John Battelle, author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture interviews CEO and co-founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, during the Web 2.0 Summit in October 2009 in San Francisco.
See video of the full interview ...
Williams answers it this way ...
"Here's what we think about revenue at Twitter. It's not like we are spending our days looking in the couch cushions for the elusive revenue model. But obviously we've done a lot of thinking about it. You don't raise as much money as we did without having something plausible -- both to tell investors and to tell yourself to justify how big a business you think you are going to build. Uh. But, we're spending 97% approximately of our efforts still in trying to improve the product and the technology. And it's not un-related to the revenue, because we think ultimately what we have to do is to deliver to people the best and freshest and most relevant information possible. And the irresponsible thing to do would be to take your eye off that and focus too much on the revenue right now with our limited resources. And when ultimately they go hand-in-hand. And the long term value will be in how good the product is and how many user it has."
He ended his answer with "Did that answer your questions?".
And Battelle answered truthfully, "No". And then laughter from the audience.
Perhaps Williams should become a politician. He was able give an answer without answering the question.
Further along in the interview, Battelle did say ...
"...and if we are driving that kind of value for business. I'm not too worry eventually to extract some of that value for ourselves."
It is interesting to note that Williams didn't sell Twitter to Facebook. Although Williams was founder of Pyra Labs which created Blogger, which did got sold to Google.
The interview also did touch upon topic such as ...
After the interview, there is a question-and-answer session where the audience can ask questions. Again, the first question asked was an interesting one. The question asked was why did Twitter suspended many twitter accounts when in fact the accounts were not spammers -- and when the accounts thought that they where playing by the rules when the rules are so undefined.
