As Twitter approaches mainstream relevance, it’s also entering a period of strategic and operational vulnerability that startup companies with big ideas run into.
By going mainstream it’s exposing the structural opportunity its founders saw years ago, but back then, only the founders and the investors were in on the secret. There had to be a slide in the Series A deck that said “Here’s the opportunity” and it wasn’t about building a small, derivative business. It was about building a disruptive, billion dollar kind of company.
In Twitter’s case it’s the opportunity to redefine how people communicate, and shaping how the economics flow in and around this new communication. It involves getting to scale, developing a third party “ecosystem” of other companies integrating with and depending on Twitter for their own success, and then monetizing all this in a compelling, huge way. This is really hard, and the folks at Twitter are still struggling a bit with the exact business model that will do all this.
Eighteen months ago, only people in the echo chamber were exposed to the nature of the opportunity. But today, with Twitter’s explosive growth and visibility, everyone can begin to comprehend the potential. When Ashton Kutcher gets petulant about his million followers, when Dell trumpets that they’ve sold $3 million of products to their Twitter followers, the incumbent titans in the internet and advertising sectors, well they notice too, and they notice “threat” ahead of “opportunity.”
You saw this first with the Facebook redesign that provided a real-time status update feed a la Twitter. A classic “fast follower” approach to someone else’s innovation. Facebook already owns a lot of people’s mindshare and time online, so the fact that they’re tracking Twitter tells you how significant the threat appears to them. By the way, Facebook is also struggling with business model and opportunity vulnerability too, they just are further along the scale path.
How does Twitter keep eyeballs and session times growing if Facebook is just going to “fast follow” them, treating them like outsourced R&D? This will be really hard, but let’s assume Twitter wins this round of the battle, gets to scale with a loyal and large audience for their new medium of tweets. Do they jump out of the frying pan and into the fire?
What’s differentiated about tweets is that they flow in real-time, and finding out what’s interesting and relevant instantly has got to be worth something, and it’s so different from the problem Google solves. Google crawls the web at a frequency measured at best in minutes, more frequently hours or days, so you could envision Twitter creating a new category Google can’t participate in.
But what if “instant” isn’t in the end all that important. The NY Times dug into this a bit, looking into why Google isn’t Twitter. And they observed that real-time search is hard and neither Twitter nor Google are currently architected to do this efficiently, or well.
What became clear is that if you need anything other than instant, real-time search, Google can give you “close enough” search, and get closer and closer over time due to their scale. We can all figure out who will reap the revenue rewards if all Twitter’s creates is another type of page Google can place ads on.
This kind of battle doesn’t result from incremental thinking, from safe bets. Twitter’s vulnerabilities are proof of the significance of the idea, and what Twitter’s investors funded. But it doesn’t mean it will have a happy ending.
And there’s food for thought here for anyone running a startup. Expect that you will become vulnerable to the incumbents just when you’re hitting your stride, just when people acknowledge your value and relevance. The presence of that vulnerability is your ticket to the next round of the fight, validation that you’re headed in a worthy direction.
I dearly hope Twitter pulls this off. I love to see the status quo up-ended, I love the mental image of apples spilling all through the marketplace as someone with a bold and compelling idea runs through, knocking the carts over along the way.
Tags: facebook, fast follower, google, twitter
Open Ambition 
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