David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…And we are your hosts. Today, we tell the story of a company that has changed every single one of our lives, Twitter. Whether you use the product all day, every day—like I know many of you out there do, ostensibly as part of your jobs—or you have just seen the occasional discomforting tweet from a world leader. There is no doubt that Twitter impacts us all, especially heading into this historic US presidential election. But how did these 140 character messages that grew out of the SMS protocol eventually play such an outsized role in our society? Conversely, why is it that despite being the heartbeat of the world, Twitter still pales in comparison both in user numbers and in revenue to its juggernaut, social media cousin, Facebook? A lot of ink has been spilled on Twitter's founding in its early days of musical chairs between various founders and board members. Most of our listeners know all about that. As Ben and I were reflecting on what the Acquired way to do a Twitter episode would be, we realized that there actually was this pretty significant fork in history—you might say it turned on a knifepoint—where starting in about 2010, it could have been Twitter that ended up owning Instagram, not Facebook, and the conversation we'd be having today about mobile, consumer, and social could all look very different. Indeed. We have the most authoritative source possible to help us tell that story, especially this period of Twitter. The former CEO who generated the first dollar of revenue, scaled it to a real business, and took it public—Dick Costolo. Welcome to Acquire, Dick.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.