What the business is
Breaker was a social podcasting app where users liked, commented on and discovered episodes through friends; Twitter is the public-conversation social network racing into live audio.
The bet
Twitter bet that buying Breaker's audio-communication team — not its podcast catalogue — would help it win live social audio with Spaces against Clubhouse
How it started
Breaker was founded in 2016 by Erik Berlin and Leah Culver, two serial founders with deep audio and open-standards backgrounds.
What happened
Twitter Spaces, its live audio product and Clubhouse rival, entered beta testing in December 2020, wrestling with bugs and moderation of live audio; podcast M&A around the deal trended content-heavy — Amazon paid $300M for Wondery, Sirius $300M for Stitcher — while Breaker's exit was staff and technology only, price undisclosed.
How it ended up
Berlin, Culver and designer Emma Lundin joined Twitter (Culver focused on Spaces); Breaker's app was first set to shut down on 2021-01-15, but per the Breaker blog Maple Media instead took over operations of its apps.
What has to be true
Twitter was buying audio-native product talent at the exact moment Clubhouse made live social audio the market's hot bet.
It took the team, not the content library — consistent with Twitter's model of collating others' material rather than making its own.
The founders' open-standards pedigree (OAuth, oEmbed) signalled the kind of infrastructure-minded builders Twitter wanted.
What can be applied
Acquihires in a hype cycle buy the people who understand the medium: Twitter wanted audio veterans, and the product was disposable.
Aftermath
As of 2021-01-04 the three founders had joined Twitter to work on Spaces, whose beta was fighting technical and moderation issues; Breaker's apps lived on under Maple Media.
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