The Twitter Shareholders Meeting

Me and Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO

The Twitter Annual Meeting was held yesterday at the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco on Market Street. Jack Dorsey, the CEO, spoke about the goals for the company.

Areas covered were:
Improving Timeline
Notifications
Safety, with regard ti transparency, better tools, and deep learning & machine learning

Dorsey talked about three major improvements:

1. Twitter Lite – for Safari or Chrome on mobile devices
   30% faster load times
   Uses less than 1 meg of data
   Looks identical to the app
   Can turn on Data Saver – all images, videos, gifs blurred
   Reduce data usage by 70%
2. Explore tab -brings everything together
   Trends, Moments, Live Events
3. Mute – Safety control
   Notifications -muted words -pause and not see

Anthony Noto, Twitter’s CFO, then spoke. He talked about the Live Streaming Video and expansion into:
Sports
News
Entertainment
ESports

He said that in Q1, there was 800 hours of live video content, over 450 events, with more than 200 premium content partners.

All the shareholder resolutions passed except the one that proposed that Twitter become a user owned company. The proposal said:

“A community-owned Twitter could result in new and reliable revenue streams, since we, as users, could buy in as co-owners, with a stake in the platform’s success. Without the short-term pressure of the stock markets, we can realize Twitter’s potential value, which the current business model has struggled to do for many years. We could set more transparent accountable rules for handling abuse. We could re-open the platform’s data to spur innovation. Overall, we’d all be invested in Twitter’s success and sustainability. Such a conversion could also ensure a fairer return for the company’s existing investors than other options.”

The questions and answers were related to looking into a Twitter Prime type service where some users could pay for a premium service, and utilizing artificial intelligence through machine learning and deep learning for timelines and notifications.

Twitter Annual Shareholder Meeting Was Today

Jack Dorsey, CEO,
Anthony Noto, CFO,
Vijaya Gadde, General Counsel
Twitter (TWTR)

Today, May 25, 2016, the Twitter Annual Meeting was held today at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, California. There was a turnout of about 60 shareholders. At last year's meeting, Jesse Jackson showed up, but he wasn't there for the meeting this year. On the stage were Jack Dorsey, CEO, Anthony Noto, CFO, and Vijaya Gadde, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary.

Jack Dorsey lead off the meeting showing a presentation of various tweets and videos. He also went over the five priorities for the company, including refining core services and safety. He mentioned the live streaming deal with the NFL.

Then Noto went over the financials. The business part of the meeting, run by Gadde,  took about 15 minutes, where Jack Dorsey and Hugh Johnston were elected to the Board of Directors to serve until the 2019 annual meeting. Also, the Name Executive Officer Compensation passed, the appointment of PriceWaterhouseCoopers as the accounting firm passed, and and the approval of the 2016 Equity Incentive Plan passed.

Then the fun part began: the question and answer period. The first shareholder asked how the expense for software engineers is shown on the financial statements (mostly R&D), and how the stock based compensation is shown (R&D).  Noto explained that the company currently doesn't use stock options; it only issues restricted stock.

Twitter Annual Shareholder Meeting

The same shareholder also asked what types of software the programmers use. Dorsey took that question and said that it has been a transition, starting with Ruby, then Java, Objective-C, then Swift. He said that several programming languages are used, and the programmers use whatever they need to get the job done.

The next shareholder came up with three new verified statuses. He had previously recommended three last year, two of which have been verified.

One young woman came up with a couple suggestions. One was having the ability to send money through Twitter. The other was having the ability to buy Twitter stock through Twitter. Dorsey said that they are looking into a money transfer system.

A shareholder asked about what the catalyst is for an increase in the stock price and both Dorsey and Noto emphasized the push for more live streaming in the areas of sports, entertainment, and news and politics.

When asked if they were open to a takeover offer or a partnership, the answer was essentially no.

Finally, the $3.6 billion in cash that the company has came up. Noto said that they have a couple of options: share buybacks and acquisitions. Management is regularly evaluation how the money should be spent.

Disclosure: Author owns TWTR.