How painful is it to be a Twitter investor these days? So bad even Chris Sacca is beginning to squawk.
The billionaire venture capitalist — one of Twitter’s earliest and biggest shareholders — signaled that he will soon launch a high-profile critique of the service.
That’s a big switch from Sacca’s longtime stance as a staunch defender of Twitter Chief Executive Dick Costolo, who is under pressure from investors to grow the social network’s stagnant user base.
“I am soon going to post a few things that I personally hope the Twitter team will accomplish,” Sacca said in an ominous blog post late Thursday. “So stay tuned for a few more of my thoughts about Twitter.”
Sacca, whose firm Lowercase Capital also has claimed stakes in Facebook, Instagram and Uber, didn’t elaborate on his beef with management.
Instead, the bearded moneyman — a former Google exec with a taste for cowboy shirts and broadcasting on Twitter’s Periscope live-streaming app — took pains to emphasize his long track record of backing the company’s execs.
“I always felt like the birdie was one of my children and I needed to defend it at all costs,” Sacca wrote.
The 40-year-old tech tycoon went on to profess his “love” for Twitter employees, saying many of them are “like family” to him.
“My wife and I even painted a room in our house the exact shade of the Twitter bird,” Sacca wrote.
His mindset changed, however, after a recent Periscope broadcast he did with CNBC’s Jim Cramer, in which the pair discussed Twitter’s problems.
“They haven’t told us how they’re going to commercialize” users, Cramer griped. Sacca voiced an interest in quantifying Twitter’s “total monetizable audience.”
Sacca’s blog post follows a disastrous first-quarter earnings report late last month that sent Twitter’s shares tumbling more than 25 percent. In a conference call, Costolo and financial chief Anthony Noto admitted that Twitter’s ads weren’t fetching prices as high as management had hoped.
To make matters worse, Twitter’s mobile monthly active users — a key metric for analysts as they look to gauge the company’s growth prospects — came in at 241.5 million, missing analysts’ estimates of 243 million.
“I believe without reservation that Twitter can soon evolve to be used by over 500 million people a month,” Sacca wrote. “ I believe there is no natural ceiling on the revenue Twitter can generate.”