It might have taken a while for Twitter to figure out a viable business model, but the company seems to be going gangbusters. CEO Dick Costolo told the Los Angeles Times the company has a “truckload of money in the bank” and can stay a private company as long as it wants.
Holding an initial public offering on the stock market is a popular way for companies to raise money and ensure longevity. However, with that comes the sacrifice of handing over voting rights in a firm to anyone with deep enough pockets to buy a significant number of shares.
“[Staying private] allows us to think about the business and the way we want to grow it in the small boardroom as opposed to being beholden to a particular way of growing the business, such as quarter to quarter,” Costolo told the newspaper.
It’s not yet clear whether Twitter’s profitable, although the company is apparently on course to make $1 billion a year through advertising by 2014.
The Twitter chief added that the firm is steering the community towards a place where tweets aren’t the “main event,” but are instead commentary on other types of content. (In other words, it wants to be a hub for everything that happens on the Web). The recently updated expanded tweets feature will certainly help provide more context.
Meanwhile, Twitter’s employees are focused on making the platform faster and simpler to use, while improving the Connect and Discover features. Twitter made some changes to the latter last week, when it improved the search function and made it easier to find interesting, relevant tweets.
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