> This is not apples to apples but Whatsapp is a product that entirely ran on 16 servers at the time of acquisition (1.5 billion users).
- 450m DAUs at the time of facebook acquisition [0]
- Twitter is not just DMs or Group Chat.
> It really begs the question why Twitter uses so much compute if there are companies that have operated significantly more efficiently.
A fair comparision might have been Instagram: While Systrom did run a relatively lean eng org, they never had to monetize and got acquired before they got any bigger than ~50m?
- 450m DAUs at the time of facebook acquisition [0]
- Twitter is not just DMs or Group Chat.
> It really begs the question why Twitter uses so much compute if there are companies that have operated significantly more efficiently.
A fair comparision might have been Instagram: While Systrom did run a relatively lean eng org, they never had to monetize and got acquired before they got any bigger than ~50m?
[0] https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/four-numbers-that-explain...