by Biz Stone
OUR COWORKERS ARE SMART AND THEY HAVE GOOD INTENTIONS.
This is the fifth assumption I presented to our employees at orientation. I made up an example: Imagine there’s a guy named Scott in Marketing who lays out a plan for a product you’re developing. He says it will take three months to execute. Three months later, the product is ready to launch, and Scott comes forward with a different, scaled-back plan. It’s not as good as the one he presented to you. Instead of assuming that Scott is lazy or a stupid jackass, why not go up to him and introduce yourself? Hi, I’m Biz. How can I help?
You don’t know how it all unfolded. There were certain turns in the road, decisions that had to be made. You went through the same process with the product you developed. It was supposed to have features w, x, and y, but now it has x and z. You had to pare it down, but you’re still proud of it. You don’t want Scott to think you’re an idiot, either. In big, unwieldy companies, everyone starts looking like an idiot at some point.
The unknown is scary. That’s why a caveman would rather not walk into a pitch-black cave. Who knows what might lie ahead? He opts to throw his spear in first, or to bolt. In a business scenario, this fear manifests itself in the assumption that your colleague is doing it wrong. But instead of throwing a spear, you assume he’s the enemy. Communication is equivalent to flicking on the anachronistic lights in that pitch-black cave. This is especially true when you’re the CEO. If investors and board members don’t hear from you, they get worried that you’re doing a bad job. And they’re not going to come down to the offices to design a new product. The only power they have at their disposal is to fire the person in charge.
As Twitter grew, we had to go on faith, assuming that our coworkers, who had all gone through a careful hiring process, were competent and driven. Maybe Scott is a jackass—hey, it happens—but that shouldn’t be the assumption. Imagine if everyone operated with a level of shared confidence. Maybe we would live in an environment of overinflated optimism, but people shine when you give them the benefit of the doubt.
WE CAN BUILD A BUSINESS, CHANGE THE WORLD, AND HAVE FUN.
It may sound like a lofty goal, but I want to redefine capitalism. What better place to start than in my own company? Traditionally, companies are driven by financial success. But I want the new definition to include making a positive impact on the world—and loving your work. I want to set a higher bar for success. If any one of these three tenets is missing, then you shouldn’t be considered successful by your own terms or those of society. I told every incoming employee, “Here’s a new bar. Let’s reach for it.”
Evan and I were now running an incredibly successful company. We could have sent the new employees who joined Twitter to Human Resources and called it a day. Or we could have said, “Welcome to the amazing world of Twitter. We’re awesome. Good luck.” We had a different approach. The company culture was introduced to our newest employees as one in which we listened to one another and the people using our system. New employees saw that we cared about the approach they took not just to their work, but to one another. They realized that we weren’t all about the bottom line. Not only did our new employees have an introduction to what the company was about, but they also learned something about their leaders. We were levelheaded. We had theories about not being arrogant and selfish. We weren’t jerks. These things matter. The whole of this orientation was greater than the sum of its parts.
When I was little I always dreamed that I could fly. Later, that sensation evolved into believing I could one day do something extraordinary, but I had no idea what that might be, and I never seemed to be on the right path. Then, in early 2009, I was invited to be a guest representing Twitter on The Colbert Report. If there was any reliable way of tracking when I’d made it, this was it. The producers of a TV show that I really liked wanted me to come on the show and talk about what I was doing. As far as I was concerned, that invitation meant I’d accomplished something extraordinary. Why else would Stephen Colbert want to talk to me? It was a big moment. Twitter had officially made it over the startup hurdle, and I was flying. Now that Twitter was huge, I wanted to make sure we used our powers for good. That instinct felt like it’d always been with me, but there are a few early moments that I know contributed to my growing sense of how I wanted to be in the world.
First, in high school, I remember a girl asking me if I liked a painting she’d made. I said, “No, I don’t like it.” She was crushed. What kind of stupid answer was that? I’d upset her. We all have moments like this in our childhoods—moments that nobody else involved would remember, but when a light bulb goes off and your perspective is forever shifted. That moment, when I hurt my amateur artist classmate’s feelings, I matured into someone with empathy. I didn’t want to walk around upsetting people. I wanted to be a good guy.
Not long after that exchange, I watched an old Jimmy Stewart movie called Harvey. In it, Jimmy Stewart befriends a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit. People think he’s gone mad, but in the face of their accusations and ridicule, he reveals himself to be persistently good-natured and kind. Again I asked myself, Am I nice to everyone? Shouldn’t I be? I wasn’t a monster before, but Harvey inspired me to be actively nice. To be a good guy to everyone. It seemed like a really fine idea, and as I started putting it into practice, I found that I liked it. This may sound a little sociopathic—I chose to be nice because it worked for me—but don’t we all evolve based on how we interact with the world? It was very basic. I tried out kindness, and it felt right.
Then there was my father. On Sundays, Dad had visiting privileges with me and my sister, Mandy. He’d pick us up at noon, take us to Papa Gino’s for lunch, then to mini-golf or a movie. It was an innocuous enough schedule, but that was the toughest day of my week. My father had been out of the picture since I was four, so I’d never had a chance to form a real connection with him. Sundays, therefore, were an anxious time. When I was sixteen, it finally occurred to me that I could refuse to go. If I could not do homework, then I could also not see my father. From then on I elected to play Nintendo with my friend Mark instead. But if I learned anything from those painful Sundays, it was this: my dad wasn’t an ideal parent, but I didn’t waste time resenting him or blaming myself. I can’t say I thought it through; I just turned my attention in a different direction. Given that the world was an imperfect place, I resolved to try to make it as nice as I could. I wanted to find the good—not just to spin things in a positive way (though I’m prone to that, too), but to do my part to make the world a better place.
The Colbert Report wasn’t just a sign that I’d made it. The experience also managed to open my eyes to the ripple effect of altruism through a seemingly small gesture: a twenty-five-dollar gift card.
Livy and I really love The Colbert Report, and we had a couple of friends who worked at the wild animal hospital with Livy who were also huge fans. We asked and got permission for them to come with us to New York and join us at the taping of the show.
Before I went on the air, Livy and I waited with our friends in the green room. A half hour or so before showtime, Colbert stopped by. He welcomed us warmly and explained to me, “On my show I play a character, and that character is, for lack of a better word, a jackass.”
I said, “I know! We love the show!”
He said, “Plenty of people don’t know, and sometimes they get upset.”
I introduced Livy and her friends, and told Colbert about the wild animal ER where they worked.
Colbert asked about their work and talked to them about some of his wildlife activism: a leatherback sea turtle he’d endorsed, to bring attention to sea turtle endangerment, and an eagle he’d helped rehabilitate. I was impressed. Instead of projecting I’m Stephen Colbert and I have my own TV show, he showed an interest in what our friends did and took the time to have a genuine conversation about it.
After the show, Livy and I were given a gift basket. Its contents were probably similar to what lots of TV shows hand out: a Colbert hat
, a T-shirt, a bottle of water. That sort of thing. But there was one small item in the basket that would have a huge effect on me. It was a twenty-five-dollar gift card to DonorsChoose.org.
DonorsChoose.org is a uniquely structured online charity that benefits schools. Public school teachers across America post requests on the site for materials they need for their classrooms. You can contribute to a project that interests you, or a school in your neighborhood, or the classroom of a teacher who sounds amazing or in great need. The money you give is put toward the exact materials the teacher has requested and priced.
Livia and I gave our friends the hat and the T-shirt, but we took the DonorsChoose.org card home with us. Back in Berkeley, we went on the website together. We found a second-grade class that needed copies of Charlotte’s Web, and we donated the number the teacher said she needed. It was so cool.
Livia and I were happy to help, but the best part came a few weeks later, when we got mind-blowingly cute thank-you notes from every kid in the class.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Most of us are born with this gift, but not all of us have learned how to access it readily or how to use it in productive and meaningful ways. Here was a child thanking me in her own tentative words and determined hand. What better way to trigger genuine empathy than through a charity that creates a direct connection between the givers and the recipients?
When I was a kid and I walked past a bell-ringing Salvation Army Santa on my way into the supermarket, I’d always drop some loose change into his bucket. But Santa’s pail was a black hole. I never had the slightest idea where my quarters went, or whether they actually made a difference. And certainly nobody was ever going to come up to me and say, “Hey, thanks for the quarter. That turned out to be the last quarter we needed. World hunger: solved.” There was no expectation of thanks, success, or even a sense of the results of the effort. But that was okay. I wasn’t looking for feedback or thank-yous. I just saw giving to others as part of being a person.
With DonorsChoose.org, that feeling of blindly donating disappeared. My gift had immediate results, the recipients shared their gratitude, and this made me want to give more. It was a brilliant feedback loop. Empathy requires more imagination than when you throw a coin into a pot. When you get a heartfelt letter from a kid who has experienced the friendship of Charlotte and Wilbur for the first time—well, that child springs to life. You see the need, and the path to filling it. Livy and I started regularly donating to DonorsChoose.org. We didn’t have much money yet—we were only giving fifty dollars at a time—but we were really into it. On any given night, you can spend your evening watching a sitcom or two, or you and your spouse can help some kids. Which feels better?
From DonorsChoose.org, I discovered the aforementioned powerful feedback loop of altruism, but there was another, perhaps even bigger lesson, and it was this: if Stephen Colbert hadn’t given me that twenty-five-dollar gift card, I wouldn’t have helped those children. It didn’t change the world, but it helped a few teachers do the projects they wanted to do. And I like to think that each of those kids who read Charlotte’s Web gained something from the book that will last forever and have a reverberating effect. The kids also had the experience of receiving a gift from a stranger. So now it’s not just me that Stephen reached. His gift reached the teacher, those kids, and the people that their positive experience and intellectual growth will touch. And I’m just one of the guests on Colbert’s show who received a gift card to DonorsChoose.org. If every one of the recipients—or even a fraction of us—had a similar experience, think of the broad reach of that simple gesture!
At the Chirp Conference, we gave DonorsChoose.org gift cards to all attendees—hundreds, if not thousands, of people got twenty-five dollars to give toward a project on the site, and, according to Charles Best, the charity’s founder and CEO, an unusually high number of those people continued to support the project.
Stephen’s small act of kindness—his donation in the form of that twenty-five-dollar gift card to each guest on his show—had exponential results. I call this the compound interest of altruism.
Many of us know the value of compound interest: If you have a savings account where the interest you earn gets added to your savings every month, then the next month the interest you earn will be a little bit higher. Repeat that month after month, and your wealth grows at a steep incline. For example, imagine that when you turned twenty you put one hundred dollars in a savings account with an annual interest rate of 0.64 percent compounded monthly. If you continued to put a hundred dollars in every month until you were forty years old, then you’d have $25,724. (Meanwhile, credit cards have average annual interest rates of 15 percent! That’s over twenty-three times the interest on your savings account. If you run a hundred-dollar credit card debt for twenty years—adding that same hundred dollars every month and never making payments—you’ll owe $153,567 when you’re forty!)
This phenomenon is not unique to savings accounts or even money. Stephen’s gift card inspired me and Livia to give at the level we could afford at the time.
And then another thing happened. Twitter grew, my financial situation changed, and Livia and I started giving a lot more money to DonorsChoose.org. Charles Best asked to meet us. I helped sketch out a redesign of their website and started otherwise advising him. My relationship with the charity grew and became more personal. Eventually I became a major donor, adviser, and active participant in DonorsChoose.org.
All of this from a twenty-five-dollar gift card.
It’s hard to give money when you have very little. Believe me, I spent many years in debt and I know intimately how it feels to worry about every single dollar. But people generally go about philanthropy the wrong way. They think you need to wait until you’re comfortable—i.e., rich—to give. We all define financial success differently, but I can tell you that for almost anyone at any income level, being rich exists only in the future.
Waiting to give is a mistake. It doesn’t have to be about money. If you get involved early—now—the value of your gift is compounded over time. This is true in two ways. First, setting the habit of thinking of others early, before you have much to give, means that intention matures along with you. As your fortune increases, so does your inclination to give. Second, and perhaps more important, your gifts have a ripple effect, just like Stephen Colbert’s gift cards. Over the next two decades, the amount of good you will have done will be exponentially greater than if you’d waited until you were forty or fifty years old to write a check.
It’s not all about money. You can give time instead of cash. Or spread the word the way Colbert did. Or give small amounts that you can afford.
The smallest, earliest gifts forever alter your trajectory for doing good. This is what I mean by the compound interest of altruism. Start early to maximize the compound interest in your efforts.
I wasn’t out of debt until 2010. Twitter hadn’t yet gone public, but with a successful startup, there are eventually opportunities to sell shares privately to investors. It’s an opportunity to take real money out of the theoretical money. I still believed in Twitter, and I certainly didn’t sell all my shares, but it didn’t make sense to have 100 percent of my money invested in one company. Anyone involved in a startup should take the same opportunity.
So I took money off the table. I distinctly remember the day we closed the deal. The guy who was, at the time, my business manager sent me an email saying, “We just got the wire.” It was for a whole big pile of money. More money than I had ever dreamed of.
I responded, “Woot. Thanks, Biz.”
He wrote back, “Woot? You’re set for life and that’s your response?”
Then I went downstairs to Livy and joked, “Okay, we’re now officially rich white people who live in Marin.”
Nothing really changed, except that I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. I’d grown up poor, and I’d spent almost my entire adult life in debt. Livy’s paren
ts were freelance artists living from hand to mouth. Neither of us had been on the streets, but we were never financially secure. We had grown somewhat comfortable being uncomfortable. It seemed like only yesterday that Livy and I were pouring coins from a coffee can into a Coinstar machine and Livy was clapping because we hit one hundred dollars.
The best thing I can say about having enough money after being in debt is that money is an immune system. When you’re in debt—and you have to pick which bills to pay and which to default on every month, for years—you’re always at the edge. Every little expense is bone on bone. Every choice can easily become an argument between you and your spouse.
If you have enough money—you don’t have to be rich, but if you have enough to meet your needs, pay your bills, and put a little in savings—the constant anxiety of just getting by disappears. The persistent worry you were carrying fades. The biggest effect money has had on me is that now, every day, I’m grateful for the relief from that anxiety.
The other thing I’ll say about money is that having a lot of it amplifies who you are. I have found this to be almost universally true. If you’re a nice person, and then you get money, you become a wonderful philanthropist. But if you’re an asshole, with lots of money you can afford to be more of an asshole: “Why isn’t my soda at sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit?” You choose who you are no matter what, but I have to say that the anxiety of making ends meet gives you a bit of a pass. When you’re rich, you have no excuse.
There’s another key aspect of altruism that is ignored when we evaluate the option to give: the mistake people make assuming that altruism is a one-way street. We forget the value of helping others. We are all in this world together. When we help others, we also help ourselves.
The simplest everyday example of this is my veganism. Although I’m a vegan because I care how animals are treated, for me being a vegan isn’t about giving something up. Health benefits aside, I gain something from knowing that I’ve made that choice and am sticking to it. Doing good isn’t a sacrifice.