Horrible design aside, there's some interesting politics represented on there.
1) Alyssa was given all of Square to run, making her the effective CEO of Square. Jack was never going to give up CEO of Square role in any other way than by taking over a top-level entity. I strongly suspect he hasn't had any interest in the core business in years, though. Given Alyssa's general background in AWS, this likely represents continued platformization of Square, and a continued de-emphasis on Square as a product. Instead an emphasis on Square as infrastructure. How this squares (hah) with their small business moat time will tell.
2) Jesse Dorogusker runs Tidal and crypto hardware, which is fascinating - he's ex-Apple, a solid hardware lead, but to my knowledge he has no music background or industry experience. I wonder how that happened?
3) Mike Brock in charge of whatever the fresh hell TBD54566975 is, is honestly the about 10x as puzzling as Jesse in charge of Tidal. I could not understand this less. The name, the design, the mission, the lead choice, the twitter page [1]. None of it. It's complete nonsense.
I have to say I thought the most ridiculous name I'd see in this space was coins named after people's dogs. This not-even-a-name might be even more ridiculous. It reminds me of those spam emails where they the writing forms an effective filter on the people who reply, the idea being that they are so ludicrous that only a sucker would reply (hence saving the time of the scammers on interacting with people who reply but won't fall for the scam). I have to say I'm super sick of all the bullshit happening in the crypto space at the moment because I think it really tarnishes the reputation of everything in the space including some decentralized apps and decentralized finance stuff that could actually be a massive net positive to everyone.
I worked at AWS at a time when Alyssa was there (running Amazon S3), and the few times I've met her, I can guarantee she was a formidable executive. No surprise she's in the top ranks at Square.
“Running Amazon s3”… wow, it’s hard to think of many roles that are more fundamental to today’s Internet infrastructure (never lose a byte!) and at the same time quite dull (it’s an object heap after all. Nothing else to see here).
It's easy to underestimate how difficult it is to make a core building block do one thing and do it really good. I mean, Twitter is another frequently cited example; most people with basic software development knowledge could build a Twitter clone in an afternoon, but the challenge is to make it globally and infinitely scalable.
Comparing Twitter and S3 though? Twitter literally epitomized site unreliability with its fail whales for so many years before finally figuring out how to do the one single thing they do reliably, viz. shuffling around a bunch of text messages. As far as big tech goes Twitter looks like the least well managed or thought Out tech stack I can see.
To make sure it’s not interpreted that way, I’m not saying a single guy could create Twitter at its scale in a month, but they do basically one thing and have infinite resources. It’s not that hard.
The real challenge is it to get people to use. I believe that there are no insurmountable technical or organizational problems in scaling a messaging service.
The hard part isn't designing and building an object heap, the hard part is building, guiding and managing a team that builds, manages and operates an object heap, at a world wide scale.
TBD to me is pretty clearly just trying to capitalize on memecoins. That Twitter is exactly what a watered down corporate version of a shitcoin looks like. Some technical mumbo jumbo, a white paper, bs name, and what boomers think memes are (putting lowercase text on a hat, using a drake img as your Twitter profile, weird snarky responses).
Based on my knowledge of shitcoins, this will do extremely well.
1) Alyssa was given all of Square to run, making her the effective CEO of Square. Jack was never going to give up CEO of Square role in any other way than by taking over a top-level entity. I strongly suspect he hasn't had any interest in the core business in years, though. Given Alyssa's general background in AWS, this likely represents continued platformization of Square, and a continued de-emphasis on Square as a product. Instead an emphasis on Square as infrastructure. How this squares (hah) with their small business moat time will tell.
2) Jesse Dorogusker runs Tidal and crypto hardware, which is fascinating - he's ex-Apple, a solid hardware lead, but to my knowledge he has no music background or industry experience. I wonder how that happened?
3) Mike Brock in charge of whatever the fresh hell TBD54566975 is, is honestly the about 10x as puzzling as Jesse in charge of Tidal. I could not understand this less. The name, the design, the mission, the lead choice, the twitter page [1]. None of it. It's complete nonsense.
[1] https://twitter.com/TBD54566975