Twitter Ex-CEO Costolo Plans Fitness Startup, Joins VC Firm | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Ex-CEO Costolo Plans Fitness Startup, Joins VC Firm

bloomberg.com

49 pointspavornyoh20 comments

Dick Costolo has been a startup person since the mid-90s; one of his first companies, BurningDoor, was hosted at the ISP I ran tech for. He's a good guy. Or, I mean, he was last time I talked to him.

I knew Dick when he was at FeedBurner (before they were acquired.) He's been a pretty good guy for quite a while.

This is very interesting, but one thing from the announcements was very interesting to me - is it common for people to release press releases by screenshotting the notes on their phones?

It's common to tweet screenshots of notes to get around the 140 character limit on Twitter. This wasn't a press release.

https://twitter.com/dickc/status/689454657832226816

Strange choice, but I suppose he wanted to use twitter at all costs.

Yes. Jack Dorsey did exactly the same when announcing the plan for removal of 140 character limit.

https://twitter.com/jack/status/684496529621557248/photo/1?r...

Sounds like a startup I used to work for here in Chicago: https://www.retrofitme.com/howitworks

While expensive, the combination of tech and actual trained wellness experts was very successful and getting people to adopt healthier lifestyles.

The vitriol in a bunch of these comments makes me ashamed of this community.

If you just want to be mean about someone, kindly do it elsewhere.

>The vitriol in a bunch of these comments makes me ashamed of this community.

Disclaimer: I don't know the first thing about Mr. Costolo, besides his association with Twitter.

Sometimes the unabashed fawning over everything tech and our Venture Capital overlords makes me ashamed of this community.

I don't see much "unabashed fawning", but even if you were right, it isn't hard to avoid either of these. In fact it's trivial if one wants to.

Maybe you're seeing this because so many startups these days seem to target upper middle class millennials by stepping between them and how they spend their money: start-up leeches. They do little except skim money going some place else under the "social" moniker by targeting people who are (1) unmarried, (2) mostly 18-34, and (3) have disposable income. They may even truly provide temporary value to that narrow community, but they're societal insulators building more of a divide between the upper middle class and the poor, between the young and the old, and between the haves and the have nots.

After all these years of stepping in the middle, maybe we want to see some of the VCs not targeting skimming money going some place else but instead, creating a startup that doesn't concentrate on "bringing the most money to founders and shareholders" but moves society around others who do. Even if that means their startup won't get them a seat at the billionaire's table.

--eat the rich Are we getting hungry yet?

I think you're mostly projecting here. Even if you were right, though, trying to get the rage needle in the red is the wrong way to approach the subject here. The HN community is genuinely interested in these problems.

So many clichés in one headline...

"Fun & Social" !

Great, another way to tell the world about how many miles you walked...

Excuse me please while I go live in a yurt...

This is the default startup idea for people who don't know what to do. :-)

Either fitness or travel planning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10923143

Not photo management?

So right it hurts. http://www.bodyko.com

;-)

He is very personally tied to fitness -- by far the most "fit" CEO I've ever known. Huge into CrossFit, he spent a ton of time in the gym at Twitter. It's not surprising at all that he would go in this direction, and it comes from a very authentic place for him. I'm just surprised he didn't weave beekeeping into it. ;)

"Twitter Ex-CEO Costolo Has No Great Ideas, Plans Fitness Startup, Joins VC Firm Instead"

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