Snapchat to IPO in March 2017

Does each company still need to roll their own search functionality? Is there some pre-packaged stuff you can just turn on and bam you go?

Salesforce wants to make things super clear for everyone — no, the company won’t buy Twitter. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff gave an interview to the FT and said that the company ruled out the acquisition.

“In this case we’ve walked away. It wasn’t the right fit for us,” Benioff told the FT. If you were looking for an official confirmation, it can’t get more official than that.

Two weeks ago, nearly all suitors announced at the same time that they weren’t interested by Twitter after all. Google, Apple and Disney don’t want to buy Twitter anymore. Salesforce was the last remaining suitor.

SAN FRANCISCO — The investor pressure began building on Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com, two weeks ago.

On Sept. 23, news broke that Mr. Benioff’s company was in discussions to buy the troubled social media company Twitter. Inside the offices of hedge funds and mutual fund companies on Wall Street and elsewhere, investors in Salesforce immediately began to question the rationale for buying Twitter. They were not happy.

The investors made their concerns known to Mr. Benioff. In emails and other communications, the shareholders told the chief executive and Salesforce’s investor relations team that they disapproved of a tie-up with Twitter.

The effort was led by Fidelity Investments, the mutual fund firm that is Salesforce’s largest shareholder, with about 14 percent of the company.
The pushback offers a window into how big investors can exert pressure on would-be deals behind the scenes. Salesforce is particularly vulnerable to what its large institutional investors think because the unprofitable online software company relies heavily on its stock to make acquisitions and pay employee compensation. As a result, the company needs to keep investors happy for its share price to continue going up.

Price can fix anything. That just means twitter is still expensive for what it’s worth. Sinking below 10B and some people will be interested.

I mean if even yahoo can find a buyer sure twitter can.

I think it’s telling Twitter said bids were due before they announce earnings.

Twitter’s market cap is 11.77B at Friday’s close. It’s inching closer and closer to the 10B mark. If it bombs the earning we can see some new people getting interested…

Seriously, I wonder what they found in due diligence that’s so scary everyone turned away. They must have pretty good idea going in how Twitter’s doing. It’s a 10 year old public company for crying out loud. And yet they found something new that’s so freaking scary everyone ran for the hills…

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I wonder if it’s unvested employee stock. You usually have to buy that out on acquisition.

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Twtr is clearly not calling the shots in these acquisition negotiations for sure.

I am no accounting expert, but don’t companies have to account for unvested options in some way? And that would show in earning statements in some form?

They have to declare employee stock/option expenses in quarterly GAAP earnings. I don’t think they have to declare the outstanding value of all grants. It’s why almost all companies focus on non-GAAP now. Facebook’s stock expense is ~10% of revenue.

How much dilution? 50% :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

I once considered buying some TWTR and looked at their earnings report. The stock comp is truly disgusting. I don’t recall Facebook being remotely as bad.

Anyway I don’t mind paying FB employees and execs more. They deliver results. Twitter has been a disaster.

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Another shitty product is Yelp. Their website and app have not improved much for years. What the heck are the devs even doing? I feel like the entire Yelp can be rolled into a medium-sized feature on Facebook.

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I figured google would disrupt yelp since they have all the maps data. Plus, so many small businesses already advertise with google. Four square could have done it too, but they are pretty irrelevant now.

Pandora is a major disappointment too. They were cutting edge for machine learning. They never applied the knowledge beyond music. Now there are a ton of music competitors.

I’m always amazed how many companies are really just a single product. They have zero visions of how to move into other businesses that use their core competencies. Then you see Amazon who’s expanding into everything. They started with text books.

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It now looks like Twitter’s abuse problem is one of the reasons $CRM backed out:

It points to big operational and technical failure on Twitter’s part. Fire the management! And please, get a full time CEO.

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Disney also backed out because of Twitter’s trolling problem:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-17/disney-said-to-have-dropped-twitter-pursuit-partly-over-image

Instead of looking for a quick sale, how about fixing the damn thing first?

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Apparently execs at Facebook agree:

That’s what happens when people get lazy and don’t keep up. Their lunch got eaten up by wolves.

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The trend is towards one app does all, socializing + e-commerce.

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Twitter will report its third-quarter earnings at 4:00 a.m PST on Thursday.

4am? WTF? Is that for real?

Maybe their buyer is in non-US timezone? :globe_with_meridians: