by Nick Bilton
Dick had been caught between ethics and business amid the ousting of his friend and boss and he often found himself at a loss for what to do. He had assumed the board would handle it tactfully. But now it had all gone awry.
As Dick drove through the dark along the wet road, he explained to Ev and Goldman that he was going to tell the board he wouldn’t take the job without Ev’s consent—and since that clearly wasn’t being given, he wouldn’t do it.
As they hung up the phone, Goldman looked over at Ev and asked if he believed Dick. “I have no idea,” Ev said. “I really have no fucking idea who to believe anymore.”
Over the following days, events started to play out exactly as they had with Jack two years earlier.
Ev called Ted, Twitter’s lawyer, who repeated almost verbatim the words he had said to Jack when he was fired. “There isn’t much you can do,” he said. “It comes down to a vote by the board.” Then, reading from the next line in the script, Ted explained that he was sorry, that he really couldn’t talk to Ev about it because first and foremost, he was Twitter’s lawyer.
Goldman then went on the offensive, telling the board that they clearly didn’t understand Ev if they thought he would simply step down. “This isn’t just going to happen like that,” he said. “If you push him out, I’m going to leave. So is Biz. So are half of the employees. You’re going to lose all of us.” He was right. Most of the Twitter employees loved Ev. More than half would have gladly put their few digital belonging onto thumb drives and walked out with him if Ev had asked them to. He had gone to great efforts to be the best boss he could be, and he had been successful. But while he was adept at managing down, managing up and sideways to his senior staffers was an entirely different story.
The conversations started to turn into a merry-go-round. “Fuck this.” “Fuck that.” “Fuck you.” Fenton came into the office to try to push things along. “I told you to manage Campbell,” Fenton told Ev as they talked in his office. “I’m really sorry about this, but I told you to manage his ego.”
“How the fuck is this up to Campbell?” Ev asked, cursing repeatedly, his hands shaking with anger. “Look, I totally acknowledge I’m not the best CEO, but you can’t put Dick in as CEO. He’s not a product guy; he’s an operations guy.”
“We’ll sort the product stuff out later,” Fenton told him.
“How?”
“I don’t know; we’ll just figure it out. You’ll be involved at a high level; maybe Jack can come back and help out.”
And there it was. Like a punch to the stomach. The word “Jack” hung in the air. “Wait, what did you just say?” Ev asked, his hands now still, his eyes hyperfocused on Fenton. “You’re going to bring Jack back?”
“No, no. I don’t know if Jack will come back. That isn’t my decision; it will be the decision of the new CEO,” Fenton said.
Another few days went by and there was a closed meeting of Campbell, Ev, and the rest of the board. Dick was sitting downstairs at his office, working away on daily operations.
After talking to the lawyers, Ev had realized he would indeed have to step down as CEO, but he also knew he could slow the transition and find the right replacement for Twitter.
“Should we hire someone outside the company, do a search for an executive, or should we just make Dick the CEO?” Campbell, who had commandeered the meeting, asked Ev.
Ev said Dick had done great work for the company, but “he’s not the right guy to be CEO.”
“So if he’s not the right guy, should we let Dick go?” Campbell asked Ev.
Ev paused. “If I step down as CEO, I will likely be taking Dick’s role, so yes, we should let him go.”
“Okay!” Campbell said as he slapped the table then stood up as people started beckoning him to stop. “Shouldn’t we talk about this?” Fenton said frantically.
“No. Guys, we’re running a start-up here!” Campbell said as he stormed out of the room, leaving a shocked boardroom in his wake. Moments later Campbell was sitting in Dick’s office and telling him he was fired and needed to call the board and resign without severance.
“What, what are you talking about?” Dick said, utterly and completely confused. “Are you joking?” One minute he was being told he was going to be the next CEO of Twitter, the next he was fired from the company.
Dick sat, mouth agape, unsure what to do as Campbell walked out after his speech where he told Dick that they would find another company in the Valley where he could become the CEO.
As soon as the board heard, Dick’s phone started ringing, with Fred and Bijan telling him, “Don’t go anywhere! You’re not fired!”
When the weekend arrived, Dick and Ev decided to meet for brunch in Marin County. Dick had spent countless nights trying to decide what to do, and here he was again, stuck between the ethics of a friendship and his desire to see Twitter, with all of its employees, grow into a successful company.
“Listen, you brought me in here, and I told you when I started that I would never go behind your back, and I won’t,” Dick told Ev as they sat across from each other eating breakfast. “So you tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”
“I need you to quit so I can focus on a CEO search,” Ev said.
“Okay, great,” Dick said, gently tapping his hand on the table between each word. “Great. I’ll e-mail Ted and ask him to draw up papers and sort out my severance.” He was trying to do the right thing by Ev, and he reasoned this was it.
But as soon as the board found out Dick was resigning, his phone started ringing again. “Don’t quit!” Fenton told him.
“Jesus,” Dick said, “what the fuck do you want me to do?”
“Don’t do anything!”
Finally Fred had had enough.
An e-mail had arrived in everyone’s in-box saying that Fred and Bijan were getting on a plane and flying to San Francisco for a meeting. Attached was a legal document noting that the entire board would be present. “Apologies for the formal notice, but I am told this is required,” Fred said in the e-mail.
“Notice is hereby given to the members of the Board of Directors of Twitter, Inc. (“Twitter”) of a Special Meeting of the Board of Directors. This Special Meeting is being called pursuant to Article II, Section 2.4 of the Bylaws of Twitter. The Special Meeting will be held in person on Friday, October 1, 2010, at 2:00 p.m., local time, at the offices of Fenwick & West, 555 California Street, 12th Floor, San Francisco, California.”
It was signed by Fenton, Bijan, Fred, and Jack.
Although Biz knew the gist of what was happening with Ev and the board, he didn’t know the full extent of it. Nor did he care to. He had never wanted a seat in Twitter’s boardroom. Company warfare wasn’t his thing. He preferred to build moral fences around corporate castles. But whether he liked it or not, he was about to become a foot soldier in the latest battle.
As the legal letter went from Fred to the board, Biz had set off to Japan for some press and meetings. The trip was going smoothly until, one afternoon, while he was walking through the hallway of the Twitter office in Japan, his phone rang. He looked down, saw the name Jack Dorsey pop up, slid his finger across the screen, and lifted the phone to his ear.
“Ev’s out as CEO,” Jack said without skipping a beat. “You have to come back so we can tell the company tomorrow.” Biz was standing in a hallway, Japanese Twitter employees milling by as he heard Jack talking. “Hold on, hold on,” Biz said as he peered from side to side looking for a quiet place to talk without people overhearing him. He quickly opened the first door he saw and ducked inside, closing it behind him.
“What are you talking about?” Biz said. Jack explained what had happened—the letter from Fred, the scheduled meeting at the law office—and that the plan was to announce that Ev was leaving the company the following day, Friday. (Ev didn’t know about this plan either.)
“You can’t do this without me,” Biz said, looking around the room, which he now realized was a computer closet fille
d with racks of servers that were powering Twitter’s Japanese office. Rivers of blue Ethernet wires crisscrossed the floors and walls.
“I know we can’t. That’s why you need to come back now. You need to get back here by tomorrow,” Jack said. “Just get on a private jet and get back here.”
“I can’t get a fucking private jet from Japan,” Biz said, also noting that he had an important press conference to attend. “That’d cost like a billion dollars.”
“Cancel the conference and get a private jet,” Jack said. “The company will pay for it.”
“Let me think for a second,” Biz said. He paused for a moment in the closet, the server lights blinking around him, the fans whirring. He knew if Jack was calling, it was real and Ev was going to be forced out of the company the next day, but this was one of those rare moments when Biz could stall the events about to happen.
“Look, you can’t do this without me,” Biz said to Jack. “If you stand up there in front of the company without me, the employees are going to think you pushed Ev out and you did it behind my back because I’m not there.”
“I know! That’s why I need you to get back here,” Jack said.
“Well, I can’t,” Biz said in an uncompromising tone. “I can’t get back until Sunday, so we’ll have to announce this to the company on Monday.”
After he hung up, Biz called Goldman to strategize. Jack called Fenton to do the same. It didn’t matter; Jack was going to return to the company the following day, with Biz by his side or not.
Jack barely slept on Thursday night. He tossed and turned thinking about what he would say to the 300 Twitter employees he was going to address the following morning, 290 of whom he had never met before. But the plan had been set in motion, or so he thought. After the meeting was over, the deed done, Jack would go to Twitter’s offices with Dick and the board. There he would triumphantly announce that he was coming back to the company. The exiled executive returning to his throne. Dick would be the new temporary CEO and Jack would serve another role at Twitter, likely running product, pushing his agenda of mobile-first status messages, not Web-first newslike messages.
He woke up on Friday morning, practicing what he would say to the employees as he dressed in his expensive daily uniform. He slipped on his dark Earnest Sewn jeans, tucked in his crisp white Dior shirt, then rubbed gel in his hands and scuffed his hair to perfection. His story about being the inventor of Twitter had been perfected over the past two years, and now he would get to tell it in the house that Jack built.
The day moved almost glacially. Jack was constantly distracted. As the time of the meeting approached, he scanned his in-box and saw a message from Ev. The two hadn’t spoken privately in months. He began reading: “Jack: I know we haven’t gotten along in the past but I really want to try to work this out … if I stay as CEO I’ll figure out ways to bring you back into the company … I want to remind you that if we do this, make this change, then I take your seat and you’re off from the Board.”
Like Ev two years earlier, Jack didn’t respond.
Ev barely slept on Thursday night. He tossed and turned thinking about what was inevitably going to happen the next day. When he awoke, he was almost in a daze. The day moved quickly, almost in a blur, and as the early afternoon set in, he knew his time had come.
He walked through the city streets alone, approached Fenwick’s offices, and looked up at the large glass building. He had arrived early for a meeting with Fenton to try to sort out a compromise and negotiate a role running product at Twitter, or so he had been told.
The receptionist greeted Ev and showed him into the boardroom, where he immediately saw Fred and Bijan sitting next to Fenton. “What’s going on?” Ev said to Fenton, confused by the sight of them all. “I thought you said it was just us meeting first.”
“I’m sorry, we’re not. We just have to get this done,” Fenton said.
Ev looked over at Fred and Bijan and asked them to leave the room for a moment. They obliged.
“You fucking lied to me,” Ev blustered at Fenton. “What the hell is going on?”
Then the conversation was muffled as the door closed behind Fred and Bijan.
Some time passed and everyone was told to go into the conference room. There were the seven board members: Fred, Bijan, Fenton, Dick, Jack, Goldman, and Ev. The two lawyers, Amac and Ted, were also in attendance.
The door closed. Tension filled the room as they sank into their seats. The meeting was called to order.
And then fifteen characters came out of Ev’s mouth: “I resign as CEO.”
“Someone needs to create a motion,” Ted said. Then he asked for two people in the room to confirm the motion. Ev looked around the room to see who would vote, and the first hand shot into the air.
“I first,” said Fred, frustrated by the past week’s maelstrom.
Then there was a brief moment of silence. Fenton didn’t raise his hand. Neither did Bijan. Or Dick. Instead, Jack’s hand slowly rose into the air.
“I second,” said Jack.
It was in that moment that Ev started to realize what was happening. Jack had been involved from the start. Moving chess pieces, ten moves ahead.
The numerous lawyers Ev had consulted had told him, not in so many words, that he was fucked. The board had spent months preparing to oust him as CEO of Twitter, ensuring that once the gears began moving, there was nothing Ev could do to stop them.
As the lawyers explained, there were seven board seats at the time. Fred, Bijan, and Fenton were clearly going to vote to have Ev ousted. Goldman, Ev, and even Dick would vote against his being fired. Which left the one deciding vote: Jack.
As Ev looked around the room, realizing that Jack must have conspired against him, he thought about the time two years earlier when he had paced back and forth in his living room, his feet brushing against the rug and hardwood floor as he debated with Fred and Bijan about what to do with Jack after he was fired.
Ev had agreed to make Jack the silent chairman as a consolation prize for all his hard work. A prize Ev didn’t have to give out. No legal or corporate obligation to hand it over. Just a moral one.
There had been numerous times since then that he had thought about removing Jack from the board. Jack’s press junkets. Jack very publicly telling people in the industry that Ev had kicked him out. Jack changing his Twitter bio to “inventor.” Their fundamental disagreement over the product. But although Ev had come close on several occasions to removing Jack, once his friend, now enemy number one, he had always decided against the conflict. That act of mercy was to be Ev’s demise.
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.
Their stares were interrupted when a vote was presented to make Dick the company’s interim CEO. First. Second. Done. And then another motion.
“We’re rotating the board seats,” Fenton said. “We’re making Jack executive chairman.”
Goldman and Ev looked at each in utter confusion. “What do you mean, you’re rotating the board seats?” Goldman asked.
Ev had assumed that because he was no longer CEO, he would take the seat that Jack had been keeping warm as a silent chairman. With the move, Jack would be off the board. But the board had anticipated this. They had checked every character. Ev was being pushed further down the ladder and Jack was being made the executive chairman of Twitter. When Jack learned this, he was in shock at the brute force the board was using against him.
Then Dick, the new interim CEO, spoke up. “Okay, so we’re going to go to Twitter and announce—” and he was quickly interrupted by Ev.
“No, we’re changing the messaging,” Ev said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Fenton and I agreed that I’m going to stay on as president of product,” Ev said. “So I want to reconsider the messaging. So we won’t be telling the company today.” And, he added, he didn’t want Jack to be there for the announcement. This, he explained, was part of the deal Ev and Fenton had made before the meeting.
The meeting wrapped up, Jack fuming that he wasn’t going to return to the company to give his impassioned speech. As soon as he got back to his office at Square, he started making phone calls. “What happened?” he roared at Fenton. “This wasn’t part of the plan!”
“I know, I know. We’ll fix it.”
A Sunday Storm
The first time any of Biz’s coworkers saw him fight for something was with the mice.
It was late 2006 and Odeo had recently moved into 164 South Park, the office that would soon become the place of Twitter’s inception. The space was relatively eccentric when the equally oddball group of programmers moved in. Little rooms off to the right and left, different levels, and a small kitchenette.
As they settled in, picking desks like children fighting over the best bedroom in a new house, the small kitchenette area became the heart of the office. On some mornings Noah would make pancakes and sing “The Pancake Song.” To make the place feel a little more like home, snacks and a bowl of fresh fruit sat out on the countertop. But the Odeo programmers didn’t nibble on the apples and bananas that sat there. Instead it was little mice that each night left tiny teeth marks that looked like mini Grand Canyons carved into the fruit.