Twitter went public and popped 73% on day one. The bird is worth $31 billion while losing money, and every founder at every meetup this week had a new gleam in their eye. Also in “numbers that break my brain”: rumor is Snapchat turned down three billion dollars from Facebook. Snapchat! The disappearing-photos app! Either the greatest bluff or the greatest conviction of our era. (Evan Spiegel is 23. I am also 23. He turned down $3B and I turned down a second helping of team lunch because I was scared of the burrito line.)
The PS4 launches Friday in the US; India’s date finally landed too — January 6th, ₹39,990, and my preorder receipt is already the most-looked-at document I own. The group chat’s one impatient soul has commissioned a grey import via a cousin flying back from New Jersey. The rest of us are practicing patience, badly.
TIL: idempotency keys (the sequel to my June lesson). We now send a unique key with every payment request so retries can’t double-charge. The payment processor dedupes on it. Elegant. Boring. Bulletproof. I’m developing a taste for boring solutions, which my tech lead says is “growth.”