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Comment by pg_bot | Hacker News Reader

I'm convinced there is no one at twitter that understands why they succeeded as a company. Their management team continually makes decisions that are reminiscent of shuffling around deck chairs on the titanic. I get the feeling that they only exist due to inertia which is a death sentence for most tech companies.

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No one in silicon valley will say the reason, but it's blindingly obvious. It was dumb luck. Luck plays a part in every success and failure and Twitter was about 98% luck. There was and is no vision or strategy that explains this. No lessons to learn. Pure zeitgeist that is bound to crumble sometime after Trump leaves office.

I think it was a convergence of luck, the solving of a specific problem that was relevant at the time (sms messages), well timed celebrity adoption (Shaq was an early twitter user) and the idiosyncratic constraint of 140 characters which distinguished the platform from alternatives and contributed to a unique feel.

It's large part luck, but the particular features play a role, too.

They turned dumb phones into smart phones which was pretty amazing back when they launched.

Reminds me of Zuckerberg's famous quote about Twitter: "... a clown car that fell into a gold mine."

No one understands why they succeeded as a company. They haven't. They created a really popular product. That's completely different from succeeding as a company.

This blog post and Jack's subsequent praise of all the hard work that went into this groundbreaking product decision is exactly why they haven't succeeded yet as a company.

> they succeeded as a company

10 years alive, still no profit.

As a company it did not succeed at all.

So why did they succeed, and how can they leverage that for user growth?

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