by Biz Stone
At the time, we ourselves were caring for two rescue dogs, two rescue cats, and a rescue tortoise. At various times we also had foster bunnies, crows, and rodents of varying sizes and shapes. So we took all the money we’d saved and used it as a down payment. We bought a little eight-hundred-square-foot house that had been built as the maid’s quarters to a bigger house. Half that square footage was the garage.
I’ll never forget celebrating my thirty-second birthday in that house. Livy, who did most of the work taking care of our animals, had gone to a medical conference for almost a week, and I was left to manage the animals by myself. It gave me a taste of the work she did professionally and often in our home. One of the dogs was prone to seizures. The other was anxious and attacked people. There was a cat that had been hit by a car and didn’t know when it was dripping poop. Livy left me with all of them plus, in the garage, five baby bunnies whose mother had been killed. They were really cute, but they were still nursing and had to be fed milk through a syringe. Then there were the crows, wintering in a giant aviary I’d crammed into the gap between our Berkeley house and the neighbor’s fence. The cage was big enough for them, but I had to stoop when I went in to feed them a stinky combination of dead smelt and fruit. Livy had said, “Whatever you do, don’t rile up the crows. They have broken wings. They shouldn’t flap them.” So I had to be quiet and gentle while I unclipped the food tray, replaced it with a new one, and reclipped it. But the stupid thing would not unclip. Wasps, attracted to the food, swarmed around me. I had to stay calm—I couldn’t rile the crows—during a twenty-minute wasp fest while I replaced the tray.
The second day Livy was gone was my birthday. At two o’clock that morning, Pedro, the older dog, started having a seizure. I ran upstairs in nothing but my tighty whiteys and found him with his tongue hanging out, eyes bulging. I thought he was dying. I picked him up and held him the way I thought I’d seen Livy do. He exploded dog diarrhea all over me. Then the phone rang. It was Livy, returning my desperate call for help. Holding the dog, covered in shit, I tried to answer without getting shit on the phone. Just then, the seizure stopped. “We’re fine,” I told Livy and quickly hung up. As I cleaned myself up, Pedro ran around like a puppy, overjoyed to be alive.
With the new house and a startup salary at Odeo, Livy and I were instantly back on our way to credit card debt. But hey, it wouldn’t have been a true leap of faith in myself if the stakes hadn’t been high. I had opted for risk and creativity, and that choice would serve me . . . eventually.
I never regretted leaving Google, but our new company was ultimately doomed. The reason why was an important lesson for me that went beyond the basic tenets of business and entrepreneurship.
Eventually we had a dozen or more people working on Odeo. Podcasting was becoming a popular activity, at least with early adopter geeky types. Whenever something became popular on the web, there was a risk that Apple or another megacompany would swoop in with powerful development teams and dominate the market. But it never occurred to us that Apple would be interested in podcasting. Why would they want to incorporate such a fringe interest into their main operating system? At the time, Apple seemed uninterested in social software.
To our surprise, in late 2005, Apple introduced podcasting right inside iTunes. Where we saw it as a way for people to exchange information, Apple saw it as a way for people to listen to professional, radio-type entertainment on demand. That was an application that made sense for them. And as it turned out, they were right about how podcasting would most commonly be used.
This development could have been a fatal blow to our startup. Why would anyone go to Odeo when they could just use iTunes? But this lesson—to watch out for the big guys—wasn’t one I needed to learn, and it isn’t my point. Ev had a smart idea to refocus Odeo on one specific feature of podcasting—as a way for people to get recommendations based on what they or people with similar tastes liked. We felt strongly that Apple wouldn’t bother with the social aspect of podcasting. They didn’t have photo communities around their photo app. We could save our skins by working on something iTunes probably wouldn’t do.
It was the right business move. However, by that point it didn’t matter, because there was something else that condemned Odeo, something more devastating than a corporate competitor with deep pockets.
Neither Ev nor I, nor (I suspect) several other members of our team, were actually interested in podcasts. We ourselves didn’t listen to them. We didn’t record our own. The truth is that good audio requires good production. Listening to Terry Gross is great, but listening to some dude in his basement drone on about XML for an hour with a low-quality mike and no sound production is pretty arduous.
We lacked something that is the key to a successful startup, and it was bigger than sound quality. It was emotional investment. If you don’t love what you’re building, if you’re not an avid user yourself, then you will most likely fail even if you’re doing everything else right.
I can’t work on anything I’m not interested in. One time, in high school, when I had to write a paper for a political science class, I got stymied. The topics were boring, and I couldn’t bring myself to write the paper. I was going to fail, or get a bad grade, unless I could find a way to enjoy the task.
Then I decided that I would write about vigilantism, using Batman comic books as my primary source materials. As soon as I came up with this topic, which was completely interesting to me, I wrote the paper in one sitting.
Evan and I hadn’t yet figured out that we didn’t care enough about podcasting. When Apple launched podcasting, Evan wrote a memo and circulated it to some of the team. It was a very well-written plan for making Odeo a success by focusing on what we called social discovery—those recommendations that a service generates based on previously liked material, the way Amazon does with books. When I read Evan’s memo, I knew it was a good plan and would probably work. One night that same week, Ev and I went for sushi and whiskey at a place in San Francisco we both liked. I brought up his memo. I had something I wanted to ask him.
“Ev, I really liked what you wrote. It’s really smart and it will work.”
“Thanks.”
“If we execute the vision you laid out, we will become the kings of podcasting.” I gave a great flourish when I said “kings of podcasting.” I made it sound very kingly.
“Wow, you think it was that good?” Ev looked pleased with himself.
“Yes,” I said, “but I have a question for you.”
“What?”
“Do you want to be the king of podcasting?” I asked, because this was the question I’d been asking myself.
Ev took a sip of his whiskey, set the drink down, and then laughed. “No, I totally don’t want to be the king of podcasting,” he said.
“Neither do I,” I told him. I knew the weight of what we were saying. How could we do this if it wasn’t something we were enthusiastic about? But at the same time I was excited at this revelation. If we weren’t engaged, we couldn’t go on.
Realizing the same thing I had, Ev wasn’t laughing for long. He put his head in his hands and let out a groan of frustration. I could tell it meant “You’re right. Now what?”
Evan is probably one of the few people in the world who can work with me. As I’ve mentioned, he gives me the freedom to be crazy and have crazy ideas. If I were to say, “Just for a minute, assume there’s no gravity,” Evan would say, “Go on.” He values my brainstorming capabilities and intuition and understands that for all the extraneous blather, there might be a legit idea in there. That’s why we’re a good team. I’m in the clouds, and he’s grounded.
Ev has always been patient when I want to think out loud—so that evening, I did.
“We could just throw Odeo out and start on some completely different idea. We have a good team and a bunch of money still in the bank.”
Ev perked up at that idea at first, but then he scowled. “As much as I’d love to do that, we raised this money from in
vestors for the purpose of building a podcasting company. We can’t use other people’s money to dabble with various other projects that may or may not work.”
He had a good point. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing that, either. So I continued to toss out suggestions.
“Maybe we should just bail completely, then. Just admit to ourselves, the team, the investors, the board—everybody—that we don’t want to do it anymore. Then we could sell the company to somebody who actually likes podcasting.”
Ev decided to think about it more seriously. We finished up our dinner and called it a day.
After a week or so, Ev resolved to tell the board of directors that he didn’t intend to continue being the CEO of Odeo. If they wanted, he would help them find somebody to take his place. But the board didn’t want that. The investors had put their money on Evan as much as on the promise of the idea. It was decided that the best thing to do would be to hire a broker to find a buyer for Odeo.
It was during this period that Evan made a decision that would forever alter the trajectory of my life. He announced to the team that the board was engaged in shopping for a buyer for Odeo. Then he suggested a “hackathon.” Mostly as a morale booster, Ev suggested that a skeleton crew continue to support Odeo, so it worked for the people who were currently using it, while the rest of us “hacked”: we would team up in pairs and have two weeks to build anything we wanted. This was a great idea because it encouraged all of us to pursue the ideas that most compelled us. If Evan devised this challenge as a response to our shared apathy for podcasting, and because he suspected that passion would spark our best work, I completely agreed. And we were both right.
There was a programmer at Odeo named Jack Dorsey, and the two of us had hit it off from the start. Jack was a quiet type, but it was easy to make him laugh. We hung out on the weekends, talking about other ideas we’d had for startups or things we’d built that had failed, and we collaborated on mini projects within Odeo. It was like in school when you’re asked to pick a partner and you know you’re going to pick your best friend. I knew off the bat thatI wanted to pair up with Jack for the hackathon. But what were we going to work on?
The story gets a little muddled here, because right after Ev announced the hackathon, it was lunchtime. A bunch of people went out together. I wasn’t there, but apparently Jack had an audience of people and described to them what he wanted to work on. When he came back to the office, he asked if I wanted to partner up.
I said, “Yeah, I was assuming we would. What do you want to do? Maybe picture-blogging? It has to be something constrained.” We didn’t have much time so I wanted to keep the project simple and elegant. “We could do the Phonternet, a little internet that you would look at just on phones. Like a MySpace for phones.”
Jack said, “Those are cool. I have an idea.” He brought me over to his desktop to explain. Together we looked at his buddy list on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). There was a little feature called Status. It was there so you could say that you were away from your desk or out to lunch, and so on, so people would know why you weren’t responding to their messages.
About half a dozen of Jack ’s friends had set their status. Jack pointed out that instead of just saying “Away” or “Busy” or something like that, people were playing with the status message. One of them had changed it to “Feeling blah,” and another had made it “Listening to the White Stripes.” Or something like that. Jack said that he liked having a sense of how his friends were feeling or what they were up to just by glancing at these status messages. He asked me if I thought we should build something similar—a way to post a status message and a way to see your friends’ status messages.
I loved the simplicity and constraint of the idea. In fact, it reminded me of two short-format blogging projects I had previously launched but failed to grow into anything worthwhile. Before I went to Google, I’d come up with something called Sideblogger, which would allow you to post quick, smaller musings alongside your more thoughtful blog posts. And while I was at Google, I’d worked on Blogger on the Go, short-format blogging from a mobile phone.
As a kid, Jack had a fascination with the way cities worked and the way taxis were dispatched. If you could tune into that, you could tune into the pulse of the city. He liked the way all these status updates would map society in a similar way—how software could capture and reflect human behavior. I was the social side of the equation. I was interested in what enabled special interactions between people.
Then Jack said, “It’s still Odeo, because you can attach a snippet of audio to go along with the text entry.”
I said, “No, if we’re going to do this, let’s do it super simple, and be done with audio.”
Jack laughed. “Okay, no audio.”
I said, “I’ll start mocking stuff up.”
He said, “I’ll figure out how to build it simply.”
At first we thought we were building a way to update your status to friends by phone. The website would just be a Welcome screen where people registered their phone numbers. But who would come to a random website and willingly give us their phone number? We threw that out, and I started brainstorming different ways we could allow people to update their status—a web interface, an instant message. But we were talking about a status report on what people were up to when they were “away” from their regular lives. Because of this, the most likely application was a text message from a mobile phone.
If someone sent a status report to us from their phone, we wouldn’t have to ask for their phone number—we’d already have it. Sign-up, at first, would be by text only. Then we figured out that we should let people update their status on the web, and the update would still go to people’s phones.
So that was our project. Jack and I decided that we would build a way to exchange simple status updates by SMS (text message). I would design the web interface, a place where people could see the messages they were exchanging, and Jack would figure out how to hook texting up to the web, and vice versa. It was simple, and I was far more excited about it than I’d ever been about podcasting.
Noah Glass, co-founder of Odeo with Ev, had named the podcasting service. The name Odeo is cool for that service because it sounds like “audio,” and it’s visually appealing. So Jack and I asked Noah for help coming up with a name for our project.
At the time, we were working in funky offices at 164 South Park. It was near the opening of the park, just across from a Shell gas station. The space had been built in a courtyard formed by the exteriors of some other buildings, so the interior walls had once been outside; one of them still had the original window in it, allowing us to peek into the neighboring building. The front had wood floors and a high ceiling, so it was big and open. Some people thought it was cool, but I wouldn’t have picked it. The carpeting was worn out, a stained pale green; the basement had mice; and the back opened onto an alley hosting homeless people, syringes, and human poop. If you go over there now, it’s pretty fancy. There are condos, restaurants, and venture capital firms, but it was gritty at the time.
Whoever was there before us had some kind of shop in the back, with a plywood floor and storage for recycling bins. You could close the sliding glass doors of that back room and talk without bothering the engineers. This lair was where Noah was often to be found.
“We want a name that feels quick and urgent,” one of us said during a meeting in that back room. The name had to capture the idea that your phone would buzz in your pocket with simple updates from friends right now. Noah had come up with a short list of twitchy words.
“How about Jitter?” Noah said.
“It’s a little overcaffeinated, don’t you think?” I said.
“Or Flitter, or Twitter, or Skitter,” Noah was on his computer now, looking up words that rhymed with Jitter.
“Twitter,” I repeated enthusiastically. It made me think of the light sound of birds chirping. It also meant short or trivial conversation. “You guys, it’s so perfect.�
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Noah was partial to Jitter or Jitterbug. He thought we should be targeting kids. I didn’t want to target kids. We didn’t know anything about kids. I didn’t even like those two words together: target and kids.
This was just a hack project, and I was so wed to the name Twitter, that the guys either agreed or caved easily. In retrospect, it was a shockingly short and incidental conversation.
During the two-week hackathon, Jack and I taught ourselves the rules of using a short code, the five-digit phone number people would use to send us their texts. We wanted the short code to spell Twttr. Jack found the registration page and typed it in to see if it was available, but it was already owned by Teen People magazine. We tried out different variations (twitr, etc.), but then we decided to just forget that. We’d pick one that was easy to remember, and to input with one hand. We settled on 40404. It was the perfect distance for your thumb to travel on the phones of the time. For a hot second we contemplated naming the service 40404. Jack loved the aesthetic simplicity, but Twitter was much better. We decided to stick with Twitter.
While Jack worked on the back end, I build a mock-up that showed how the service would function. As Jack and I worked, we rolled up to each other’s desks in roll-y chairs to talk, or I’d spin my screen around to face him, saying, “How does this design look?” I kept it stark and simple, mostly white. We both liked that. Usually I was excited, and Jack was calm. I made jokes; he laughed. I knelt on top of my chair and spun around like a kid while I talked nonstop, repeating myself if I was excited. Jack listened quietly. Or I lay on the ground talking while Jack sat properly in his chair, his hands clasped or flat on the table, nearly expressionless except when he chuckled. Sometimes we went for walk-and-talks, walking around the city and talking through ideas.
I talk a lot. “No, that’s a bad idea. Wait, it’s a good idea. Is it a good idea?” It was the same with Ev and Jack. I’d brainstorm, and they’d filter. They were both patient enough to listen to the junk—or I didn’t give them a chance to get a word in edgewise.