Twitter is Still Up
REWORK
The Importance of Zero Followers
There's not enough of a reason for mass numbers of people to jump ship. Building an audience is incredibly hard, flat out hard. You can see it when you have a big audience in one platform and try to switch to another. It's very, very hard to bring that over. So starting at zero and having numbers of zero all over the place was a bad idea.
It's been more than seven months since Elon Musk purchased Twitter. Since then, a reported 80% of the company has been let go, reducing their staff from just under 8,000 employees to around 1,500.
With all that turmoil, many believed that Twitter would fail completely or stop working, but Twitter's still up!
Today, host Kimberly Rhodes, Jason Fried, and David Heinemeier Hansson sit down to delve into the aftermath of Elon's controversial acquisition of Twitter, the surprises and lessons learned from this transformative event, and an exploration of the question, how many people do you really need to run your company effectively?
Tune in as they share insights into their own experiences at 37signals and offer valuable lessons for entrepreneurs and business owners on the impact of Twitter's restructuring.
Listen in as Jason and David discuss the resilience of Twitter, their initial predictions for the company, and the evolving dynamics of company size and efficiency.
Show Notes:
[00:00] - Kimberly introduces the topic of today's show, which is all things Twitter, and asks, how many employees do you need?
[00:55] - Jason shares that the fundamental point of view is that companies need fewer employees than they think.
[01:41] - While there were casualties in terms of job losses, the system of Twitter still works—you don't need as many employees as you might think.
[02:28] - When building a company, the lesson is to avoid hiring more people than necessary.
[03:03] - David shares, “Twitter was morbidly obese.” The lesson is clear: Less is more, and lighter teams can move faster.
[04:11] - The Twitter downsizing experiment is a real-life revelation.
[05:30] - In stagnant organizations, some individuals may have had "bullshit jobs" that did not impact the company or customers.
[07:01] - "Representative of the kind of company that Twitter was, I can totally see how they had six and a half thousand too many people." Plus, a former Twitter employee's experience highlights the depth of the issue (not a single thing that person had worked on ever made it into production).
[09:00] - The primary advantage of being small is speed—it’s just physics—and it's business.
[09:52] - The valuable lessons to be learned from Twitter.
[10:24] - One of the most controversial decisions made by Musk that sparked widespread debate and contestation.
[11:21] - One of the novel case studies of the entire tech history—reminiscent of when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997.
[12:21] - Speaking of Mr. Jobs - how he pared Apple down to the four things he thought Apple needed to be a top-tier company (and got rid of the bloat).
[13:24] - Quoting another social media tech titan on Twitter prior to Musk's takeover.
[14:43] - “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’—spawning competition and breathing new life into an area that had become stagnant through experimentation.
[15:25] - Twitter's complex challenge—there's no easy fix for creating a perfect 'town square of conversation' and the social media platform poised to unseat Twitter through its radical difference.
[17:34] - Even a radical dislike of Elon can’t break the addiction to the network.
[18:02] - Starting from 0 followers sucks, and building an audience is hard.
[19:41] - Going from 200 to zero is still going to zero. Many networks fail to address the emotional impact of starting over—on HEY, the focus is on the pleasure of writing without analytics.
[20:57] - You can find Jason on Twitter @jasonfried and David @dhh. “Rework” is a production of
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