the product, you actually shared in the revenue and were provided a more valuable service altogether? What if that revenue flowing to users was dwarfed by the real value being creating? What if there were a market bigger and more important than advertising dollars?
If you build the global identity layer of the internet, and you build the data infrastructure on zero-knowledge roll-ups, redistributing ad revenue could be the greatest trojan horse of incentive alignment in the history of the world.
Here’s the value proposition in my made up future:
“If you’re using «Twitter», we will pay you according to that usage, and when we use your data, the world will become a better place instead of one that is dominated by advertising and psychological warfare.”
Data infrastructure and interoperability.
But how do we ensure that data is used to actually better the world and that there’s enough revenue per user to keep people engaged beyond the town center dialogue that already occurs? Well it would depend on how Twitter, or any digital service, wanted to leverage that data and the ways in which they made it accessible to a new type of customer—in this case, other businesses, governments, research institutes, non-profits, and service providers.
If users are incentivized to use the platforms they love, and the data they already volunteer anyway becomes leveraged responsibly and for their own good rather than harm, then we are in a situation where every industry and every function of everything we know can be made more efficient.
We’re talking about federated search of a truly global identity infrastructure without any privacy concerns.
What if companies, governments, and individuals could access 1st party data lakes? You could run analyses and test hypotheses on every permutation of everything. We could move from social manipulation through advertising to social observation aimed at our fundamental problems—like curing cancer and creating personalized medicines or nutrition regimens, organizing the world’s population to effect climate change, improve the accountability over where tax dollars flow, improve democratic processes like voting and managing the court and prison systems, creating interoperability for the world’s charitable organizations to work together toward unprecedented impact, and of course, the list goes on and on and on and on.
Maybe that’s too esoteric and altruistic to be realized in the short-term, but just look at the customer data platforms like Segment, Twilio, or mParticle where data of your customers/users is made more operable between previously private datasets. They’ve created billions in market value running that playbook, and Twitter has the potential to build that on a peer-to-peer basis—which would utterly flip big tech on its head. It would decentralize the data that makes those companies so valuable in the first place, along with the power that comes with it.
I honestly cannot think of a greater opportunity for web3 to reach its potential than to start from first principles with identity and to rebuild the internet’s entire infrastructure from the ground up. Although in this case, Twitter gives Elon a massive $44B head start.
And if that’s not reason enough to stay at Twitter, or finally testing your own potential as a builder isn’t enticing, or having a front row seat to one of the most successful leaders in tech history doesn’t do it for you, maybe working in tech isn’t for you.
If that is the case, that’s ok, but I just can’t listen to people writing about how harsh Elon’s approach to culture & work ethic is. Clarity over culture is how world-class teams are built, and commitment is how incredible things are accomplished. I think the peanut gallery might just need to take a backseat on this one, and see what unfolds.
If he fails they can bring the “I told you so’s,” but if history is any indication, the scale of what’s possible is only accelerating.
See you Monday.
PS. We didn’t even get to generative AI as an engine in this new version of the world where 1st party data lakes are accessible the way AWS provides server space, or vertical integration across his other companies, or the potential for a super app like WeChat, but I’m not even sure I could capture the enormity of it all anyway.