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

by Nick Bilton

  “I’m not a big gambler,” the boyish-looking thirty-six-year-old replied to Goldman as Ev laughed at the two of them.

  “Okay, then a handshake?” Goldman responded, reaching across the table.

  “Fine,” Amac replied, looking back at Goldman through his round wire-rimmed glasses. “A handshake, but there’s no way he’s going to try and buy us.”

  “We should go,” Ev said, looking at his watch.

  A few minutes later they were back in Amac’s decrepit 1985 brown Honda Civic. Ev, sitting in the front seat, was dictating directions from his phone. Goldman stared out the back window. “This guy’s worth seven billion dollars?” Goldman said sarcastically as they drove past the nondescript house. They soon found a parking spot a few houses away.

  As they walked up to the house, it seemed tiny. The exterior color looked like a flat beige from a distance, but up close it was apparent that areas of the walls had been touched up with different mismatched shades, some darker, some lighter. The front yard, which was about the size of a studio apartment, was scattered with browning patches of grass. A few spindly plants swayed in the light breeze. They meandered around the unassuming black Acura parked in the driveway and walked up to the front door. Ev knocked, then turned to Amac and Goldman, who stood with curious looks on their faces. A few seconds passed and they heard the door handle turn. Mark Zuckerberg appeared.

  “Oh. Hey, guys,” Mark said as he opened the door, standing there in jeans, a T-shirt, and his signature blue Adidas flip-flops. “Hey, guys,” he said again, as if he hadn’t already said it once. “Come on in.”

  Mark spoke in sound bites. “We’re still waiting on a couple of people to show up. Let me show you around,” he said as he led them down the hallway of the home he shared with his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan. “Thanks again for coming down here. I appreciate you meeting at my house. You know, I didn’t want anyone to see us on campus. And to think something is going on.” He laughed as he looked at Ev.

  Ev returned an awkward smile. “Understandable.” He wasn’t in much of a laughing mood.

  A few days earlier, relations between Twitter and Facebook had turned from cordial to sour. Now here they were, trying to resolve something that was likely unresolvable. At 3:00 P.M. on Wednesday, June 23, 2010—a couple of weeks earlier—Josh Elman, an engineer at Twitter, had unveiled a new Twitter tool, called “Find and Follow,” which allowed people to find and follow their Facebook friends on Twitter. But barely seconds after the new feature was publicized, it stopped working.

  Elman, a clever, round-faced engineer who always seemed to be squinting through his glasses, had joined Twitter after working for Facebook for nearly two years, so he knew immediately what had happened. “We’ve got a problem,” Elman told Ev and Goldman as he rushed toward Ev’s office.

  “Are you sure they shut us down?” Ev asked after hearing the news. “And it’s not a bug?”

  “Nope, they shut us down,” Elman replied confidently. “Our app is still live on Facebook, but they’ve disabled the friends-dot-get call and it keeps returning a zero,” he said in programmer speak. In other words, Facebook had changed the locks on its door, at least for Twitter, blocking access to the site’s friends lists, even though thousands of other sites were allowed to access the same Rolodex.

  The tech press had already started picking up the new feature and was quickly adding that it was broken, pointing fingers directly at Twitter. So to defend itself, the company spent the next few hours engaged in a very public spat with Facebook.

  “We believe this is an issue on Facebook’s end,” Twitter declared on its company Web site, publicly slapping Facebook in the face. Facebook responded, telling the press that, awww shucks, it’s just a silly technical problem, and “we are working with Twitter [to] resolve the issue.”

  But of course this was “total fucking bullshit,” as Goldman said when he saw Facebook’s response. Twitter executives had known Facebook was going to be upset by the new feature, but they’d had no idea the company would euthanize the feature the moment it emerged into the world. Earlier in the week, during a Twitter management meeting, executives had decided to show Facebook what it planned to release. Some people in the room had argued for an “ask for forgiveness not permission” philosophy. But Goldman decided to reach out to Bret Taylor, Facebook’s chief technology officer, whom he had worked with at Google years earlier.

  “We really don’t want you to launch this,” Taylor had told Goldman on the phone. “You’re a big company, and we want to develop a better relationship with you.”

  “Okay, that’s fine. We’re happy to develop a better relationship, but we still want to launch this feature,” Goldman had replied, noting that Twitter was using fully public feeds that Facebook made available for anyone to use. “We’re just giving you a heads-up of what we’re releasing,” Goldman had said. This response had annoyed Taylor, and the call had quickly become heated as it reached a stalemate.

  Mark and the rest of the Facebook management team had been in Barcelona at the time, attending a conference. When Taylor had called Mark to explain the situation, Facebook’s CEO had given clear instructions to shut Twitter down the second it tried to launch.

  And that was where it had ended. At least, until they arrived at Mark’s house.

  “So. This is our study,” Mark said as he walked them through his tiny home, pointing to a room with blue walls. Two wooden desks sat, chairless, on the right side of the room, and a single leather ottoman in the left corner. “I had some designers from Facebook come in and paint the place,” Mark added proudly as he directed them into the sparse yellow kitchen. The black marble countertops were practically empty.

  “Did you just move in here?” Goldman asked.

  Mark stopped walking and looked Goldman in the eye. “No,” he replied, confused. Goldman didn’t know how to follow up his question, so he stared back for a moment. Luckily, the awkward moment was interrupted by a knock on the door. The rest of the Facebook team had arrived.

  Ev was fully aware of how uncomfortable the meeting would be. He had been in a similar situation when Facebook had tried to buy Twitter a year and a half earlier.

  Everyone shuffled into the living room, where there were not enough seats for all the people in attendance.

  Although Mark had been publicly disregarding the 140-character competitor, once telling a group of close friends that Twitter was “such a mess it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in,” he was actually worried about the company. In a recent interview with the blog Inside Facebook, Mark had admitted, “I looked at their [growth] rate and thought if this continues for 12 months or 18 months, then in a year they’re going to be bigger than us.” But then he downplayed his worry. “It just turned out that their growth rate was kind of unnatural,” he said. “They got a lot of media attention, and it grew very quickly for a little period of time.” But that wasn’t actually correct. Twitter was still growing at speeds it had never seen before. You don’t end up on Oprah, featured in Time magazine, in front-page stories in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, featured in the World Cup, and fueling revolutions and then find that people suddenly stop signing up. Each week Twitter continued to break records.

  After Facebook had shut down Twitter’s latest feature, Mark had reached out to Ev and suggested the two meet “to figure out how we can work together better.”

  As everyone shuffled into the living room, Mark sat down first, and like a kid’s game of musical chairs, everyone else quickly grabbed the seat closest to where they were standing. This proved to be awkward, as Mark and Ev were now sitting right next to each other. The meeting was very cordial, as Mark, Taylor, Dan Rose (Facebook’s head of business development), and a Facebook lawyer delivered a pitch for how Twitter and Facebook could find ways to work together. They used words like “opportunity,” “constructive,” and “partnership.” Every few seconds Mark awkwardly turned his head to look directly at Ev, wh
o was a mere few inches away.

  Mark explained that people coming to Facebook to view other people’s profile pages made up a majority of the site’s traffic. Facebook’s newsfeed, or timeline, was being used only as a springboard to get people to look at profile pages, he explained.

  “We have the exact opposite experience,” Ev said, noting that the Twitter timeline made up 90 percent of the site’s traffic, people’s profile pages just 10 percent.

  “I know,” said Mark, who always did his homework. “That’s why I think you guys are doing great stuff. It would be amazing if we could …” He paused. “If we could do something with you guys as a partner. But there might be things that made sense if they were more closely aligned.” Goldman immediately tilted his head and looked at Amac, wondering if Facebook had just offered to buy Twitter. But in the court of Amac, that would not count.

  Then Rose interrupted, “And of course, if you guys ever want to just sell the company, we would be interested in buying it.”

  At that point Ev had received more offers to buy Twitter than he could count. Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, a former vice president, celebrities, and rappers had all made overtures toward Twitter, and each time Ev had said no.

  But it wasn’t the money that made him turn down Facebook’s proposal. It was that Twitter and Facebook were two completely different companies, with different goals and, as Ev saw it, vastly different morals. Twitter’s ideals had been cemented when Ev started Blogger almost a decade earlier, forming his resolute belief that blogging, and now Twitter, should offer people a microphone that allowed them to say whatever came to mind. It was the same reason Ev had hired Amac, who had become a staunch proponent of free and open speech on the Internet while at Google. The same reason Goldman worked there. The same reason Biz was so important to Twitter’s moral fabric. They all believed that these technologies, first and foremost, should be a mouthpiece for everyday people.

  In the past, when government officials had come knocking on Twitter’s door demanding information about people on the service for any number of reasons, Ev, Biz, Goldman, and Crystal, who managed Twitter’s support team, had always said no, “not without a warrant.” Such a stance would become the conviction of Twitter over the years. And it would be the DNA that made it a different kind of company in Silicon Valley. Twitter, with Amac at its legal helm, would eventually fight a court order to extract Occupy Wall Street protesters’ tweets during protests. It would stand up to the Justice Department in a witch hunt for WikiLeaks supporters online. And in stark contrast to Facebook, Twitter would eventually allow newcomers to opt out of being tracked through the service.

  Facebook had a completely different approach to free speech and tracking, often infringing people’s privacy and sometimes removing content that violated its strict terms of service. Facebook also demanded people use their real names and dates of birth on the site. Twitter, on the other hand, was as open as a public swimming pool. That was the way Ev liked it. Push-button publishing for the people, now in 140 characters.

  As Ev still owned the largest majority of the company, he would become a billionaire in a sale to Facebook or any other big suitor. But it wasn’t about the money for Ev, it was about protecting the sanctity of Twitter and giving a voice to the people who used it.

  “I appreciate the offer,” Ev responded to Mark in his living room, using a polite tone to show respect. “But I don’t think anything is going to change for us for now.”

  They agreed to keep talking, and the meeting wrapped up with a few handshakes. “We’ll be in touch.”

  As they walked outside, past the planters, past the browning grass, away from the tiny house of the accidental billionaire, Goldman looked at Amac and quietly whispered, “See, I told you!”

  The Coach and the Comedian

  Every aspect of the company was growing. The number of sign-ups, the number of people visiting the site each minute, and every other Twitter-related metric continued to double, triple, and quadruple. In 2007 people had been sending 5,000 tweets a day. By 2008 the company had been processing 300,000 tweets each day. As 2009 rolled on, that number grew by 1,400 percent to 35 million tweets sent each day.

  But the number of employees at the company had grown slowly and was still in the double-digit range. Although the board had been pressing Ev to hire a new CTO, COO, and CFO, among other high-level jobs, Ev couldn’t decide which candidates were the right ones. In typical Ev fashion, he preferred to pick from a litter of friends, people he trusted who wouldn’t try to undermine him or hurry his slow decision making.

  This was something Ev had promised himself he would never do again—take too long to make a decision.

  Back in 1996, when he was twenty-four years old, Ev had moved back to the family farm after the company he had started in Lincoln, Nebraska, had flopped. “We’re giving up the office,” he told his employees and friends one afternoon. “Everyone just go home.” Then, penniless and crushed, he packed up his life and drove the eighty-five miles back to Clarks.

  The company, which was called Plexus—a name he had randomly found in the dictionary that meant “a network of nerves or vessels in the body”—had been run by Ev and his brother and, before they shut the doors, had employed ten part-time staffers, most of whom were Ev’s friends.

  Ev had pitched his father, Monte, on the idea a year earlier: “The Web is going to be huge,” he’d explained. Plexus could be the biggest Web shop in all of Nebraska. Monte trusted his nonconformist son and agreed to bankroll the business. After nearly a year, his father’s money was completely gone; some of his friendships, destroyed; his relationship with his brother, splintered.

  After the company flopped, Ev sat at the table where he had once toiled over algebra and history homework and played back the past year in his mind. He took a deep breath, put his pen to paper, and started to make a list.

  One, two, three, four, five … He paused as he rounded the corner past ten. Before long, he made it all the way to thirty-four.

  The list was a collection of all of the ideas he had come up with while running Plexus. But this wasn’t a good list. Instead it was a collection of thirty-four abandoned hatchlings, thirty-four concurrent projects he had started and never finished. He knew the company hadn’t failed because it didn’t have enough work. Quite the opposite. It had cracked because each week Ev would come in and announce to his friends and employees that he had a new idea, a new project, a new focus. When Plexus had finally focused on a single project, Ev couldn’t make a final decision about when to release it. He had been like a geologist searching for oil and changing the drill site before his workers had even cleared the ground to start digging.

  Eventually the projects had piled up and fallen under their own weight. The feeling of guilt from squandering his father’s money—savings that had been slowly collected by toiling in fields and irrigating crops—added to the defeat.

  In that moment, looking at the list, he made two promises to himself: First, he would repay his father. Second, if he ever had an opportunity to run another company, he would never lose focus like that again; he would always make a firm decision and stick to it.

  The former would eventually happen, and Ev paid his dad back with interest and much more. The latter wasn’t as easy to solve. Coming up with ideas was what made Ev Ev.

  Ev was doing his best to avoid this at Twitter in 2009 and focused on helping the company navigate the unrelenting attention it had been receiving for its role in everything from America to Iran, Oprah to Obama, businesses to protests. He was also overseeing the latest round of funding, which would put Twitter in an entirely new league.

  Although Ev had originally set out to raise fifty million dollars in venture money for the company’s fourth round, there was so much interest in Twitter that he would end up raising one hundred million dollars, with New York–based Insight Venture Partners leading the round, which valued the company, for the first time, at one billion dollars. But Twitter’s
revenue was still stuck at that same number from three years earlier: zero. Now, as with Plexus, Ev’s hesitation when making final decisions was starting to slow Twitter’s business growth.

  Earlier in 2009, at Fenton’s urging, the board had encouraged Ev to adopt a CEO mentor to help him manage these decisions better. Fenton had pitched the idea of bringing in Bill Campbell, a legendary CEO coach, who had mentored Steve Jobs and a long list of other titans. But to his surprise, both Ev and Campbell said no. “Twitter? Not interested,” Campbell told Fenton, “I don’t need a CEO coach,” asserted Ev.

  But Fenton wasn’t the type of person who understood the word “no.”

  He called Campbell every few days and shared news snippets about the company with him.

  One weekend Campbell set out on a fishing trip with some bigwig friends. Among the people on the boat was a friend’s technology-savvy son. And instead of reeling in trout, the friend’s boy spent the entire trip using Twitter. Campbell returned to Silicon Valley realizing that there was more to the Twitter story than he had first thought, and he told Fenton he would take Ev on.

  “Campbell is the real deal,” Fenton explained to Ev, trying to convince him to meet with the mentor. “He’s coached Eric Schmidt, Larry and Sergey, and Steve Jobs. He’s a fucking legend.” Ev finally agreed to the meeting.

  Campbell was an institution in Silicon Valley. A former Ivy League football player, he was nicknamed the Coach by those who knew him. Although he was in his late sixties, he still carried around a bulky physique. His hairstyle, which hadn’t changed in decades, parted on the left and drifted across his scalp like choppy white water.

  As the first meeting approached, Ev, now thirty-seven years old, was excited about what he might be able to learn from the man, the legend, the Coach.