So Twitter is going public. We knew this was probably coming eventually, but the way they announced it on Wednesday is the part that's actually stuck with me, more than the IPO itself.
No press release. No conference call with analysts, no glossy PDF. Just a tweet, from the @twitter account, sometime Wednesday afternoon: "We've confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the SEC for a planned IPO." Followed by the standard legal disclaimer that the tweet itself doesn't count as an offer to sell securities, because of course a company built on tweets has to append securities law boilerplate to one. That's it. That's how a company that people are already guessing is worth somewhere around $10 billion (nobody actually knows, the number keeps moving depending on who's speculating that day) told the world it's about to become a public company.
I've had my account since early 2009, back when you basically needed someone to tell you it existed, or at least that's how it felt in my corner of the internet. I remember checking it by texting 40404 because the website itself would time out constantly during anything resembling a traffic spike. The fail whale showed up so often it became a whole personality for the service, and somehow that was part of the charm instead of a dealbreaker. The whole thing ran on duct tape for years.
Now it's a company that has to justify a valuation to Wall Street, and I've got mixed feelings about what that eventually does to a product that used to feel like a place instead of a platform. Not because going public is automatically bad, plenty of companies do it and stay perfectly decent. But the incentives shift the second there are quarterly numbers to hit. More ads in the timeline, probably. More "promoted" everything. An algorithm eventually, even though the entire appeal right now is that it's just reverse chronological, no games being played with what you actually see.
Maybe none of that happens. Maybe it stays the same site where I follow a weird mix of local news reporters, a couple of comedians, and one account that only ever tweets about the weather in Reykjavik for reasons I genuinely can't remember anymore. But companies don't usually file confidential paperwork with the SEC and then leave everything exactly as it was.
Quick aside, since it happened the same week and I'd feel weird not mentioning it at all: Apple had its event Tuesday. Two new phones, the 5C in a handful of plastic colors and the 5S with a fingerprint sensor built into the home button. I'm not going to spend this whole post on it, every tech site already has, ten times over, and I don't have much to add that isn't just a press release with extra adjectives stapled on. I'll say this much though: the fingerprint sensor is the part I actually think about longer term, more than the colors or the gold model everyone's currently losing their minds over. Putting something like that into a device most people carry all day changes what a phone can authenticate, not just how fast you get past the lock screen. Whether Apple does anything interesting with it beyond unlocking the phone is the real question, and that's not something we'll know for a while.
Back to Twitter, because that's the thing I keep circling. The "confidential" part of the filing is interesting on its own, legally speaking. It's a JOBS Act provision that lets companies under a billion dollars in revenue file privately first and hold off on revealing the actual numbers until closer to the real offering. Which means every "Twitter is worth $X billion" figure going around this week is a guess wearing a reporter's byline. I'd take all of it with a pretty large grain of salt until there's an actual document anyone can read.
I don't have a neat point to land on here. I just think it's a little funny that a company built around a 140-character limit managed to announce its own IPO in fewer characters than that, and somehow it felt like exactly the right way for them to do it.