Valley of Genius

by Adam Fisher

  Rabble: And the rest of us kept the podcasting thing moving forward. And so that continued for a few weeks and by March 21, 2006, enough code had been written and they had a little phone attached with a USB cable to a computer that could send the tweets back and forth.

  Dom Sagolla: It began with a series of early tweets that were automated, saying, “just setting up my twttr.” That was the way it worked: It automatically sent the first message. So everyone’s messages, if you look back in the early days, say the same thing.

  Adam Rugel: There was no i or e, it was T-W-T-T-R at the time. A lot of the start-ups had done vowel-less names.

  Dom Sagolla: This was in the age of Flickr.

  Adam Rugel: It was just a trendy thing, a sign of the times.

  In March 2006, Jack Dorsey sent the first recorded (nonautomated) tweet: “inviting coworkers.”

  Adam Rugel: It was just to everybody in the room.

  Dom Sagolla: The next messages were people just typing whatever they could into this web page prompt. We’re all at this office at 164 South Park, and Jack and I were back-to-back, and I just typed something: “oooooooh,” almost ironically. And Jack wrote, “waiting for Dom to update more.” And my response was, “oh this is going to be addictive.”

  Rabble: Twitter is this little black box where you press the button for the reload and you don’t know when you’re going to get something awesome. Did I get something new? Did I get something new? Did I get something new? Did I get something new? Oh wow, look at that! So it’s incredibly addictive.

  Dom Sagolla: Because it was almost too easy. You don’t need to think about it. You just write.

  Ray McClure: So we’re tweeting about what we’re eating and when we’re going out: just really really personal but not very interesting content. Maybe by the end of the day there was a hundred and something people on Twitter and we’re testing it: Is this a thing? And what can it be used for?

  Adam Rugel: Everybody had a slightly different twist on what it was supposed to be.

  Tony Stubbledine: When we had a version that was friends and family only we all had a magical experience of feeling connected to our friends.

  Biz Stone: After we got it working I was getting on BART to go to Berkeley. And just as I was getting on I heard people talking: “Earthquake, earthquake…” And I’m about to go underwater—under the whole Bay—in a tube. I’m thinking, I got to get off. And my phone was like zzzt, zzzt, zzzt—lots of messages coming in at once. And I look and it said, “Earthquake on the Hayward fault: 2.3 on the Richter scale. No big deal.” And so I stayed on BART. I was like, Huh! That was useful.

  Rabble: Very quickly we started using Twitter for protests. And then lots of people sort of discovered that Twitter is a really good tool for activism.

  Blaine Cook: Rabble was pretty bored of working at Odeo and distracted in all sorts of different ways.

  Rabble: I’m an anarchist. I think we should have a revolution and we should restructure and we should have democratic control and decentralized worker cooperatives and everything else.

  Ev Williams: It’s hard to manage anarchists.

  Biz Stone: They wore shirts that said ANARCHY. And then they would ask questions to all of Odeo, like, “What’s a good hedge fund to invest in?”

  Rabble: I was waiting around for my stock options and ready to move on and had enough of the dot-com thing. I felt like I wasn’t changing the world enough.

  Biz Stone: Those guys were a pain in the ass. They would specifically sit down during a stand-up meeting—on purpose! There was one stand-up meeting where they were sitting down and Ev was like, “Guys, please, I need everyone here by ten a.m.” Because everyone was showing up at noon or whatever. And one of the guys raised his hands and said, “I have a question.” And Ev was like, “Yes?” And he said, “What’s our motivation?” And Ev just lost it. Ev just yelled out, “It’s your fucking job!!”

  Dom Sagolla: It was this weird intersection of I-don’t-care versus I-care-too-much: “How much don’t you care?” “I don’t care so much that I’m going to wear a nose ring and I’m not going to cut my hair or take a shower! But if you get into a discussion with me, like, ‘How is this going to be built?’ I will sit here and argue with you over code until your eyes bleed.”

  Blaine Cook: Over the summer of 2006 it was just a pretty terrible place to work. We were depressed that Odeo wasn’t working and weren’t really sure what the heck this Twitter thing was going to do or what it was. We didn’t have any users for Twitter, either, though we thought that there was some potential there.

  Rabble: And so the next thing was: Let’s figure out who really wants to be here. A bunch of people were fired.

  Dom Sagolla: Rabble, me, Adam, and Tony all got laid off on the same day.

  Rabble: It was this blurry thing. Like, Adam continued to work out of the office for the next couple of years. So it was like, “You’re fired!” “Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow at the office.”

  Ev Williams: So it was September or October of 2006. I went to the board meeting and said, “Well, here’s the situation: We probably have like $2.5 million left, still no real growth with Odeo, and we have this Twitter thing going. We think it could be a thing, but there’s no real evidence of that.” And then they’re like, “You tried to do something new. There’s no evidence it’s working. No one wants to buy the company. There is still a couple million dollars in the bank. You should just give that money back.” That was the very clear direction from the board and I couldn’t really argue with that. And then that’s when I said, “Well, how about I just buy the company?” So, I bought Odeo, paid back the investors, put it in this new company called Obvious, and we were running Odeo and Twitter.

  Biz Stone: Actually Ev was like, “Let’s me and you say we bought it back in case things go wrong.” And I was like, “Okay.” And then things went right and he was like, “Yeah, I bought it back.” Because it was all his money. So, he basically owned everything and then decided to dole out ownership based on what he thought was fair, which I thought was unfair for me, but whatever. It all came out in the wash.

  Blaine Cook: Obvious was Ev’s idea of a research lab or a prototyping lab like Xerox PARC or Atari Research, where we were going to work on a whole bunch of projects. And around that time there was a meeting: Do we kill Twitter? Do we kill Odeo? What do we do with these things? We were pretty sick of Odeo, so that got put into maintenance mode. And I think at the time we decided that we should probably keep doing this Twitter thing even though it wasn’t an instant runaway success.

  Adam Rugel: Then Noah was forced out.

  Biz Stone: Noah had been acting really crazy. He was staying up at the office all night long with giant puffy hair making YouTube videos: “I don’t know, man. I don’t think we’re gonna make it.” That kind of stuff. And he was driving everybody crazy with weird little details that made no sense. And so Jack told me, “I can’t do this anymore. I wanna go to fashion school and learn how to make jeans.” And Florian was like, “I’m just gonna move back to Germany.” And so, Ev was like, “Should I fire Noah?” I was like, “Well, yeah. If we don’t have the engineers what are we gonna do? We can’t do it by ourselves.” And Ev was like, “Okay. I’m gonna do it right now.” And he was really like kind of nervous about it, but he fired him.

  Ray McClure: Noah did it to himself. A lot of it was because he was breaking up with his wife at the time and I think Noah became a little unhinged. It was a bummer.

  Adam Rugel: He would have been the best billionaire of the bunch by far. He would have been a Howard Hughes–type billionaire. So it’s a shame that we didn’t get to see that, but I think it was inevitable that it wasn’t going to work out.

  Biz Stone: We all knew Noah was crazy. He was one of those guys that’s fun at a party but working with him is just a nightmare.

  Dom Sagolla: So a series of layoffs and then this pivot into Obvious Corporation; then a private launch to friends and family—not anyone fro
m big corporations like Apple or Google; then the public launch in the summer, mostly to influencers and early adopters; then they purchased a couple of vowels and Twttr became Twitter. And now it’s February 2007 and we see the iPhone demo and our eyes and minds are lighting up. Everyone is paying close attention to this potential for a mobile web, and then we have a demonstration in the halls of South by Southwest.

  Blaine Cook: South by Southwest is a big conference with sort of three parts: music, film, and what they call “interactive” around web and online technologies. It’s been going for years and years now. I guess we were probably nominated for an award that year, though we were still pretty small.

  Ev Williams: Twitter was getting adoption from our set. The web geeks in San Francisco were using Twitter. So I thought we should show up at South by Southwest because all these people would be at South by Southwest—plus many more.

  Biz Stone: Ev had this idea to do some marketing at South by Southwest. He was like, “We should do something different. We should do something that nobody else does.” And I said, “Everyone hangs out in the regular hallways between the things. What if I designed a visualizer and we put plasma screens up there?”

  Ev Williams: Ray coded this beautiful full-screen tweet visualizer and Jack and Biz went early to set the visualizer up. We had this cartoony aesthetic—birds and clouds.

  Biz Stone: We were up all night trying to get them to work. Then as people started coming in the service went down and we were sitting there like schmucks. It’s like ten, eleven a.m. and all the screens were black, and we were just like, “Come on!” Blaine was asleep and he refused to have a cell phone. So we had to get another guy to go to his house and wake him up. Then we finally got it to actually work.

  Ev Williams: The people who were there at the conference: Their tweets would float by on-screen.

  Adam Rugel: So they did a party and gathered everybody at the festival on Twitter, and people were using it as a back channel to the whole conference.

  Blaine Cook: Twitter gave people a way to be able to sort of organize and communicate without texting directly.

  Adam Rugel: I think all the people there saw the potential.

  Ev Williams: There was enough momentum going into it, enough buzz. People were talking about it on the blogs, and then that same crew all showed up at once and they saw the tweets of a lot of people that they were excited about on the screen.

  Ray McClure: Twitter just totally took over South by Southwest that year.

  Biz Stone: A couple of things that happened. One is this story of the guy at the bar who tweeted, “This bar is too loud. If anyone wants to talk about projects let’s go to this other bar that’s quiet.” And then in the eight minutes it took him to walk there eight hundred people had showed up! That was my realization that, Oh, shit. We definitely invented a new thing. We definitely made something that the world had never seen.

  Ev Williams: And then because the tech press and the bloggers were all there, they just talked about it everywhere.

  Biz Stone: Then we were bumbling into the award ceremony to watch the awards and I looked at Ev and Jack and I was like, “Wait a minute. What if we win something? What if we actually win? We might win!” And the guys were like, “Oh, shit.” And I was like, “If we win we should have a speech.” And Ev said, “Yes, we should: You write the speech; Jack says the speech.” And I was like, “Great.” So, I wrote the speech for Jack. And we did win.

  Jack Dorsey (from the stage): I’d like to thank everyone in 140 characters—and I just did.

  Biz Stone: We won for “best blog,” which made no sense, but we won something.

  Dom Sagolla: They had to be recognized for something. They had to win something.

  Adam Rugel: Then it becomes an inside thing. So the tech community and the tech journalists are on it. They know that Evan is special and has this history, they saw how the product worked and functioned in that environment, and they wanted to be a part of something big and new: That was the energy that helped it grow.

  Ev Williams: It was a moment. It was lightning in a bottle.

  Biz Stone: We incorporated Twitter as a separate company two days after we got back.

  Rabble: Twitter launched right before the iPhone, and the iPhone made the experience of sending and receiving text messages nice. But at first only Apple was allowed to build apps for the first year or two.

  Blaine Cook: But iPhones had the web, so people could load Twitter.com on their iPhone and view the messages very easily.

  Ev Williams: We had shifted it to be more of a web product from an SMS-focused product, and that was key.

  Rabble: So, it was one of the few things that worked really well—uniquely well—on that first generation of iPhones.

  Dom Sagolla: And as soon as we saw that, we realized that this was peanut butter and jelly. This is how Twitter was meant to be experienced: not on the web, not over SMS, not on your desktop, but in your pocket wherever you were, talking about whatever’s going on at that moment, to other people wherever they are, away from their desk. It was a watershed moment. And so you can actually follow the rate of adoption in Twitter’s user base with the number of iPhone installs. There is a very solid correlation between the growth of iPhone and the growth of Twitter.

  Rabble: Do you see the irony in this? Apple killed Odeo for the iPod, and then Twitter exists and is successful because of the iPhone.

  Adam Rugel: It was just nuts from 2007 on.

  Rabble: Twitter got really lucky.

  Mark Zuckerberg: It’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine—and fell in.

  Ev Williams: It’s a myth that Twitter was successful because we were lucky. I mean, obviously we were lucky, but it’s naïve to think that we were just lucky.

  Rabble: The other part of the luck was that Ev was really well connected with the digerati. You know: the cool folks who show up at parties and like to use each other’s stuff.

  Ev Williams: Our users were web geeks—bloggers. That’s when it got the term microblogging.

  Nick Bilton: The original concept was What am I doing? and the original concept was never realized.

  Ev Williams: Twitter didn’t find immediate product-market fit. Why did it then grow? Because we changed it! And—little-known fact—after that fateful South by Southwest, growth stalled again. And then we changed it more.

  Nick Bilton: I can’t remember the last time I saw someone tweet “Going to lunch with my friend Bob!” on Twitter—like you do on Facebook.

  Ev Williams: Success at this magnitude is fucking hard—and unlikely—no matter how great the idea. Because it’s not just an idea—it’s dozens of ideas and hundreds of decisions. The myth is that ideas are stumbled onto fully baked. In reality, they have to be developed.

  Nick Bilton: And at the end of the day, Twitter became a place for people to become more famous, and not a place for conversation.

  @RealDonaldTrump: My daughter Ivanka thinks I should run for President. Maybe I should listen.

  Nick Bilton: Twitter today is one person talking to a lot of people—not a conversation. And I don’t think that we as human beings were designed to enable 320 million people to have a conversation together.

  Steven Johnson: It’s true, Twitter is not a conversational medium, and that’s fine. Not everything has to be a conversation medium. So if you are judging it by that standard, then yes, it’s a failure. But I have found Twitter, personally, to be just a great addition to my life.

  @RealDonaldTrump: I love Twitter… It’s like owning your own newspaper—without the losses.

  Steven Johnson: What I find so beautiful about Twitter is that it’s literally like the serendipity of the front page of the newspaper, times one hundred. So when people sit there and say, “Oh we’re killing serendipity because Google has ruined all that. Now you just go to the web and search for what you want and you get it,” I look at those people and think, Have you never used Twitter? Literally every time I hit Refresh there
is an interesting hint of a take about something. And more often than not, a link to something longer that opens my mind in some way. Twitter is a serendipity engine.

  Nick Bilton: I think we’ll look back at Twitter in ten, twenty, thirty years—in the same way we look back at The Well today—and say, “Well, that didn’t work out so well, did it?”

  @RealDonaldTrump: The #1 trend on Twitter right now is #TrumpWon—thank you!

  To Infinity… and Beyond!

  Steve Jobs in memoriam

  Silicon Valley is a culture, a people, a point of view. But if the place had to be represented by just one person, it would have to be Steve Jobs. He was a native son who twice plunged into the wilderness. The first foray was in 1974, to India. The nineteen-year-old Jobs did not find the holy man he was seeking, Neem Karoli Baba, a living saint known to his followers as Maharaj-ji, but the trip stirred something within him. On his return to the Valley Jobs kick-started the personal computer industry. The Apple II and the Macintosh were breakthrough products, but the Mac, at least initially, did not sell. Exiled from the company he cofounded, Jobs was a wash-up at the age of thirty. A dozen years later he was asked to come back and save the company from near-certain oblivion. Astonishingly, he did save the company—by moving beyond the computer-on-every-desk paradigm that he had established some three decades before with the Apple II. The iPhone ushered in an age of anywhere-anytime mobile computing. Thus the man who started the personal computer era also ended it. Jobs’s premature death three years later permanently enshrined him in the Valley’s firmament. His life was the stuff of myth—myths that Jobs often encouraged. But Jobs had no magical powers, no superhuman ability to see the future. The truth is both mundane and extraordinary: By sheer determination and cleverness, Jobs became the very man that he went looking for as a lad—the guru, the seer, the wizard. He died at home, in Palo Alto, on October 5, 2011.

  Mike Slade: In October of 2003, Steve wanders into my office out of the blue on a Monday afternoon after the executive team staff meeting and he goes, “I need to talk to you.”