Things A Little Bird Told Me

by Biz Stone

As I’ve already discussed, constraint breeds creativity. That evening, I thought hard about what I could do in an hour that would seem like it had taken a year. What was physically lightweight, but potentially could look like it had required great time and effort?

  Aha! I had it. A play! Plays are made up of dialogue, the epitome of lightweight writing. (Apologies to Chekhov et al.)

  That night I wrote a play about two middle-aged guys playing a basketball game called Around the World. The way Around the World works is that the players take a series of shots from a sequence of points on a semicircle on the court. If you make a shot, you advance to the next point. If you miss the shot, you have to make a choice. You can stay where you are, or you can risk taking another shot. If you make that bonus shot, you advance, but if you miss the bonus shot, you go all the way back to the beginning.

  These two middle-aged guys were friends back in high school. Now, one of them is the CEO of World Wide Industries, Inc. He is rich and successful. The other guy has a dead-end job, painting houses or something. They’re shooting the breeze, talking about their kids, but mostly reminiscing about high school (which, for me as a senior, fell into the “write what you know” category).

  As they talked and played, the guy who was successful kept taking the risky bonus shot and advancing around the court. He was winning the game. The guy who was not successful never moved past the corner. When he missed a shot, he wouldn’t risk the bonus round. At the end of the play, the rich guy won. He said, “You wanna go again?” That was the end of the play.

  The obvious subtext was that taking risks breeds success. In those years, I was already forming the philosophies that would serve me later in life. It was a very entrepreneurial attitude—I just didn’t know it at the time.

  I turned my play in the next day. I would have gotten an A, but it was late, so I got a B. What salvaged my grade was having the right idea. (Of course, in this case, the severe time constraints came from my own procrastination, but sometimes, as I’ve mentioned, constraint can be a motivator.)

  What I needed now was the right idea for Jack’s would-be acceptance speech, and it came directly from the creativity of constraint.

  “I’ve got it,” I exclaimed. “Here’s what we’ll do . . .”

  It seemed only moments later that Jack, Ev, our good friend Jason Goldman, and I were up on the stage to accept an SXSWi Web Award. Jack went to the podium to accept it. He said, “We’d like to thank you in one hundred forty characters or less. And we just did!”

  It was an eighty-character speech, and history was made—in our minds at least.

  Our team had put many facets of work, inspiration, passion, and creativity into Twitter, but what I saw at SXSW was bigger than the sum of those parts. Once Twitter was available to them, people instinctively knew how to use our service, and as a group, they would guide us. Our jobs, from here on, would be to listen to them, and to build and sustain a service to support their instincts. It was inspiring, and it was humbling.

  In the years that followed, there would be Twitter user stories that trumped those of SXSW by many orders of magnitude, but I’ll always remember March of 2007 as a major turning point for Twitter and my dreams for what it could be.

  When we got back from SXSW, Evan, Jack, and I founded Twitter, Inc.

  Evan and I went to lunch with our friend from Blogger, Jason Goldman, who had either joined Twitter already or was just about to. Evan wanted some time off. He hadn’t taken a break since he’d started Blogger, then Odeo, and now Twitter. What he really wanted was to go be a ski bum for a year. But before he left, he wanted to make sure Twitter’s leadership was sorted out so he could chill.

  At that lunch, we ate veggie burgers and talked about who should be CEO.

  Evan said, “I guess I’ll be the interim CEO.” It made sense. He was the founder with the biggest financial stake, and he’d been our leader at Odeo. It was a natural assumption.

  Still, I said, “If you don’t really want to be CEO, you shouldn’t be the interim CEO. That’s wishy-washy. Why don’t we make a decision? Let’s make Jack CEO, a real CEO, no interim bullshit.”

  Goldman disagreed. He thought Ev should be CEO. But Evan didn’t really want to at that point.

  I advocated for Jack. Jack and I had worked together to create the prototype of Twitter. It was our thing. For part of the time, Noah Glass had come in and taken over. But after working with Noah, Jack had threatened to quit. So Ev had fired Noah and put me back alongside Jack. I never considered taking the role of CEO. I had always thought of myself as a supporting actor. My best gift was helping people.

  I said, “Jack’s the guy who’s writing most of the code. I’m doing all the design work. We’re the founders.”

  Jason said, “Do you think he can do it?”

  I said, “It’s not like it’s General Motors. There are seven of us.” All that being CEO meant at that point was signing people’s options paperwork, providing some leadership by example, and making sure the work got done.

  Though Goldman thought it was a mistake, Evan said, “Okay, you’re right. Ask Jack what he thinks.”

  Back at the office, I went up to Jack. “Hey, Jack, I told Ev you should be the CEO.”

  Jack spun around in his chair. “Me?”

  I said, “Yeah, it was either Evan as the interim CEO or you as the real CEO.”

  Jack was taken off guard. He didn’t initially know if he wanted to do it.

  He slept on the idea. The next day, he came in and said, “Sounds great. I’ll do it.”

  We officially spun the company out of Obvious, and Jack became the CEO. I was the creative director. Sometime thereafter, Ev said, “Okay, boys, have fun,” and he took off, but he still had the largest stake in the company and was on the board of directors.

  In March, before our SXSW launch, we had seven employees and forty-five thousand registered users. By the end of the year, a mere nine months later, we had sixteen employees and 685,000 registered users. At the time, 685,000 was a lot of users, considering how many years it had taken Blogger to get to a million. Now, in the world of hyperconnected news feeds, an app can acquire a million users in a week. But back then you had to claw your way up, literally relying on old-fashioned word of mouth.

  At SXSW and its breathtaking aftermath, Twitter taught me that our behavior, as humans, is infinitely expandable. The technology of Twitter didn’t teach humans to flock. It exposed our latent ability to do so. Mind-blowing! The phenomenon was more than a technology-induced herd mentality. Each of us, each bird, was newly attuned to the birds flying nearby, and to their proximity to other birds. We all were experiencing a view of our place in the world, live and in mid-flight.

  In the spring of 2007, after the South by Southwest conference in Austin, I finally had the sense that the risks I’d taken were worth it. Twitter was going to take off. I was committed to it, and it looked like Livy and I were settled in our little Berkeley house for a while. Then it dawned on me that she and I had been dating for ten years.

  It had taken some left turns to find a project I loved, but all the while, there was one emotional investment I’d made in which I never had doubts: Livia.

  Back when I was working with Steve Snider at Little, Brown, I wasn’t dating anyone. I wasn’t even thinking about going on a date. All I was interested in was work. I’d go on long walks and think about stuff. I guess I missed the memo on love. I had my talents, but I could also be completely clueless. One day, Steve Snider and I stopped at a diner on the way in to work. We both looked at the menu, and when the waiter came over, I ordered “Two Eggs Any Style.” The waiter was laughing; Steve was laughing; and I was sitting there wondering what everyone thought was so amusing.

  Anyway, my friends started staying to me, “You should go on a date, man. You’re nineteen years old. You need a girlfriend.” Even Steve Snider would say, “You’re a young, good-looking guy. You should meet someone.”

  Everyone was bugging me about it. “Ok
ay,” I told them. “I’ll go on a date. Next time I meet a nice girl, I’ll ask her out.”

  Not long afterward, I went out to dinner with Steve’s family at a restaurant called Paparazzi. (A great name for your restaurant if you want to make sure nobody even the slightest bit famous goes there, ever.) The next day at work, Steve said, “The hostess at the restaurant was pretty. Why don’t you go back and ask her on a date?”

  I wasn’t sure this was a good idea. I was supposed to walk into the restaurant and just ask her out? According to Steve, that was the idea.

  “It just seems so . . . direct,” I said.

  “This is what people do,” Steve said.

  So the next day at lunchtime, I went back to Paparazzi. I was sort of hoping the girl wouldn’t be there, so I could just tell Steve that I’d tried and call it a day. But when I walked into the restaurant, there she was. She was fair-haired and nice looking.

  But wait—I had no plan. I needed a plan! I walked back out of the restaurant.

  I love movies, and back then I particularly loved going to a movie theater called the West Newton Cinema. It had old-fashioned decor and showed art house films. It seemed like a decent place to take a date. I would ask her to see a movie with me at the West Newton Cinema. Okay, I had a plan. I walked back into the restaurant.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “I was in here a couple nights ago with my boss and his family, and I noticed you, and . . . do you live in Newton?”

  Now she gave me a suspicious look. “Yes,” she said. “How did you know that I live in Newton?”

  We weren’t in Newton. One sentence in, and she thought I was a stalker. Tough start. I briefly considered walking back out of the restaurant.

  “Um, I don’t know where you live,” I explained, “That was a coincidence. I’m trying to ask you go to a movie with me at the West Newton Cinema.”

  She said, “Oh. Well, I have a boyfriend.”

  A boyfriend! Of course. Duh. It never occurred to me that this alleged boyfriend might be a made-up, date-avoidance-tactic boyfriend. I was too busy logging the nuances of this unfamiliar new world.

  I heard her friend in the background say, “Aw.” Aw, as in Isn’t that sweet? This guy actually thought he had a shot with you!

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks for your time.”

  My first attempt had failed, but instead of being fazed, I was emboldened. That was the worst-case scenario? It had been awkward, but it hadn’t been so bad. I had a mission now.

  Not long after my failed Paparazzi hostess attempt, a young woman who worked in the children’s editorial department at Little, Brown walked into Steve’s office to drop something off. She was wearing an oversize army coat, and her long dark hair was pulled back. She looked melancholy. I liked her instantly.

  She asked Steve to sign something. He did, and she left the office.

  I said, “Ooooh.” I pointed at the doorway and her receding army jacket. “I think I’m in trouble.”

  “Her?” Steve said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What about the girl who works in Legal?” Steve asked.

  The Photostat machine that we used to reproduce art was in a tiny darkroom with a revolving door that kept the light out. It was so small that there was a sign on the door saying, ONLY ONE PERSON ALLOWED AT A TIME. A few times when I was working in there, the woman Steve was talking about had knocked and come in. She said something like “It’s so crowded and dark in here.”

  I said something like “Yeah, I know. You should leave?” That was me. Totally clueless.

  But now I said to Steve, “Who? No, I think I like her.” The girl in the big army coat.

  So I boldly went downstairs to the office that Livia (for that was her name) shared with her boss. I asked her to lunch, and she agreed to join me. But—here’s the catch—she insisted on bringing her boss. Let’s just say she wasn’t optimistic about our prospects.

  We set a date, but in the interim, I found an excuse to go back to her office, the way people with intra-office crushes are wont to do. Livia wasn’t around, but I noticed that on the computer she shared with her boss, she’d left a sticky note. It read, “Hey, when are you going to fix me up on a date like you promised?”

  This was definitely a sign, and it was not a good one. She’d already invited her boss to join us on our date. Now she was actively pursuing other leads. She wanted to date someone, just not me. Later I would find out that this was because I seemed so sure of myself at work. She figured I’d be overbearing and presumptuous. It’s true. I was sure of myself when it came to the work, but I was definitely not confident about going out on a date.

  And so we went out to lunch—a cozy, intimate meal at a table for three. To Livia’s surprise, I was not a jerk. I was on my best behavior. I was funny and charming and nice. She agreed to go out with me again—this time without her boss. I was really making strides.

  Soon enough, Livy and I were dating for real. She came with me when I moved to New York to start Xanga, then to Los Angeles for a stint when I thought I might be a film director, then back to Boston when I sold a book about blogging to a publisher. When I wanted to move west for Google, she thought it was a great opportunity and would be a big adventure. When I decided to quit Google, she supported that, even though we were always worried about money. Livia has always understood what is important to me and has helped me through legitimately hard decisions. Wherever we went, she managed to find a job at a book publisher or a magazine, until she started writing her own books about crafts, such as quilting, ceramics, and stained glass. It’s a cliché, I know, but she has stuck by me, and I couldn’t have done it without her.

  I may have been clueless about dating and relationships, but I didn’t let that stop me from taking a shot. What was the worst that could happen? A girl could say that she already had a boyfriend? She could be so uninterested that she’d bring a chaperone on the date? Even if I failed, I’d just be a little less clueless the next time.

  When it comes to taking risks, so many of us hedge. It’s natural to set up safety nets. I’ve often met with entrepreneurs who tell me that they are hanging on to their job and tinkering at night on their passion. Of course they are; they need to feed their families. The problem is unless you are willing to accept the worst-case scenario, you can’t expect to achieve the best-case scenario. If it is going to reach the potential you dream it will, your true calling needs all your attention. Willingness to take risks is the path to success.

  Gattaca is a sci-fi movie about a somewhat dystopian future in which reproductive technology is used by those who can afford it to breed genetically ideal people. Vincent (Ethan Hawke) and Anton (Loren Dean) are brothers, but Vincent was conceived without being selected for superior genetics, while Anton is genetically ideal. Throughout their lives, Anton is better than Vincent at just about everything. A bunch of crazy stuff happens in the movie, but the point is that there’s a scene where Vincent challenges Anton to a swim race, a version of “chicken” that they used to play when they were boys. They swim straight out to sea—really far out. The first to give up and turn back to shore loses. Vincent wins. Anton asks Vincent how he beat him. After all, Anton is far stronger and genetically superior. Vincent explains that he gave every ounce of his strength swimming out to sea. He saved nothing for the return trip. This is a revelation for Anton. He is stronger, but he was conservative. He held back instead of giving his all. Vincent, on the other hand, was willing to risk drowning in order to win.

  There is a wonderful lesson to be learned from Vincent’s decision. In order to succeed spectacularly, you must be ready to fail spectacularly. In other words, you must be willing to die to achieve your goals. Figuratively, of course.

  What I’m suggesting is that you embrace the upside of fantastic, epic, earth-shattering, life-changing failure. It’s totally worth it if you succeed. And if you fail, you’ve got a great story to tell—and some experience that gives you a serious edge the nex
t time you go for it. This is a good lesson for startups in general, and for otherwise going for what you truly want. It’s like there’s a natural force of equality at play. If you really want to succeed big, you have to be willing to risk crazy failure.

  It’s been widely reported that 90 percent of tech startups fail. Every entrepreneur in any sector is a risk taker. Even some of the most widely known successes had periods of ambiguity or near failure. For example, Pixar began as part of the computer division of Lucasfilm, developing graphics and animation technologies. It hadn’t found its footing when Lucas needed money for his divorce and decided to unload it. He sold it to Steve Jobs for $5 million. The animators at Pixar had for a long time wanted to do computer-animated movies, but the costs of making a computer-animated film were too high. Jobs believed in their dream. Twenty years later, Jobs sold Pixar for $7.4 billion.

  When I was in high school I took a gymnastics class. I wanted to learn to do a back handspring. It’s sort of like a backflip, but your hands touch the ground in the middle. I watched other kids do back handsprings and figured the way to do it was to jump backward and land on my hands. But I couldn’t seem to jump forcefully enough. I’d chicken out, twist around, and land on my side. I just couldn’t do it; I kept falling.

  My teacher, seeing my futile attempts, said, “Let me tell you the secret to this maneuver. The secret is that it’s easier than it looks. It actually doesn’t take that much effort. Here’s what you do.”

  He led me to the mat. “Stand with your arms up, palms up and open.”

  I raised my hands above my head.

  “Now bend as if you’re going to sit down, arch your back, and let yourself fall past the point of recovery. Keep your arms outstretched. When you feel your fingers touch the ground, then push with your toes. The key is being willing to fall past the control point. If you can give in to the risk of that, you can perform the back handspring with very little effort.”