Are Venture Capitalists going to lose their shirts on Twitter?
Some historical perspective on the immense bet Venture Capitalists have made:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/09/30/where-twitter-ranks-in-vc-history/
This article shows how the odds are against this investment returning funds to investors. Because Twitter falls into the zone of “VC insanity” Tulip-bulb style investing, circa the 1999 Nasdaq bubble.
We were big fans – cutting-edge early adopters
Initially, for the first two years as Twitter users, we slowly became strong rooters for the company. There is something cool about the fact that they started out just as an SMS text-messaging, a bulletin board sort of play without much ambition. Then they stumbled across this huge idea – a new form of “one to many” human communications. It inspires thoughts of Thomas Edison and the lightbulb. But reality intrudes!
After our site hijacking and the complete stonewalling job from Twitter’s founders, management team, venture capital backers, and Board members the wind has definitely gone out of our sails a bit. Sadly, we’ve realized that we simply had the Company on an undeserved pedestal of sorts.
Why we came to view this company as something less than really special
Twitter middle and senior management staffers, including the founders and ceo, have very aggressively avoided helping Startup Trek with recovering from our July 21 account hijacking, despite a barrage of polite requests for help via emails, calls, visits to their headquarters, discussions with their vc’s, personal fedex’s to the founders, VC’s, and CEO; a personal appeal to the CEO from his friend, and posts on the leading 3rd-party support forums.
We still use the service – but without the same kind of enthusiasm for the company.