by Biz Stone
Dick texted back, “Ha ha. Seriously?” or something like that.
Ev called me right after. He said, “I was joking around about Dick taking over from me as CEO, but I actually think we could hire him. He’s talking about moving to California, and he’s strong where I’m weak. This could be amazing.” So we hired Dick as COO in September 2009.
Evan, Jack, and I had started Twitter together. We were a team. I hoped we’d always be a team. I didn’t see this coming.
I said, “Okay, Jack, let me see what I can do. Getting home from Japan by tomorrow is going to be a little tricky.”
Jack said, “Get a private jet if you have to. We need you here. The company will pay.”
Upset, I called Jason Goldman. He, too, had just heard the news. We talked about what, if anything, we could do to make this better for Evan. But the firing was supposed to be announced the very next day. We needed to buy time.
I said, “What if I can’t make it back by Friday? Can we make the case that it will look bad for the company if they fire Ev while I’m in Japan?”
Jason thought it was possible that the board would delay the news to wait for me. If I flew back on Saturday, we would at least have the weekend to strategize.
Then I called Jack back. “Please tell the board that I can’t find any planes,” I told him. “They’re all booked. If they have the meeting without me, it’s going to look bad. Plus I’m supposed to interview a quadriplegic. Can you see if we can do it on Monday?”
Jack said, “Okay. I’ll let everyone know.”
Then I had to break the bad news to Livia. Kyoto would have to wait until the next time we flew halfway around the world. She’d spent three days hanging out in a hotel room only to fly straight back to San Francisco.
On Friday I did the interview with the quadriplegic man; then Livia and I flew home. On the plane, I had time to think about what was happening. It wasn’t hard to guess the reasons for Ev’s firing. I remembered being in a meeting, reviewing our stats, and noticing that on one random Wednesday we had had a banner day. A million new users had signed up, more than twice our daily average of around three hundred thousand. I asked, “What happened on Wednesday?” The answer was that the service was up and running for a contiguous twenty-four hours. It was that simple. If Twitter hadn’t been consistently broken, we’d have had a million new users every day. We were holding up our own success. It was our company; if it ran into a wall it would be because we were driving.
Maybe the board thought that by now we should have been technically stable. We should have been growing faster. We should have had monetizing engineers in place. It was taking forever to find a VP of engineering.
Evan was getting dinged for not making progress quickly enough.
I arrived home on Saturday and called two meetings for Sunday in the Twitter offices.
First Evan, Jason, and I met. Evan was stressed out yet still incredulous. He kept covering his face, then opening his hands again to say, “What the hell? I don’t believe this!” This was the guy who’d given me my big break. For a long time we’d been collaborators, with similarly aligned goals. We’d built this company together. And he was my friend. It was very hard to process what was happening.
It’s a rare founder who makes a successful transition to CEO of a huge company. There are arguments on both sides. Some say founders are founders. They’re best at starting companies, and CEOs are best at running them. Others argue that it’s best to keep the founder as CEO, find out what support he needs, and give that to him.
Our first CEO, Jack, had a background as a programmer. Evan was a programmer/CEO who had sold Blogger before he had a chance to turn it into a business. Neither truly had career CEO experience. It’s fine to learn on the job, but as soon as billions are at stake, people get antsy. You can’t blame the board for saying, “This company is growing really fast, and there’s nobody’s in charge who’s done this before.”
Evan and Jack are both incredibly talented people. If I had to say what both of them lacked, fundamentally, it was that they weren’t communicating enough. At least half the job of CEO is communication—because of human nature. People fear what they don’t know. If the board wasn’t hearing that things were going well, they assumed that things must be going badly.
Dick Costolo had started several companies. He was older, and he was an experienced CEO. Emotions aside, he was a reasonable choice for the position.
But Ev wasn’t being demoted. He was being fired. He was going to be stripped of his security badge and escorted out of the building! This seemed completely unjust to me. It was so extreme. It would look as if Evan had done something terribly inappropriate, when he hadn’t. They may have had issues with his leadership, but there was no reason to give his removal this urgency. People would assume the worst.
The three of us sat in the conference room. I said, “I have an idea. What if the board doesn’t fire you?”
Evan, understated as always, said, “Yeah, go on.”
We all knew that he was out as CEO. When the board of directors votes on a decision like that, it’s immutable. As the Borgs of Star Trek say, “Resistance is futile.”
I said, “Why don’t you talk to Dick?” Dick Costolo was our friend before we first asked him to be an angel investor and later hired him. He and Evan were good buddies. They respected each other’s work, and they often hung out together—sometimes they even met up in Vegas. Maybe Dick could help soften this blow.
I continued: “Tell Dick you will support him not as interim CEO but as the new CEO. Tell him you’ll endorse him, and ask if he’ll name you chief product officer. Then you can run Product, which is what you really like to do anyway. If you’re not happy running Product, you can quit later, on your own terms.”
If Evan simply moved positions within the company, it wouldn’t be seen as a dramatic ouster. Then, if he later departed from the position of chief product officer, so what?
Ev was slightly comforted by this plan, but pulling it off was going to take some finessing.
Evan went into a conference room with Dick to discuss the plan we’d come up with. Outside the room, we could hear a lot of “no fucking ways” coming through the door. Ev came out looking very morose. With a cracking voice, he said, “I need to get some air,” and left.
Now it was my turn to try. I went into the room with Dick, closed the door, and said, “What just happened?”
Dick said, “Evan wants to fucking horse-trade with me. I’m not getting the role of CEO through some kind of fucking deal.”
I said, “Why not?”
He said, “I won’t do it. I’m very uncomfortable with this plan. I won’t do it.”
I said, “That’s disappointing. Ev’s a good product guy. You want him on your team, don’t you?”
He said, “Of course I do, but this is the board’s decision.”
I could see that Dick wasn’t going to agree.
We all joined up again in the meeting room—Dick, Jason Goldman, Amac, Ev, and some of our communications people. The idea now was to come up with the communication strategy for Ev’s departure. We had tried our plan, and it had failed.
But before we could get into it, I couldn’t hold back. I thought of all the work that Evan and I had put into Twitter. I owed my success and my career to Evan, and I still felt I had much to learn from him. I thought about how few people there were in the world who could put up with me and find value in what I did the way Evan could. I honestly felt he was a good leader and that it’s usually best if the CEO of a company is also its founder. He couldn’t leave like this. It wasn’t fair. Nobody was thinking about Evan as a person and what this would do to him and his career. It was killing me.
I said to Dick, “Wait a minute. I heard you, but for the sake of everyone here, I want to confirm this. You don’t want to keep Evan on as chief product officer, with his full endorsement of you not as interim CEO but as actual CEO, and your reason for this is that you’re uncomfortable.
Is that correct?”
I had everyone’s attention. As I thought he would, Dick confirmed what I had said: “Yes, it makes me uncomfortable.”
Uncomfortable. It was such a weak emotion in contrast to what Evan was going through.
“How about this?” I said. “How about you be a little fucking uncomfortable for your friend. For your fucking friend. A little uncomfortable.”
There was a long, silent moment. Then Dick said, “All right, I’ll fucking do it.”
There was more back-and-forth, Dick spoke to the board, and eventually everyone agreed. It was settled. So Dick ultimately came through for Evan. I kind of shamed him into it, which didn’t feel good, but I felt I’d accomplished a small victory for my friend. Ev could walk away from Twitter on his own terms. He more than deserved that.
Beyond what it meant for Evan, the change in management was a sign for me. My perhaps overly happy-go-lucky optimism and change-the-world idealism was out of place in a company where the leadership was in flux and my friends were in conflict. I didn’t like to force an issue, and the fact that I had to in that case meant we weren’t all seeing eye to eye.
All kinds of crazy stuff had happened, and continued to happen. Jack had been yanked from CEO to be replaced by Evan. Two years later Evan was booted; he stayed as chief product officer for six months, three of which he was on leave, and then quietly left. A couple of weeks after the dust settled on Evan’s departure, Jason Goldman got his own marching orders. Relationships were destroyed. Jack and Ev were no longer friends. Jason Goldman and Dick Costolo weren’t too friendly, either. Even my friendship with Jack was strained for a bit, though never broken. It was a trying time. During those turbulent days, I remember sitting in a board meeting and thinking to myself, Why is all this happening? And then the answer dawned on me. Oh. Because billions of dollars are now involved.
It’s a little abnormal to have three CEOs in three years, but the turbulence at Twitter was the reality of what happens when a startup is successful. The stakes are higher. The board of directors was made up mostly of investors. They had no ability to redesign the product or write code to fix a problem. The power they had was to reorganize the leadership.
The changes looked like power plays. They looked calculated from some perspectives, but I don’t believe anybody was being malicious. If you were to talk to any of the people involved, they’d say they were doing what they thought was best for the company. Our success meant the stakes were higher now. People became opinionated. It provoked action, and there were casualties.
Ev was gone. Jack was gone. Jason was gone. All were off exploring new projects and opportunities. I started to get restless. Think of the effect of surface area on a melting ice cube. If you want the ice to melt faster, you break it up to expose a greater surface area to the warmer air than would be exposed if you left the ice in a solid block. The same is true if you’re trying to effect more positive change. Theoretically you should start multiple successful companies and then leave them to smart people to run. Some would argue that it makes the most sense to pick one and do it really well, but for my purposes (spreading = good), I thought the surface area approach made the most sense. Maybe it was time for me to find my next project.
I had announced that I was leaving and had one foot out the door in 2011 when Amac, our general counsel, pulled me aside. Amac knew how hard I’d worked in the past five years to establish that Twitter was a neutral force in the world. The company might be involved in controversy, but we were not opinionated. We didn’t take sides. It was our software, but their problem. The only, very narrow rules we had for kicking people off the service were directly derived from actual laws.
Now Amac said, “I know how sensitive you are about separating Twitter and the government . . .” Then he told me that Twitter was planning to host a presidential town hall meeting. People on Twitter would be able to ask Obama questions. There would be a separate website for it, and a moderator.
After a bit of thought, I said, “That’s fine. It’s similar to the one-off micro-websites we did for the Super Bowl, the 2008 election, and other events. The only thing is the moderator shouldn’t be someone from Twitter. We can’t have a Twitter employee standing next to the president. It should be a newsperson, an anchor, or a pundit. If we don’t participate, then we’re just the tool. They could be using the telephone.”
Amac agreed, and everything was set—or so I thought.
June 28, 2011, was my last official day at Twitter. The next day, Twitter’s government and politics guy at the time sent out a company-wide email, “At 8 a.m. PDT tomorrow, the White House will be announcing its first-ever ‘Twitter town hall’ with President Obama. The event is scheduled for next Wednesday, July 6, at 11 a.m. PDT and will be streamed live from the East Room of the White House. Jack Dorsey will be the moderator.” (One of Dick Costolo’s first decisions as CEO had been to bring Jack back into the leadership fold of the company in a very public way, though soon Jack’s focus seemed to shift back to Square.) I read this email first thing in the morning, in bed, on my phone. I was horrified. I imagined Jack standing next to the president as if to say, “Not only does Twitter love the U.S. government, but we love Obama!” This was exactly what I’d worked so hard to avoid.
Without pausing for reflection, I hit Reply All and wrote:
When Amac first explained this to me he said that nobody from Twitter would be the moderator specifically to highlight the fact that we are a neutral technology. I very strongly disagree with anyone from Twitter being involved as the moderator especially a founder.
This is very wrong and I’ve made my case many times. Please work harder to get a proper moderator from a well-respected news organization. Not our founder in charge of product. This goes against three years of work to stay out of the narrative and remain neutral.
Amac, what happened? This is the complete opposite of what you pitched me and it was the one thing I said to avoid with which you wholeheartedly agreed. The only thing I said to avoid. Please, please, please don’t do it this way. We should not get involved in this manner.
Biz
To be fair to Amac, I am not sure who made the decision to change what he and I agreed upon—but I was angry. During the Arab Spring it had been so hard to keep us neutral—to diplomatically dodge all those land mines. All those years of work were going to be undone in one day. Replies to my impassioned email immediately came in, many in support of my statement, some asking me if I was aware that I’d sent my criticism to the entire company. Damn, yes.
I was still technically an adviser to Twitter, but it wasn’t my call. They had Jack go ahead with the town hall. And that was my last all-company email.
Ultimately, a decision like the choice of the town hall moderator comes down to a question of PR versus philosophy. The Twitter I helped build had an idealistic long-term vision. We were in the business of uniting humanity. In fact, I hired a corporate social responsibility person several years before I hired a sales person. The highest value I saw in Twitter was its ability to transmit information immediately and to help people react quickly and together in critical times or sometimes just for fun. If there was an earthquake, a revolution, a triumph, a party—what could Twitter do? In my view, Twitter didn’t take sides. We stayed out of controversy. This neutrality allowed the service to work across cultures and religions, and to be truly democratic.
My job had always been to say what the company did and why. I was the idealist. I wasn’t politically motivated, and I wasn’t trying to make anyone look bad or good. It was my duty to sound the alarm about the town hall decision and anything else that I thought might jeopardize our mission, even if it was unpleasant. I like to think that I built a brand that is synonymous with freedom of speech and the importance of the democratization of information.
But it was Dick’s company to run. I believed that doing good in the world was the key to Twitter’s success. I wanted to redefine capitalism. By signing up for Twitter you were
becoming part of something good. Dick had to lead a company with that kind of soul into a profitable business. No small task.
From the beginning, I had built a moral compass and righteous soul into the company. I had instilled in the company the spirit of doing well by doing good. I had done all I could personally in that regard. One of the last projects I had a say in was moving Twitter to new offices in San Francisco’s Mid-Market area. At the time, this was a rundown part of the city where our presence could make a difference. Indeed, after Twitter moved, other companies soon followed suit, starting the revitalization of the neighborhood.
Now it was up to Dick to grow the business and to keep that spirit alive. It was up to me to hope that our early investment in altruism would grow along with the company.
Here I was fighting little skirmishes. That wasn’t how I wanted to spend my time. I trusted that, overall, Dick and the company had the right instincts. Business was thriving, and the spiritual backbone was in place. Twitter was set up for success. It was time for me to do a whole other thing. They had this.
At Blogger, my colleagues and I developed a talking point that summed up our beliefs: “The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact.” We had taken that with us to Twitter. In fact, that aphorism became a tacit, qualitative initiative. We could have said our mission at Twitter was “To increase the open exchange of information for positive global impact.” After six years, hundreds of millions of active users, and billions of Tweets every day, we could have declared our mission accomplished.
When I left, Twitter was not just successful. It was also the empathetic company I wanted it to be. Instead of moving down to Mountain View like many big tech companies, they’d made the decision to move into a derelict neighborhood in the center of San Francisco. Dick and the leadership formed a special team to engage actively with the community and figure out how Twitter could best help improve it. In my final days at the company, they were completing that agreement. In the fall of 2010, only six months after releasing its first advertising product, the company launched Twitter Ads for Good. Through that program, nonprofit organizations apply to receive pro bono promoted Tweets and accounts.