Hacker News Reader

Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

I think about Twitter occasionally and I'm always amazed that the company has thousands of employees.

If he charged $2 / month for an individual to get a blue check and $100 / month for a company to get verified then eliminated ads, could he get the staff count down to under 100 people?

I remember when Facebook bought Instagram. Instagram had something like 13 employees. Why does Twitter need two orders of magnitude more?

View on HN

So to replace Twitter's current revenue at those rates, you'd need something like 170 million blue check marks or 3 million corporate accounts.

How many do you think is realistic? Reducing your revenue by an order of magnitude to reduce your headcount by an order of magnitude seems like a bad plan.

Why focus on revenue rather than profit?

Revenue puts a ceiling on profit. You can't sell at a loss and make it up in volume, but you also can't make more profits than revenue.

Right now there are 360,000 blue check marks on Twitter. If I spot you the first million blue checkmarks and the first 100,000 business profiles, that's only $144M of revenue per year. Even if that is 90% profit, $130M / year profit on a $50B investment is not particularly brag-worthy.

I assume Musk needs Twitter to be profitable, but as somebody trying to sell cars, and satellites and big solar projects and space launches around the world, the platform can help him in other ways too.

Electric cars are a bad plan if you are an oil company, its a great plan for the rest of society

Electric cars are a great plan if you're an electric car company, though.

> I think about Twitter occasionally and I'm always amazed that the company has thousands of employees.

Once a company gets big enough, 95% of an employees job is navigating the bureaucracy. So the head count goes way up.

> I remember when Facebook bought Instagram. Instagram had something like 13 employees. Why does Twitter need two orders of magnitude more?

Companies tend to hire more employees as long as the marginal benefit to doing so is greater than the marginal cost. Even minor improvements to a product like Twitter can boost revenue by millions. Reducing the headcount might not maximise their income.

There will be exceptions though. Valve does lot more than most video-game companies with far fewer employees.

> Valve does lot more than most video-game companies with far fewer employees.

Wait a minute when did Valve go back to being a video game company?

A "video-game company" doesn't necessarily have to be a game developer, and being a distributer is enough. Consider how "music company" aptly applies to Spotify.

Elon will be able to remove 90% and turn twitter HQ into a homeless shelter. SF and the world will be better off.

Of the fewer than 100 employees:

• How many are engineers?

• How many work in customer service?

• How many are in compliance?

• How many are in marketing?

• How many are ICs and how many are managers?

• How many are in HR?

• How many are in finance?

Do you happen to know the breakdown of Instagram's 13 employees?

No. But I know that Twitter today is a very different company from Instagram in 2012.

Definitely is. I'm just wondering if they can move closer to that model.

They can not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com