Twitter has a new Chief Twit 🐤-Snowflake growing strong ❄️- Xbox vs Playstation 20 year battle 🕹
Know the value of key success indicators: Employee satisfactions (Twitter) and Net Revenue Retention (Snowflake)
Episode #87. Hey Sunday reader 👋🏼
This Sunday, The Timestamp is here again for you! Get your weekly dose of summaries from the articles, books, or podcasts you may have missed in tech & culture.
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#1. Twitter won Elon 🐤
My takeaways from this post from The Platformer published on Oct28 by Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer. I do not know how those guys manage to source their information from Twitter but they seem to be pretty well-informed. This article reflects on employee satisfaction surveys and gives insights about understanding where Twitter stands today after its change of CEO.
Twitter has a new Chief Twit called Elon Musk. The new boss has a message to advertisers (as ads are close to 90% of a source of revenue for Twitter): Twitter will not be “a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences.”
Musk feels he has a mission to change a weak leadership that hurt employees’ morale during the days when Jack Dorsey was the CEO.
Now it is interesting to witness how the new Chief Twit will manage to impulse a new dynamic in a company that suffered a tough ride mixing up the negative impact of the post-Covid era x the rumors of Musk acquiring then not acquiring the company.
Twitter measures an employee satisfaction index with a combination of 3 KPIs :
Pride in working for Twitter,
Likelihood to refer a friend for a job,
Intent to remain at Twitter.
This score has hit a score of 69 down 13 points since a year before.
Let's now see how this core will evolve. The company reports that until now communication and processes did not allow employees to perform their best work".
#2. Snowflake still growing like a snowball ☃️
My takeaways from this great post from The Diff published on Oct24 👇(Click on the graph to access the source article).
Since Snowflake went public in 2020 with an incredible valuation of x177 trailing sales, the company grow its sales 4x to $1,989m while the stock declined -33% over the same period of time.
Snowflake is still trading at a value worth 32x its annual sales but why? Because the revenue growth is solid but above all, the net dollar retention is just outstanding (NRR is the indicator showing how a company can upsell/sell more to existing customers every year compared to the previous year).
The net dollar retention is now at 175% which is way above the top performers that are generally showing 130%.
Understanding this growth means understanding what, exactly, Snowflake is selling. The company describes itself as a “data cloud”: they’re offering ways for customers to store and query all of their data on top of existing cloud services like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Snowflake's core asset. "Snowflake’s current core product is a database engine, supporting data pipelines, business intelligence, and data applications. The last point is important because it leads to network effects: a Snowflake user can share a subset of data with their customers while restricting it to just what the customer needs access to." This is called a data marketplace.
Discover why in this article, some compare Snowflake to an Enterprise Google.
#3. Game console war 🕹
Business Wars also exists in French version for those of you who want to practice your listening skills 🇫🇷. This series of 3 episodes (published initially in October 2018 by Wondery) covers a battle that has been on for almost 2 decades in the game console industry 👇
3 important facts you should know about:
While Microsoft spent billions focused on catching the success of Sony (Playstation was still a clear market leader after the release of PS1 and PS2), they got taken by surprise by an unexpected comeback, Nintendo, after their release of the Game console Wii.
Price elasticity: both Playstation with the release of PS3 and Microsoft when they released the Xbox One (embedding a hard drive + the Kinnect in their initial launch) experienced the problem of pricing their console with a price that was too high. They opened the door wide open to their competitor who benefitted from a lower price.
Quality can make the difference: are you familiar with the Red Ring of Death that hit 20%+ of Xbox360 customers? (I was part of them!).
Multiplatform games like Fortnite (a game you can access from any type of console) completely depreciated the game console business model which was heavily relying on best-seller games. Remember the 1st Xbox was launched with Halo, a franchise that was uniquely associated with Xbox.
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