Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

by Nick Bilton

  From the time he could walk he was a daydreamer. As a young boy, he would sit on the side of the family’s green tractor in the deep fields and stare up into space. He was shy and sometimes socially awkward and rarely fit in, often spending hours alone with his thoughts. As he grew up, normal life in Clarks required that he go hunting with his dad and brother. Like all midwestern boys, he was supposed to learn to fire rifles, shoot a bow, gut a deer, and fish for bass or trout in the Nebraska lakes. He was also expected to fall in love with football. And, of course, all of these things should be done while driving a very large pickup truck. All part of the American Dream.

  Yet Ev preferred to sit in his bedroom and glue together plastic models, or spend hours taking apart his bikes before painstakingly putting them back together, or draw ideas for video games he wanted to make when he was older—when he could afford to buy a computer. Guns, football, and hunting were simply not his thing.

  When Ev grew up and it was time to buy his first car, rather than procure a big, brawny truck, he opted for a bright yellow BMW. Owning four wheels and four doors helped catapult him to high-school popularity. A car in the Midwest for a teenager is like a watercooler in the middle of the desert. He was soon whisking his new friends to parties, where he started hooking up with girls and drinking beer out of red plastic cups.

  But his carefree new lifestyle came to a halt when his parents got divorced during his senior year. The small-town gossips whispered that his mother later fell for the fertilizer guy. Ev was dragged over to a different town and a different high school, where he once again fell into obscurity and isolation.

  His mind was always filling up with wacky business schemes. Most of them never quite clicked, especially with the local Nebraskans. As the Internet stared to gain speed on the coasts, Ev came up with the idea of making a VHS tape explaining what this Internet thing was. He then spent a summer driving around in his yellow Beemer trying to convince local businesses to buy the tapes. He didn’t sell many.

  But once Ev got an idea in his mind, he was determined to make it a reality. You might have had better luck stopping the earth from spinning than barring Evan Williams from raising one of his idea hatchlings.

  After high school he didn’t stray far from home and attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but after a year and a half he felt that college and his professors were a waste of time. One afternoon in 1992 he was sitting in his dorm room reading, when he came across an obscure article about an advertising guru who lived and worked in Florida. Ev was so taken by the subject of the article that he tried to call the man to ask if he was hiring. After a few conversations with an answering machine, Ev said “Fuck it!” and got into the family’s old Chevy van. He drove the two thousand miles to Key West, Florida. As a runaway student he was flat broke. He paid for gas with plastic and slept in the van. In the morning, as the southern sun woke him, he would pop an audiobook tape into the car’s cassette deck—often a marketing or business book—and listen as he coasted along the empty roads. When he arrived in Florida, he knocked on the advertising exec’s door, demanding a job. Impressed by Ev’s tenacity and persuasiveness, the exec hired Ev on the spot. Yet after several months Ev realized the man was more bullshit artist than advertising artist. So, playing everything in reverse—with a brief stay in Texas—he drove back to Nebraska.

  His determination often rubbed people the wrong way. At O’Reilly Media he was once asked to compose the marketing material for one of the company’s latest products. Ev responded by e-mailing the entire company that he wouldn’t write it, because the product “was a piece of shit.”

  His abrasiveness didn’t help win many friends when he arrived in California, either, so each night he would ride his borrowed bicycle home, back past the vines of grapes that would soon end up in a bottle of something he couldn’t afford. Once atop the garage, he would sit and sip cheap beers alone in a single room that was large enough for a mattress, a small brown kitchenette, and Ev’s prized possession: his computer.

  There he would teach himself how to write code, his only friends the crickets he could hear gathered around the garage cheering him on as he learned to speak a language only computers could understand.

  He eventually escaped the confines of the sleepy northern California town and darted south to Palo Alto to work for Intel and later Hewlett-Packard, building mundane software and slowly making friends who worked in the industry. On weekends he would take the train to San Francisco, where his new buddies took him to start-up parties. The draw of the city eventually enticed him to rent an inexpensive, crooked apartment in the Mission area of San Francisco.

  He met a girl, Meg Hourihan, a sprightly programmer who shared Ev’s passion for opinion and computers, and the two began a brief love affair. Although the relationship didn’t last long, they decided to start a company together. They set off with a small group of friends, and opened a bare-bones start-up called Pyra Labs that operated out of Ev’s apartment. The group planned to build software to increase workplace productivity. But, starting a pattern that would follow Ev through his career, something better accidentally grew out of Pyra.

  Ev and an employee had built a simple internal diary Web site that would help Pyra employees keep up to date about work progress. Meg didn’t like the side project and was not shy in expressing her views, calling it just another Ev distraction. One week in the summer of 1999, while she was away on vacation, Ev released the diary Web site 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.

  After Blogger rose in popularity among the tech nerds, Meg eventually came around to its potential, but not Ev’s. Meg was concerned that he didn’t have the skills to run a business, as paperwork was piling up and bills going unpaid. A mini power struggle quickly ensued, wherein Meg tried to take control of the company and Ev refused to step down. In the end, the five-person Pyra team disbanded, leaving Ev friendless, single, and running a company out of his living room.

  At around the same time, the tech boom, which had since turned into a tech bubble, went pop. The stock market started to spiral down, with trillions of dollars eventually falling out of the NASDAQ. Within months the parties disappeared. Jobs became sparse. Start-ups closed down. And most of the people who had come to the Valley in search of wealth left the area, broke.

  Ev wasn’t going anywhere, though. He had a vision for Blogger, where anyone could have their own blog, the equivalent of their own online newspaper. Unlike his lonely high-school days, Ev’s seclusion was relieved by a connection to the world through the hundreds of blogs that were popping up in this town he had laid the foundation for: Blogger, population tens of thousands.

  On his own blog, EvHead, he forged digital friendships with other people. By day he wrote code by the pound, often for fourteen or sixteen hours at a time, expanding Blogger and building new features for the service. At night he wrote on his blog about the “electronica” he was listening to, recent movies he had seen, a run-in with the IRS for some back taxes. Then, as the moon crested in the sky, he checked the blogs one last time, said good night to the people of the Internet, scrunched up into a ball on his couch surrounded by week-old pizza boxes and empty Snapple bottles, and fell asleep. No friends, no employees, no money. Just Ev.

  He soon learned that if you give a microphone to enough people, someone will yell something into it that will offend someone else. Complaints flowed into Blogger constantly. People were vexed by political blogs, religious blogs, Nazi blogs, blogs that used the words “nigger” and “spic” and “kike” and “retard” and “whitey.” Ev realized it would be impossible to police all of the posts that were shared on the site, so as a rule, he opted for an anything-goes mentality.

  As Blogger, and the art of blogging, continued to seep into everyday society, Ev started making just enough money, through ads and donations from people who used the site, to gradually
hire a small gaggle of programmers. In 2002 they moved into a tiny four-hundred-dollar-a-month space that looked eerily like an old detective office.

  By then, Blogger had grown to house nearly a million people’s blogs from around the world, with close to ninety million blog posts—both huge numbers in 2002. Yet the “office” was no bigger than a New York City studio apartment: a meager twelve feet by twelve feet. The room was dark and dank. One of the three small white clocks that hung on the wall had stopped ticking a long time ago, looking as if it had simply fallen asleep, the little hand napping on the seven, the large hibernating near the ten.

  It soon became apparent that Ev needed an office manager to handle all the mundane tasks, like bills and paychecks and the onslaught of complaints about the content of the site. So he hired Jason Goldman, an already-balding twenty-six-year-old who had studied astrophysics at Princeton University but dropped out for the tech promised land and was now willing to work for the cash-strapped start-up for twenty dollars an hour.

  Jason Goldman wasn’t the first Jason in the six-person start-up. He was the third. To avoid having three people looking in his direction when he called for one of them, Ev referred to all the Jasons by their last names. Jason Sutter, Jason Shellen, and Jason Goldman were Sutter, Shellen, and Goldman.

  “Goldman!” Sutter barked in a playful tone on one of Goldman’s first afternoons at work. “You’re going to be in charge of the customer-service e-mail.”

  “What’s that?” Goldman responded, peering up at him through his glasses in confusion. “And why are you grinning?” Goldman was tall and wiry with an egg-shaped head. As unstylish as Ev at the time, he often wore clothes a little too wide for his shoulders and pants a little too long for his legs.

  “Oh, you’ll see. It’s the e-mail address we use on the site where people complain about other blogs.” Slight laughter came from others in the room as Sutter showed Goldman how to check the account. “Start with that message,” he said, pointing to the computer screen. Goldman clicked on the e-mail, which was a complaint from a woman in the Midwest who had come across a blog that she demanded be taken down immediately. He opened the link in the message and his screen was quickly filled with an animated picture of a group of naked men having sex on a trampoline.

  “Ahhhh … man … What … what, what am I supposed to do about this?” Goldman asked with an uncomfortable laugh, as they all giggled. He squinted at the screen, his head half turned away, trying to understand what the men were doing and who, if anyone, would be interested in such bizarreness.

  “Nothing,” Ev said. “Push-button publishing for the people.” It was Blogger’s motto and meant that anyone should be able to publish whatever they wanted. There were mugs around the room that declared this statement, brown coffee stains dribbled over big, bold letters that laid out the moral code of Blogger: PUSH-BUTTON PUBLISHING FOR THE PEOPLE. 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 wrongdoings. 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.

  Blogging had an unintended side effect for Ev. As the company grew, along with other blogging services, Ev was written about in the technology trade press, and he started to grow slightly popular in Silicon Valley. Soon his endless nights on his couch alone with his computer started to change; his personal life started to grow. Just as in his early days with a car in high school, he was now being whisked off to the few tech parties that still existed in the area, hooking up with girls, and drinking beer out of red plastic cups.

  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

  Noah Glass almost dropped the issue of Forbes when he saw the picture on the page. Like two magnets coming together, he pulled the magazine toward his face and his face toward the magazine, the gravitational pull of curiosity at work.

  It was a warm summer afternoon in 2002 and he had been lounging around his apartment, the chatter of traffic and derelicts from Church Street below floating up through the window like an inescapable smell. Flip, flip, flip, through the pages, when he stopped at a profile of a twentysomething man who was behind a burgeoning Web site called Blogger.

  As Noah looked at the picture, it wasn’t the words that made him almost fall from his chair to the earth. It was the picture of Evan Williams, the Pied Piper of Blogger, proudly posing for the photographer in front of a computer with a bright orange Blogger sticker stuck to the bottom corner of the screen. In the distance, past a smiling Ev, through a window, was a kitchen. The same kitchen that Noah was sitting in at that very moment.

  Noah spun around in his chair and held the magazine up in the air, peering through the window and into the apartment directly across the way, where the same exact computer from the magazine sat at the same exact desk in real life. The same orange sticker was stuck to the bottom corner of the screen, and there was the man featured in the article in his hand: Evan Williams, sitting at his desk.

  “Whoaaaa, holy shit!” Noah said aloud as a giant smile spread across his face. He stood there for a second, doing a double take between the photo and real life.

  The magazine looked particularly small in Noah’s hand, given his size. He was large in every way: tall and broad, with a wide, boxy face and droopy eyes like a sad puppy’s. And like a puppy, he had the energy of a nuclear power plant.

  He quickly opened the back door to his kitchen and rushed out onto the balcony. “Hey. Blogger!” Noah yelled. Ev turned around, confused and a little startled by the noise. “You’re Evan Williams, from Blogger, right?” Noah said. “I’m Noah. Noah Glass.”

  “Yeah, that’s me,” Ev said cautiously as he walked out onto his balcony.

  Noah looked over Ev’s shoulder and into the distance of the apartment. Earlier in the summer he remembered seeing as many as five people stuffed into the space, often sitting in the kitchen at computers, working away. A set of servers, which were barely indistinguishable from pizza boxes, sat on the countertop above Ev’s kitchen sink powering all of Blogger. But today the makeshift workplace was empty except for Ev.

  “Are you blogging? Are you blogging right now?” Noah asked excitedly between their two respective balconies.

  “Yes,” Ev said, then let out a small burst of laughter. They stood there talking for a while, Noah continually laughing and clapping with amazement, proud that they were neighbors.

  At the time, Noah’s head was shaved bald. When his hair grew, it was often scraggly and wild, like a surfer who lived on the beach, which is exactly where Noah had grown up. He was born in a small, decrepit house next to an even more decrepit barn that was home to a hippie commune in Santa Cruz, in northern California. His mother and the other commune residents made candles and other trinkets by hand to pay the bills.

  His dad left the house for a quart of milk one morning shortly after Noah was born, and he never returned.

  The commune life didn’t last long, and soon Noah ended up living with his grandparents nearby. One of his relatives, a tough mountain man, took on the role of father figure and directed Noah into adulthood. 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,” the man told the boys afterward, the pipe dripping with blood in his hands. Noah just stood there in utter shock. He had a gentle soul and was
not wired to be so tough and rugged. He was more artist than revolutionary, often preferring to escape into his creative and zippy mind.

  Although Ev was more standoffish and hushed, he was drawn to Noah’s effervescent personality, and they quickly became close friends. In an earlier era they could have been an odd-couple TV show, two polar-opposite neighbors who met regularly to share a beer or two on their abutting porches, Noah mostly speaking, Ev mostly listening. Their friendship continued to grow and intertwine, moving from their porches to coffees at nearby cafés, lunches at Barney’s Burgers down the street, late-night parties, and before long they spent more time together than apart.

  Goldman, who had developed a strong friendship with Ev, often joined them on their outings.

  Noah was always glancing out his kitchen window to see if his new friend was home. Sometimes he showed up randomly, knocking on the door erratically—more than once while Ev was enjoying the company of a girl—and turbulently entering the apartment.

  Noah was always offering to help too. One afternoon Goldman and Ev were struggling to lug a couch up the stairs of Ev’s apartment building. When they stopped to rest for a moment, they turned around to see Noah standing there, pushing them aside, no questions asked, as he dragged the large sofa up through the stairwell practically alone.

  Toward the end of 2002 Blogger moved out of its rented detective’s office and temporarily back into Ev’s apartment. 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 a 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 paychecks 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. Erin, his wife, was often nowhere to be found, attending law school at all hours of the day and night. Noah was like an only child playing alone in a giant sandbox.