Ron Conway on early Twitter opportunities when the platform had close to 200 million users and a growing developer community. He points to new features like annotations and real-time apps built on trending tweets as the next wave of startups.
Questions this video answers
"Close to 200 million" unique users.
About 800 developers.
Twitter Chirp.
F8.
nowmove.
A little dark in here.
Want me to move?
That's better, actually. So, Ron, we're here at Twitter Chirp.
It's awesome.
Yeah.
Who would have thought four years ago when it had 10 people that it would have 800 developers four years later?
Yeah. Pretty crazy. What do you think about all the changes in the marketplace? Are you still as an investor, are you still all in? Are you going to be making deals next week? Are you going to say no?
No, no, no, we're going to be as activ deals. I think that Twitter is in its infancy. So the companies that are starting in the Twitter ecosystem today have unbounded growth opportunity because we just found out Today close to 200 million unique users are utilizing the service. And you know that's probably on its way to a half a billion very quickly. That means thousands of apps are going to be developed for this community of what's going to be a half a billion users someday. So that says the opportunity is just massive.
What's your advice? Because all this filling holes story went out around the last week with Twitter buying tweety and building its BlackBerry client. And so what's your advice as an investor to startups now? Do they change their strategy? Do they come and re pitch you on something different?
Yeah, I think a lot of the companies in the Twitter ecosystem, now that it has become clearer what the directions that Twitter wants to pursue, there's boundless opportunity in all the other sectors and what will happen is the existing companies are going to react. These are really smart entrepreneurs who will pivot their idea so that they don't have a conflict with Twitter. And the market is so huge and there's so many apps that aren't even served yet that there's still a huge opportunity. We're not even through the first inning of how big Twitter can be.
Tell me what you think of the new features like annotations, which. Let me put more metadata underneath the tweet.
Yeah.
Do you think there's going to be new companies and what it's, what's your sense of where the market's going?
Yeah, just the annotation feature could be a platform for hundreds of new applications. The annotation feature is the feature that I think got the biggest audience reaction that, wow, that is something we all need. And here it is. So that's a perfect product enhancement for Twitter to develop that the developers can go expand on that. I'm hoping 100 companies sprout out of that.
Are you hearing anything from the Facebook camp about what Facebook's going to do next week?
Well, next week is F8. And Facebook is never asleep at the wheel. No one's asleep at the wheel in Silicon Valley. And I think Facebook and Twitter have two very unique audiences. They do have overlap, but they're serving two different functions for the hundreds of millions of users that they serve. And I think they complement each other beautifully. But Facebook is building a phenomenal application community as well. Ethan Beard is here.
Who's Ethan?
Ethan Beard is the head of the Facebook platform. F8 is his show, and he's here sharing the wealth.
Tell me about some of your top one or two or three companies that you're seeing right now. What's floating your boat?
We have a company called nowmove that tracks the most popular tweets out there, and based on that tweet stream, serves up videos about that very same topic. So you have real time video with real time data. It's a perfect example of how fast the technology is moving.
We're going to call you Real Time Ron from now on.
Please, please. Thank you so much. We love that name.
