Notes
In one memorable lesson, one of the horses on his grandfather’s property kicked Noah’s brother in the leg. To teach them how to control such a situation, Noah’s relative grabbed a pipe and beat the horse to death. “That’s how you stand up for yourself,”
Building a start-up is a lot like building a house, as Noah soon learned, so he recruited more laborers 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 finally Ray McClure, a small, soft-spoken Flash developer who looked like he was in elementary school, was hired to work on the tools for the Web site—an interior designer, if you will.
please no more metaphors like this
When the interviewed ended, Jack was introduced to Rabble, who asked a few pertinent questions about his programming skills but really wanted to know his political biases.
typo
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.”
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. It could be a technology that would erase a feeling that an entire generation felt while staring into their computer screens. An emotion that Noah and Jack and Biz and Ev had grown up feeling, finding solace in a monitor. An emotion that Noah felt night after night as his marriage and company fell apart: loneliness.
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.
At around lunchtime on July 5, Dennis Crowley, a well-known entrepreneur who ran Dodgeball, which had recently been acquired by Google, e-mailed Twitter asking if he could join. Crystal, unaware of who Dennis was, happily responded with a code that activated his account. Moments later, when Noah saw Dennis’s name stream across his computer monitor with the usual first tweet, “just setting up my twttr,” Noah became enraged, storming out of his office like a wrestler into a ring. “What the fuck is going on?” he bellowed as everyone’s head’s snapped around, startled. “Why the fuck did we approve Dennis Crowley’s account?!” “I don’t know who he is. . . . ,” Crystal said, a timid look of shock and fear in her eyes as she stared back at Noah. Noah tore into a rampage. “You have no idea what you’ve just fucking done,” he yelled, pacing erratically. Crystal burst into tears.
Goldman tried his question again. But the response wasn’t what Ev wanted to hear.
typo? what Goldman wanted to hear ?
One of his 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. So the cutting began: “Worship” ensured that people received every single update from someone they followed. (Gone.) “Sleep” allowed people to pause updates they received. (Too unclear.) And a long list of other options were nixed.
Of the fifteen thousand tweets sent across the network up to that point, almost all had still been focused 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. It was as if someone had pulled the end of a hanging thread on a sweater, forcing the fabric to scrunch up closer together. Or as Noah had originally foreseen, months before anyone else, Twitter had been used to “help people feel less alone.”
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.
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.
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.
“If there’s a fire on the corner of the street and you Twitter about it, you’re not talking about your status during that fire,” Ev said during one of their unending discussions about the topic. “You’re Twittering: There’s a fire on the corner of Third Street and Market.” “No. You’re talking about your status as you look at the fire,” Jack replied. “You’re updating your status to say: I’m watching a fire on the corner of Third Street and Market.”
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.
“Why don’t we just join these companies and call it a day?” John said as he peered over at Fred, a tinkling sound emanating from their respective urinals.
wow
“It seems to me, there are three reasons to sell a company,” Ev wrote in an e-mail to the board outlining why they should decline Facebook’s offer. 1. The price is good enough or a value that the company will be in the future. (“We’ve often said Twitter is a billion dollar company. I think it’s many, many times that,” Ev wrote.) 2. There’s an imminent and very real threat from a competitor. (Nothing is going to “pose a credible threat of taking Twitter to zero.”) 3. You have a choice to go and work for someone great. (“I don’t use [Facebook]. And I have many concerns about their people and how they do business.”)
Twitter had practically become particles in the air that everyone was breathing, which for Noah was particularly bittersweet. It was as if he had helped invent the sky, choosing the color palette that would hover above everyone, and then, banished by its other inventors, was unable to escape from it.
enough with the metaphors
Ego affected them all: Noah, Jack, Ev, and Biz. They were all driven by it. For Noah ego became a tool for reflection, for trying to understand whom he had wronged in the past and how he could be a better person in the future. For Jack it had the opposite effect, causing him to obsess over who had wronged him in the past and how he could return to the spotlight in the future.
While Jack had the germ of the idea, of people sharing their status, without Odeo the idea would have remained just that—an idea. It was Noah’s determination to save Odeo that brought Jack’s status concept to a group of people who brainstormed during the hack days and could execute it. Without Noah’s vision of a service that could connect people who felt alone, and a name that people would remember, Twitter would never exist. It was Ev who insisted on making Twitter about “what’s happening,” and without Ev’s financial support and Silicon Valley fame, Twitter would never have grown as rapidly as it did. And without Biz’s ethical stance on protecting and standing up for people who used the service, Twitter would be a very different company. Most of all, without the dozens of dedicated Twitter employees building and developing new ideas and keeping the site alive, the start-up might have failed like so many others.
To Jack it was about telling stories about yourself—about Jack. To Ev, Twitter was about telling stories about other people.
“Twitter was originally conceived as a mobile status update service—an easy way to keep in touch with people in your life by sending and receiving short, frequent answers to one question, ‘What are you doing?’” Ev and Biz wrote in a blog post on Twitter’s Web site. “Sure, someone in San Francisco may be answering ‘What are you doing?’ with ‘Enjoying an excellent cup of coffee,’ at this very moment. However, a bird’s-eye view of Twitter reveals that it’s not exclusively about these personal musings. Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news.”
Jack and Ev looked at each other for a moment in the boardroom. At that moment neither realized that they were both fundamental to what Twitter had become. The perfect equilibrium of two different ways of looking at the world: the need to talk about yourself, compared with the need to let people talk about what was happening around them. One could never have existed without the other. That balance, or battle, had created Twitter. A tool that could be used by corporate titans and teens, by celebrities and nobodies, by government officials and revolutionaries. A place where people with fundamentally different views of the world, like Jack and Ev, could converse.
“So this is our new analytics tool,” he said to the group. “It can show you which tweets are performing better than others.” “Oh, really, dude? That’s really neat, dude,” Snoop said, imitating a white-person voice. “That’s your new analytics tool. Dude, that’s really cool.” Laughter erupted from the rest of the class as they all sat playing with their phones, barely paying attention. But the engineer continued to speak. “So you can see, whenever you tweet about weed, you get a huge spike from your followers,” he said. At this Snoop sat up, staring inquisitively at a graph on the screen.