all is fair in love and twitter - nytimes

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10/10/13 All Is Fair in Love and Twitter - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/all-is-fair-in-love-and-twitter.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print

October 9, 2013

All Is Fair in Love and TwitterBy NICK BILTON

Right in the center of South Park, a large, grassy oval near San Franciscos financial district,

there is a rinky-dink playground with slides, ladders and firefighter poles, all dented and

dinged, connected by gritty brown pylons. Yet for many in Silicon Valley, this playground is

hallowed ground. It was here, one breezy day in 2006, according to legend, that Jack Dorsey

ordered burritos with two co-workers, scaled a slide and, in a black sweater and green beanie,

like a geeked-out Moses on Mount Sinai, presented his idea for an Internet service that would

allow users to update their current status and share what they were doing. That playground

right up there is where I first brought up the idea, Dorsey, whose present-day uniform is a

white Dior dress shirt and tailored dark blazer, told CNBC earlier this year.

The idea for Twitter? the interviewer asked him.

Yep, Dorsey replied.

In Silicon Valley, ideas are not in short supply. At every coffee shop, beer garden and

technology conference, there are legions of start-up founders, like screenwriters clutching their

scripts, desperate to show off an app or site that they believe will be the next big thing. Yet

around 75 percent of start-ups fail. Usually its not simply because the ideas are bad (although

some certainly are), but because of a multitude of other problems. They are either ahead of

their time or too late. Some have too much money and collapse under their own weight; others

have trouble raising the capital they need to survive. Still others implode because of the poor

management and infighting of founders who have no experience actually running companies.

For the ones that make it, success often comes down to a lot of luck. YouTube was one of dozens

of video-sharing sites in existence when it was purchased for $1.7 billion by Google. Instagram

wasnt the first app on iTunes to share photos, yet Facebook still paid $1 billion for it. Twitterwasnt the first place to share a status online; it was certainly the luckiest. Celebrities joined the

service, then a queen, presidents, news organizations and, of course, Justin Bieber. Seven years

after it was founded, the company with a catchy name had more than 2,000 employees, more

than 200 million active users and a market value estimated at $16 billion. When it makes its

initial public offering, many of Twitters co-founders, employees and investors are going to

become very, very rich. Evan Williams, a co-founder who financed the company out of his

pocket during its first year, is expected to make more than $1 billion. Dorsey, the companys

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executive chairman and putative mastermind, will make hundreds of millions.

But in Silicon Valley, luck can be a euphemism for something more sinister. Twitter wasnt

exactly conceived in a South Park playground, and it certainly wasnt solely Dorseys idea. In

fact, Dorsey forced out the man who was arguably Twitters most influential co-founder before

the site took off, only to be quietly pushed out of the company himself later. (At which point, he

secretly considered joining his biggest competitor.) But, as luck would have it, Dorsey was ableto weave a story about Twitter that was so convincing that he could put himself back in power

just as it was ready to become a mature company. And, perhaps luckiest of all, until now only a

handful of people knew what really turned Twitter from a vague idea into a multibillion-dollar

business.

Genesis stories tendto take on an outsize significance in Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs dropped

out of Reed College, traveled the world, dated Joan Baez and helped create a revolutionary

computing company. Mark Zuckerberg wrote the initial code for Facebook while ranking the

attractiveness of girls in his Harvard dorm room. In the Valley, these tales are called the

Creation Myth because, while based on a true story, they exclude all the turmoil and occasiona

back stabbing that comes with founding a tech company. And while all origin stories contain

some exaggerations, Twitters is cobbled together from an uncommon number of them.

In 2005, Jack Dorsey was a 29-year-old New York University dropout who sometimes wore a

T-shirt with his phone number on the front and a nose ring. After a three-month stint writing

code for an Alcatraz boat-tour outfit, he was living in a tiny San Francisco apartment. He had

recently been turned down for a job at Camper, the shoe store.

His luck changed one morning as he was sitting at Caffe Centro off South Park. As Dorsey

looked up from his laptop, punk rock blaring through his earphones, he noticed a man about his

age. Evan Williams, then 33, was a minor celebrity on the San Francisco tech scene. A few years

earlier, he sold the Web-diary service he co-founded, Blogger, a word he popularized, to Google

for several million dollars. Now Williams was using some of his Blogger money to finance a new

company, Odeo, that made podcasts. Odeo was co-founded by his neighbor and friend, Noah

Glass. Its dingy loft headquarters happened to be located around the corner, a block from SouthPark. Williams had stopped in and ordered a coffee.

Dorsey, who was shy after battling a speech impediment as a child, was reluctant to introduce

himself personally. Instead, he opened his rsum on his computer, deleted any signs of his

desire to work for Camper shoes, found Williamss e-mail address online and sent a message to

see if Odeo was hiring. Williams, whose investment in Odeo had turned him into the companys

C.E.O., soon called him in for an interview. He and Glass, both college dropouts themselves,


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preferred rabble-rousers to Stanford grad students and Dorsey, with his nose ring and

disheveled hair, seemed like a perfect fit. He was hired immediately as a freelance engineer and

blended in seamlessly, often winning the companys weekly Getting [expletive] Done award,

and hanging out after work with his new co-workers, particularly Glass. After work, they would

go on bike rides around the city or to live music shows and drink late into the night, usually

talking about technology. Dorsey and Glass soon became inseparable.

Like many entrepreneurs in the Valley, Glass created no distinct line between his work and

personal life. Social gatherings and office meetings were indistinguishable, with wives and

husbands who didnt work in tech forced to listen to banter about MySQL databases. This

boundary-free approach worked when Odeo was thriving, but it became trickier after Apple

announced it would add podcasts to iTunes, essentially making Odeo redundant in a single

afternoon. By the end of 2005, Williams and Glass began to disagree about the future of the

company. Williams, who was known to be slow to make decisions, was weighing whether to shut

down Odeo. Glass, on the other hand, was relentlessly trying to siphon ideas out of Odeoemployees, looking for a way to transition the company into something new. His stress seemed

exacerbated by the fact that his marriage was also coming apart.

One night in late February 2006, around 2 a.m., Dorsey sat in Glasss parked car as rain poured

down on the windshield. The two were sobering up after a night of drinking vodka and Red Bull,

but the conversation, as usual, was about Odeo. Dorsey blurted out that he was planning his

exit strategy. Im going to quit tech and become a fashion designer, Glass recalls him saying.

He also wanted to sail around the world. Glass pushed back: He couldnt really want to leave the

business entirely, could he? Tell me what else youre interested in, he said. Dorsey mentioned

a Web site that people could use to share their current status the music they were listening

to or where they were. Dorsey envisioned that people would use it to broadcast the simplest

details about themselves like going to park, in bed and so forth.

Glass had heard Dorsey s status idea before, and he was unimpressed. It didnt seem like much

of a leap from the away messages that people had been posting on AOL Instant Messenger

for nearly a decade. Also, Glass thought the idea sounded too similar to other start-ups,

including a service called Dodgeball, which let people use their mobile phones to share their

current locations with a note attached.

As he listened to Dorsey talk, Glass would later recall, he stared out the window, thinking about

his failing marriage and how alone he felt. Then he had an epiphany. This status thing wasnt

just about sharing what kind of music you were listening to or where you were, he thought. It

could be a conversation. It wasnt about reporting; it was about connecting. There could be a

real business in that. He would certainly like such a service: his nights alone in his apartment,


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alone in his office, alone in his car, could feel less alone with a steady stream of conversation

percolating online. The two brainstormed for a while longer, and as Dorsey staggered out of the

car to go home, Glass said, Lets talk to Ev and the others about it tomorrow.

The next morning, on Feb. 27, 2006, Dorsey and Glass walked into an Odeo conference room to

talk about the idea with Williams and Biz Stone, an Odeo colleague and Williamss friend from

his Blogger days. Williams and several other Odeo executives had been working for weeks on asimilar idea, which they called Groups, where people would converse with their friends, likely

through audio clips. But the idea from the night before a status updater that could be used to

connect friends sounded more promising. Glass soon took charge of the project, writing

guidelines and a feature list about how this site would work. He added integral elements,

including time stamps, to let people know when an update had been shared. Stone started

exploring designs. Dorsey and another programmer, Florian Weber, did the coding. Williams

pushed a bloglike template that showed peoples past messages in a stream.

Soon, the question of a name came up. Williams jokingly suggested calling the project

Friendstalker, which was ruled out as too creepy. Glass became obsessive, flipping through a

physical dictionary, almost word by word, looking for the right name. One late afternoon, alone

in his apartment, he reached over to his cellphone and turned it to silent, which caused it to

vibrate. He quickly considered the name Vibrate, which he nixed, but it led him to the word

twitch. He dismissed that too, but he continued through the Tw section of the dictionary:

twist, twit, twitch, twitcher, twitchy . . . and then, there it was. He read the definition aloud.

The light chirping sound made by certain birds. This is it, he thought. Agitation or

excitement; flutter. Twitter.

A few weeks later, after several other meetings and presentations of spinoff ideas concluded,

Williams made a definitive decision to move forward with Glass and Dorseys status concept.

In terms of our new projects, I feel most strongly about Twitter, Williams wrote in an e-mail

to Glass and a couple of other Odeo executives. We could have a lot more discussion, and I may

change my mind, but I think I just need to make a call at this point, and my gut is pulling me to

Twitter. Dorsey, still one of the junior employees at Odeo, was not included in the discussions

or e-mail, but he soon became an important engineer on the new Twitter team. And in March

2006, Dorsey sent the first tweet, quickly followed by Stone and Glass. (Eventually, Dorsey

decided to limit tweets to 160 characters, or the maximum length of a text message on a mobile

phone. It would later be lowered to 140 characters.)

As the new service evolved, though, the power struggle between Williams and Glass, which had

been simmering at Odeo, moved to Twitter. Glass, protective of his new idea and distracted by

his divorce, was growing increasingly edgy and anxious. When a lower-level employee


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mistakenly let a well-known tech entrepreneur join the service, Glass went into a tirade. This

is our enemy, he yelled in front of the staff. We need a war map. Theyre going to attack us.

He also pulled Dorsey aside and confessed his fears that Williams wanted him out.

What Glass didnt know was that Dorsey was the one who wanted him out. Perhaps it was

because he sensed vulnerability or perhaps it was because Glass was the only person who could

rightly insist that the status updater was not Dorseys idea alone. Whatever his reasons, Dorseyhad recently met with Williams and threatened to quit if Glass wasnt let go. And for Williams,

the decision was easy . Dorsey had become the lead engineer on Twitter, and Glasss personal

problems were affecting his judgment. (For a while, portions of the company existed entirely on

Glasss I.B.M. laptop.) After conferring with the Odeo board, around 6 p.m. on Wednesday, July

26, 2006, Williams asked Glass to join him for a walk to South Park. Sitting on a green bench,

Williams gave his old friend an ultimatum: six months severance and six months vesting of his

Odeo stock, or he would be publicly fired. Williams said the decision was his alone.

That night, a defeated Glass met with Dorsey at a nearby club, where they drank late into the

night. At one point, as they stood at the bar to order another round of drinks, Glass confided his

days ordeal. Dorsey acted dumbfounded and blamed Williams. As the night came to a close,

Glass hugged his friend and walked home. Two weeks later, he was forced out of the two

companies he co-founded. Dorsey soon became chief executive of Twitter.

Its one of Silicon Valleysgreat oddities that start-up founders refer to themselves as

entrepreneurs. More often than not, the people who come up with company ideas have no

understanding of how to run a business or turn a profit. Partly as a result, the relationship

between the entrepreneurs, who have the ideas, and the venture capitalists, who finance them,

can become tense. Kevin Systrom, Instagrams co-founder, felt slighted when the venture-

capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, one of its earliest investors, backed a competitor. At Tumblr,

the venture capitalists grew so impatient with its founder, David Karp, as he struggled to make

the company profitable, they were discussing his removal before the sites sale to Yahoo. In the

end, though, money usually heals all wounds. Silicon Valley has seen some of the greatest

wealth creation in all of human history. According to the National Venture Capital Association,

start-ups can raise more than $20 billion in venture capital in a single year.

By 2007, the V.C.s in the Valley were shifting their interest from consumer and enterprise

companies to social networks. MySpace (then with a capital S) and Friendster were the chatter

of the late-teen world, and a company called Facebook, which had started a few years earlier,

was already spreading quickly around college dorm rooms. Flickr, the social photo site, had

been purchased by Yahoo for almost $40 million. And while some outsiders scoffed at Twitters

140-character microblogging service, Williams, who was up to that point financing the company


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with his own money, had a track record with Blogger that earned him a solid reputation. A year

after Glass was pushed out, Williams brought in $5 million of venture financing from a handful

of investors, including Fred Wilson, a powerful partner at Union Square Ventures.

In exchange for their investment, venture capitalists want, if not a profit, then at least the

promise of one eventually. And so, Williams quickly needed to turn Dorsey into a better

manager. His hacker personality had helped him thrive as an engineer, but it undermined himas he tried to lead programmers who had been his peers at Odeo. Often, Dorseys inexperience

showed. During a meeting with Bradley Horowitz, an executive at Yahoo, about a possible

acquisition of the site, Dorsey sat silently until the end. Then he gave an unimpressive

explanation of his vision for Twitter. Yahoo made a lowball offer and said that it was building a

better competitor.

When Williams asked Dorsey to send a companywide e-mail setting Twitters goals, his first

draft began with the subject line 3 things I want for Twitter (Goals), each goal beginning with

an off-putting I. Dorsey often tried to act as if he were in control, posturing that his actions

were all part of a bigger plan, but employees saw him frequently pacing in frustration around

South Park. He also habitually left around 6 p.m. for drawing classes, hot yoga sessions and a

course at a local fashion school. (He wanted to learn to make an A-line skirt and, eventually,

jeans.) His social life, once virtually nonexistent, was becoming a distraction as venture

capitalists wooed him at San Francisco Giants baseball games and parties throughout the city.

On Dorseys watch, Twitter, which had never been completely upgraded from its prototype,

was suffering major infrastructure problems that regularly knocked the site offline for hours at

a time.

One summer afternoon, Williams asked Dorsey to meet him in the upper-floor conference room

that the Twitter gang referred to as Odeo Heights. They opened the door to the small room,

pulled back the chairs across from each other and sat, hands clasped as they had dozens of

times before. You can either be a dressmaker or the C.E.O. of Twitter, Williams said to

Dorsey. But you cant be both.

Dorsey seethed silently as Williams ticked off his grievances. But their dispute over Dorseysmanagement illuminated a far deeper disagreement. Dorsey still believed that T witter was

primarily a service through which people could talk about themselves by updating their at-the-

moment status. Williams worried that simply appealing to peoples egos would make Twitter

too ephemeral. After seeing how users responded to a series of events that year, including an

earthquake and a car crash, he was coming to a different conclusion one that was much more

in line with what Glass had thought from the beginning. Twitter was a service for people to talk

about what was going on around them, to share news and information. It was when Williams


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explained this concept eventually saying Twitter was about whats happening that many

in the industry, including those who once dismissed it, started to understand its potential.

The conversation ended awkwardly, but Twitter was getting so much attention that Dorsey and

Williams had no choice but to work, if not together, then at least next to each other. Often they

were both acting as chief executive. In June 2008, when it came time to raise a new round of

financing, some investors were confused when they received separate phone calls fromWilliams, the companys chairman, and Dorsey, its chief executive, sometimes moments apart.

Eventually, Williams decided that the main investor would be Spark Capital, which was leading

an $18 million investment in the company. Bijan Sabet, a well-respected partner, would soon

join the board.

Initially, Sabet and the venture capitalist Fred Wilson, another board member, were concerned

by some of Dorseys decisions. He pushed people to use Twitter over text message, which

produced a monthly bill for the company approaching six figures. Dorsey had also been

managing expenses on his laptop and doing the math incorrectly. Beyond that, it became clear

that there was no backup of some key components. If the site went down, significant data could

be lost. Williams and Dorsey started meeting for weekly dinners to discuss the problems, but

one night Dorsey became defensive. Do you want to be C.E.O.? he said abruptly. Williams

tried to evade the question, but eventually replied: Yes, I want to be C.E.O. I have experience

running a company, and thats what Twitter needs right now.

Dorsey raced home to try to figure out a plan for his resignation, but the Twitter board instead

offered him a three-month window to fix the site and its issues. Not much changed, however,

even as text bills mounted, and the site continued to crash. Before the three months were up,

Dorsey recalled, Sabet and Wilson took him to a breakfast at the Clift hotel and told him that

they were replacing him as C.E.O. with Williams. Dorsey sat before a bowl of uneaten yogurt

and granola as he was offered stock, a $200,000 severance and a face-saving role as the

companys silent chairman. No one in the industry had to know that he was fired. (Investors

would not want to be seen as pitting one founder against another anyway.) But Dorsey had no

voting rights at the company. He was, essentially, out.

The timing of the departure was particularly fraught. For weeks, Facebook had been quietly

exploring the possibility of buying the fledgling company, and while Dorsey was intrigued,

Williams was not. The day after he was ousted, Dorsey called Zuckerberg to confidentially share

the news. To Dorseys surprise, Zuckerberg asked if there was a way to prevent the firing,

perhaps in order to save the deal. Dorsey assured him that there wasnt, and Zuckerberg

switched his plan from try ing to buy Twitter to try ing to hire Dorsey. So Dorsey met with Chris

Cox, who ran Facebooks product division, at a Philz Coffee in San Francisco. The discussions


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gone rogue, is how Biz Stone privately characterized the behavior.) But Williams feared the

public-relations backlash as well as what Dorsey might do if he was banished forever either

possibility could damage Twitters growth curve. Under Williams, the number of sign-ups,

visitors and every other Twitter-related metric continued to double, triple and quadruple. In

2007, people were sending a total of 5,000 tweets a day. Just two years later, it was 35 million

tweets. The companys string of outages eventually slowed. (They had happened at

inopportune moments, including when the Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, showed up atthe offices to publicly send his first tweet.)

While some C- and B-list celebrities joined Twitter during its formative years, it wasnt until

2009, when Ashton Kutcher joined, that the serv ice took a permanent turn toward Hollywood.

Soon came Justin Bieber, Queen Rania of Jordan and, eventually, world leaders as diverse as

President Hugo Chvez of Venezuela and the Dalai Lama. By that point, Williams was regularly

turning down overtures to buy the company. Al Gore pitched Williams and Stone one night over

copious amounts of wine and Patron tequila at his St. Regis suite in San Francisco. SteveBallmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, approached Williams during a private dinner at Bill

Gatess home.

Around this time, Williams also invited to the companys board the venture capitalist Peter

Fenton, who desperately wanted to get in on Twitter. (His $21 million investment valued the

company at around $250 million.) Before becoming an investor, Fenton, like virtually everyone

in Silicon Valley, believed that Dorsey, who had become the public face of the company, had a

day-to-day involvement in its operations. Yet at one of his first board meetings, in early 2009,

Fenton sensed tension between Williams and Dorsey. Afterward, Fenton called Dorsey and

asked him to meet near his apartment.

At the restaurant, Dorsey told Fenton that Williams had pushed him out over power and

control. Then he complained at length about the companys most recent direction. Williams had

wasted no time, Dorsey said, discontinuing many of the text-messaging partnerships that he set

up during his tenure as C.E.O. (He didnt note that many of them had cost the company

hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.) Fenton believed that Dorsey, now a darling of the

tech scene, had been slighted. After Dorsey concluded his side of the events, Fenton pounded

the table with his hand. I will not rest until youre back in that company, he said.

It didnt hurt Dorseys case that Fenton was also frustrated with Williamss inability to manage

the companys rapid growth. Twitter needed to hire a new chief technology officer, a chief

operating officer and a chief financial officer, among other high-level jobs, but Williams couldnt

make up his mind. Often, he preferred to pick from a litter of friends, people he trusted who

wouldnt try to undermine him or hurry his slow decision-making. So Fenton pitched the idea of


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bringing in, as an adviser, Bill Campbell, the famously foulmouthed former C.E.O. of Intuit and

head coach of the Columbia University football team, who had mentored Jobs, Googles Eric

Schmidt and many other top executives. During their first meeting, Campbells message was

exceedingly simple. When Williams asked, Whats the worst thing I can do as C.E.O. to screw

the company up? Campbell responded, Hire your friends! He then went into a 10-minute

tirade about how friends and business dont mix. Williams scribbled in his notepad. They shook

hands and agreed to start meeting once a week.

Fenton was encouraged by the first meeting, but Williams ignored the advice. He saw his

success as the result of a lot of hard work and also a fair bit of luck, and he wanted to give the

people he knew the opportunity to be a part of it. He hired his sister, to stock the kitchens at

Twitter; his wife, Sara, was hired to design the new offices; and he employed numerous friends

from Google. Among them was Dick Costolo, who had recently sold his start-up for $100

million. After they bumped into each other at a party in 2009, Williams asked him to be

Twitters chief operating officer. On his first day, Costolo, a former improv comedian, thumbedhis first tweet: First full day as Twitter COO tomorrow, he wrote. Task #1: undermine CEO,

consolidate power.

In Walter Isaacsonsbiography of Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, Apples head of design, recalls

how Jobs occasionally hit upon his ideas. He will go through a process of looking at my ideas

and say: Thats no good. Thats not very good. I like that one, Ive told Isaacson. And later I

will be sitting in the audience during a product presentation and he will be talking about

it as if it was his idea. Jobs certainly created a number of life-altering innovations, but Ives

point suggests a larger truth about Silicon Valley that Jobs understood well. Ideas rarely, if

ever, come from the mind of a single person, but those who go down in lore as visionaries take

credit for them as if they do. Dorsey seemed to understand this intrinsically, too.

By 2010 Twitter had grown rapidly, and the attention for its success was being given over to

Williams and Stone. At the same time, some Twitter senior executives were becoming

frustrated with Williamss management style. Dorsey began meeting with them at his office at

Square, at Blue Bottle Coffee and later at his loft in Mint Plaza, near the Tenderloin, to persuade

them to tell the board they werent happy. The board and Dorsey soon determined to remove

Williams and return Dorsey to Twitter in a day-to-day role. He couldnt be the C.E.O. of Square

and Twitter, but returning with the public recognition of being the companys founder would be

its own reward.

By this point, many Twitter investors believed what Dorsey had been telling the media for the

past two years. More important, they knew the public did. He could be an effective public face

of Twitter as Costolo managed the operations. The board was grateful for the $25 million that


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Costolo arranged in deals with Microsoft and Google, and he had a good rapport with Twitter

employees. A pact between all of the investors was formed. By late September, Costolo was told

that he had been picked to be interim C.E.O. Williams was out. Dorsey was back in.

Not long after that, Williams looked up from the doorway of his Twitter office to see Campbell

roaming like a linebacker. Have a seat, he said. This is going to be hard. Were going to have

a hard conversation. Williams fell onto the couch, not sure what he was about to hear. Theboard wants you to step up to the chairman role, Campbell told him. Williams seemed

genuinely confused. Youre being serious? he asked. Campbell said he was. T he board wanted

him to move on, he continued; his indecision was creating an organizational pileup, a potential

disaster for a start-up of Twitters magnitude. The board wanted to see a return on its

investment. Then Campbell, who, according to some at Twitter, had known about the firing for

some time, told him he was being replaced by Costolo.

Once Campbell left his office, Williams, stunned, picked up the phone and began dialing. Bijan

Sabet was apologetic and insisted that they wanted to keep him on in a product-advisory role.

According to several people at the company, Fred Wilson, however, said he thought Williams

had always been a terrible C.E.O. I never considered y ou a founder, he said. Jack founded

Twitter. (Wilson denies this exchange.)

Williams called Costolo, who was driving home from the airport through a heavy downpour.

Costolo had asked that the Twitter board handle Williamss ouster tactfully, so that it didnt

seem as if he was pushing him out. Now he was caught between loyalty and business interests

in the ousting of his friend and boss a position that had become all too familiar at Twitter. As

he drove along the wet road, he told Williams that he was going to tell the board that he

wouldnt take the job without Williamss consent. But it was already too late for that. At the

behest of the Twitter board, and with Dorsey s help, he had already undermined the C.E.O.

Two weeks later, on Oct. 4, 2010, Williams walked out of his office and told the Twitter staff

that he was stepping down. A few blocks away, Dorsey was pacing in his office at Square,

preparing for his return.

After Williamss departure, Costolo eradicated the code and infrastructure problems thatwould sometimes knock Twitter offline. He also started relentlessly exploring how to make the

company profitable, building an expansive sales team of more than 400 employees who sell a

variety of advertisement options on Twitter. In recent years, Twitter has developed a tight

relationship with television networks, pushing people on the service to engage with Twitter

during live television events and integrating hashtags into TV advertisements. Late last

summer, the company quietly began to file papers to go public.


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Last month, just days before the I.P.O. news was announced, Noah Glass was walking through

the Mission district. Glass, who fell into a depression after his ouster, disappeared from his

former friends. Now he lives in an apartment that was built as an earthquake shack that he

shares with his girlfriend, his infant daughter and his dog, Ewee. As he was walking toward

Dolores Park, with his daughter strapped to his chest and Ewee in tow, he rounded a corner and

bumped into his old friend Evan Williams. After a moment of initial shock, the two men, now in

their early 40s, chatted amiably, recalling how they had once been next-door neighbors, thenextremely close friends, then co-founders, all just a few blocks away. They politely agreed that

they should meet up for coffee and went their separate ways.

In Silicon Valley, most companies have their own Twitter story: a co-founder, always a friend,

and often the person with the big idea behind the company, who is pushed out by another,

hungrier co-founder. Ronald Wayne, was written out of the founding story of Apple, even

though he was a third co-founder of the company. For a time, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen

were given sole credit for inventing a video-sharing service that later sold to Google for nearly$2 billion; yet a third man, Jawed Karim, also came up with YouTube. Snapchat, the latest tech

darling, is currently being sued by Reggie Brown, who was pushed out of the company in its

early days. And of course, there is Mark Zuckerberg, whose travails and claim of ownership in

Facebook ended in several lawsuits and a feature-length film about his supposed deceptions.

But unlike Facebook, Twitter really was a collaboration; an idea that came out of a failed

podcasting company that happened to come about at the right time. While Dorsey had the germ

of the idea, without the collaboration of the people who worked at Odeo, that idea would have

remained just an idea. Glasss realization that the initial concept could be adapted to connect

people to their friends was significant. And the name he came up with undoubtedly helped, too.

Without Williams and Stone influencing its development with the lessons they learned from

Blogger, it still would not have taken off. Making it a company required Williamss money, then

Wilson, Sabet and Fentons and dozens of other investors, not to mention Costolo, who turned it

into viable business, and 2,000 employees who helped shape it into one of the biggest social

networks on the planet. Such is the case with every company in Silicon Valley, though you

never hear it in their creation myth. Dorsey will make $400 million to $500 million when

Twitter goes public. Glass stands to make about as much as Dorseys secretary at Square.

One early Twitter employee used to say that the company succeeded in spite of itself, and in

some ways, thats true. While it was clear for years that Twitter was going to be huge, it wasnt

clear until very recently as many Twitter employees privately confessed to me that it

wasnt going to be the next Myspace or Friendster: great ideas that became great failures on

account of bad management. For many, that only began to change when the company felt like

just that, a company. Its unclear what responsibility Dorsey can take for this. As one former


13/13


Twitter employee has said, The greatest product Jack Dorsey ever made was Jack Dorsey.

Nick Biltonis a columnist and reporter for The Times. This article is adapted from his book,

Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, to be published next

month by Penguin/Portfolio.

Editor:Jon Kelly
mailto:[email protected]://hatchingtwitter.com/mailto:[email protected]

all is fair in love and twitter - nytimes

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