I'm mostly interested in the non-financials in the document. On the top of the list is this:<p>"We have implemented a disaster recovery program, which allows us to move production to a back-up data center in the event of a catastrophe. Although this program is functional, we do not currently serve network traffic equally from each data center, so if our primary data center shuts down, there will be a period of time that our products or services, or certain of our products or services, will remain inaccessible to our users or our users may experience severe issues accessing our products and services."<p>One of the most technically advanced software companies is still operating a <i>single</i> critical datacenter instead of many at once?
Loss of almost $80 million on $316 million in revenue, and they're offering $1b... seems like they're asking for a lot when they have very little.
Somewhat tangentially, I feel Twitter sort of stopped innovating after they got big. If Google as a search engine can do Gmail, Glass and driverless cars, why has Twitter made tweeting the only business they do?
I can't help myself, but Twitter seems to me like a subset of Facebook. Something like ICQ, AIM, or Yahoo Messenger is to Facebook Chat or Skype.<p>It came at the right time in the US, but it takes some time for these things to get abroad. While it arrived to Central Europe, Facebook had enough users and introduced features like Followers etc. Today, Twitter is solely used by a marginal tech/hip/geek community here.<p>And advertising goes where people go. The question is, whether this evidence suggests that the Twitter of today can't compete directly with Facebook, and it's success is based on acquiring users before FB matched it in functionality. How stable this user base is? Is it a similar case as with the chat applications?<p>Anecdotal evidence - a friend of mine just asked, whether one should invest in Twitter... on Facebook.
I find it interesting how low their revenue is. With Twitter being so popular, you'd think they'd be above 1 billion in revenue.<p>Goes to show you how hard it is to monetize some products.
For those of us with limited IPO watching experience, what other companies have gone public with a negative bottom line?<p>Another question: will the infusion of capital from going public drive them towards profitability? What is there plan to become profitable?
<p><pre><code> We anticipate making capital expenditures
in 2013 of approximately $225 million to
$275 million
Our users create approximately 500 million
Tweets every day
Over 65% of our advertising revenue was
generated from mobile devices in the
three months ended June 30, 2013
our advertising revenue per timeline view
was $0.80
As of June 30, 2013, we had approximately
2,000 full-time employees.
</code></pre>
Conspicuously absent in the list of acquisitions is Atebits, Loren Brichter's company, from which Twitter for iPhone was derived.
"According to the filing, Twitter has 250 million monthly active users, 100 million of those are daily active users."<p>I'm not a Twitter insider, but I've been crawling Twitter users for a service I'm building. Based on my experience I think the number is closer to 25 million, not 100 million, and even that is pretty generous if we're talking about DAILY active users.
It appears that the offering price has been censored from this document:<p><pre><code> To the extent that the underwriters sell more than shares
of common stock, the underwriters have the option to purchase up
to an additional shares from Twitter at the initial public
offering price less the underwriting discount.
</code></pre>
probably due to whatever act allowed Twitter to file without public scrutiny up-front.
Letter from founders/company seems to be really short and to the point, just like Twitter itself. No grandiose words but simple mission - "..to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers"<p><a href="http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312513390321/d564001ds1.htm#toc564001_12a" rel="nofollow">http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/0001193125133...</a><p>Key numbers:<p>Revenue for first 6 months till June 2013 - $253.6 million with net loss as $69.3 million
Wow, they fall below what I thought the required threshold for going public now was ($500mm/yr revenue). I guess the assumption is they could scale their revenue fairly comfortably.