Things A Little Bird Told Me

by Biz Stone

  At the end of our two weeks, Jack and still I didn’t have a working prototype, but I had mocked up a fake web version of Twitter. At the hackathon presentation, our colleagues had come up with some of their own projects. One of them (done by Adam Rugel, I think) made fun of what everyone knew Jack and I were building. It was called Friendstalker, and if I remember correctly, it consolidated your friends’ postings into one place so you could aggregate all your friends’ online activity. Florian Weber did something called Off Da Chains. I have no memory of what it was supposed to be. Another team came up with a concept for group communication.

  When it was our turn to present Twitter to Odeo employees, I stood up and demo’d the “service” using a laptop hooked up to a projector. It didn’t matter that the programming wasn’t done yet. The demo let me click through the experience of sending a status message by phone and seeing it posted on the web.

  The first screen showed a webpage. At the top it read, “What are you doing?” and had a place where you could enter your status. I typed, “giving a demo.” Then I clicked on Submit, and another screen came up showing my status at the top:

  giving a demo

  Below it were mock posts from everyone else using the service. Then there was a line, and below that were messages from my favorite people.

  Then I said, “Here’s Jack’s phone.” I clicked to the next slide, which showed a picture of his phone with my text message, “giving a demo,” Photoshopped onto it.

  Then I showed his phone sending “eating lunch” to 40404. The next slide was another web screen, where we could now see that Jack was eating lunch.

  That was it. Our demo showed how the communication would work between phones and the web. I titled it “Twitter, an Odeo thingy.”

  The team was less than impressed by what we had built. Someone said it was too simple and needed something more interesting, like video or pictures. We said that the whole point was that it was supposed to be really simple. On the whole, the project wasn’t very well received.

  Nonetheless, Jack and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The whole time I was on the subway going into work, all I would think about was ideas for Twitter, features for the user interface, questions I wanted to run by Jack. Oh my God, if we did that, then we could do this. Wait, that won’t work. What if we did this? The train couldn’t go fast enough. I would hurry from Montgomery Station to South Park to get to work as soon as possible. Every day, more momentum built. It was an idea I couldn’t shake. That was the feeling. Later on, I would put a finger on this as emotional engagement, but I didn’t define it at the time. I was too busy living it.

  Jack and I loved working together, and we were excited to keep going until we had a functioning version of the idea that we could try out. After our presentation, in a private conversation with Evan, Jack and I asked if we could continue together on Twitter. Evan gave us permission. We would get a real prototype up and running in a few weeks. That two-week hackathon project was the birth of Twitter.

  Our offices consisted of an open loft with an upper deck in the back of the space. Ev and I had desks up there, near each other. I often walked over to his desk to bother him. It was the only way to pull information out of his quiet Nebraskan head.

  A week or so after the hackathon, I walked over, sat down on an inflatable yoga ball, and asked him what was up. He told me that the board had been unsuccessful in its search for a buyer for Odeo. Apparently we weren’t the only people who lacked enthusiasm for podcasting. If nobody bought the company, it would mean real failure—the money we had spent would be lost, and the investors would probably never again want to invest in anything we did. This was why I always made a point of checking in with Evan. Important information, ideas, and worries festered within. He never proactively shared.

  “I’ve thought of every avenue there is,” he said. “There’s no way out.”

  We sat there in silence for a few moments—with him unmoving, me bouncing slightly up and down. Then I looked at him. I didn’t know how much money he had, but I figured he was rich from selling Blogger to Google for stock before Google’s public offering.

  I said, “There is a buyer for Odeo if we want one.”

  “Have you been listening to me?” Ev asked. “I just told you, there is no buyer.”

  “Yeah there is: you,” I said. “What if you bought Odeo? Then the investors would get their money back, our reputations would be intact, and we’d be free to do whatever we wanted.”

  Ev thought there was some merit to the idea; he might even have considered it himself before I mentioned it, but it was unconventional, to say the least. Entrepreneurs don’t generally raise money from venture capitalists, create a faltering business, and then buy the business from the VCs. If buying his way out of failure were perceived negatively, it might hurt Ev’s reputation and career.

  Then I suggested that we announce publicly that Ev and I were starting a new company together as a startup incubator, and we planned to acquire Odeo. Since everything wonderful seems obvious in retrospect, we would call the company Obvious.

  This was an easy plan for me to endorse, considering I didn’t have any money to offer—though nobody outside my immediate circle of friends (except Visa) knew this. In fact, I had already borrowed money to pay off my credit cards, again. My interest rate was a whopping 22 percent, and when I did the math, I realized that if I paid the monthly minimum, it would take me more than two hundred years to pay off the debt. My grandchildren would be paying down my credit card bill. So I borrowed money from Ev. We set it up as a legitimate loan with interest, but he gave me a much more humane rate.

  My financial limitations aside, adding my name to the deal seemed to make Evan feel more comfortable. This way, if everything went south I’d share the blame with him. We’d both look like chumps. (As it happened, things went north.)

  Obvious offered to buy Odeo and all its various side projects (including Twitter, which nobody thought was worthwhile) from the investors. Of the five million dollars raised for Odeo, there were still three million left. Obvious offered to buy the company for two million, plus a little more, so the investors got all their money back and then some. It worked out well; the investors were satisfied. Eventually Ev found a buyer for the Odeo technology. A Canadian company bought it for one million dollars, which went back to Ev. If you do the math, that means Ev bought Twitter for a million dollars—a real bargain, considering what it’s worth today.

  I had moved from Little, Brown in Boston; to starting my own business as a web designer; to a brief stint at Xanga; to a job at Wellesley College; to Google; to Odeo; and now to Obvious, where I was already at work on a project that captivated me in a way that nothing ever had. By spring of 2006 this little project finally attracted the interest of the rest of the company. The newly minted employees of Obvious set to work on Twitter, and we made good progress.

  The moment we got the texting part to interact with the web part of Twitter, I was working from home and IM’ing with Jack. It was March 21, 2006, at 11:47 a.m. When Jack’s maiden Tweet—what we were then calling an update—appeared on my screen, I was so excited that I IM’d him Alexander Graham Bell’s famous words to his assistant when he made the first phone call:

  Mr. Watson, come here—I want you.

  I later discovered that I didn’t get the quote exactly right, but that thrill of discovery was the spirit we all felt in the early days of getting Twitter up and running. I had left Google for Odeo in search of fertile ground for creativity. What I hadn’t found at Odeo was there from the start with Twitter. Of course, I had been dying to get the Blogger job at Google. And I had been eager to leave for Odeo. It felt like real passion. But what I felt now was different. That high—the excitement of invention; the effortless flow of ideas, good and bad; the conviction that what you are doing is meaningful and cool—it’s a little like falling in love. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for until it was standing right in front of me.

 
At first we didn’t buy the domain name twitter.com. A bird enthusiast already owned it. Instead we set up the service at twttr.com. At some point Noah suggested we spell it that way: Twttr. Like Flickr. But I wanted our name to be a genuine English dictionary word. Later, when we bought the domain name from the bird guy, my blog post was “We bought the vowels.”

  For a long time the home page stayed as we’d first designed it, displaying the most recent Tweets from everyone using the service. Actually, that was the basis for much of the flack we got. Who’s Joey B, and why do I care what he’s having for breakfast? What we eventually learned is that someone does care what Joey B is having for breakfast. The Follow button let those people identify themselves.

  When we first came up with the idea for “followers,” there was an argument about the terminology. Some thought we should call it Listen. But it wasn’t listening; it was reading updates. “Subscribe” was too boring. I argued for “Follow.”

  “You’re following this person like you follow the news and you follow football games. You follow Biz Stone.”

  That thrill—the joy that I never found in podcasting—would continue throughout the birth of Twitter, but there is one particular day that stands out in my memory. It was early in the prototyping phase, before we had launched. Only a few of us were using the service. My wife and I were living in our tiny box of a house in Berkeley. There was a heat wave. I had chosen this day to do some home improvements.

  Remembering the old episodes of This Old House that I liked to watch as a kid, I figured I’d rip out all the once-white wall-to-wall carpeting in our house to expose the attractive hardwood floors beneath. With scissors, I made a big gash in the carpet. Then I started the arduous process of ripping it up from the nails that held it down at the edges. It wasn’t until I had already ruined the carpeting that I discovered there was no hardwood floor underneath.

  Still, there was no turning back now; I decided to pull up the carpeting anyway. Hunched over, sweating from the heat wave, and cursing my stupidity, I felt my mobile phone buzz in the front pocket of my jeans. I fumbled to take it out and read a Tweet from Evan Williams:

  Sipping pinot noir after a massage in Napa Valley.

  My situation at precisely that moment, and its incongruence with Ev’s, made me laugh out loud. My wife thought I had lost my mind. In truth, I was not just amused; I was enlightened. In that moment, I realized why my other startups had failed and why Twitter was going to work. Twitter brought me joy. I was laughing out loud on a Sunday afternoon using the application that I had spent many days and nights working on. I was passionate about this project.

  That hot day in Berkeley stands out in my memory because it was the day I realized the value of emotional investment. You know in your heart something’s worth pursuing; you’re not sure exactly why, but it doesn’t matter. Success isn’t guaranteed, but failure is certain if you aren’t truly emotionally invested in your work.

  That commitment was a critical element that would carry us through the toughest challenges ahead. At first Twitter was ridiculed. Someone called it the Seinfeld of the internet: a website about nothing. That was intended as an insult. Undaunted, I added this remark to the rotation of testimonials on the site’s home page. I took it as a compliment. Seinfeld is maybe the funniest show of all time! No matter how many times Twitter broke—and we repeatedly had to struggle to fix it and explain the cause of the crash yet again—my faith in the idea kept me going. I could bear any struggle if my work was bringing me joy. My passion for the project made me immune to all the things people thought were stupid and useless about Twitter. I, who had had no desire to be a king of podcasting, was very excited to be a creator of Twitter. This was a powerful lesson.

  So often people follow a career path without thinking about what really inspires them. How many people graduate college, see that lawyers and doctors get paid a lot, and follow that route, only to discover that they hate it? I think about the comic Demetri Martin, who often appears on The Daily Show. He went to law school at NYU, but instead of being a lawyer, he ended up a quirky comedian who plays the ukulele and uses puppets in his act.

  Adopting a career because it’s lucrative, or because your parents want you to, or because it falls into your lap, can sometimes work out, but often, after you settle in, it starts to feel wrong. It’s like someone else punched the GPS coordinates into your phone. You’re locked onto your course, but you don’t even know where you’re going. When the route doesn’t feel right, when your autopilot is leading you astray, then you must question your destination. Hey! Who put “law degree” in my phone? Zoom out, take a high-altitude view of what’s going on in your life, and start thinking about where you really want to go. See the whole geography—the roads, the traffic, the destination. Do you like where you are? Do you like the end point? Is changing things a matter of replotting your final destination, or are you on the wrong map altogether?

  A GPS is an awesome tool, but if you aren’t the one inputting the data, you can’t rely on it to guide you. The world is a big place, and you can’t approach it as if it’s been preprogrammed. Give yourself the chance to change the route in search of emotional engagement.

  If you don’t wake up excited for the day ahead, and you think you’re on the wrong path, how do you find your way? I always tell people to back into it. Imagine working on something you love. Describe it to yourself. Don’t focus on how much money you want. Instead, think about this: What type of people surround you? What sort of work are they doing? How do you get to work? What adjectives would people use to describe what you do?

  Maybe your ideal situation is to be in a funky office space near the ocean. There are bikes hung on the wall right outside so you can go for a ride in the middle of the day. Maybe there are even office surf boards. People are laughing. Maybe, describing your fantasy, you say, “We have a lot of fun during the day, but sometimes we work really hard.”

  What job is like that? Maybe you should consider working at a small ad agency. The place sounds like a creative shop of some kind.

  Once true passion hits you, you can recognize all the times in your life when you were chasing the wrong dream. And after you’ve experienced that sustained fulfillment, you’ll never want to settle for anything less.

  One of the first decisions we made about Twitter, something that never changed, was that each message would be limited to 140 characters or fewer.

  Constraint inspires creativity. Blank spaces are difficult to fill, but the smallest prompt can send us in fantastic new directions.

  There are stories supporting this all over the place. I read somewhere that when he was making the movie Jaws, Steven Spielberg wanted to build a giant, realistic mechanical shark in order to shoot scenes of the scary beast attacking people. But making that full-size shark became a budgeting nightmare, so Spielberg came up with a low-budget solution. He decided to shoot from the shark’s point of view, underwater, looking hungrily up at the tasty legs of the oblivious swimmers. Guess what? Way scarier. Those shots came about because the director’s budget was constrained. The New York Times recently joked about how today’s Jaws would look, opening on Shia LaBeouf playing a rock star and a supermodel wife: “We zoom in for a super-close-up of the shark’s enormous computer-generated teeth, in 3-D, chomping them both in half.” Lame.

  Another Spielberg story: When Harrison Ford was shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark, three months of filming in Tunisia gave the actor a terrible case of the runs. When it came time to shoot a long, drawn-out sword battle, Ford, desperate to call it a day, suggested that when faced with the sword-flashing enemy, he simply pull out his pistol and shoot the guy. This improvised solution became one of the movie’s best, funniest, and most iconic scenes.

  On special occasions when I was a child, my family went to a restaurant in Waltham, Massachusetts, called The Chateau. There were velvet paintings of Frank Sinatra on the walls, and the menus were paper placemats. To distract me while we waited for our food to
arrive, my mom would flip over the placemat, take a pen from her checkbook, and tell me I could draw.

  “What should I draw?” I’d say.

  “Draw anything,” my mother would answer.

  But I would stare at the blank page and ask her again, “What should I draw?”

  Finally she’d say, “Draw a dump truck.” That did the trick. I’d start drawing right away. And it wasn’t necessarily a dump truck. In fact, it probably wasn’t ever a dump truck. But limiting my options gave me a place to start. I felt the same way when I started designing book covers. I liked being told it was a two-color jacket, or that we couldn’t afford to buy art. Or that whatever the jacket looked like, it had to include a dump truck.

  In business, constraints emerge from the time you have to finish a project, the money you have to invest in it, the people you have to build it, or the space to you have complete it. These limitations, counterintuitively, can actually enhance productivity and creativity. Think about the question “How was your day?” The answer is almost always “Fine.” But putting constraints on the question—“How was your lunch with Steve?”—yields a much more interesting answer.

  At a dinner once, I sat next to Hermann Hauser, the guy whose company created ARM, the technology that powers the chips that are in practically all cell phones. He’s a billionaire from Silicon Fen, the high-tech business region around Cambridge, England. Hermann said to me, “I’ll tell you how we came upon the perfect chip for mobile. It was an accident. You know what I gave my team? No money, no time, and no resources.”

  Given their limitations, the engineers came up with a low-power chip that wasn’t very good for PCs. But it turned out to be perfect for cell phones. Now that chip dominates the market.