Twitter’s new CEO and owner, Elon Musk, has been rocking the social media giant and ruffling a lot of feathers both inside and outside the company. But while some in the tech world describe such chaos as a wildfire, others see it as something very different: opportunity.
Years of federal social networking, Older social platforms All of the earlier space efforts have emerged as alternatives to Twitter, which have their own issues. And that way, completely new ideas too.
One of these is being hatched by Gabor Sele, a co-founder who wants to build what he describes to me as “the new Twitter.”
In true Valley Hustle style, Gabor is still holding out on small details like the name and what, exactly, it all entails. He is doing that. in real timeYou can view the multi-tab Google Doc.
But Gabor has it as a first step in gathering interest for the new Twitter. Put together a registration list For people to register their interest while he works. (Note: The name T2 on the registration page appears to be an acronym for Twitter 2, but Gabor says it’s just a placeholder name.)
Now you may ask yourself, why pay attention to this? Isn’t Gabor getting a little ahead of himself here? It doesn’t even have a name or a product yet.
Well, yes. Gabor is just one of hundreds of millions of founders worldwide. But there are a few things that set him and his alt-Twitter efforts apart.
For starters, he’s the co-founder who sold his first company, YC-based mobile email startup Rimel, to Google. His second company, native advertising startup Namo Media, sold itself to Twitter.
He worked on those two titans between those acquisitions and on subsequent products, and that experience — focused on Timeline, new-user onboarding and exit experiences on Twitter; And with many, many different consumer ideas, the director of Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator project — gave him a taste of what was interesting and what wasn’t. And what works and what doesn’t.
Gabor left Google in July 2022 and has been tweeting his daily journey to figure out what to do next. (Day 106For example, he had a blast at TechCrunch and came to see Paul Davison, another hustler, talk about Clubhouse highlights and Highlight lowlights. And, naturally, insight into the Twitter conversation itself.
Elon told me that his initial push to buy Twitter generated a lot of interest among his friends and connections, who were talking in disparaging terms about how the whole place was going to collapse.
Then Musk bought it. And then, the layoff hit — a tipping point for Gabor.
“I’ve been thinking about a new Twitter for a while,” he said. However, after several of my friends in the company were fired last week, I thought to myself: ‘This is what I’ve been thinking about for a long time! “Maybe this is the time.”
Gabor is currently long on big picture ideas.
“I want to build the next public square for conversation. I want it to be fun and interesting, rewarding and valuable, and safe from harassment.” I mean, we’ve got 15-20 years of content moderation experience on the Internet now, and let’s build on that.
He’s also a big fan of Andrew Chen’s cold start concept. For his cold start, Gabor first focused on gathering a critical mass of people — a community to hit the ground running when “T2” launched. According to Google Docs, this is currently set to be September 2023, which is the date Gabor tells me he might try to move up.
It even had some investor interest that had been building through iMessage. That inbox includes a former Twitter-exec-zone investor who already texted Gabor how much money he’d like to get to get this new bird off the ground.
And he got a lot of unsolicited advice. Twitter is great for this.
“Why doesn’t someone start a new Twitter last week? It will only take 3 days and 50 million dollars,” he said. This is what prompted me to ask what a roadmap might look like. I think it will not be a three-day construction, but it will not cost 50 million dollars.
This raises many other questions… not the least of which is why Twitter thinks it can build what it can’t build itself, or why more centralized social media wall gardens have a future given the problems we see in them today.
For now, that’s what he’s interested in: Creating something from scratch will be easier than trying to fix something big and in the works, and it certainly won’t be as easy as getting what he calls “the best people” together. “But it’s not impossible either.”
“I think I’m looking at this empty space right now, and I want to be in that space,” he said.
If you want to take a gander, sign up here.
