Slate’s Big Money had an interesting take on Twitter yesterday: That the dumb, narcissistic microblogging site knows it has to monetize sometime, but it’s playing Peter Pan and avoiding growing up into a real live company for as long as it can. And hooray for that. To wit:
Because Twitter is so resolute in its nonmonetization, it has earned a certain amount of respect among tech entrepreneurs. They’re the champions of an improbable and absurd scenario: Imagine, a company restricts its users’ self-expression, builds a global community, and raises millions of dollars. It’s impressive enough that somebody actually pulled it off. Even more impressive, though, would be if the geniuses who gamed the system then chose not to reap the monetary benefits. It’s a brand of asceticism one can find only in Silicon Valley, and even there only in selected pockets.
Except that they’ve got to recoup $15 million in VC investment. But besides that, hey, free hugs for everybody.
Esquire‘s sprawling 75th anniversary issue touched on the subject, because it touched on pretty much every subject ever. In its take on Google employees’ widening orbit in Silicon Valley’s tech and VC universe, Sean Dempsey, an ex-Googler and cofounder of Merus Capital, says that Twitter is “nothing we would invest in. Despite the excitement, we don’t see the economics behind it.”