Feature
Twitter’s parent company, X Corp., has made its first acquisition since billionaire Elon Musk took over: Laskie, a startup that develops job-matching technology. Listening to the talk surrounding the deal, it’s hard to shake the notion that it’s more about commerce than jobs.
No details of the sale have been officially revealed. Neither Musk, Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino or Laskie founder Chris Bakke have commented on the purchase, but Axios said Twitter paid tens of millions in cash and stock for the San Francisco-based company. It would add up since in 2021, Laskie raised $6 million in a seed round led by Bloomberg Beta and Peak State Ventures, according to Gizmodo.
What makes this transaction so interesting? For some time, Musk has talked about building a “superapp” that would offer multiple services through a single interface. He said people should be able to message their friends, look for work, book travel tickets and do everything they want from a single app on their smartphone. No more switching between apps to accomplish different things.
His goal, he’s said, is to transform Twitter into such a platform. And acquiring Laskie is widely seen as a step in that direction.
But as Axios noted, engineering such a transformation will require convincing American users to move away from apps they like — such as Uber for ride-hailing, Amazon for shopping and Zoom for conferencing — in favor of Musk’s vision.
The challenge is that while Musk’s idea of an “X app” isn’t exactly new (China has been successful with that approach for WhatsApp), Yahoo finance technology editor Dan Howley noted that launching a superapp “is going to be a little bit more difficult here in the US just because of how many different apps there are, how many different options people have.”
The Laskie Story
According to its now-shut website, Laskie was founded in 2021 and designed as a better way for talent and employers “to find each other.” The site claimed to have made “thousands” of matches between employers and candidates from the time it launched, with candidates following through with 80% of the opportunities presented to them within the app.
“By replacing some of the most hated parts of a typical job search with smarter ways of capturing and structuring data, our platform makes sure there is mutual interest, clear expectations and visibility into the hiring process before either side invests time,” Laskie co-founder and CTO Daniel O'Shea had written at the time.
In the here and now, a number of observers seem skeptical of Twitter’s deal — if they recognize its purpose to begin with. The problem is that many, if not most, have been quick to assume that Twitter is intending to jump into the online job market with both feet. What some fail to understand is that such a move on Musk’s part would require a one-on-one confrontation with LinkedIn, another with Indeed, and many more with other competing firms that have deep experience in recruiting as well as an established customer base. And one advantage those competitors have: they lack the internal drama and rash decision-making style that’s become the calling card at Musk’s Twitter.
“This seems to be a time where [Twitter] is really transitioning into something else,” observed Howley. “What that is, we still don't know yet.”
Related Article: Is There Anything to Learn from Musk’s Run at Twitter?
Paths to Where?
Howley said that LinkedIn — often portrayed as the 800-pound gorilla in the job-posting realm — is turning into more of a social network than it has been in the past, a change he believes is coming at the cost of efficient usability.
“It's becoming more of the free-wheeling social network [like] Facebook is,” he said.
Still, he noted, “if you're thinking about jobs, you would think about LinkedIn more than Twitter at this point, especially given Twitter's reputation.”
The acquisition of Laskie may have been intended to help overcome that branding gap. The social technology company Drunk on Social wrote that it expects Laskie’s technology to be integrated into Twitter’s to set up the microblog to offer job-related services as a first step in the superapp direction.
Twitter “is still looking to establish a definitive path forward under Musk’s ownership,” the Drunk on Social article read, adding that the next step is likely to include video, original programming “for big names” and, “eventually, more kinds of tools and options to facilitate expanded usage.”
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But no one is expecting a smooth road ahead. Keerthi Vedantam wrote in a Crunchbase article that acquiring Laskie was “a surprising move for Twitter, which recently cut upward of 3,500 employees and sold its pricey office furniture, and is still, after all that, being sued by at least six companies for not paying its bills,” she wrote. Not to mention that Facebook and Amazon have made more real progress toward developing a superapp, she noted, giving them a solid head start over Musk.
Caitriona Fitzgerald, the deputy director for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., said building the kind of superapp Musk has in mind “is a far more complicated challenge than Twitter.” Its developers are bound to have more complex relationships with regulators in Washington D.C., California, Brussels and elsewhere. Nothing like X App exists yet in the West, which is likely to create a “regulatory nightmare,” she said.
Despite all this, we have to bear in mind that Musk is not the kind of character we can easily count out. Since its founding, Musk’s SpaceX has raised $9.8 billion in funding. In the first quarter of 2023, Tesla produced over 400,000 cars and in March, the company showed revenue of $23.3 billion, up 24% from the same month in 2022. None of this has happened without hiccups, but Musk does seem to get things done.
