A wonderful book that can throw lot of insights on Startup culture, conflicts between founders and how ideas are hatched and grow!
What role does a Founder’s past have on the company she is founding? Author gives us a good enough glimpse of their hometown, childhood and college to be able to relate with their context and mind-set much better.
Did Twitter end up changing society in some way? Did it truly have a role in the revolutions taking place in the Middle East or other places — so much so that US Govt had to once ask Twitter to reschedule a planned maintenance event for the site?
Did the founders truly backstab each other as much as it is described in the book? I could not help myself but take sides with one of the founders of Twitter after reading the book.
What follows are some excerpts from every chapter of the book. This is a story worth remembering.
EVAN WILLIAMS AND THE BIRTH OF BLOGGER
This is around 2000’s, the time of tech bubble, I guess.
Ev and an employee had built a simple internal diary Web site that would help Pyra employees keep up to date about work progress. Later, Ev released the diary to the world. He called it Blogger, a word that had not existed until then. He believed it would allow people without any computer programming knowledge to create a Web log, or blog.
He soon learned that if you give a microphone to enough people, someone will yell something into it that will offend someone else. Complaints followed into Blogger constantly. People were vexed by political blogs, religious blogs, Nazi blogs … Ev realised it would be impossible to police all the posts that were shared on the site, and so as a rule, he opted for an anything goes mentality.
PUSH-BUTTON PUBLISHING FOR THE PEOPLE. It was Blogger’s motto and meant that anyone should be able to publish whatever they wanted. And it was a motto Ev was determined to stand by. In one instance, a coal mining company in Scotland threatened to sue Blogger if it didn’t take down a union blog that was being used to show a coal mine’s wrong-doings. Ev always stood his ground, preferring to go out of business rather than to give in to corporate pressure. Eventually, the coal mine gave up.
Outside the small enclave of the Valley, most people didn’t believe in the promise of this weird blogging thing. Some called it “stupid” and “infantile.” Others asked why anyone would care to share anything about themselves so publicly.
But not Ev. Ev was determined to see Blogger grow, to allow anyone with a computer to publish anything they wanted. To disrupt the publishing world. To disrupt the world in general. One line of code at a time.
NOAH GLASS AND RADIO PIRATE STATIONS
Noah would wake in the morning, sip his coffee by the window, and watch the programmers in Ev’s kitchen with admiration. It was something he wanted to be part of. Sure, Blogger wasn’t a traditional start-up: It didn’t have a pool table, a fridge full of beer, or rambunctious parties — and people’s pay-checks sometimes bounced because the company had trouble paying the bills — but Noah yearned to join a group of friends huddling together trying to change the world with code.
Noah had been working from home for nearly two years on a pirate radio project, hacking together tools that would allow anyone to set up a pirate station subverting government rules and regulations. But he often found himself lonely with no one to talk to about his ideas.
Across the way, inside Ev’s messy apartment, that wasn’t the case.
GOOGLE BUYS BLOGGER
Ev explained that Google had approached Ev to buy Blogger. There were over one million blogs hosted on Blogger at that time.
Then, on Feb 15, 2003, he got the call. Evan Williams had found gold.
“The buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing that has begin to change the equations of online news and information,” wrote the San Jose Mercury News reporter who broke the news of the deal. “Part of that vision, shared by other blogger pioneers, has been to help democratise the creation and flow of news in a world where giant companies control so much of what most people see.”
The Blogger team moved to Google’s fancy campus, with free food galore, and Ev became famous.
Noah had since taken his pirate-radio project and refocused it to work with Blogger, writing an application called AudBlog, or audio blogger, that allowed anyone to post voice-based posts to blogs from a phone. Google’s acquisition meant more attention for Noah’s project too.
Before long, through discussions with friends, Noah decided to turn AudBlog into a start-up, and as soon as Ev started cashing out his Google stock, Noah asked if he would invest a few thousand dollars to help kick-start the idea.
HACTIVISTS?
With Ev finally investing, Noah took off the project, posting a freelance job listing for a start-up called Citizenware. From programmers applying for the gig, one stood out. It was from a hacker who knew “Ruby on Rails,” a hip new programming language.
The interviewee introduced himself as Rabble. Rabble explained that he was only in SFO for a short time with his fiancee, Gabba, so they could save money to continue travelling and going to political demonstrations and protests around the world. This, Rabble explained, was their “full-time” job. But they were not your traditional protestors: They were hacktivists, part of an emerging group of protestors who used laptops instead of picket signs and blogs instead of paved streets. Rabble told Noah he only planned to work for few weeks, then hit the road again, looking for another protest to join and another way to tell “the man” to go fuck himself.
Noah wasted no time talking excitedly about his new audio-blogging project, which was a music-like service that would make it simple for anyone to make and share podcasts, which could be downloaded to the relatively nascent Apple iPod. Noah also spent a solid part of the interview speaking effusively about Ev, his involvement, and how he was the real deal.
BUILDING A START-UP
For the first few weeks the official Odeo (Citizenware is a code), wasn’t very official. Coffee shops around the city became the vagabond start-up’s makeshift workplaces.
Building a start-up is a lot like building a house, as Noah soon learned, so he recruited more labourers to help. Noah outlined the site’s business plan: He was the house’s architect. Rabble wrote the back-end code, the equivalent of the house’s plumbing and electrical. Then Gabba was recruited to help, building a desktop version of Odeo, essentially the house’s driveway and garage; and a Flash developer to work on the tools for the web site — an interior designer, if you will.
As soon as Ev had managed to off-load all his Google stock, he quit with the goal of never returning to the company, or any like it. The Blogger team had been stuffed into a window-less conference room. He din’t fit in with his programmer cohorts, who spent their lunch hours bragging about their degrees from prestigious schools. Those same programmers didn’t understand blogging, and Ev soon learned that the acquisition of Blogger was facilitated simply to place ads next to people’s blogs, not to try to further the cause of push-button publishing for the people.
While Sara (Ev’s wife — whom he met while at Google) were becoming proficient in the art of spaghetti making, Noah and his troupe of programmers were toiling away, scrunched in the corners of coffee shops around the city, sitting on mis-matched chairs, computer power cords weaving among mugs and torn sugar packets. A modern-day Beatles. Their instruments, laptops; their music, code.
Every once is a while, Ev would appear in the coffee shop of the day and start asking questions. Noah, who was indebted to Ev for the money that had so far financed Odeo, had no choice but to answer. Before long, that fear of business ruining friendship started to come true.
Eventually, team moved to Noah’s apartment …
The apartment situation also worsened, threatening Noah’s marriage, and before Noah knew it, he found himself with two options: either stop development of Odeo or ask Ev for more money.
Ev agreed to finance .. and on the condition of becoming CEO. It wasn’t a coup as much as a compromise. For Noah, who was still very much a no-name in tech, it would mean that Ev, well-known and with tech street cred, would now be permanently attached to Odea. To sweeten the deal, Ev offered to continuing paying the rent for his old apartment, which could become Odeo’s first real office.
For Ev it was a paradox. He had no interest in podcasting, but he had started to enjoy the label given to him by bloggers and the media: one of the new up-and-coming tech pioneers who had helped take blogging mainstream. Now here was an opportunity to do the same for podcasting.
It was time for Ev to prove that he wasn’t a one-hit wonder. And if Noah wanted to succeed, to break radio and put it back together again, he knew he needed to let the farm boy from Nebraska run the show.
JACK DORSEY
Jack had always been a big fan of routine, so each day when he arrived at Caffe Centro, he sat at the same place, butted up against the window on a rickety wooden chair, able to watch the world float by like a silent movie.
As he sat calculating how he could get out of his dead-end job, he noticed someone familiar walk by the window … Evan Williams. The man didn’t notice Jack staring at him, methodically studying his every move; if he had seen the visual intrusion, he might have felt slightly violated. But Jack saw it as a sign … he spent hours tweaking his resume … choosing the spiky yet elegant Futura typeface to represent himself. He split his resume up into three sections: Jack. Life. Love. He sent the resume to Ev saying he had just seen him at the cafe and was he hiring?
Jack was directed to the conference room … When Ev walked in, he began with the usual banal questions about Jack’s past employment, where he was from, and how he ended up in SFO.
Ev stewed silently as Noah rambled. The relationship between the two had become increasingly strained. It was unclear who was making the decisions, and Ev, often the recluse, would sometimes be overshadowed by Noah, who tended to be the most boisterous voice in the room. Of course, Jack didn’t know any of this yet.
When the interview ended, Jack was introduced to Rabble, who asked a few pertinent questions about his programming skills but really wanted to know his political biases.
While Ev and Noah had been sparing over who made the decisions in the company, Rabble had recruited most of the Engineers at Odeo, often hiring friends, typically those who had the same fuck-the-man, hacker mentality that he did.
Given the choice between hiring a hacker and a hack, Rabble always chose the former. On one occasion someone with a corporate background had applied for a job at Odeo. Although Ev wanted to hire him, Noah and Rabble were petrified that he would set up a lot of meetings.
Jack was hired as a freelancer immediately and fit into the culture of Odeo seamlessly. He had a hacker mentality, no degree, and a love for programming. He also had a solid work ethic and completed any given task with speed and accuracy.
Before long he began winning the Getting Shit Done Award, a contest Ev set up to reward the hardest worker of the week.
Though most people in the office liked Jack, they weren’t shy about telling him his ideas were a bit strange. He was always experimenting with peculiar concepts.
But for now, Jack had found what he had spent his life looking for. A job with someone he looked up to: Ev. A group of coworkers who had a hacker spirit: Rabble and company. And a new friend, Noah.
Biz Stone
It was early October 2005 when Biz Stone sat down in a small conference room with his boss at Google. “I’m quitting!” Biz said with a giant grin. His boss looked at him, unsure. “Biz, you do realize that you will have to give up your stock options?” his boss said. “How much am I leaving on the table?” Biz asked. “More than two million dollars,” his boss said, confident that such a number would sway the young employee’s decision. Biz did the math a little differently.
Biz was far from rich. He had finally paid off fifty thousand dollars in credit-card debt he had been battling for years and was now living month to month in a small Palo Alto apartment with his wife. Yet having zero dollars in the bank, while he worked at Google — wasn’t a new experience for Biz. That was, after all, exactly how he had been raised: poor among the rich.
At that time, in the summer of 2003, Ev had been working at Google for a few months, trying to settle into the giant company. Biz had read about Ev and his “push-button publishing for the people” philosophy and wanted to help spread the word about blogging too.
Like Ev, Goldman and the rest of Blogger team, Biz often felt out of place amid the company’s cut throat business-like mentality. Like a group of unpopular kids at school, the Blogger misfits would eat together in the company’s cafeteria, drink in their own corner during the Company’s weekly Friday addresses, and crack jokes at the expense of the straitlaced programmers.
Ev wasn’t like any traditional boss Biz worked under before. When Ev hired someone new, rather than wait to trust them with confidential information or important tasks, he chose to trust them immediately. Biz felt a sense of confidence and pride that Ev treated him this way, and the bond between the two quickly tightened.
After Ev left Google in 2004, Biz was miserable, as his new bosses at Google didn’t trust him or treat him, with respect. So in 2005 he decided he had had enough and wanted to follow Ev to his next project. This came with a conundrum: he would have to leave millions of dollars on the shiny Google table.
“We didn’t move out to California so I could work for Google,” Biz told his wife as they discussed the millions of dollars they would be throwing away. “We moved out here so I could work with Ev.”
He went into work the following day and turned over his white Google employee ID, and the money that came with it, in exchange for the freedom of start-up life.
When he started at Odeo on September 6, 2005, he quickly realised it was a much bigger change than he had anticipated. His unlimited free meals, free snacks, free buses to work, and free inexhaustible everything at Google were now replaced with an office where homeless people slept in the stairwell, the only free transportation was his own feet, and the only free food or drink was a beer after work, if Ev picked up the tab.
The cultural differences was incalculable. The sterile, robotic culture of Google, with its know-it-all engineers and bossy bosses, was now replaced with tattooed hackers with a do-what-you-want mentality. A group of people who had nothing but disdain for the Googlers of the world, who made a point to always tout their degrees from Stanford or MIT, the Odeo employees were all dropouts from mid-tier colleges.
And Biz, working alongside his best friend and former boss, among the homeless people and the chaos, the grime and grunge, felt right at home.
TROUBLED WATERS
Ev and Noah were at odds on almost everything. The colors of logos. The type of products they should focus on. Who was in charge. They couldn’t even agree on when to open Odeo to the public.
The site they had just unintentionally launched hoped to be the Web’s central destination for podcasts. It would allow people to create and record audio files, then share them with other people on the Web using an Adobe Flash-based widget called Odeo Studio. All of this would be completely free.
With Ev’s name attached to the company, Odeo had received press and awareness throughout 2005 that had brought the attention of investors, who presumed that podcasting could become a competitor to radio, just as blogging had done to publishing. In August 2005, with no business model, Odeo had received five million dollars in funding — a bet on podcasting and Ev, not necessarily on the company or the people working for it.
With a slew of money in the bank to hire new engineers and take the company in any number of podcasting-related directions, Noah and Ev hadn’t been able to agree on anything. Noah had started complaining to the board, his displeasure with Ev’s lack of leadership and inability to make decisions. On several occasions, Noah had tried to stage a mutiny and suggested the board remove Ev as CEO and install Noah as the new captain. Ev, who had an aversion to conflict, decided to deal with the contention by simply ignoring it. On most days he skipped going into the office altogether, rather than face the wrath of frenetic Noah.
Jack sat quietly listening. He never really said much. When he did speak, it was in two — or three — syllable sentences. He was, after all, one of the most junior people at Odeo. The deckhead on a boat; a lowly private in the army; a contract programmer at a start-up. Although Ev rarely interacted with Jack, he referred to him in the office as “the idea guy” because of his wacky concepts.
At times Ev and Biz talked about their days at Blogger and how people used the service to share news. To tell stories. To disrupt media.
On one of the group’s outings, Rabble and Blaine shared tales of their hacker days using mobile phones to help anti-war and anti-government demonstrations evade the police. Noah talked about pirate radio stations. Jack mentioned his days as a bike messenger.
Jack took it all in, processing the ideas he heard and he sat silently, as usual.
“No,” Jack said solemnly. “I’ve never heard of texting. What is it?”
“Here, let me show you,” Crystal told him as he stood nervously watching her explain how to send an SMS from a phone with a tiny two-inch black-and-white screen, a form of communication that until then had been lost on Jack but had spread in the rest of society like an epidemic that afflicted only girls with cell phones.
Jack was a quiet engineer at the time, and with his Raggedy Andy hair and fear of face-to-face communications he had not had the opportunity to interact with too many girls, most of whom texted. That was, until he met Crystal.
A daily morning “stand-up” meeting was scheduled by Tim Roberts, a VP at Odeo. Yet two people always remained seated: Rabble and Blaine. “I’m not standing at your fucking meetings,” Rabble blared when asked to get up out of his chair with everyone else.
The Anarchists defied any directive. ….
But worse than the anarchy inside was the fact that Apple Computer had recently torn a hole in the hull of the company….
Stunned silence had enveloped them when Jobs declared that Apple was adding podcasts to iTunes … In that brief moment podcasting, which had been the entire company thesis for Odeo, had become a simple add-on for Apple. Ev had known almost immediately that this was a fatal blow for Odeo.
STATUS
“So what excites you?” Noah asked again. “What do you want, really want, to do?”
“I want to go into fashion,” Jack said quietly. “I want to make Jeans.”
“What else do you want to do?”
Although Jack and the others didn’t know it, Ev had been talking to Noah about shutting everything down, throwing in the dirty Odeo towel. Ev was tired and saw no solution to Odeo. But Noah was trying desperately to sift ideas out of the employees to save the company. Or at least the people in it.
Jack listed a few items he liked, including music, sailing, and programming. Then he mentioned his “status” concept.
Several months earlier, Jack had raised the idea with Crystal and Noah on one of their drunken outings. He’d originally come up with it in early 2000 when he was living in a dingy building … At that time, Jack had been using a blogging service called LiveJournal, which was a competitor to Blogger. One of the features LiveJournal offered was the ability for people to show small status messages on their blogs to say what they were doing at that moment. Most bloggers used the feature to write pithy updates about themselves.
The idea of displaying a status on a computer had come into public light in 1997 when AOL introduced its instant messenger service. How do you let others know that you have stepped away from your computer when they can’t actually see you? The solution was a feature AOL called the “away message.” When teens started using the “away” feature, they took a different approach, often typing in their mood or the music they was currently playing on their computer.
…
Jack wondered if it could be sifted out to be its own website. Now, six years later, sitting in the car with Noah, he again mentioned the concept of a one-off site that people could use to share their current status. “You could say what music you’re listening to,” Jack said, “or tell people you’re at work.”
“I get it!” Noah exclaimed.
This status thing could help connect people to those who weren’t there. It wasn’t just about sharing what kind of music you were listening to or where you were at that moment; it was about connecting people and making them feel less alone … An emotion that Noah felt night after night as his marriage and company fell apart: loneliness.
It was the same sentiment that had driven Ev to feel so passionate about Blogger, sitting there in his apartment, alone, with no friends, able to connect with the world through his keyboard. It was the reason Biz had started blogging from his mother’s basement years ago. The same reason Jack had started a LiveJournal account. This status idea could be the antidote to all of this, a cure for feeling lonely, Noah thought.
“What if it had audio!” Noah said with excitement. “Or what if” — he paused — “it was text messaging instead of e-mail?” Ideas sprang into view: “What if .. what if .. what if…” “Lets speak to Ev tomorrow.”
Changing the focus of a start-up is not like the metamorphosis of a traditional business — like trying to turn a high-end clothing store into a construction company. Instead it is more akin to altering the type of food a restaurant serves. Although the cuisine the customers are served changes, sometimes drastically, the same chefs and waitstaff can be used to make and serve it. Or, in Odeo’s case, the same programmers, designers and managers.
Ev’s worst fear was about to be realised: Odeo was going to fail, which meant Ev, the blogging phenomenon, was actually a one-hit wonder. But he reasoned that if he could pivot Odeo into something else, he could save his name in Silicon Valley.
“What if we killed the audio part of Odea?” Ev had suggested a few weeks earlier. “Or what if we make it a messaging platform, where you can leave a message to a group of friends to hear?” The conversations about the reinvention of Odeo had been focused on the concept of friends following one another on a messaging platform. The big question Ev, Noah, Jeremy, and Tim were unable to answer in those discussions was what these groups of people would actually want to share with one another. This was where Jack’s status idea fit perfectly.
When Biz heard the concept, it reminded him of an idea he had been obsessed with at Google. He had owned a phone called a Treo at the time. he had started suggesting to coworkers that Google should build its own “Phone-ternet.”
“It’s like an Internet, but for your phone!” Biz told those who would listen.
But now, hearing about Jack’s status concept — mixed with mobile phones, groups of friends, and Noah’s human explanation of it all — Biz, like Ev, was smitten.
Together they were about to build something that would change their lives forever.
All the other engineers not involved in Status were busy reluctantly working on what was left of Odeo. The small group immersed in the new project had been throwing around name ideas for a couple of days, though they couldn’t agree on something that worked. Jack suggested the name “Status” which others said was “too engineering sounding.” Biz suggested Smssy. “Cute, but no.”
Although the rest of the group didn’t seem as concerned with the name, Noah had been obsessing about it since the drunken talk in his car with Jack. He had skipped lunch with his coworkers all week, burrowed in the back of the office.
When he arrived at his apartment, he again sat flipping through the dictionary. But his thoughts kept getting interrupted by text messages, which would trigger a loud dinging noise on his mobile phone. Frustrated by the intrusion, he reached over and flipped the switch to silent, causing his cellphone to vibrate slightly on the table. Noah stopped what he was doing and stared at the phone, then picked it back up again and held it in his hand as he flipped it on and off, watching it quietly shake. Vibrate, he thought, and quickly looked up the word in dictionary. “Shake, quiver, or throb, move back and forth rapidly.” This immediately got Noah exited.
— –
His vibrating phone led him to think of the brain impulses that cause a muscle to twitch. “Twitch!” No, that would never work, he thought. So he continued flipping through the tw’s in the dictionary. Twister. Twist tie. Twit. Twitch. Twitcher. Twitchy. Twite. And then, there it was.
“The light chirping sound make by certain birds.” Noah’s heart started to pound as he continued to read.
A verb. Twitter. Twittered. Twittering. Twitters.
“Why wouldn’t you just use voice?” Dom asked.
“Well, you could,” Jack said, but then explained that via text message, people could send their status from a noisy club, where it’s almost impossible to make a voice call.
It was agreed that Jack and Biz could take two weeks to pull together a prototype. Florian would be the main engineer. Noah would oversee development of everything. Everyone else, including Rabble, Crystal, should stay focused on Odeo as they continue to search for someone to buy the podcasting company.
JUST SETTING UP MY TWTTR
To keep the site simple and clean, Jack’s original status concept had envisioned that, as with instant messenger, people would have only one status message visible at a time. If a person updated their status, the previous update would vanish forever. But Ev had argued that like blogs, status updates should be in stream format, showing up chronologically. After Noah spent a few days following Ev’s Twitlog, he also suggested adding a time stamp to each update so people would know when it had been posted.
For several days Noah, Biz, Jack, and Florian worked away. There were bugs. Problems. Roadblocks. Things were digitally taped together, held in place with makeshift snippets of code. Then finally, two weeks later, Jack sent what would be the first official Twitter update. On March 21, 2006, at 11.50 AM, Jack tweeted, “just setting up my twttr.”
And with this collaboration, it all started to come together. Jack’s concept of people sharing their status updates; Ev’s and Biz’s suggestion to make sure updates flowed into a stream, similar to Blogger; Noah adding timestamps, coming up with the name, and verbalizing how to humanize status by “connecting” people; and finally, friendships and the idea of sharing with groups that had percolated out of Odeo and all the people who had worked there.
SHOW AND TELL
It was late in the evening when the door to the Odeo offices burst open and Noah stumbled in, drunk.
“Jack!” he bellowed across the room … “I might have just fucked up” .. “I think I just announced Twitter to the media!”
A few days earlier the Odeo board members had arrived in the office to attend a quarterly board meeting and hear updates about potentially selling the podcasting service. But before the meeting began, Noah and Ev wanted to demo Twitter to the investors. Jack came into the conference room for the show-and-tell, which was his first time attending a board meeting, and sat dead silent as Noah gave an impassioned demonstration of Twitter.
“What do you think?” Noah asked George Zachary, the lead Odeo investor, after his demonstration. “It’s amazing, right? It can allow you to connect with your friends!”
George stared at Noah with a confused look, quietly wondering to himself why anyone would want to “connect with their friends” when those friends were sitting right there. He thought the group of programmers had smoked something before the meeting and looked around uncertainly. Still, Noah continued with animated examples of Twitter’s ability to connect people.
A few days later, when Noah stumbled in from the hoedown and announced that he had told the blogosphere, Jack acknowledged that it wasn’t a big deal, brushed it off, and got back to work. Like Ev, Jack was grossly averse to conflict, at least the kind that happened in plain sight.
Secretly, Jack was furious …
And he wasn’t alone.
— –
A blog post read “A new mobile social networking application written by Noah Glass (and team).”
Ev tried to fix the press afterward, but it was too late. And although Noah didn’t know it yet, his drunken media announcements were about to have serious consequences.
THE GREEN BENCHES
Twitter was barely a newborn at the time, but there was already squabbling over who had fed it, who had let others go near it. For a while, the entire site had existed solely on Noah’s IBM Laptop. Then Jack had taken charge of the engineering side of Twitter.
—
Ev was torn about what to do about Noah’s outbursts and media hijacking. Jack helped him decide … “If Noah stays, I’m going to leave. I can’t work with him anymore.”
—
So after conferring with the board, at around 6 PM on Wednesday, July 26, Ev and Noah walked outside the park benches. Noah knew exactly what was going to happen next. The park benches were an Ev tell.
— –
Noah left the office that evening, sullen and sad, angry and defeated, believing Ev was kicking him out of the company to conserve control of Twitter. He met up with Jack .. As they stood at the bar ordering drinks, Noah told Jack what had happened. Jack appeared dumbfounded by the fact that his friend had been pushed out. He never mentioned that he had handed Ev the gun with which the final shot was fired.
— –
Ev had expected Noah to battle for power and control of Twitter. But no matter how much Noah wanted to be a fighter, he wasn’t. He didn’t fight because he didn’t know how. When he was kicked by a horse, he just walked away.
Noah didn’t fight because he realized it wasn’t power that he had been after when he started Odeo. More than fame and more than fortune, he had just wanted friends.
LAUNCH ATTEMPT
It was summer of 2006 and Twitter was just a speck of dust at the time, a small town in a big city of bigger start-ups. Barely 4500 people had signed up for the site since Noah had first announced it a few months earlier at the hoedown — a smaller portion of whom were actually tweeting on a daily basis. It was a bare-bones operation too.
Although it wasn’t an official company yet, Twitter had been growing slowly over the summer with a lot of “firsts”. There was the tweet of a car crash. A blogger announced that he had been fired from his job. In August, Ev tweeted that he had asked Sara to marry him. And a lot of egotistical banter.
But still, this repartee hadn’t moved beyond the tech nerds. So Jack followed through on Noah’s suggestion and decided the Love Parade (a burgeoning techno-music festival that would soon land in SFO) would be the perfect venue to bring awareness of Twitter to the music loving mainstream.
The plan was to give out free drinks, along with the Twitter flyers, to get people to sign up for the service. But the idea soon turned into a disaster.
—
Strangely dressed and half-naked ravers, many tripping on various drugs — twirled by the Twitter booth, grabbing free drink concoctions that Jack mixed, in exchange for a Twitter flyer being trust into their hands. But that was about how far the transaction went. The few people wearing enough clothes to actually put the flyer somewhere likely lost it during the night.
—
“Less than a hundred,” Jack said, a defeated look on his face. “Less than a hundred new users.”
CHAOS AGAIN
After Noah had finally and officially left the company, the power vacuum had not been resolved as Ev had hoped; rather, it had spun into another orbit. No one to make a decision. No one to revoke the few bad decisions that had been made.
Having successfully returned the Odeo investor’s 5 million dollars from his Google’s earnings, Ev’s mind was elsewhere. He was still involved in Twitter and was the sole investor, having allocated 1 million dollars of his own money to nurture the company, though he was trying to leave Jack and Biz to run the operation. But it wasn’t much of an enterprise yet. The site was growing slowly with only a few 1000 sign-ups.
— –
Although Jack had taken a lead at Twitter, it was clear that no one was actually in charge. Companies often take the traits of their founders and first employees, so Twitter, which was nurtured out of Odeo, a seedling from Noah’s chaotic brain, was still operating as an anarchist-hacker collective with no rules.
Many of the employees did what they wanted, where they wanted — that was, if they wanted to do anything related to their daily job at all. Rather than fix the servers, people built their own little trinkets and apps that fed into Twitter. Jack had no luck taming them. There was also a tremendous amount of rivalry between him and his coworkers as, just a few months earlier, when Odeo still existed, Jack had been working below all of them.
— –
One of Goldman’s first tasks was to work with Jack to help make Twitter friendlier for newcomers to understand. The service allowed people to perform actions through text messages with the ability to do things like “follow” or “unfollow” others. But there were other verbs that were puzzling to people on the site and needed to be culled. Worship (get every single update). Sleep (pause updates). And a long list of other options were nixed.
There were, of course, much bigger problems than the question of which verbs to use on Twitter. Since the site had been built as a prototype in two weeks using a relatively new programming language called Ruby on Rails, it was rife with shortcuts and code problems. People were now moving into the building before construction crews could replace the flimsy materials with real ones.
And then there was the biggest problem of them all: trying to explain to people what Twitter actually was. Everyone had a difficult answer: “It is a social network.” “It replaces text messages.” “It’s the new e-mail.” “It’s micro-blogging.” “It’s to update your status.”
As a result, most newcomers didn’t understand what do do when they first arrived at the site. First tweets were — “This is dumb”, “Twitter is stupid”, “What the fuck is this thing”, “How do I use this”.
The confusion led to one of the first things Jack and Ev saw differently. Jack saw Twitter as a place to say “what I’m doing.” Ev saw it as more like a mini blogging product. Both of them thought the way people had used it during a mini earthquake the previous summer held clues to what Twitter could be.
— –
On the day of that small earthquake only a few hundred people were using the service. Of the 15000 tweets sent across the network up to that point, almost all had still been focussed on the original concept: “What’s your status?” a question that often invited a narcissistic response.
Sharing the quake on Twitter had been a moment that was about the status of something bigger than each individual. Although the people on the site were all in completely different locations, time and space had briefly compressed. Or as Noah had originally foreseen, months before anyone else, Twitter had been used to “help people feel less alone.”
For Ev it was another clue in a theory he was developing about Twitter’s role as a way to share news, not just status — Twitter as a communication network, not just a social network. Jack instead saw the earthquake as an example of the speed of Twitter.
Jack had continued to see Twitter as a way to talk about what was happening to him. Ev was starting to see it as a view into what was happening in the world. Philosophically, Jack and Ev were developing different view-points as to what Twitter was. And what it had the potential to be.
AND THE WINNER IS …
Ev had been to South by Southwest (an annual technology conference several times before, and he knew the way people crowded in the hallways between conference sessions to chatter with friends. So months earlier, he had suggested an idea. Why don’t we “put a flat panel with a cool Twitter screen in the main hallway where people hang out?” “On that, put the twitters from people who are at the conference (and, of course, instructions on signing up).” He noted that it would be “highly compelling to see all these updates, with pictures, from people all around you.”
Biz and Jack had been immediately sold on the idea and corralled the troops to get to work.
— –
A few days before the conference began, Biz and Jack had flown out to set up the screens throughout the halls. In the background of each display a large beige Twitter logo hung in the air surrounded by instructions telling people how to tweet what they were doing.
Attendees loved seeing their names, faces, and commentaries stream across the screens for all to view. It didn’t take long for the plasma displays to become digital billboards, with people huddled around to see which talk or panel to attend as pithy updates scrolled down.
The Apple iPhone would not go on sale for another three months ..
Since Twitter worked via text messages, people with all types of cell phones could use the service and it started to spread quickly among the conference attendees.
As people sat in panel discussions, rather than look up at those speaking, they instead peered longingly at their phones, staring patiently while they waited for an update, hoping to find some snippet of information more important than real life.
As usage of the site started to spread, investors who were at the conference in search of the Next Big Thing soon found out about Twitter.
— –
Back in SFO, engineers spent the weekend hunkered down at their offices, tinkering and tweaking the servers to ensure that the site stayed alive during the critical few days of the conference.
— –
As Ze Frank stood on the stage preparing to announce the winner for the best new startup, the servers were about to get battered again.
“And the winner is …” “Twitter!”
— –
“I would like to thank everyone in 140 characters or less,” Jack said to the crowd “… and I just did.” .. as the group walked off the stage to thunderous applause.
— –
Noah was dismayed as he wandered the halls for a short time after the awards, but he quickly decided that rather than harbour resentment at not being invited to join his former coworkers on stage, he would be happy for his friends’ new success.
— –
Just a few blocks away, Noah wandered alone in the rain as his former friends and cofounders toasted to the award they had just won without him.
THE FIRST CEO
In the few months since South by Southwest, Twitter had quickly passed one hundred thousand people who had signed up for the site. There was still no revenue, or even talk of a business model, but figuring that out would be the job of the CEO.
— –
It had been a confusing and stressful few weeks for the top half of the Twitter mast. Though they were less concerned about their monetary stakes, their titles, and in turn their egos, were paramount.
— –
In the early days of start-ups, titles are usually handed out without much thought or resonance. Who will be a VP, CTO, or Director of X, Y, Z is often discussed in a land of make-believe. Given that 90% of start-ups don’t make it past their toddler years, such decisions rarely matter in the long run. At Twitter it was no different.
— –
“I’ve decided I’m not going to be CEO,” Ev told Jack, Biz and Goldman as he leaned back in his chair.
— –
A few days earlier, at a private lunch with Biz, Goldman had tried to convince Ev not to make Jack CEO, telling him he “didn’t thin he was capable of running the company.” And although he agreed, Ev believed Jack could be moulded.
— –
Jack had already shown he could make deft decisions, including an email he had sent in late January. “We have 4, and only 4, priorities: performance, usability, development, efficiencies, and costs,” he wrote. He added that the company needed to fix confusing design issues on the site, and hire new engineers.
Jack had also made one of the most important decisions for Twitter to date: limiting the length of tweets.
— –
Ev looked at Jack and asked him if he thought he could be the chief of Twitter. “We can do a CEO search and find an outsider who has experience running a company,” Ev said. “That would make you something like CTO.”
“No, I can do it,” Jack said. “I want to do it.”
— –
As Ev had personally financed Twitter with his own money to date, he told the group that he would retain 70 percent stake in Twitter. Jack, the CEO, would be given 20% of the company. Biz and Goldman would receive around 3% each. The rest would be split up among current engineers and new hires.
100 MILLION DOLLAR OFFER
Yahoo! wanted to buy Twitter. Although Twitter had no revenue and no projected business model at the time, Yahoo! envisioned this new start-up as an extension of its mobile offerings.
— –
[Yahoo Office] As everyone got comfortable and introduced themselves, Ev began talking. He had learned how offers to buy start-ups work when he went through the process with Google and Blogger. It was more like trying to negotiate with a high-level escort than selling your company. In the end it almost always came down to the highest price.
Ev ran through the numbers of Twitter. He explained that there was no revenue at Twitter yet, but that would come later, he said.
Jack clasped his hands together on the table, barely saying a word. He was nervous but attempted to portray an air of confidence that didn’t come across to the others in the room. He simply watched Ev walk Bradley around the Twitter garden. Then the discussions turned to what Twitter actually was.
“So it’s a social network?” Bradley asked.
Silence filled the room.
Almost a year into the service, there was no consistent answer to the question. Ever since March, after South by Southwest, the site had continued to take on a life of its own, not just for status updates but also for news. The technorati were clearly obsessed with the site, using it mostly to talk about themselves. But other people, and companies, were using it differently. Major news companies started sharing breaking, local, and gossipy news. Fake Bill Clintons, Homer Simpsons. A few “real” celebrities. There were also “things” on Twitter. Fire departments had joined. Police scanners. Yet even with this flood of distinctive use cases, no one in the press really seemed to understand what Twitter was. Hipster narcissism? Self-absorption? Self-obsession? Egotistical?
But the question made Jack pipe up for the first time. “I see Twitter as a utility,” Jack said. “A broadcasting system for the Internet.” Then he began to describe his vision for Twitter, noting that it was “like electricity.” All this confused Bradley, who looked around the room, perplexed by the idea of a social media company as a utility.
As the meeting came to to a close, Bradley thanked them and walked everyone out.
— –
“So what’s the lowest price we sell for?” Goldman asked.
“A 100 million?” Ev hazarded. Biz and Goldman would each get about two to three million dollars if a sale went through at that price.
— –
Jack had the most to win from a sale. A sale for 100 million dollars would give him 20 million, a gargantuan sum that could change his life forever.
“Maybe we would take 80 million?” Jack asked. (This would be a 16 million dollar win for Jack.)
— –
They didn’t have to wait long to find out the real number.
Twelve Million Dollars.
They weren’t upset by the offer, as investors were begging to fund the company, but they did think it was comical that Yahoo! would offer such a low number.
The comical tone was interrupted as Ev told them what Bradley had said on the phone: that he believed Yahoo! could easily build the technology behind Twitter, that it was “simply just a messaging service” and “a few engineer could do the same thing in a week.” He had concluded that if Twitter didn’t sell, Yahoo! planned to build and release a competitor.
It was a typical relationship offering in the Valley. Either you fuck us, or we’ll fuck you.
But hearing such an offer, followed by the fearful thread of attack by a much bigger company, was also a relief. Now that they knew they weren’t going to sell Twitter, they had a clear path. They could move forward and raise their first real round of VC money they needed right away to expand the servers and hire engineers to help with the company’s growth.
IS TWITTER DOWN?
Jack wrote in a blog post, “We’ve raised funding … a five-million dollar round of funding that would value Twitter at just over twenty million dollars.”
Then in a separate blog post, Fred explained why his firm was investing in a company with no income. “ The question everyone asks is ‘What is the business model?’ To be completely honest, we don’t know yet.” Revenue would have to come later.
Because of the way the site had been built — hacked together over two weeks — the influx of people on Twitter was making it fall apart.
— –
The outages also had a domino effect. Third-party tools Twitter gave to developers were being harnessed by 100s of companies and apps that used Twitter’s content. This influx of applications was straining resources away from the web site.
— –
Although the site’s problems should have slowed the flood of people signing up, they were only making it worse, adding bad press that would pique more curiosity about this Twitter thing — “if everyone else is signing up and breaking it, then surely I should see what this thing is …”
Every two weeks the number of people joining Twitter doubled.
— –
FT said “the mini-blog is the talk of the valley.” There as a BusinessWeek profile. Time magazine referenced it as one of the top 50 new web sites. “Broadcast where you are and what you’re doing right here and right now by texting from your mobile phone,” the article said. Even though the site was not ready for its moment on the stage, it was getting it.
— –
Twitter employees were so busy to keep the site alive that they were stripping things out of the site, rather than adding new ones. As this all happened, some of the loyal tech nerds on the service decided to take the lack of new features into their own hands, and two new strange characters started to appear regularly in people’s Twitter stream: the symbols @ and #.
— –
In an example of the site taking charge where the founders could not, people continued to use hashtags to organise everything, including group chats, conferences, and discussion of news events.
Internally, amid the growing outages on the site, Ev and Goldman continued to try to forge Jack into a better CEO — a struggle that proved to be even more difficult than keeping the Web site alive.
Each step forward felt like two steps back. When Ev told Jack to send a Twitter-wide email setting company goals, his first draft began with the subject like “3 things I want for Twitter.” Jack then went on to begin each milestone with the off-putting “I want to be able to …” or “I want …” or “I …” Goldman suggested “we” might be a more appropriate way to address the company. Sounding like a dictator wasn’t the best way to talk to your employees.
Although Jack really wanted to learn how to manage, how to run a company, and how to be a good CEO, he often found himself at a loss for what to do next. Although he would never admit it, pretending that he knew exactly what he was doing and that his actions were all part of a bigger, more resolute plan, he was so far out of his league that he was often speechless. When things grew frustrating, rather than confront the problem with his employees, Jack would walk out of the front door of the office and then spend an hour or more walking in circles around South Park, a petulant look on his face.
— –
Ev didn’t care whose fault it was or wasn’t. His personal money was invested in the company and his name, again, was on the line. Ev wanted to stop the site outages, fix the lack of management, and settle the overall chaos of the company. As 2007 wore on, Ev was growing increasingly impatient with the reality that these issues weren’t being fixed and they were actually growing worse.
THE DRESSMAKER
Things often don’t break; they bend. Relationships rarely just splinter apart; they slowly start to bow, curving in another direction, distorting, and eventually seperating. The relationship between Ev and Jack had been doing just that for some time, bowing like wet wood, moving between good and bad, but right now, as they shuffled into their seats in the conference room, it was about to break in two forever.
…
Ev immediately dropped the gauntlet. “You can either be a dressmaker or the CEO of Twitter,” Ev said. “But you can’t be both.”
Although Jack worked hard, coming into the office well before anyone else arrived, he often left at around 6 PM, to attend to one of his extracurricular activities. (Drawing classes, sketching nudes, hot yoga, fashion classes and to learn how to sew). Jack’s social life had also grown exponentially, just as Twitter had. People had started to invite him to parties, lot of parties. Baseball games. Girls paying attention. Fame as a Z-list celebrity.
…
But there was one person who was not Jack’s biggest fan: Ev. He believed Jack didn’t work hard enough. Wasn’t in the office enough. Was distracted by his hobbies. Was too lackadaisical with his management style. Was .. was … was.
When Ev was in the office, he demanded quiet. Jokes and chatter among coworkers were often met with a log “Shhhhh!” from Ev. Biz, the always-on jokester, often laughed off the shushing, but Jack took such requests personally.
Jack had been trying to befriend his employees, organizing movie nights and dinners on a regular basis. But Ev didn’t care about Tea Time or movie nights. He was concerned with the company. A company that was in trouble.
The continual site outages had started to take their toll on Twitter, For a few weeks sign-ups had started to slow slightly, and Ev had sent e-mails sounding alarms.
“You leave the office too early,” Ev said. “You go off to your dress-making classes and yoga, and to socialize, and we have all these problems with the site and growth is slowing,” Ev went on listing Jack’s flaws. Jack was furious but didn’t respond. Could a CEO argue with a chairman?
It was unclear what Jack could and couldn’t say to Ev, as their relationship and the power dynamic between them were full of twists and turns. They had started out as employee and employer, then became co-founders and friends as they started Twitter together. Then the roles of employer and employee had switched as Jack became the CEO and Ev, although the lead investor in the company and chairman of the board was technically an employee reporting to Jack. Now they were two people at odds with each other.
— –
But more pressing than their opinions of how well the company was being run, Ev and Jack had fundamentally different views of what Twitter was and how it should be used. Jack had always seen Twitter as a status updater, a way to say where he was and what he was doing. A place to display yourself, your ego. Ev, who was shy and had been shaped by his days building Blogger, saw it as a way to share where other people were and what other people were doing.
Ev saw it as a way to show what was happening around you; a place for your curiosity and information. This was the debate that had originated with the concept of Twitter as a news source after the earthquake months earlier.
To many this might sound like semantics. Yet these were two completely different ways of using Twitter. Was it about me, or was it about you? Was it about ego, or was it about others? In reality, it was about both. One never would have worked without the other. A simple status updater in 140 character posts was too ephemeral and egotistical to be sustainable. A news updater in 140 character spurts was just a glorified newswire. Though they didn’t realize it, the two together were what made Twitter different.
They also disagreed over the importance of mobile versus the Web. Jack was adamant about focusing on mobile development, devoting resources to building new SMS tools, allowing more countries to sign up for the service using text messages, and focusing energy on mobile applications. Ev was more focused on the Web and was constantly pushing the team to expand features on the Twitter web site. He also worried that an emphasis on text messaging was going to bankrupt the company. Each month Twitter was being forced to pay cell-phone carriers tens of thousands of dollars in SMS bills. And each month the bills were higher than the last.
The only thing that Ev and Jack agreed on was that there was very little Ev and Jack actually agreed on.
— –
And in that moment, the click of the beige front door, the departure of Ev, the relationship between Jack and Ev was no longer bending. It had just broken.
RUMORS
It didn’t matter that Twitter still had no business model or even the faintest signs of one. Or that the site was broken. Everyone still wanted a piece of the fledgling company because it was gaining so much attention. Investors wanted their names associated with the Next Big Thing, and they believed they could help fix the problems.
…
From the outside looking in, it appeared that Twitter was just growing too quickly. Inside, it was complete disarray.
…
While Ev had been leading the funding talks, Jack felt excluded from the conversations. Wanting to prove to Ev that he could handle the task, Jack tried to negotiate with investors on his own. As a result, one minute a VC would get a call about a meeting from Ev, the Chairman. The next, the phone would ring with Jack, the CEO on the line, hoping to set up the same meeting. To the venture investors, it just came across as a slight misunderstanding. To Jack it came across as being slighted.
— –
Though Jack didn’t know it at the time, for Ev the funding round hadn’t just been about the money or the valuation of the company. It had been about a bigger goal, fixing the company the best way Ev knew how: by taking more control of its daily operations.
BUILDING SAND CASTLES UNDER WATER
Bijan and Fred soon found out that Jack had been incompetent with the company’s finances too. Although revenue was still at zero, expenses were quiet the opposite, with growing server fees, text-message bills, and payroll. Jack, who had been managing expenses on his laptop, had been doing the math incorrectly. When Ev learned about this, he asked a friend and seasoned entrepreneur, Bryan Mason, to meet with Jack and show him how to manage the company’s books, but Bryan spent the entire meeting at a whiteboard with a marker explaining the basics of accounting.
When Bijan and Fred met with the engineers, they heard mostly worries about Jack. “Engineering and ops are a disaster,” they consistently said. “He’s a great guy. A great friend. A fun boss. But he’s in over his head,” another announced. “He’s like the gardner who became the president.” “I don’t know who is in charge. Ev presents the product and vision for what’s going on, and Jack just sits in the corner and takes notes.”
The board members knew they had to find a new role for Jack or let him go immediately.
— –
They sat him down and gave him an ultimatum. “Three months to fix things.” Of course, they knew Jack couldn’t fix anything in three months, or three years. He was incapable of running the company. It was like watching somebody try to build sand castles underwater.
— –
Jack’s idea of thinking big wasn’t to fix Twitter’s endless 30 hour outages. Or the bank-robbery size SMS bills. It was to “be at the forefront of this historic 2008 Presidential elections.”
Fred: this wont solve our problems. Bijan: Oh, Jack! Ev: WTF!. Goldman: What the hell is he thinking?
— –
The reality was, Twitter didn’t need to do anything to ensure that it kept growing. It continues to compress time, often reporting news more quickly than news outlets that had been in the business for more than a century. As more people joined the service, it moved even faster.
— –
As Jack got to work designing a dedicated Elections page, Ev said nothing, waiting for Jack to fail. And it didn’t take long.
— –
“We have a bit of a problem”,” Greg began. While he had been running tests on the site, he had discovered that there was no backup of Twitter. “If the database goes down right now, we would lose everything,” Greg said awkwardly. Every tweet, every user, every thing. Gone.
As Greg rushed out of the room to figure out how to backup Twitter, everyone looked in Jack’s direction. Successful election site or not, Jack Dorsey’s days as Twitter CEO are numbered.
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