<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1610275857561538561.html">https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1610275857561538561.html</a>Thread by <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-1dbjc4n r-1loqt21 r-1wbh5a2 r-dnmrzs r-1ny4l3l" href="https://twitter.com/volodarik">@volodarik </a>copy &amp; pasted below:"There are many multibillion dollar companies that started out as tools for internal use only. Here are 10 that will surprise you:1/ <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="entity-mention" href="https://twitter.com/SlackHQ">@SlackHQ</a> In 2011, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="entity-mention" href="https://twitter.com/stewart">@stewart</a> (&amp; his team) built it to communicate with each other while working on a game. The game failed, but he launched the internal messaging app as a team communication tool. Today, it makes $1B/yr in ARR, &amp; recently Salesforce acquired it for $27.7B.2/ <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="entity-mention" href="https://twitter.com/basecamp">@basecamp</a> <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="entity-mention" href="https://twitter.com/37signals">@37signals</a>, a design consultancy, developed it as an internal tool to manage projects and communication. Later, clients continuously asked the founder, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="entity-mention" href="https://twitter.com/jasonfried">@jasonfried</a>, about his project management tool—so he launched it. Today, it has 75K+ companies as customers.3/ <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="entity-mention" href="https://twitter.com/segment">@segment</a> - customer data platform. It started as a classroom lecture tool allowing students to flag any confusion to the professor, but it failed. Then, it pivoted to a web analytics tool. It, too, failed due to competition. Now, the company only had $100K in the bank.@mentionsFinally, the founders launched the internal programming tool they had created to build their previous products. It blew up on GitHub and became the company’s main product. In 2020, Twilio acquired it for $3.2B. Here is announcement from (maybe my cousin)<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1315751163262693376.html">Unroll available on Thread Reader</a>4/ <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="entity-mention" href="https://twitter.com/asana">@asana</a> In 2008, two engineers at FB, Dustin Moskovitz and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="entity-mention" href="https://twitter.com/rosenstein">@rosenstein</a>, developed a project management tool to improve internal team collaboration. But the tool became so popular on the FB team, they quit FB to work full-time on it. Today, it makes $378M/yr in revenue.5/ <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="entity-mention" href="https://twitter.com/hootsuite">@hootsuite</a> Invoke Media, a digital marketing agency, originally developed Hootsuite to manage its customer's social media accounts. The founders later launched it as a separate product. Today, it has 25M+ users and makes $250M+/yr in revenue.6/ <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="entity-mention" href="https://twitter.com/intercom">@intercom</a> The founders first developed it to communicate with the users of their existing app, Exceptional. Eventually, Exceptional shut down, but they doubled down on Intercom—developing tools for support and sales platform. Today, it makes $300M/yr in revenue.7/ <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="entity-mention" href="https://twitter.com/freshbooks">@freshbooks</a> <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="entity-mention" href="https://twitter.com/MikeMcDerment">@MikeMcDerment</a> built it to help him manage the invoicing and billing for his design firm. He later launched the same tool for others and found they loved the product—so he went all in. Today, it generates $50M+/yr in revenue.@mentions8/ Amazon originally built AWS to manage its infrastructure &amp; services. Later, the company launched it as a separate product for outside customers. Today, it generates $80B/yr in revenue. Here's an excellent deep dive on AWS:9/ <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="entity-mention" href="https://twitter.com/Mailchimp">@Mailchimp</a> The founders first developed it to help their design agency clients send emails. But in 2007, due to growing demand for the service, they shut down the agency &amp; went all-in on it. Today, it does $700M+/yr in revenue, &amp; recently Intuit acquired it for $12B.10/ <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="entity-mention" href="https://twitter.com/MiroHQ">@MiroHQ</a> The founders originally built the visual collaboration tool to communicate with their design agency team &amp; clients. Over time, after realizing the demand for it, they decided to build a company around it. Today, it has 45M+ users &amp; generates $400M/yr in revenue."<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1610275857561538561.html">Unroll available on Thread Reader</a>

10 Multibillion Dollar Companies that Started as Online Tools

Hi I'm Jeremy. I'm building this site because I'm not satisfied with other online community type websites and their lack of innovation (see the /about page). The goal is to make a superior, more open, and more decentralized online community.

The site is still in early stages in active development (see the dev masterthread here: https://zsync.xyz/p/zsync-dev-update-masterthread)

Join us if this sounds interesting! Feel free to send me any feedback or reach out directly!

BlockFi Pauses Withdrawals

Binance Walks Away From Deal to Acquire FTX

Binance to acquire FTX

Jack Dorsey unveils decentralized social with algo choice and portable accounts

At the Ethereum Devcon conference in Bogota, Daphne of a DAO called blu3dao ("a DAO focused on empowering women, non-binary people, and allies to learn, earn, and play in web3 towards financial freedom") accused a man of harassment, tweeting a photo she took of him with his face visible: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/daphachar/status/1579879538099879937">https://twitter.com/daphachar/status/1579879538099879937</a>"Day 1 of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406 r-1cvl2hr r-1loqt21 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" href="https://twitter.com/EFDevcon">@EFDevcon </a>and a group of us women got harassed by a gross guy! What did the Ethereum Foundation team do? Smiled and chatted with him for 10 minutes and let him go on his way! I feel horribly unsafe at this event. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://emojipedia.org/thumbs-down/">👎</a>Take women seriously when they report harassment."The photo contains three visible faces and does not make it clear who the alleged harasser is. Also there was no explanation as to what actually happened, just the tweet quoted above.A couple days later the man, "the brown backpack guy", wrote a public account of what happened: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/bejzik8/status/1580627781410385920">https://twitter.com/bejzik8/status/1580627781410385920</a>. His account states that he didn't harass anyone, the alleged victim never attempted to confront him, that he was stopped multiple times by security including getting his phone searched because Daphne accused him of following and taking photos of her female friends, and then the following night he got kicked out of a club.A conferencegoer confirmed that Daphne had accused him of taking photos of her friends, and that the security guards had searched his phone and found nothing: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/minchi_p/status/1580909702342328321">https://twitter.com/minchi_p/status/1580909702342328321</a>Daphne responded a few days later with a statement: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/daphachar/status/1581492182438932487">https://twitter.com/daphachar/status/1581492182438932487</a> The statement is titled "The dark side of the crypto community" and starts off with "Now that I have arrived home to physical safety". She claims that he repeatedly booed and gave them thumbs down them while they were getting their picture taken. She then told the staff who confronted him and gave him a warning. According to her, "Several of us felt very unsafe sharing the same environment with someone who refused to leave us alone after repeated pleas, and still felt uninhibited to continue to harass us." She claims after the incident "I never followed him, or came within 10 feet of him" and that she never accused him of taking pictures of them and that she wasn't present during the police search (in direct contradiction to the previous witness's testimony".She concludes her statement with the following demands to the Ethereum Foundation:"-An amendment to the Devcon code of conduct to institute a zero tolerance policy for harassment when multiple reports are received.-On call safety and support team available onsite for anyone to report incidents.-A public response from the Ethereum Foundation team detailing the incident, what they could have done better, and how they will improve to keep the entire community safe.-A full-time professional hired by the Ethereum Foundation team to put appropriate policies and procedures and training to protect the safety of all in future events.-Open source DEI training provided as a resource for the broader web3 community."She concluded her statement with "The dark side of the crypto community runs rampant."Blu3dao came out with a statement the day prior: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/blu3dao/status/1581366698917388288">https://twitter.com/blu3dao/status/1581366698917388288</a>Another user on Twitter named cami came out questioning blue3dao's finances: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/camiinthisthang/status/1580716130166927360">https://twitter.com/camiinthisthang/status/1580716130166927360</a>Another user investigated blu3dao's engineering to find "their most promising piece of software is a shell script designed to inflate the activity on your Github profile by spoofing commits."<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/intrinsicrypto/status/1580691898402209792">https://twitter.com/intrinsicrypto/status/1580691898402209792</a>Tweet from another woman who attended the conference (no connection to the incident): <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/defigirlxoxo/status/1580992622398955521">https://twitter.com/defigirlxoxo/status/1580992622398955521</a>

Blu3dao Member Publicly Accuses Man of Harassment at Ethereum Devcon, Man Responds

Japan to Invest in Metaverse and NFT Expansion

How BuiltWith generates $14 million a year while having zero employees

"Some of the biggest EVM-based DeFi platforms — including Aave and Uniswap, as well as Web3 social platform Lens and gaming studio Midnight Society — will be amongst the first protocols to deploy on the zkEVM Testnet, with more joining soon.To get started, check out the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://wiki.polygon.technology/docs/zkEVM/overview">documentation</a> and start building on the testnet today, and read on for all the details."

Polygon zkEVM Public Testnet Launched

Aztec Introduces Noir, Rust-based DSL for Zero Knowledge Proofs

<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/10/06/binance-linked-bnb-price-falls-close-to-4-on-hack-rumors/">https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/10/06/binance-linked-bnb-price-falls-close-to-4-on-hack-rumors/</a>Transaction: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://bscscan.com/tx/0xebf83628ba893d35b496121fb8201666b8e09f3cbadf0e269162baa72efe3b8b">https://bscscan.com/tx/0xebf83628ba893d35b496121fb8201666b8e09f3cbadf0e269162baa72efe3b8b</a>Wallet of potential hacker: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://bscscan.com/address/0x489a8756c18c0b8b24ec2a2b9ff3d4d447f79bec">https://bscscan.com/address/0x489a8756c18c0b8b24ec2a2b9ff3d4d447f79bec</a>One of the largest hacks of all time, if not the largest.CZ update: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1578171072067031042">https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1578171072067031042</a> "the current impact estimate is around $100m USD equvilent"

Binance Smart Chain Halted After 2M BNB Hacked From Binance Bridge (~$566M USD)

A philosopher moderated a public debate on a college campus on the question of should trans women be allowed to compete in women's sports. The debate quickly escalated into chaos as the supporting camp became unruly, even going as far as to leveling personal attacks, and exposing their own bigotry and hypocrisy.Video description:"In early May, my team explored the following claim with students: "Trans women should be able to compete in women’s sports.” After about 25 minutes of discussion, one student asked, “What’s the goal of this?”The idea of examining beliefs seemed utterly foreign to her. Universities have a responsibility to provide students with tools to think through claims and exchange in fruitful inquiry. They are failing.?

College Campus Debate on Trans Women in Women's Sports Escalates, Exposing Woke Bigotry [Video]

<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1571495273997664258.html">https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1571495273997664258.html</a> (thread by <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-1dbjc4n r-1loqt21 r-1wbh5a2 r-dnmrzs r-1ny4l3l" href="https://twitter.com/realjondavids">@realjondavids)</a>"I just discovered a 1-man company that pulls in $13M/yr selling the most basic software you’ve ever heard of. I was curious so I went full Sherlock Holmes to figure this out. Here’s the story 🧵• the company is called Digital Inspiration • they make niche plug-ins for google apps like gmail and docs • they have millions of customers including big companies like disney and uber• the founder is amit agarwal - <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="entity-mention" href="https://twitter.com/labnol">@labnol</a> - who lives in uttar pradesh, india • amit is the only employee Still with me? Let's dig in 👇1/ THE BASICS Amit started as a tech blogger in 2004. Then he developed a Gmail plug-in called "Mail Merge with Attachments."So if you want to send 100 emails with 1 click, but make each one personalized, that's what this plug-in does. Handy right? He promoted it on his blog.2/ FINDING THE MONEY Here's where it get nuts. You can download that plug-in for free and upgrade to the paid version starting at $39/yr per user. According to Google, it's been downloaded 7.5M times.So if even 5% of these downloads end up in a paying user, that's $1.5M in annual recurring revenue. And I'm sure it's more than that. He has customers like Uber and Zoom who are paying for 100's of enterprise users. Those licenses are printing money.This plug-in has to bring in $4M+. But wait, there's more...3/ HERE'S THE MIND-BLOWING PART Amit has developed 13 apps (that I know of) and each one is a cash cow. • there's a document mgnt app that starts at $79/yr with 6M+ downloads • there's a notification app starting at $39/yr with 10M+ downloads• there's a youtube app starting at $79/yr with 8M+ downloads With my rough math, this dude is making $13M/yr 🤯 And if you told me it was $30M/yr, I wouldn't be surprised. Let's all pause for a round of applause 👏👏KEY TAKEAWAYS: → Building an audience gives you massive leverage on customer acquisition → There's riches in the niches. Who would have thought Google productivity apps were so lucrative?→ Lucrative products don't need to be sexy. It's actually better if they're boring → Some businesses don't require lots of employees to make lots of money"

1-man company making $13m/yr with Google plugins (gmail, docs) - Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration

Individuals who make less than $125k/yr will get up to $10k of student debt forgiven, and up to $20k if they are Pell Grant recipients.Biden is also proposing a new income-based repayment program that will cut payments on undegraduate loans in half from 10% to 5%.The <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.crfb.org/blogs/new-student-debt-changes-will-cost-half-trillion-dollars">Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculates</a> the budget impact at somewhere between $440 billion and $600 billion over a decade. The University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="css-yywogo" href="https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2022/8/26/biden-student-loan-forgiveness">just over $600 billion</a> over 10 years.

Biden Announces Student Loan Debt Relief of up to $20k for Individuals Making Less Than $125k/yr

Ethereum Merge scheduled for September 15-16th

This comes days after the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0916">U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned virtual currency mixer Tornado Cash</a>

Suspected developer of crypto mixer Tornado Cash arrested

The different types of ZK-EVMs - Vitalik Buterin

Nomad bridge drained of $150m due to coding mistake

Post all site feedback here. Unfiltered honest feedback welcome(fyi here is the dev update thread: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://zsync.xyz/p/zsync-dev-update-masterthread">https://zsync.xyz/p/zsync-dev-update-masterthread</a>)