Over the past couple of months, we’ve seen a lot of action happening in and around the Twitter camp. With a few of the company’s higher-profile members taking the option to cash out and go elsewhere, there’s been a lot of questioning about what’s going on behind the scenes at Twitter.
One attention-grabbing moment was when early Twitter backer Kevin Rose decided to cash out some of his shares, again raising questions about the solidity of the company and what would cause such a move. According to Rose, though, it’s not nearly as ominous as it might sound, as he explains to Bloomberg’s Emily Chang:
“All investors are looking for some type of future liquidity event. They come to you and they say that another round of capital is happening; you have the right to sell up to a certain percentage of your holdings. When you’ve seen 50, 75x return on your investment or more, it’s hard not to say yes to something like that.”
What does that mean for Rose’s belief about the future of Twitter? As he goes on to explain, “It wasn’t out of [lack of] faith in the company or where they’re going, it was a matter of not having all of your eggs in one basket.”
Rose talks, then about the return of founder Jack Dorsey to Twitter, stating that he sees Dorsey as “another Steve Jobs”. He talks about the fact that Dorsey’s fine-grained control over the product of Twitter has ruffled some feathers, but in the end this is a good thing because Dorsey is, according to Rose, “a product genius”.
As for Rose himself? He’s keeping busy these days, with his new project called Milk. Billing itself as a solution to the “biggest problems in the mobile Web.” The first release, Oink, has gained massive traction (snagging 100k users in the 3 weeks since its launch) and we’re now waiting to see what’s next.
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