VP Lee Mighdoll Out At Twitter, Business Plan Still MIA

Twitter VC is cleaning house. I’m sure most of the programmers at our startup will be asked to retire as well because we have personalities, including myself.

It goes to show, when they offer you equity, push, push, push…..

Jooce had offered me .5% equity for a management position there in February where I could not go because I had to shut down and sell everything at my own company in Canada. You need at least 2-3% equity for a serious position or it’s not worth it. I did the math on a typical exit plan, where the company does not go public.

The point is, if you came in on the ground floor you going to get gotten rid of anyway. Make sure you get the 2-3%. Craig Newmark is the exception, not the rule.

That should read “you are going to get gotten rid of anyway”

Duncan, “haven’t been great” is quite an understatement, when Twitter simply did not update for several days - a well-known and recognized fact, even here on TC…

Given how popular Twitter as a service is, and the tone of these articles, does anyone get the feeling that the bubble is about to burst on web 2.0?

2 Buffet quotes come to mind:

“Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks. ”

“When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact. ”

Another quick fact: Rails is Cool, Rains is Fun, Rails can’t scale so its like a pole up your bum

@5
“Another quick fact: Rails is Cool, Rains is Fun, Rails can’t scale so its like a pole up your bum”

MySpace used to have errors every other day at the point which it was sold to newscorp. They completely reprogrammed the platform and emerged from those issues, still one of the most popular sites on the web.
Switching platforms isn’t insurmountable.
I would be more worried that the VCs broke apart the core team instead of getting them technical help. That’s generally the way they think though.

Chris, are you blaming errors on MySpace to the lenguage or to the way it was coded the application? I hope you are referring to the second one becuase the language had nothing to do with the bugs in MySpace.

Zoli
how quickly people forget: think back to last year and how Twitter being up was a bonus half the time. Sure, they’re had some downtime again, but their track record this year is a darn site better than it was last year. You + Michael have very short memories

@7 Raul.

The original MySpace was coded with Cold Fusion, and through the SQL drivers had tons of data connection errors.

When they recoded MySpace in C# on .NET with the blue dragon servers it got rid of “most” of the errors they were experiencing because of load balancing. They did this after they were aquired by newscorp.

Had they been using Linux, they could have done this more easily, but they had already started on Macromedia which was very popular at the time 2002-2004 in So Cal.

My point being, is that any website functionality can be coded exactly the same on a multitude of platforms. The team is what is important. If the team needs technical help, the VCs should HELP them. Not cherry pick people off until everyone is scared straight. I’m sure our VC or major investor will be exactly the same. For right now we are safe and happy with seed funding.

The level of service for me has been great so far, I’m not a hardcore twitter user, twitted once or twice a day… and all I can say is I’ve not experience any downtime when I was using Tweeter.

And that brings up, the uptime issues for Tweeter might not be that not bad at all to the general tweeter users.. only maybe to hardcores like scoble

Scaling issues and downtime aren’t necessarily related. Downtime can have many causes, not just traffic and load. Prolonged downtime, unless it’s caused by a major natural disaster or terrorist attack, point towards management failure.

And if you read the Twitter blog, you clearly see a few bad management decisions: new stuff to improve scalability (perfectly normal, not reflecting on Blaine, scalability is always a work in progress) on Friday. There we have issue #1: whatever happened to the good old “no big chances on friday”?.

Anyhow, the changes caused problems (shit happens), and that’s where things start to go off the rails (no pun intended): apparently, there was no real contingency plan, no scenario for a quick roll-back. Where these changes really that desperately needed they couldn’t wait another week? And if so, who let it come that far?

These bad decisions turned a ‘normal’ problem (shit happens, no matter how good your kung-fu is) into a prolonged outage. My guess is the VP Engineering and Operations is considerably more responsible for these decisions then the Chief Architect.

@Chris,

You are truly mistaken if you Believe Blue Dragon has anything to do with ColdFusion, ColdFusion currently on version 8 and by Adobe is no way similar to Blue Dragon, Blue Dragon is from New Atlanta Group whch they resemble the ColdFusion language but the CORE, the Application server is another thing completely, so please dont go blamming ColdFusion on MySpace, if all blame poor coding.

There is nothing at Twitter that can’t be fixed. Get off the RDBMS treadmill.

Now is the time for twitter to sell out to a company that understands how to scale (*cough* Facebook *cough*), while their debt is relatively low. There is a good amount of value to add if Facebook can maintain Twitter as an independent service (i.e. Flickr w/Yahoo) while providing Twitter with the benefit of Facebook’s IT and monetization infrastructure.

@13

Yawn
newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon/open_source/faq.cfm

“About New Atlanta and BlueDragon:”

“BlueDragon also powers MySpace.com, helping to serve of 200 million customers on their popular social networking site.”

MySpace migrated off Cold Fusion and on to .NET and C# in late 2005. I’ve seen the C# source code when it was leaked through a server configuration error. Yawn, Yawn

As usual, I post proof. Here is actual MySpace C# debug code:
http://pastebin.com/f711b591

I back up what I say.

That was actually @ Raul, #12, not 13, sorry about that.

You should read more carefully what I said then, BlueDragon is a copy of the language ColdFusion created by Allaire, Macromedia and Adobe. The application server used in BlueDragon is not the same one as ColdFusion Application server which is the real ColdFusion app server.

You should put some more studying in your “proofs”

http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/

Adobe ColdFusion and BlueDragon “ColdFusion” are NOT the same thing. Once you agree to this, we can move on. The language is the same, but ALL that is behind the language is not (the important part)

@17,

You didn’t read what I wrote. In 2002-2004 myspace was on pure cold fusion. They migrated away to .NET in 2005 after the newscorp purchase. CF had SQL driver problems with a clustered environment. The new platform does too, but not to the same extent.

I was saying that twitter can simply make a new library of classes on a different framework as MySpace did, and it too can get rid of load balancing problems, specifically due to platform specific SQL drivers.

Why is ColdFusion or its ugly twin brother even being mentioned… what a mess of a language, puke.

For the record, Evan Williams ran blogger, Biz Stone was only hired to work on blogger by Google after Ev sold Blogger to Google. Biz was a co-founder of xanga, which is still around, and i believe making enough money to pay the bills. His job at google was not to find a way for blogger to make money, google’s pretty good at making money.

If you want to blame somebody for not knowing how to make money, blame Ev, he’s got an amazing history of building apps which are super compelling but tend to have grow it first business models.

Hey Duncan, please please please - get your facts straight.

Joyent was NOT dumped by Twitter. Joyent asked Twitter to find another host.

Carry on.

Most people would kill for the opportunity to be involved in such a popular service as Twitter. Something’s rotten here. At arguably one of the more popular web services in recent memory, the top two tech guys leave within a couple of weeks?

@all: seriously, all this discussion about SQL drivers? If Twitter’s scale issue is due to db interaction, then 1) Michael was right — they ARE amateurs, and 2) they’re going to die, anyway.

But I doubt this is a SQL driver issue. Way too many solutions out there for that to be the cause.

With all of the recent and unfounded spite towards Twitter lately from Arrington and crew, how much does anyone want to bet that TechCrunch has a friend about to launch a twitter competitor?

You could at least get your facts remotely right regarding Biz Stone working at Blogger. Sheesh - I don’t even live in the stupid valley and I know that.

Here are some likely reasons why Lee Mighdoll is out:
1. Lee is a dick and no one likes working with him.
2. Lee has very little experience building scalable systems.
3. Lee is a poor leader with no exec level experience.
4. Lee lives in Seattle and the telecommute situation just wasn’t working.

@24, I bet you work at Twitter.

Did Lee leave amicably too?

@24, I think Mike means to say you’ve already gone this far and trashed him. You may as well get specific at this point. You’re anonymous with credibility at this juncture.

Another one headed for the Deadpool.

The whole idea behind Twitter is foolish. Who the hell cares what other people are doing, because most people are doing nothing of intrinsic value anyway.

Kristie Duncan did get the facts right. Joyent blackmailed Twitter in to positive blog posts with the threat of pulling half of their servers offline. Twitter had to escape even though joyent was increasingly offering more free capacity to keep them around.

Talk about somebody who toots their own horn about scaling then fails to follow through. Joyent goes on about how great they scale some facebook app built on rails, yet fails to provide quality support when twitter needed it. File systems failed, boxes became overloaded, joyent didn’t even have a way of knowing what was breaking!

Blaine told twitter management that Joyent was a bad choice and that they should either have gotten their own colo space or gone with Engine Yard. Eventually he managed to win the argument, after a year of terrible uptime.

Certainly the problems twitter has are not limited to their hoster, but not being able to add new boxes or scale up was a big part of the problem. Why was it so hard to get a secondary database box while at joyent????

Mark my words, the whole social networking craze will be the swansong of the Bubble 2.0.

While I don’t know details, I have heard that Twitter makes a considerable profit from SMS messages and may even be cash flow positive.

What ever happened to the business model of build it (a service) and they (users and a business model) will come?

It is puzzling why Twitter hasn’t rolled out a serious monetization strategy yet. With venture capital support, you figure they would hire a business development person to start making some deals.

Maybe this is an opening for Pownce, which has a business model, but far fewer users.

@Rabble: Duncan DID NOT get the facts right, and even more importantly - there was no blackmail. There are no contracts or lock-ins at Joyent. Customers can come and go as they please. Joyent can also ask customers to leave (we did). We can also offer (and did) free infrastructure to help them through a big event (SuperBowl), even knowing they were moving as we want to see them succeed. There is no evil plot here.

Not sure who you are or what your affiliation is, but making a random statement about not supporting Twitter through their growth is insane. There are two sides to every story, but it was to everyone’s benefit to see Twitter succeed.

Out of respect for both companies, I will not disclose any more details here.

And we begin to see a primary example of taking other people’s money without having a business strategy in place. The microblogging thing is neat (I just started messing with Twitter last night, it’s neat, but could use a lot of work still), it just needs to be able to monetize. Hell, even Adsense at this juncture could help the company out.

The second point is that when you do a Web 2.0 project like this, always, always, always, have a game plan. It seems so much these days that the game plan is “Let it get popular then monetize” and Twitter seems like a great example of that, except they forgot about the second part.

P.S.: I’ve never heard many positive things about Joyent as a service (doubly true when they unveiled it as a FaceBook partner), so good for Twitter for getting away from them.

Considering how addicted to twitter some people seem to be, ‘pro accounts’ seem like an obvious way to bring in some money.

On another note: going through a huge growth spurt, having downtime and changing management is just business as usual in the valley. Why is this a story? Anyone remember ebay’s growth issues? Didn’t kill them.

I told @biz he should sell teeshirts and stickers which would spread the word virally and create a small income. It’s almost like they don’t want our stinkin’ money, I’d buy one to put next to my Apple sticker in a heartbeat.

Jason

I can totally relate to this. I founded 2 start-ups (one of which was making $100k-$300k / day at that time), and I can tell you uptime and scalability was our number 1 priority. It was hard but we pulled it off.

We did a combination of database optimizations, replication (both near real-time DB and scheduled SAN-based snapshots), clustering, caching, and a series of hardware and software upgrades. My message to the Twitter guys — “every” successful startup goes through this phase

They really should just put ads on the site already, even though they said they never would (they should never have said that). The ads on twitter japan are perfectly sized, not too obnoxious or anything. They need to make money. Even though tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people use twitter constantly every day, I don’t think anyone would pay for it. The only solution is ads.

@Dave (#31)

I’ve heard that too, that when you send small numbers of messages the providers charge you, but once you reach a certain tipping point you can negotiate with the providers to have them start paying you - since twitter generates so much revenue for the cell companies via text messaging charges (or unlimited plan charges) from all the twitter addicts.

anybody know any more details on this?

Well, I know the infrastructure companies are all rooting for people to really get into text communications as it represents the easiest way for them to keep customers happy without having to do upgrades.

I couldn’t imagine Seesmic (good service btw) generating as much video messages as Twitter, it could bring down the internet most likely when you add that to P2P.

If you’re, um, checking, ah, ETrade and, and…OKCupid while, uh, videoing your, er, your comment, um, type it…just type it out.

It seems pretty plain at this point that Arrington’s Blaine story has been illustrated to be pure personal vendetta. In other words, does this story make Mighdoll an amateur?

EH - personal vendetta requires some sort of personal interaction. I’ve never met, spoken to or really even heard of blaine before the post yesterday.

Twitter is cleaning house for sure, they should (if not already) fire Alex Payne. He is the real idiot that mouthed off about Ruby on Rails being their reason for not scaling. You want to talk about an amateur, Alex is the shining example of that.

If they firing people at Twitter, they need to fire Alex Payne. Talk about amateur hour, Alex is the real idiot blaming Twitter scalability problem on Ruby on Rails.

Personal on your part, not w.r.t your target. The point was that your lashing out at him was irrational and completely out of proportion to what the story seems to be.

Steven Hodson put it best in his post, and asked some pointed questions, the most critical one being “[W]hat happens if there is no real monetization at the end of the fabled Web 2.0 rainbow for Twitter?” Pandrogas #34 is right in his assessment; “build it and they will come” does not constitute a valid business strategy.

“if Cook was out due to scaling, why wait till now given the dramatic failures of last year? How can someone like Mighdoll, praised by Twitter, leave after such a short time if all was well at the management level of Twitter?”

The short answer may simply be, because scaling a web site after the launch is not an easy problem to solve. Especially if the architecture of the original design is antithetical to making the required changes as the site is running. The ideal scalability methods are ones which require deep integration with the underlying architecture of the web application. Ideally, the core API should be multi-threaded to have even a hope of performing an efficient dynamic distribution of requests over multiple servers under increasing load. If this was a web 1.0 site serving pages it would be easier, but twitter does lots of aggregation of twits and routing to subscribers…tons of db work through the app server layer…if that is not done efficiently, scale will not happen. If you don’t have smart multi-threaded code, it is going to be a B-och and a half to add in without major hiccups or out right downtime. The architect would have to build a parallel scalable system while the old system runs but do it fast enough to replace the old system before the increasing load kills it completely. That is the recipe for stress on a level we can only imagine. I’ve done my share of over nighters at a dot com and I’d imagine the stress of this type of re-architecting to be almost suicide inducing…so what do you do if you aren’t going to off yourself because of the stress of the job??? You jump ship.

That is my theory given the limited knowledge we have of the company internals and some personal experience in web application architecture.

my two bits