by Biz Stone
Every company needs an idealist. In general, in the early days of Twitter, my de facto job as co-founder was to be the voice of the company. I spoke to individuals, groups of users, and employees, wrote weekly newsletters to the staff, led Friday afternoon meetings, posted communications through the Twitter blog, and generally kept an upbeat, positive attitude about why we were doing this stuff and why it all mattered. This approach wasn’t some kind of master plan. It was just me being communicative.
Nevertheless, it’s not fun to fail. People were constantly telling us that the whole concept of Twitter was dumb. Even some of our own engineers had their doubts. On top of that, the service was breaking all the time. This did not feel good. I had helped create Twitter, I was working on it every day, and when it failed, I felt as if I’d done something bad. As if I’d neglected a responsibility. Whenever the app was broken, I was frustrated and on edge until it was fixed.
But lots of times, we didn’t know what had gone wrong and it took hours to get ourselves back up and running.
One day, all this stuff caught up with me. Maybe I’d also had a bad commute. Anyway, this time when the service went down, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I stood up in the middle of our grim South Park office and blurted out something like “This is bullshit. Why can’t we get our acts together?”
Jack Dorsey, who was CEO at the time, heard my outburst. He said, “Hey, Biz, will you take a walk with me?”
We walked around South Park, and Jack said, “I need you always to be the guy that has the positive attitude and keeps people feeling like we’re on the right track, we’re doing good work, and we’re happy.”
That was the moment when I realized that the company’s spirit was one of my key responsibilities. I had often had my own internal struggles, as we all do, worrying that I wasn’t helping enough or doing enough work. In the beginning, I was doing all the user interface and design work myself, but by the time of my outburst, we had hired people to handle some of that. I wasn’t coding all day long like an engineer. And I wasn’t the CEO. Was I pulling my own weight? Were the things I was doing important? I was giving a voice to the service, I was building a brand, but there was no way to quantify the results of my work.
When Jack told me that he needed me to keep up the company’s spirits, I realized that my positivity, though hard to measure, was important. I wasn’t just creating a brand for the outside world; I was responsible for the company culture. We hit much lower points with much bigger stakes after that, but never again would I snap as I did that day. I was always able to find the bright spot.
In Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From, he talks about how good ideas assemble themselves from spare parts we have lying around. As a metaphor, he tells a story set in the Indonesian city of Meulaboh. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the hospital in Meulaboh was given eight lifesaving incubators for newborns. What a generous gift! Meulaboh was going to do much better now. But four years later, when Timothy Preston, an MIT professor, checked back to see how the hospital was doing, he found that none of the incubators was working. In the intervening years, they had broken—and nobody knew how to fix them. The expensive, lifesaving technology was useless.
Timothy Preston took particular note of this because he had a team designing an incubator specifically for the developing world. He’d gotten the idea from Jonathan Rosen, a doctor who noticed that in spite of the failing infrastructure in the country, all around were lots of Toyota trucks, and they were running great. So Preston’s organization, Design That Matters, built an incubator called the NeoNurture, made of automotive parts. There were headlights for warmth, and the machine was powered by a cigarette lighter or a motorcycle battery. I like to imagine that when Preston delivered the new incubators to the hospital, he said, “Here are some baby incubators. If they break, call the mechanic.”
Johnson uses this story to talk about how innovation comes from preexisting ideas “cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting in the garage.” But to me it also means something slightly different: finding the bright spot. When everything’s wrong and broken, instead of harping on what’s wrong and broken, find what works, and build on that. Seek out the positive “bright spot” amid seemingly limitless negativity. Solutions emerge if you look for the positive.
For me this played out in a funny sort of self-fulfilling way. Instead of worrying about what my role was in the company, I let my role evolve to be the not-worrier of the company. But this idea can play out on a larger scale. For example, at the company level, Evan, having given up on podcasting, looked at the Odeo team and decided there was no reason to waste the assembled talent. He may not have thought of it in these terms, but he assumed there was a bright spot, an idea worth pursuing, and he opened the door for it by suggesting the hackathon. In your own company, as Evan did, keep your eyes open for the side project that might deserve center stage. Ten years ago, if you wanted to launch a startup, you had to have a roomful of servers to host the site and its traffic. Since then, Amazon, realizing a side skill it had developed as an online retailer, launched Amazon Web Services, giving even English majors an easy, cheap way to do a startup. Look for bright spots of efficiency—say, a department that fulfills its task so well it might be able to provide that service for other companies—and make space for the skills and interests of your employees and colleagues to thrive.
The same theory applies to even the smallest aspects of life. I’m not saying that if your car breaks down, you can find a way to use it as a refrigerator (though that would be impressive). But say you never find time to clean out the garage. What is it that you always manage to get done? Paying the bills? Then look at why paying the bills happens. Is it because you set aside time for it in your calendar? Do you do a little bit every night? Try applying the same strategies to the garage project.
Beyond the practical, the bright spot theory is about a fundamentally positive outlook. Rose-colored glasses tint the world with false beauty. But an open, curious, optimistic mind yields solutions, and has a better time along the way.
We came home from South by Southwest in 2007 convinced that Twitter was going to be important. We formed the company. Livy and I got engaged. Free pizzas landed on our desks. That summer, I was dreaming big about the ways people might use the new piece of technology we were creating for them.
One day, when everyone was out at lunch, I started looking through stock photo sites, browsing illustrations—you know, just for kicks—and I stumbled across some drawings that people were doing with Adobe Illustrator using vector graphics (images made up of basic geometric elements). It looked easy. I wanted to try it. What should I draw? Oh, I’ll draw a bird. So I drew a bird using Adobe Illustrator. I made it blue. It looked pretty cool. I gave it a lighter blue tummy, a beak, and some wings.
When everyone returned to lunch, I showed Ev what I’d done.
He said, “Oh, that’s pretty good.”
I said, “Maybe we should put this bird on our site.”
Ev said, “Sure.” Then he walked away.
So I put the bird up, people liked it, and I started referring to it as the Twitter bird. A few weeks later I asked my friend Phil Pascuzzo, a professional designer and illustrator, to give it a little Phil style. He did a quirkier iteration, and my bird now had a little hairdo. That was our Twitter bird for a while. Later, I started thinking more philosophically about it. Any company could use the first letter of their name as a logo. Only Twitter could use a bird in flight as a representation of the freedom of expression. Then I asked our creative director, Doug Bowman, to make the bird less cartoony, more iconic. He did a variation on Phil’s bird, and I presented it to the company.
In the presentation, I showed the Apple logo, the Nike logo, and the Twitter bird. I said to the team, “Guys, in my aspirational vision of the future, people will use Twitter to topple despotic regimes, and when they do, they will spray-paint stencils of this bird on the crumbling walls o
f the tyranny.” Later, Jack asked our art director to have another go at the bird—simplifying it even further—and gave a similar speech.
There were so many ways to get a Tweet onto Twitter that it would be impossible to restrict it. People in any nation would have the freedom to communicate. No matter what the restrictions, people would find a way around them. To shut down Twitter, you’d have to shut down all mobile communications everywhere. We—in the form of our technical weaknesses—were our only obstacle. Twitter was unstoppable.
There were only twelve of us goofing around in Twitter’s offices on South Park then. I was living in Berkeley and taking the subway home every day. At seven o’clock one evening, I entered the BART station, where I would hop on a train to head under the San Francisco Bay to my house. Just as I boarded the train, I heard some people muttering something about an earthquake.
Whoa! Someone was saying, “Earthquake!” and I was about to go in a giant tube under the bay? That didn’t seem like the safest place to be during or just after an earthquake. Should I dart off the train before the doors close? I looked around to see if anyone was panicking. It was hard to say. Commuters move around a lot, in all different directions. Was it panic or was it rush hour?
Checking my phone, I saw that I had a bunch of Tweets about the earthquake. One read,
Eh, it was only 4.2 on the Richter scale.
Others reported that it was just a mild earthquake.
Oh, I’ll stay then.
Twitter was no longer just an amusement for me, the quirky little app that made me smile. Now it meant the difference between my staying on the train and worrying, or jumping off and being late to get groceries, walk the dog, and see Livy. A small thing—the opinions of a miscellaneous group of people without any authority or expertise in the area of earthquakes. Still, those opinions served a meaningful purpose. Twitter had just saved me a whole bunch of trouble. It was actually making a difference in the way I was living my life.
We didn’t set out to build a tool to help people make decisions about earthquakes. This would be our next lesson, the biggest that Twitter had to offer: even the simplest tools can empower people to do great things.
Twitter was a small concept, but its growth was exponential. And with that growth came something unexpected. We started seeing the true power of a social network to channel humanity.
In April of 2008, James Buck, a Berkeley graduate student, was in Egypt working on a multimedia project about that country’s antigovernment factions. He was following the opposition party, but he was having trouble finding out about their gatherings in time to attend them. Finally, he asked how they were organizing their protests and coordinating the sharing of information. They told him, “We’re using Twitter,” and introduced him to it (which was kind of ironic, considering he was from the Bay Area).
A week later, James made it to the next spontaneous antigovernment protest. Later, when he came to the Twitter offices to tell us about it, he said that police in Egypt tend to have mustaches. It’s an unofficial part of the uniform, like for Major League Baseball players here. He said, “When you see a lot of mustaches, you know something’s going down.”
So he got to the protest, and the mustaches were out in force. James ended up getting arrested with a group of people. For some reason, the police didn’t take his phone away. They just threw him in the back of a car. He was really scared—an American kid in Egypt arrested by Egyptian police—and had no idea what to expect. Surreptitiously, in the back of the police car, he tweeted a single word:
Arrested.
His friends back home knew where he was and what he was up to, and they knew he wasn’t joking. He could be in serious trouble. They contacted the dean of Berkeley, who arranged for a lawyer in Egypt to help James get out of jail. His next Tweet was again one word:
Freed.
This was good for James, and—now that the concern had passed—a great story for us. We at Twitter, and anyone else who heard the story in the news, could instantly envision infinite scenarios where Twitter could be a lifeline. I was particularly prone to fantasizing about Twitter user stories.
• There’s an earthquake. You’re trapped under some rubble. Your phone battery is running low. You can text one single friend, or you can tweet a hundred people. Which are you going to do?
• A farmer in India with a crappy phone posts a Tweet asking what a certain grain is trading for at the market fifty miles from his home. The answer is double what he was planning to charge. This changes his life and the life of his family for a year.
• Twitter could be a part of the news, complementary to the Bloomberg News feed. If Bloomberg got three Tweets about something significant from unconnected sources, it could investigate.
• Information could be spread within minutes through retweets. Within one minute, millions of people could be made aware of something important.
The more I imagined the possibilities, the more I saw that the whole value of Twitter was in the way people used it. As a company, instead of talking about how great our technology was (which was tricky to defend, what with the Fail Whale and all), we simply started celebrating the amazing things people were doing with it. It was an odd reversal. Usually companies write press releases about the great stuff they’re doing and try to drum up news and interest about it. But we couldn’t possibly scour all the Tweets that passed through the system. Instead of telling newspapers what to write about us, we used them to find out the latest lives Twitter had changed, or even saved.
It wasn’t about Twitter being brave; it was about brave people doing brave things. But Twitter was a good, trendy hook for reporters. We built a billion-dollar brand because we were lumped in with an ongoing series of incredible human gestures.
We were consistently surprised by the adoption of our service. In short order, all of Congress was on Twitter. What? And I never thought celebrities would want to use Twitter. The whole point of being a celebrity is that the public has limited access to you. They have to wait to see you in a movie. Why would a star want to dilute his exposure by sharing his everyday life? What I didn’t factor in was that celebrities liked circumventing the agents and studios. Twitter was a way they could finally connect directly with fans. I should have known this: just as I had realized that humanizing Twitter would make people like our company, the celebrities wanted to be seen as human, too.
A year after we officially launched Twitter Inc., our office was having startup pains. One problem we had was with the international carriers. In the United States, we’d worked out deals with most of the phone companies. With our short code, 40404, the Tweets people sent were basically free. But in Europe and Canada, we were still paying the bills for every Tweet that went through. One month our bill was six figures! The international carriers hadn’t agreed to make the Tweets free.
Our international system was so jury-rigged that it was running from a single laptop. There was a handwritten sign above it reading DO NOT UNPLUG. The sickeningly large bill was my breaking point. When it arrived, I walked over to the laptop and pulled the plug. I unplugged international Twitter. Then I posted to the Twitter blog, essentially saying, “We just turned off all international because it’s too expensive.” I figured if enough people cared, the carriers would call us to make a deal. Eventually that happened.
The graph of our growth in 2008 looks very steep, and it felt steep to us. But if you look at it in the context of the years that followed, it seems flat—so dramatic was our growth. We weren’t yet worried about making money. Our investors understood that something like this had to get very big before it would make money. Evan always said, “There’s no such thing as a service with one hundred million active users that doesn’t make money. Don’t worry.”
Meanwhile, our tech was as troubled as ever, breaking constantly—and the faster we grew, the harder it was to keep the service up and running. The company’s growth was in spite of itself.
Our popularity lit a fire under the boa
rd of directors. Like the rest of us, they wanted Twitter to work. Jack, our CEO, was an engineer. He’d never run a company before. Someone with leadership experience needed to take the reins. So they decided to remove Jack as CEO and put Evan in his place. Needless to say, this caused some bad blood.
When they told me they were going to let Jack go, I pleaded with the board to allow him to stay on for another year to prove himself, but three months later, in October 2008, they yanked him without informing me. I found this out on a Wednesday morning when Evan asked me to meet him at his apartment, two blocks from our office, in half an hour. When I arrived, I found that Ev had also assembled Jason Goldman; our chief technical officer, Greg Pass; and our chief scientist, Abdur Chowdhury. Greg and Abdur had joined Twitter with our July 2008 acquisition of Summize, which gave us the technology to let people search public Tweets. The four of us were probably the last top-level people to hear the news.
We walked to Ev’s place. There, Ev said, “The board has decided to remove Jack and replace him with me as CEO.” There was a brief moment of silence.
Greg said, “Wow.”
I said, “Where’s Jack? Does anyone know where he is now?” Wherever Jack was, I was sure he wasn’t feeling great. He’d just been kicked out of his own company.
Jack had been getting his marching orders from the board at the same time as Evan told us what was happening. I immediately texted Jack, and he and I met up for lunch right after I left Ev’s place. Jack was dejected. He would later describe feeling like he’d been punched in the stomach. I suggested that he break the news to the rest of the team, giving a classy speech wherein he praised the board’s decision, told the team that he was taking a higher-level backseat position as chairman of the board, and showed confidence in the company’s future success.