Andrew Dewson
It’s not every day that an insanely wealthy venture capitalist (translation: someone who has no idea how lucky they are) gets his knickers in a twist about an investment. Well maybe it is, but Chris Sacca isn’t an ordinary venture capitalist. Just 40 years old, he is known for his utterly naff, hand-embroidered cowboy shirts and was an early Google employee, which is where the money to be a venture capitalist came from.
He claims that he is not an “activist” investor, but that didn’t stop him from penning and publishing an 8,500-word screed on Twitter’s current struggles this week. If only the company would listen to him, his investment, which began before the company went public and from which he has already made many hundreds of millions, would be worth a lot more.
His Twitter stake is owned by his vehicle, “LOWERCASE capital”, a name that presumably was meant to be amusing but is about as funny as genital warts. His brother happens to be a well-known comedian, but the comic genes were not spread evenly. It also owns a stake in Uber and Snapchat, both of which seem to double in “value” every couple of months, so his struggle is real.
Mr Sacca doesn’t seem to be finding an awful lot of sympathy. No wonder. His thoughts on what Twitter’s management should do are shallow to the point of making the average Big Brother contestant sound like the Dalai Lama: “Make tweets effortless to enjoy”; “Make each of us on Twitter feel heard and valuable”; “Twitter feels lonely”.
The company’s problems are not going to be solved by vague drivel like “Twitter has failed to tell its own story”. Besides, only in the fantasy world that people like Mr Sacca inhabits can a company that made a loss of $577m in 2014 and has missed forecasts time after time, but is still somehow worth about $25bn, be considered to have failed.
Twitter’s has failings, for sure. Keeping up with it is a pain in the neck, unless you have literally nothing else to do with your time. Life is too short, and its weak user growth and retention perfectly illustrates that fact. It’s also home to legions of racist trolls – witness the repulsive reaction to Barack Obama’s recent arrival on Twitter as Potus. What sane person sees that and then wants to hang out there? Apart from the President, that is
The Twitter chief executive, Dick Costolo, was also noticeable by his absence from the entire 8,500 words. It is Mr Costolo’s habit of making promises he can’t keep that has resulted in Wall Street’s distrust of Twitter, and until he is shown the door, or the company starts to give guidance that it can actually meet, the stock is going to continue to lag behind its peers.
Without a hint of self-awareness, Mr Sacca told CNBC that Google buying Twitter would be a “fantastic” use of Google’s cash. It wouldn’t be, but it would be a fantastic bailout for Mr Sacca – and, boy, does he think he deserves one.
Twitter is far from dead, but Mr Sacca is demanding the impossible in the most trivial way – which probably seems like a perfectly rational demand when you live in a fantasy world.