It’s starting to make more and more sense now. When Twitter raised $15-20M, I was surprised, because raising money to scale a business which lacks a business model is something that Twitter investor Fred Wilson is against.
Turns out the money will be spent on moving away from a Ruby on Rails infrastructure, according to Tech Crunch.
When publishing my Twitter’s 140 problems post, I talked to Heri Rakotomalala - who is a Ruby expert and runs a Ruby consulting shop - “why do I keep hearing Rails does not scale?”
He answered:
Because you read too much techmeme and stories about twitter.
more seriously, rails is a relatively young framework. very powerful but also very easy to use. developers who don’t have experience in architecturing big systems can use it to develop a web2.0 website with full features etc. then they are surprised it can’t handle the load. the equivalent of giving kids a battlecruiser.
also, at its beginning, some developers saw their server stopped working unexpectedly, but there are solid tools now to prevent this (monit, nagios, god etc to monitor the server)
fiy, here is a list of big companies using rails
for me, we are going through the same things that Java went through, at its beginnings, it was very slow, too complex, irrelevant to IT etc. And now 10 years later, it’s king in banks systems, insurance firms, healthcare etc. Rails is going the same way.
I guess time is money. With so many big name VCs on board and Twitter being in the public eye, investors don’t want to wait for RoR to become stable. They want stability - now - and I guess there’s no better way to make the hands of time go faster than throwing money at it.
Yes, I’m being somewhat sarcastic there. Twitter has a lot of work ahead of itself without a code rewrite. This might be necessary due to heightened pressures that come from accepting VC dough, but unless they execute this move perfectly, this might turn into a bit of a debacle.
Anyway, this might explain the “From Mess to Success” post Fred published last week. He was probably coming out of a Twitter board meeting.
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WatchMojo NewsletterIf you noticed the light blogging this week, it’s because end of month usually is hectic and this week in particular I’ve had a lot more meetings than usual. Don’t ask.
Anyway, in various meetings, a couple of themes came up while I was chatting with a wide number of industry observants and participants, they are:
- Hearing about two of Metacafe’s three founders leaving and cashing their shares (coverage here, here and here), there’s a lot of cynicism from a lot of folks about any of the YouTube contestants ever exiting. I am not sure I agree with that 100%, but I agree that while the race for #3 is on, it’s very hard to position one of them for a sale, and IPOs are out of the question for some time to come. So how do investors get their money back? I don’t know. The distribution/aggregation space is as commoditized as the CDN or CMS one, frankly.
- Some very well-known and very well-funded companies are lacking street credibility largely because they have changed strategies and course so many times that they’ve become the butt end of jokes. I won’t name anyone here, but you can judge for yourself. Feel free to comment in the comments’ section. Oh, one more thing, some of the investors backing these firms are also starting to draw snickers…
I think this highlights some of the challenges you will see more and more in the video landscape and why you are seeing seismic changes in how investors look at investing in video.
Wireless. B2B. Social networks. All pretty faddish if you ask me. The latest, apparently, is green investments.
Gentlemen, start your engines and start flushing your money down the toilet:
Kleiner Perkins raises $700M fund…
CBS generated $23M from March Madness in 2008. That’s pretty good, because indeed it is icing on the cake.
But interesting to note the following, then:
Tribune’s LA Times expects to generate $25 million in display ad revenue this year, more than tripling the $6 million that area attracted three years ago, according to Rob Barrett, SVP interactive media and site GM at the paper’s website. By 2011, the site will account for about 20 percent of the paper’s cash flow, he told the Kelsey Group’s conference on local media, according to ClickZ.
Read more on PaidContent.org. Those are small numbers compared to offline stuff. But I guess they have no choice, no matter how small the figures might be relative to offline sales.
Can you think of any two bigger phonies in a contest:
in the one corner, eBay; in the other, Craigslist. One was started a brazen capitalist who like to promote socialist tenets in a veiled attempt to take the focus away from their massively profitable business that is applying crazy pressure to their peers, and the other is… oh wait, that described both companies.
Read more about this here: eBay was stupid for buying the 25% stake, didn’t it seem odd that every other would be buyer balked once they understood that Craigslist would not cede control, one bit. What did you think? On the other hand, what on earth do Jim and Craig think? That eBay would simply let its massively valuable but locked stake sit there idle.
As a judge told me one time:
You want to start a company that gets the attention of big business? Congrats, you did. Welcome to the big leagues, big boy.
Read more:
Why companies who invest ask for control.
13 Most Explosive Startups.
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