| Twitter Investor: No Business Model Required |
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Wired/Online Media Daily, Monday, February 16, 2009, 3:45 PM
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It looks like Twitter will now have years to come up with that business model: On Friday, the social media startup nabbed another $35 million in venture capital funding, in a round led by Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital, as reported in Online Media Daily. In an interview with Wired, Todd Chaffee, General Partner at IVP, said that Twitter now has well north of $50 million on its balance sheet. We've got a ton of cash," Chaffee said, when asked about the company's business model. "We have far more cash then we need, so I'm not in any hurry."
In fact, according to Chaffee, Twitter didn't even actively seek the current round of funding, which was the company's third. As Wired's Chris Snyder says, "it's hard to argue with the endorsement the endorsement an unsolicited $35 million windfall implies," but it's easy to point out the parallels to the dotcom bust, when enormous valuations were handed to companies that had no viable business model.
That doesn't faze Chaffee, who says that eyeballs are all Twitter needs at the moment. "You essentially have this company which has these assets that's turning into a very large media property," he said. "When you have tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people actively engaged everyday, you've got all sorts of monetization opportunities."
Just because Twitter doesn't have to focus on monetization, doesn't mean that it's ignoring it altogether. As founder Biz Stone noted recently, the company is now devoting more resources to finding a business model that works.
Read the whole story at Wired/Online Media Daily.
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