Chris Sacca. Twitter experiences

Chris Sacca, one of Twitter’s first venture investors, re-entered the Midas List regularly published by Forbes, this time in third place. How such a guy could achieve this is incomprehensible. He has neither technical nor business education. He does not know how to program, he never opened a business and did not work in an investment fund. He previously worked at Google, but after quitting, he quickly burst into the investment ranks, finding himself in the same boat as veteran venture capital investors like John Doerr and Michael Moritz.

Against the background of his investment feats, Chris often quarrels with everyone around. Chris’s approach is frustrating for many entrepreneurs, so Travis Kalanik (Uber), with whom he was previously in a warm relationship, now does not communicate with Chris at all. Lately, it seems like advising Twitter, which he has been engaged in for a long time - the end. Therefore, I propose to read the translation of a recent blog post by his investment fund Lowercase Capital .

Disclaimer

• I have many Twitter shares, both in personal property and in the accounts of my funds.
• I definitely do not speak on behalf of Twitter.
• I do not have any internal Twitter information.
• I did not come up with the fourth paragraph of the disclaimer, but just in case I just added it.

Twitter has been firmly embedded in my heart ever since I signed up in 2006. I began to feel closer to people who weren't really around. The sense of unity brought such diverse perspectives that no blog could. I suddenly found myself in the center of events, exchanged experiences, asked questions and made unexpected friends.

My initial investment on Twitter was relatively modest, but the more I became convinced that this company would change the world, I bought more and more shares. At one point, I even spent all my savings on its shares, becoming almost insolvent. In those years, I went to the office of the company, often without an invitation, and did everything I could to be useful. Recently, the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, was sitting at a table opposite me, so I could help agree and carry out the first few deals with Twitter. I spoke with Jerry Murdoch-level investors from Insight Ventures, hovering on their private jets to San Francisco to invest an estimated billion. I took the phones of any celebrities, politicians, or company executives that I knew and installed the Twitter app before they said no. I have tweeted more newbies than anyone else. I was obsessed with help.

Twitter, in fact, has moved from being a mere investment into part of my identity. My children can discern a blue bird at a distance of one hundred feet. I have very few T-shirts not related to sports, but life is painted with the Twitter logo. On Twitter, I shared my wedding, the birth of children, moments of my life that I am proud of and which are not very. I spoke and apologized for what I said. He expressed unpopular opinions and (sometimes) apologized for it. I raised money for charity, for politicians and startups. I joked stupidly and made revelations. My wife and I even painted the number of the house in the color of the Twitter bird.

All this time I carefully followed the followers. At first my tweets were pretty dumb, but as my audience grew larger, a sense of responsibility prevailed. Thanks to the ups and downs of my business and my personal life, I'm used to relying on feedback and user support. Over the years, I have been peering at my audience and have never felt alone.

In parallel, from the first days, investors and experts asked skeptical questions: “How will Twitter make money?” And wrote about the end, attaching a photo of a dead bird. I spent a couple of years trying to convince them of Twitter's potential and ultimately decided that instead of wasting time, it’s better to buy all the stocks I could find. It was almost impossible for me. However, by the time of the IPO, my affiliates owned most of the company.

Throughout this time, I have never worked on Twitter and never been on the board of directors. I was associated with the company as long as the current head, Dick Costolo. We both invested in Twitter at the very beginning and both acted as consultants. In 2009, Dick became CEO, and I remained in the same position.

Think for a moment, is this value in your life, your energy, passion and capital given to a company in which you do not even work? Companies where no strangers can attend the weekly general meeting of the team (on Twitter, partly because of it, a rule was adopted according to which people who do not work in the company are not allowed to participate in employee meetings). I am no longer an official Twitter consultant and I don’t know what will happen to the company next, like any other person who is not a Twitter employee.

However, I certainly have a good opinion on Twitter. Honestly, who is not? I want to know what will happen to the company next. As one of the first 140 users, I saw several generations of the product. I saw three executives, a couple of generations of the board of directors and the constant evolution of the management team. For 9 years I have listened to complaints that it does not work and bold claims on all sides about what Twitter is and is not, and what it should and should not be. I have offered countless ideas (most of them are buried).

For all this time, I was not particularly frank in public. I spoke on television a dozen times in support of Twitter, talked on the phone many times and scooped up thousands of letters from analysts, investors, journalists, potential employers and partners, many of which you know firsthand. I always considered Twitter, one of my children, and defended it at all costs. I have never expressed disappointment or dissatisfaction about missed opportunities, or any other occasion. However, in a recent broadcast with Jim Kramer on CNBC, I changed my mind on this.

For several hours we discussed various ideas. He considered himself entitled to criticize Twitter, but at the same time reaffirmed my continued belief in its potential. My audience significantly exceeded the audience of several company executives, and most importantly, the content of the conversation found a genuine response from viewers, some of whom are employees of Twitter. Mentions and my mailbox are filled with passionate reviews of shareholders and users of the service who are not indifferent to the fate of the company.

I am writing all this because in the near future I am going to send some ideas that I hope the Twitter team will fulfill. I want to make it clear that everything I say is aimed at the benefit of the company and is connected with my warmest feelings for the service. I love Twitter. I use it for several hours every day, and I can not imagine life without it. I also love the people who develop and support Twitter. Many of them are like relatives to me.

I believe that without artificial restrictions, Twitter can increase attendance to more than 500 million people a month, and I believe that Twitter’s natural revenue ceiling is unlimited. I believe that its distribution will accelerate and its influence will become more significant. I believe Twitter is a great investment and its stocks are still cheap.

So watch out for my thoughts about him. At the same time, thank you for giving me the opportunity to reflect on the path that has already meant so much to me.

PS To make it clearer, I’ll tell you a short background. Ev Williams invited Chris to buy Twitter for $ 400 million from him. Chris is preparing a deal with Williams. With $ 1 billion in funding from JP Morgan and municipal funds, Chris quietly buys up the shares of former employees and other investors in order to catch up to the public announcement of the company's IPO in May 2013. After it came to an IPO, the rest of Twitter investors were very surprised and very annoyed by the distribution of shares in the company in which Chris became Twitter's largest external investor. “There are people who blame Chris for buying,” says Williams. “But he did what everyone would do in his place.” Trying to do a similar trick with Uber, Chris had a big argument with Travis Kalanik.