Having spent a week with its 120,000-word IPO document, I’m left with a nagging feeling. The document is full of numbers and charts and graphs that show how the service is growing. But if you look hard enough—heck, if you look at all—you’ll see it has virtually no details about the most important aspects of its business.
If anything, the filing ascribes Twitter’s impressive ad-growth figures to the fact that more people are using the service. And that is “like a car dealer reporting that sales increased because he put more cars on the lot. The cars don’t sell themselves,” says Rett Wallace , CEO of Triton Research, a New York firm that analyzes private companies. “How can you project the performance of a company when you don’t know who is selling and who is buying?”
