#31: But Twitter's Quarter Was Really Good! With Rajiv Sud

The Razor’s Edge

Oops, it happened again. A company we follow closely on The Razor’s Edge reported earnings, met or beat expectations, and then sold off heavily along with a major market sell-off. Last time it was PagerDuty, this time it’s Twitter.

To work through the quarter and perhaps the angst and anxiety around it, we speak with Rajiv Sud. Rajiv is a Silicon Valley veteran, with time logged at Google, AdMob – which was bought out by Google while he was there, at TellApart, and then at Twitter after Twitter bought TellApart. He’s been out of Twitter for about two years but as a shareholder and a frequent tweeter, he still follows the company closely. We break down the company's ad server issues and why they may be in the past, the deliberate approach the company takes to product releases, and why Jack Dorsey is maybe fine as Twitter's CEO.

Topics Covered

• 4:45 minute mark – Q3 Reaction
• 8:00 – One-off effects of a weird 2020 for comparison’s sake
• 14:30 – The challenges with the ad server and what changed
• 19:30 – The Jack Dorsey question
• 24:30 – The stand-alone nature of each company’s ad stack
• 28:30 – The ad-tech graveyard
• 30:30 – The MAP delay
• 36:30 – How Twitter engages users, and the step-up from occasional to active
• 41:30 – When does this scale, or the rising expenses
• 53:30 – Differences between Google and Twitter from an insider’s perspective
• 58:30 – Twitter’s engagement and the upside or money left on the table in the subscription ecosystem
• 1:01:30 – Controlling the narrative