You can learn a lot about a public company by reading its risk factors.
These are the portions of companies’ financial filings that require them to put on a show of honesty and humility. Risk factors are the challenges a company sees for itself, the threats it believes could sink it.
Twitter lists more than 40 risk factors in its most recent quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Many of them are obvious challenges that apply to any company (currency fluctuations could hurt, taxes might go up, God forbid a natural disaster destroy our headquarters, etc.). So far, it has navigated those successfully enough. It’s on the risk factors unique to Twitter it has foundered.
Here are a dozen areas where Twitter has foreseen risks — but still failed to avoid them.