Memo to Peter Thiel: I Was Wrong About Twitter, Too

Bethany Clarke/Getty Images Peter Thiel is underestimating Twitter (TWTR). I should know; I made the same mistake. On Sept. 17, Thiel, an early Facebook (FB) investor, used part of a wide-ranging CNBC interview to dismiss the microblogger. "Twitter is hard to evaluate. They have a lot of potential. It's a horribly mismanaged company -- probably a lot of pot-smoking going on there." Let's be clear about what Thiel is saying here. He isn't commenting on cannabis so much as accusing Twitter of poor performance. A claim that any sober analysis of the numbers would instantly refute. Overall revenue growth is up 117 percent over the past 12 months. Ad revenue per 1,000 timeline views -- a key metric for the company -- doubled in the most recent quarter and is growing even faster overseas. Of course, it would be easy to skewer Thiel if I hadn't been just as dismissive of Twitter and CEO Dick Costolo. But I was. Dysfunctional and Slow Back in 2011, a Fortune exposé told of a dysfunctional culture in which nothing moved fast enough. Even Costolo -- barely six months into the job as CEO -- had come off poorly for spending six weeks to craft a new mission statement. Naturally, I piled on in a follow-up column: "At Twitter, arrogance seems to have manifested itself in the form of a confused mishmash of visions and product strategies. Six weeks to form a mission statement? Six weeks is a lifetime in tech, especially in the fast-paced microuniverse we call Silicon Valley." I'd concluded that column by saying I would avoid the Twitter IPO, which looks like a smart decision on the surface. The stock is up about 13 percent since the offering vs. 15 percent for the S&P 500 (^GPSC), a small but likely transient win that will evaporate now that the business is performing as well as it is. Costolo never responded to my finger-pointing. (As if he needed to.) But he did respond to Thiel, in the most hilarious way possible:

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@goldman working my way through a giant bag of Doritos. I'll catch up with you later. -- dick costolo (@dickc) Sept. 17, 2014

4 More Quotes Every Twitter Investor Should Know For Costolo, it wasn't just an applause-worthy quip. It was also reflective of a style that's helping him to foster a high-performance environment that his workers have come to treasure. Twitter headlines Glassdoor's list of the top 25 U.S. companies in terms of culture and values.