Obviously not an impressive quarter (wasn't disastrous either) but I don’t know that I’d make the leap to state that it’s time for Jack to leave. To be clear if I had my druthers he’d be working as a full-time CEO there, but it sounds like he’s happy with his choices and believes he can continue doing what he’s doing. I think part of what the company is struggling with is unwinding years of poor leadership before Jack came back full-time. The fact of the matter is that there was no clear vision as to what they wanted to be and further the business was simply run poorly with no real focus on shareholders or profitability. That’s all perfectly fine if you’re private, but if you’re public it matters a lot and I think this was a big opportunity squandered early on after its IPO.

I think Jack hit the nail on the head today when he said: “The whole world is watching Twitter. While we may not be currently meeting everyone’s growth expectations, there is one thing that continues to grow and outpace our peers: Twitter’s influence and impact.” There’s no denying the importance of the platform. But they are obviously not meeting certain sets of expectations. Somewhere they need to figure out how to close that gap if that's even possible at this point.

I think the market has more or less told us at this point that this is what it thinks Twitter is worth in the face of continued lackluster results. For investors it’s basically a coin flip, but I’d say that coin flip offers more upside than downside assuming that management continues to work on the initiatives they’ve laid out for us in things like engagement, safety, speeding up the pace of innovation and development, bring stock-based compensation in line with peers and hitting GAAP profitability in 2017. They seem to have sensible goals that could ultimately help the cause so I imagine as long as they feel they are on that path Twitter will remain independent. But this is looking more and more like a “important product, bad investment” kind of situation.

For shareholders today? I don't see any harm in hanging onto your shares; I'll hang onto mine. It's a pretty easy ticket to the potential that this thing may still have and it's probably best if you just tuck 'em away and check back in a year. Again, it's an important network and it's not something that can just disappear with no consequence. By the same token I totally get it if you've just had enough and can't deal with even seeing the ticker in your portfolio anymore. It's been a dud of an investment to say the least. But that's why we preach patience and diversity; we just ain't gonna get 'em all right. Don't own shares but are thinking about buying? I guess I could think of worse things to do, but I can also think of way better ideas out there for your money today. Like I said, this one's pretty much a coin flip now. As long as you're diversified and can sleep at night, it's all good either way.

Keep calm and Hit 'Em With the Hein

Anecdotally, for my trip down to Georgia to close on the sale of our house last week I found my hotel on TripAdvisor and booked it on TripAdvisor as well. This was a big win in both cases as I depended on the reviews to find an affordable (and acceptable) place in an otherwise pretty expensive part of town. They really came through and the booking process was seamless.

This is the third time I've actually booked a hotel on TripAdvisor and I've no doubt it was the right move for them building the Instant Booking platform. Now whether it gains meaningful traction is another story altogether, but from this one customer's perspective (yep, me) I will use it every time it lets me going forward. From an investing perspective (and I do own shares of TripAdvisor personally) I think there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic but we'll learn more next week when they announce. I'll be looking specifically for signs of growth in revenue per hotel user as well as growth in hotel users.

Keep calm and Hit 'Em With The Hein