Twitter’s Biz Stone says no IPO or new funding any time soon
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Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said Thursday that the popular social media website has no plans to go public or issue any new funding rounds any time soon, deflecting rumors to the contrary yet again.
Stone made his comments to Reuters at the World Economy and Future Forum in Seoul.
‘We have so many other things before we even think about’ issuing shares on publicly traded stock markets, Stone told Reuters. ‘We are not even discussing it internally. It’s too far off.’
On top of that, he told Reuters, Twitter isn’t planning on getting into any new investment rounds in the next 12 months either.
‘We make money,’ Stone told Reuters. ‘We earn money from a suite of products -- we have promoted tweets ... promoted accounts, all of which are in our advertising mechanism.... We are just really getting started. We have some internal forecasts (for advertising revenue for 2011) but nothing is really shared right now. We don’t need to set the world record or anything like that.’
On Monday, there were reports that JPMorgan Chase might be in talks to buy a minority share in Twitter. JPMorgan recently disclosed in a regulatory filing the formation of a $1.2-billion ‘digital growth fund.’
Stone told Reuters on Thursday that the rumors about the JPMorgan-Twitter talks were false.
In recent weeks, rumors have been circulating that Google and Facebook were interested in buying Twitter for about $10 billion have, something Stone and company CEO Dick Costolo both have denied.
Andreessen Horowitz, a Menlo Park, Calif., investment firm started by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, invested $80 million in Twitter in February by buying shares directly from existing investors. And in December, Twitter raised $200 million in capital during a funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Estimates have pegged Twitter’s worth around $3.7 billion.
Twitter, which has about 350 employees, had about 175 million users as of September, Reuters said.
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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles