27
April
2011
|
03:40 AM
America/Los_Angeles

Will Co-Founder Biz Stone Be Next To Leave Twitter?

Back in March I predicted that Twitter co-founder Ev Williams might not be around for much longer:

Twitter Is 5 Years Old - What's Its Future? It's In The Tweets... -

I was proved right when Mr Williams resigned his position and co-founder Jack Dorsey returned to head product development.

My thesis was that if a Twitter executive isn't into the product, it's probably not a good fit. Mr Williams rarely Tweeted and he acknowledged that his startup Podio failed because he and co-founder Biz Stone weren't into podcasts, the whole point of Podio.

Will co-founder Biz Stone be next and move onto other things too?

He's not much of a Tweeter. In April, he averaged 1.5 a day. Jack Dorsey did better at an average of 3 a day, but he is only part time at Twitter because he is also running his startup Square.

Hopefully, Twitter's management will settle down soon and it can get on with the business of finding a business model with revenues that justify its exceedingly high valuation of as much as 100 times revenue. This is a "bubble" valuation when all the experts maintain that we're not in a bubble.

Facebook's private equity valuation is around 20 times revenue, Zynga at five times revenue, and Groupon at seven times revenue.

Is Twitter leading the way in stratospheric valuations? Maybe. Or maybe investors will reevaluate and revalue their shares in Twitter if there is no good plan of action. With all the management shuffles at Twitter it's probably hard to plan anything at all.
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Please see: Gravity Meets Bubble? - Twitter Soars In Private Equity Valuation - SVW