Chris Sakka. Twitter experiences

Venture investor, one of the first Twitter investors, Chris Sakka, re-entered the Foras Midas list, regularly published by Forbes, this time in third place. How such a guy could achieve such a thing is unclear. He has neither technical nor business education. He does not know how to program, never opened a business and did not work in an investment fund. Previously, he worked at Google, but quitting, quickly broke into the investment ranks, being in the same boat with veterans of venture investments like John Doherr and Michael Moritz.

Against the backdrop of his investment feats, Chris often quarrels with everyone around. Chris's approach is infuriating many entrepreneurs, so Travis Kalanik (Uber), with whom he was previously in a warm relationship, now doesn’t communicate with Chris at all. Recently, it seems like consulting Twitter, which he has been doing for a long time - the end. Therefore, I suggest reading the translation of a recent blog post from his investment fund Lowercase Capital .

Disclaimer

• I have a lot of Twitter shares, both in personal property and in the accounts of my funds.
• I definitely don't speak on Twitter.
• I have no inside information on Twitter.
• I did not come up with the fourth point of the disclaimer, but just in case I just added it.

Twitter has been in my heart since I signed up in 2006. I began to feel closer to people who were not really around. The feeling of togetherness brought such diverse perspectives as no blog could. I suddenly found myself in the center of events, exchanged experiences, asked questions and found unexpected friends.
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My initial Twitter investment was relatively modest, but the more I became convinced that this company would change the world, I bought more and more stocks. At one point, I even spent all my savings on its shares, becoming almost insolvent. In those years, I went to the company's office, often without an invitation, and did everything I could to be useful. Recently, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sat at the table across from me to help me negotiate and implement the first few deals with Twitter. I talked with investors at the Jerry Murdoch level from Insight Ventures, driving around on their private jets to San Francisco to invest an estimated billion. I took the phones of any celebrities, politicians or company executives I knew and installed the Twitter app before they said no. I put more newbies on Twitter than anyone else. I was obsessed with help.

Twitter, in fact, has moved from the category of simple investments to a part of my identity. My children can discern a blue bird at a distance of one hundred feet. I have very few non-sports t-shirts, but my life is painted with a Twitter logo. On Twitter, I shared my wedding, the birth of children, the moments of my life, of which I am proud and of which I don’t really. I spoke and apologized for what I said. He expressed unpopular opinions and (sometimes) apologized for that. I raised money for charity, for politicians and startups. I stupidly joked and made revelations. My wife and I even painted the Twitter bird’s house number.

All this time I have been closely following the followers. At first, my tweets were pretty dumb, but as my audience grew, the sense of responsibility prevailed. Thanks to the ups and downs of my business and personal life, I am used to relying on feedback and user support. Over the years, I have aligned myself with my audience and never felt alone.

In parallel, from the first days, investors and experts asked skeptical questions: “How will Twitter bring in money?” And wrote about the end, attaching photos of the dead birdies. I spent a couple of years trying to convince them of the potential of Twitter and eventually decided that instead of wasting time, it was better to buy all the stocks I could find. It was almost impossible for me. However, by the time of the IPO, my affiliate funds owned most of the company.

Throughout this time, I have never worked on Twitter and have never been on the board of directors. I have been associated with the company for as long as the current head, Dick Costolo. We both invested in Twitter at the very beginning and both acted as consultants. In 2009, Dick became CEO, and I remained in the same position.

Think for a minute, is this value in your life, your energy, passion and capital given to a company in which you do not even work? Companies where none of the outsiders can attend the weekly general meeting of the team (Twitter, in part because of it, made the rule that people who do not work in the company are not eligible to participate in employee meetings). I am no longer the official Twitter consultant and I don’t know what will happen next with the company, like any other person who is not a Twitter employee.

However, I certainly have a good opinion on Twitter. Honestly, who is not? I want to know what will happen with the company further. Being one of the first 140 users, I saw several generations of the product. I saw three executives, a couple of generations of the board of directors, and a constant evolution of the management team. For 9 years I have been listening to complaints about what is not working and bold claims from all sides about what Twitter is and is not, and what should and should not be. I offered countless ideas of my own (most of them are buried).

For all this time, I was not particularly frank in public. A dozen times I spoke on television in support of Twitter, talked on the phone many times and shoveled thousands of letters from analysts, investors, journalists, potential employers and partners, many of whom you know firsthand. I have always considered Twitter as one of my children, and protected it at all costs. I have never expressed frustration or discontent about missed opportunities, or any other reason. However, in a recent broadcast with Jim Kramer on CNBC, I changed my position on this issue.

For several hours we discussed various ideas. He considered himself the right to criticize Twitter, but at the same time he confirmed my unchanging faith in his potential. My audience significantly exceeded the audience of several company executives, and most importantly, the content of the conversation found a genuine response from viewers, some of whom are employees of Twitter. The references and my mailbox are filled with passionate reviews of shareholders and service users who care about the company's fate.

I am writing all this, because in the near future I am going to send several ideas that I hope the Twitter team will execute. I want to make it clear that everything I say is aimed at the benefit of the company and is connected with my warmest feelings for the service. I love Twitter. I use it for several hours every day, and I can not imagine life without it. I also love Twitter development and support people. Many of them are like relatives to me.

I believe that, without artificial constraints, Twitter can increase traffic to more than 500 million people per month, and I believe that Twitter’s natural income ceiling is unlimited. I believe that its spread will accelerate, and the influence will become more significant. I believe that Twitter is a great investment and its shares are still cheap.

So watch out for my thoughts about it. At the same time, thank you for giving me the opportunity to think about the path that has already meant so much to me.

PS To make it clearer I will tell a short background. Ev Williams offered Chris to buy Twitter shares worth $ 400 million from him. Chris is preparing a deal with Williams. Having secured funds in the amount of $ 1 billion from JP Morgan and municipal funds, Chris quietly buys the shares of former employees and other investors in order to have time for the public announcement of the company's IPO in May 2013. After the case came to an IPO, other Twitter investors were very surprised and very annoyed by the distribution of the company's shares, in which Chris became the largest external investor on Twitter. “There are people who condemn Chris for buying,” says Williams. “But he did what everyone would do in his place.” Trying to do a similar trick with Uber, Chris strongly quarreled with Travis Kalanik.