Dick Costolo: evaluation

Transcript context

…I'm curious, maybe reflecting back on it today, there's an economic opportunity that comes from being a platform that developers can build experiences on, and you can think of that as maybe the 10-cent-type opportunity, and there's an opportunity that comes from being the greatest place to buy ads in the world, which Facebook and Google basically have a duopoly on. Twitter also makes $3 ½ billion in revenue on, but not $70 billion or not $100 billion. How do you think was the right call to build an advertising business versus being a platform company? Yes, because the road to being a platform company for Twitter at the time—based on the way the API had been leveraged to date, 95% of which was to build people going and building their own clients and taking the stuff out of Twitter and moving it away from Twitter and doing whatever they wanted with it—the road from that to building a platform where developers could build into Twitter was far. Having gotten the ad network and ads business up and running in the short time we did and having struggled with building out the platform of Twitter Cards the way we had theorized was possible and could be awesome. I would say that in hindsight, that proved to be the right decision. It's hard to imagine going from that to a WeChat-like experience.…

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