by Nick Bilton
“SuperfluousBanter,” he said, among a list of other finalists, then after a slight pause, “… and Twitter!” The packed auditorium began whistling and clapping, a very different reception from the launch of Twitter at the Love Parade five months earlier.
Jack turned to look at the people around him, almost in disbelief, and smiled as everyone cheered. Ev scanned the room too, taking a sip of the red wine in the short plastic cup in his hand, and then leaned over to Jack, whispering to him that if Twitter won, he should give the acceptance speech. Jack was thrilled, but having barely spoken as a child, he wasn’t confident about talking in front of large crowds. He turned to Biz to share the good, or bad, news. “What should I say?” Jack asked him.
Biz stared off into space for a second and then said, “I got it.” He grabbed a pencil and a piece of paper and scribbled down a short speech that he then handed to Jack.
Noah, now the outcast of Twitter, was seated next to the group and held a video camera, taping what was about to happen. He whistled and whooped as the word “Twitter” echoed throughout the room.
Noah had come to South by Southwest to explore other start-up ideas he was thinking of building alone and had bumped into his former coworkers and best friends outside the theater. After chatting about the mundane and about the extraordinary rate at which people had been signing up for Twitter at the conference, Ev had made a peace offering.
“Hey, Noah, would you like to sit with us?” Ev had asked.
It had been a rough few months for Noah, as he had recently written in a very personal blog post explaining that 2006 had been the “hardest year” of his life. “i lost more than i knew i could. i lost my two best friends. changed my definition of self,” he wrote on his Web site. “i left my company, and everything i spent years creating. i learned about stress. about trust. about sadness … i cried more tears than i ever have.”
Now, as he was picking himself back up, Ev was holding out a hand. “Sure, that’d be great,” Noah had said to him. “I’d like that.”
As they sat in the audience together listening to Ze Frank, the Twitter guys were all excited, but they were also completely exhausted from the past few days.
Ev had been to South by Southwest 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,” Ev had written in an e-mail to Jack and Biz in the weeks leading up to the conference. “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. The team at Twitter was still very small—just a handful of engineers and designers—but Blaine and Jeremy had started on the servers. Ray, who had done something similar for the disastrous Twitter Love Parade unveiling, had built a Flash animation that could be set up on fifty-one-inch plasma displays. 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 became 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, so the act of peering down at a cell phone for hours on end wasn’t part of the social vernacular yet—even at a technology conference. Most people, like Jack, had a Motorola Razr, which was a slim phone that flipped open to offer an extensive menu of features: sending text messages or making phone calls.
Since Twitter worked via text message, 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. One young investor, Charlie O’Donnell, a shorter man with a head as bald as Mr. Clean’s, was standing on an escalator on Friday afternoon talking to a friend and couldn’t believe what he was witnessing.
“This is fucking crazy,” Charlie said as he wandered through the conference halls peering from side to side at everyone glued to their phones, constantly pecking for new updates. “Everyone here is on Twitter,” he said.
“I’ve gotta tell Fred,” Charlie added as he pulled out his phone to e-mail his old boss, Fred Wilson, who was a partner at Union Square Ventures, a well-known investment firm in New York City.
“Do you twitter?” he asked Fred in the e-mail. “You should check it out … I didn’t get it at first, but now that there’s a group going to sxsw, I get it,” Charlie wrote. “I’d never text all the people I’m texting now … but it’s a really seamless way to text groups and individuals at the same time.”
Fred wasn’t convinced, telling Charlie that such a service would never work and that other companies that had tried to make Twitter-like products had all failed.
Yet by Monday morning, Twitter was gaining such popularity at the conference, and thus receiving so much attention on the tech blogs, that Fred changed his tune. As he sat sipping coffee, his short, dark hair still scruffy in the early morning, he went to Twitter.com and registered his name. “trying twitter,” he wrote, sending his first tweet.
Fred was forty-five years old at the time, already a legend in the investing circles after having sold GeoCities to Yahoo! for $3.57 billion in stock in 1999. He had also gained a reputation for making adept predictions about new Internet services or themes. Now here he was, watching a stream of tweets fill his screen. Some of the messages talked about the conference, others mentioned Austin, and of course people complained about their hangovers from the night before.
At South by Southwest, one of the main pastimes of attendees is a treasure hunt for the biggest buckets of free liquor. After a few days, Twitter had become the equivalent of a decoder ring in a cereal box to find such a bounty. On several occasions, Jack, Biz, Ev, and Goldman were sitting in a packed bar, sipping beers and reeling from the day, when all of a sudden people’s cell phones would start dinging with text messages. Like clones, people would look down at their tiny two-inch screens, read a tweet about a new party, then one by one grab their coats and trickle out of the bar. Off to the next alcohol-soaked gathering with Twitter guiding their way.
Soon bloggers at the conference were referring to the mass exodus from one place to the next as “flocking.”
Back in San Francisco, Jeremy, Blaine, Ray, and the other engineers spent the weekend hunkered down at the offices, tinkering and tweaking the servers to ensure that the site stayed alive during the critical few days of the conference. When massive spikes of usage and conversation happened on Twitter, their hearts palpitated with anxiety, hoping the Web site could live through the influx of updates.
After the launch at the Love Parade—now a distant memory they would rarely speak about again—Twitter had been growing at a healthy pace, partially because of the chatter about the service, but mostly because Ev’s well-known name was attached to it. That week in Austin, the sign-ups made the last few months look like Twitter had been growing in slow motion.
As Ze Frank stood on the stage preparing to announce the winner for the best new start-up, the servers were about to get battered again.
“And the winner is …,” Ze Frank said int
o the microphone as he looked down at a piece of paper, the audience quieting for a brief moment as he prepared to tell them all what they already knew.
“Twitter!”
Noah began whistling and clapping as he heard the announcement. But his happiness was diluted in a matter of seconds as Jack, Biz, Goldman, and Ev rose from their seats, squeezing past Noah as if he were just another conference attendee and then wading through the ocean of applause and up the staircase to the stage. Jack’s brown cowboy boots hit the floor as he rushed toward the microphone. Biz stood to his right holding the award in his hands. Ev and Goldman stood back, giving the spotlight to Jack as he delivered the pithy speech that Biz had written.
“I would like to thank everyone in 140 characters or less,” Jack said to the crowd as he leaned forward into the microphone “… and I just did.” He waved, then said, “Thank you,” as the group walked off the stage to thunderous applause.
By the time they returned to their seats, Noah was gone.
Jack, Biz, Goldman, and Ev were gleeful after the announcement. They wandered the halls of the conference, holding up the rectangular glass prize they had been given, posing for photos and shaking people’s hands as they made their way to an after-party.
Jack was wearing a blue scarf that swirled around his neck and over his black long-sleeve T-shirt. When he arrived at the party, he was glowing and elated, like a prom queen with a crown atop her head. People continually walked up and congratulated him. Just two days earlier, he had arrived as a nobody. Now he was a mini celebrity.
Noah was dismayed as he wandered the halls for a short time after the awards, but he quickly decided that rather than harbor resentment at not being invited to join his former coworkers on stage, he would be happy for his friends’ new success. Off he went, trudging toward the after-party, and he soon caught a glimpse of the Twitter crew from the corner of the room.
As he approached Jack, Noah reached out to shake hands, his mouth opening to offer congratulations. Yet when he was just a few feet away from his friend, Biz swooped in and placed his arm around Jack as he spun them both around and in another direction to pose for a photo. Noah was left standing there in a room full of people, his arm at a forty-five-degree angle, as if he were shaking hands with an invisible man. Jack, Biz, and Ev then slipped off into a side room as more people asked to take their photos. Noah, devastated by what had just happened, left the party.
After the festivities started to die down, Jack tweeted that the small group of founders were making their way to a diner to decompress. As they sat inside, the neon MAGNOLIA CAFE sign glistening in the rain, snacking on chips and salsa and sipping from tall glasses of beer and water, they reeled from the excitement of winning. “At magnolia’s, sopping wet,” Ev tweeted. Then shortly afterward Biz added, “Chowing down late night at magnolia with the guys.”
But it wasn’t all the guys.
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
The engineers were staring into their computer screens, their headphones wrapped around their heads, as Jack, Ev, Biz, and Goldman wandered toward the back of the office and into the rear room that had once been Noah’s office.
No one paid them any attention; it looked just like any other meeting as they shuffled inside, each grabbing a mismatched rolling chair. Goldman slid the glass door closed behind him, giving it an extra push to make sure no one could overhear the conversation they were about to have.
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.
After weeks of private discussions—some over coffees or beers, others via e-mail—they were finally going to decide who would be running Twitter, what each person’s title would be, and how they would split up the stock. Until this moment, the company had belonged solely to Ev, who had financed it with his personal money after buying out Noah and the previous investors almost six months earlier.
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 vice president, chief technology officer, or director of X, Y, and Z is often discussed in a land of make-believe. Given that 90 percent 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.
Although it was unlike Biz to politic for anything, he had been pushing for a more important title at Twitter for months, hoping to avoid the fate that had befallen him at his previous jobs. When he’d joined Blogger it had already been acquired by Google—no fancy titles for him there. When he’d landed on Odeo’s shores, important titles had already been divided up there too. Throughout his career he had always been in the right place at the wrong time. To ensure he didn’t fall into the same trap at Twitter, he had begun campaigning with an e-mail he’d sent to Ev and Jack a few weeks earlier.
“Maybe this is inappropriate, but if I don’t ask, I’ll never know!” Biz wrote in the message after debating over a long weekend about what to say. “What do you envision my title to be? Is there a chance I could be called co-founder?” He knew that if the company grew, the title of cofounder would garner him more respect, both internally and externally. Unlike titles like CEO, CFO, or COO, to which specific roles are attached, the title of cofounder also meant Biz could do what he wanted, moving around the company with a lot of power but without too much responsibility.
At the time, it had been assumed that Ev would be CEO of Twitter and Jack would be president or director of technology. But Biz’s role had always been unclear.
“I don’t know the answer to this yet. It is not an unreasonable request,” Ev wrote back to Biz, also noting that he wasn’t sold on the idea. “But it might not be best, for a number of reasons.” (For one thing, he worried that if he made Biz a cofounder, then Blaine, Ray, or Jeremy would want the same grandiose title.)
The room in the rear of the office had now been nicknamed the Purse Factory by some employees after Sara, Ev’s fiancée, had moved into the office a few months earlier with the goal of making women’s purses there. A few scraps of fabric hung about. Some tailor scissors. A sewing machine. And although it was rarely used to make women’s handbags, this had become the impromptu office for important meetings.
“I’ve decided I’m not going to be CEO,” Ev told Jack, Biz, and Goldman as he leaned back in his chair. He explained that although he wanted to be involved with Twitter, offering his guidance and vision for the product, he wanted to focus on Obvious Corporation and continue to build new Web start-ups from within his idea incubator.
This wasn’t what Goldman wanted to hear. He was hoping that Ev would run Twitter and that Jack would report up to the CEO, not be the CEO. 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 think he was capable of running the company.” And although he agreed, Ev believed Jack could be molded.
“So who is going to be CEO?” Biz asked.
They all looked in Jack’s direction. There was no question that Jack had taken on leadership of Twitter after Noah had been pushed out, but there were questions as to whether he could pull off building a real company. Especially one that was growing as fast as a bacteria in a petri dish.
Jack had already shown he could make deft decisions, including an e-mail he had sent in late January. “We have 4, and only 4, priorities: performance, usability, development efficiencies, and costs,” he wrote. Then, offering a plan to take Twitter from a buggy Web site to a smooth operation, he added that the company needed to fix t
he servers, sort out 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. “Currently the number of characters you are allowed in your update is dependent on the length of your name,” he had written to his colleagues. “We’re going to standardize this at 140 characters. Everyone gets the same amount of space to Twitter, no more confusion or guessing as you are typing.” Until then, messages had been limited to 160 characters, which was the maximum length of a text message that could be sent from a cell phone. The move to 140 characters would allow Twitter to include someone’s username in the text.
Jack’s next move had been to transition to usernames everywhere on the site. Jack had written in the same e-mail, “If your name is bob2342, your friends are going to get “bob2342: walking the dog.” He added: “This should clear up massive amounts of confusion and complaints.” But this was the type of thing Goldman worried about from Jack. Using usernames, rather than real names, was a typical engineering decision. People in the real world didn’t call themselves bob2342; they were simply Bob.
Still, Ev had been impressed with Jack’s leadership. “Excellent writeup, Jack. I agree with everything, wholeheartedly,” he’d written.
Back in the Purse Factory, 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 chief technology officer.”
“No, I can do it,” Jack said. “I want to do it.”