Things A Little Bird Told Me

by Biz Stone

  Twitter was doing good, and it would keep doing good without me.

  It was time for me to figure out what I wanted to do next. While I did so, I teamed up with Evan and Jason to noodle with no particular goal in mind. Reviving our old company name, the Obvious Corporation, we did some investing in startups. We talked about ideas for new companies. We hired an executive coach, who analyzed our strengths and weaknesses—how we could expand our abilities, double-down on things we were good at, and strengthen our weaknesses. Jason and I helped Evan start a publishing platform called Medium. Some entrepreneurs might take the time between startups to get an MBA or be an entrepreneur-in-residence. Instead, I did Obvious with those guys.

  This interlude gave me time to distill some of the notions and theories I’d been working on over the years. We took a high-altitude, long-term view of what we, as entrepreneurs, were capable of doing in our city, in our country, and in our world. People are proponents of change; tools are helpful. We didn’t know what we’d build, but we shared the desire to build systems that would help people work together to make the worlda better place.

  I ruminated on all the principles I’d been implementing at Twitter: empathy, altruism, humanity. Through DonorsChoose.org, Product(RED), and my involvement with other charities, I had realized that helping other people was fulfilling. It gave my life meaning. Above all, I had learned through Livia’s daily example. In her work at WildCare, she’d been bucked in the stomach by a deer, sprayed directly in the eye by a skunk, taloned in the face by an owl, and she’d given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a squirrel. Through it all, and every day since, I’d watched her glow with empathy and selflessness. Being around her all the time, I can’t help but soak that up. I might be a decent guy, but it’s because I’m deeply influenced by her.

  This realization led me to define my life’s work. I knew what I wanted my work, my direction, and my legacy to be. I decided to dedicate my life to helping people. But it had to be via something I was good at.

  Our approach to work, the projects we select, and the little things we do each day all add up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts. If philanthropy or charity or goodness—call it what you will—is woven into the fabric of a business, then you automatically do good as you make your way. I wanted to redefine the success metrics of capitalism according to the definition I’d been developing at Twitter. First, having meaningful, positive impact. Second, truly loving our work. Third, generating strong revenues. This is how corporations can best achieve compound impact in the world. We can do well simply by doing good. It is possible for us to work toward creating a healthier planet, a smarter world, even better humans.

  I wanted my next project to manifest all that I believe.

  My son, Jake, was born in the early hours of November 21, 2011. Later that morning, when Livy was comfortable in the recovery room, she lifted me from my helpless, though elated state by making a request.

  “Go out,” she said, “and please get me a decaf soy latte and fruit.”

  It had been a sleepless night. I was overtired (if a husband is allowed to say that the day after his wife gives birth) yet buzzing with energy. Reciting the instructions in my head so I got the order right, I jumped into Livy’s Subaru Outback. Fruit, soy latte, fruit, soy latte, fruit . . .

  Near the Marin General Hospital is a plaza with a Starbucks. I turned into the parking lot behind a brand-new black Prius. Suddenly, the Prius stopped. There were five empty spaces up ahead, but the driver was waiting for someone with a grocery cart to unload one million bags into her car. You gotta be kidding me.

  Screw it, I thought, and pulled around the left side of the Prius. But I neglected to factor in the size of Livy’s Subaru. I’m used to driving my little car, a Mini. The hulking Subaru didn’t fit between the Prius and the line of parked cars on my left, and I scraped the side of the Prius.

  So much for a quick jaunt to Starbucks.

  I looked through my passenger-side window into the driver’s-side window of the Prius. An ancient woman was sitting there. She turned to me, looked right into my eyes, and said, “Fuck you, asshole.” I couldn’t hear her, but I had no trouble reading her lips.

  We got out of our cars. The woman was very upset. She continued swearing at me, a lot.

  Trying to calm her, I said, “Everything’s going to be okay. This is just a scratch. The cars can easily be fixed. I will pay for it. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to write down my insurance information for you.”

  I wrote down my phone number, my full name, everything I thought she needed. While I was writing, I said, “By the way I’m actually coming from the hospital. My wife just had our first baby. It’s a boy.” I was trying to be extra nice. I’d caused her trouble, but I was going to fix it. I thought a little small talk would help her calm down. “I wish we were meeting under nicer circumstances,” I said. “You seem like a nice person.”

  She said, “Did you say you had a son?”

  An image of Livy sprang to mind, holding the little wrinkled bundle that was Jake. I was a father. I had a son.

  I smiled. “Yeah.”

  She said, “Well, that’s my son’s car you fucked up,” and returned to screaming at me.

  When I got back to the hospital, the nurses asked what had taken so long. I told them I’d crashed the car. They loved that and mocked me for making a rookie father mistake.

  It’s a small moment. A frazzled new father. A cranky old woman. A fixable problem. All day long we make choices that have consequences, and above all the choice that interests me most is how we interact. Do we hear each other? Can we find empathy? What does knowing a little piece of personal information change? If I find out why the old lady is so unhappy—she tells me she recently lost her husband—I can understand why she can’t stop screaming at me for scratching her son’s car. This stranger just became a father; this is a big moment for him. This ancient woman lost her husband of sixty years last year; any inconvenience is the last straw for her. The more connected we are, the more empathy we feel.

  The internet and mobile devices have connected the world like never before. The onset of social media motivated another steep acceleration in connectivity. For almost a decade now, we’ve been “friending,” “following,” “liking,” and in other ways amassing a prodigious network of virtual connections, but without a long-term goal. What’s it all for?

  Connections foster empathy. In the summer of 2008 a woman named Amanda Rose, while sitting down with some friends at a pub in London, had the idea to gather together a bunch of friends using Twitter. She decided to charge for the event and to ask for donations of canned goods, both in support of a local homeless shelter, The Connection. She named it the Harvest Twestival, and—boom!—in a single night she raised a thousand pounds.

  Impressed by what she’d experienced, Amanda expanded her efforts. She said, “Hey, everyone in two hundred cities around the world, let’s all host events and raise some money.” Boom! She raised $264,000 for Charity: Water. She then decided to make a whole thing of it. And when I say “whole thing,” I mean it. Twestival is now a global social media fund-raising initiative, helping communities around the world use social media to create fund-raising events. Talk about compound altruism!

  Twestival and other efforts like it prove that the flocking I observed back in the beginning of Twitter, at South by Southwest, is more than a way for a bunch of nerds to decide which bar to hit. It offers glimpses of what happens when random groups of humanity become one and do something. Back at SXSW, I saw flashes of a utopian future. Little daydreams can come true.

  Imagine that kind of behavior on a six-billion-person scale. What if we weren’t citizens of a particular country or state? What if we were citizens of the world? It’s mind-blowing.

  The creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenbery, envisioned a utopian future in which humanity had eliminated hunger, crime, poverty, and war. Where we humans unite to explore the universe. How are we going to get the
re, or to a reasonable version of it, minus the evil Borg (“Resistance is futile”)?

  Technology is the connective tissue of humanity. Designed right, it can bring out the good in people. It can connect us into one giant, emergent, superintelligent life form. That’s what I saw happening with Twitter.

  Flocking is a triumph of humanity. It can make things happen. Imagine if humanity could cooperate like an emergent life form—we could get things done in a single year that would otherwise take one hundred years to do. Imagine if all the world’s astrophysicists put their egos aside and collaborated on a Mars mission? Or all the environmental scientists worked as one on global warming? Or the world’s best oncologists took on cancer together, one type at a time? Only 114,000 people in the world have thirty million dollars or more in assets. What if they were in a Google group and decided to invest in one thing to change the course of history?

  Then there’s all of us, and together we are more powerful than any one thing. Can you imagine what we could get done?

  These ideas were rattling around in my head when I went for a walk with Ben Finkel. Ben and I have known each other since 2007, when a mutual friend introduced me as a potential adviser to his startup, which Twitter subsequently acquired. Ben and I liked to get coffee, walk around, and talk about ideas. One nice, sunny day in December 2012 we were walking around Yerba Buena Gardens, a park in San Francisco, talking about various things, when a thought popped into my head. It was as if my brain had asked me a question. The question was: If I had to build a search engine today, given today’s technology landscape, what would it look like?

  But not exactly a search engine. I put it in slightly different terms to Ben: “What if someone forced us to build a system that could answer any query you put to it? What if that was our challenge?”

  How does a search engine work? Documents on the internet are hyperlinked. When you ask the search engine a question, it finds you a document that an algorithm has determined is most relevant to that question.

  But now there is nearly one active mobile phone for every person on earth. Practically everyone has a mobile phone.

  I started to answer my own question. “If we had to invent the search engine, we’d do it on mobile. Phones are the hyperlinks of humanity.” My thought was at once simple and obvious, and at the same time exciting to both of us. People were already connected. All those friends and favorites and followers made up a network. A network that rivaled any search engine’s ability to comb through documents with speed and accuracy. There was room to reinvent the whole idea of getting help.

  Ben said, “Oh my God, you’re right.” And he had his own enthusiastic ideas for how this might work.

  Then I said, “We could build a system in which you ask a question. The system will send it out to people in your social networks—maybe two degrees out. If they don’t know the answer, they can forward it. It’s guaranteed that someone knows the answer. It’s six degrees of separation on hyper-speed. We could build a system to answer any query. We just need people to route the questions.”

  This kind of problem solving was something we already saw people trying to do by jury-rigging technology. They set up Yahoo groups; they ask questions on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. But there was no technology that let people answer one another’s questions quickly and elegantly, without other distractions, on a mobile phone—with pictures to boot. Ben and I got really excited. An app that resembled a search engine that could answer any question because it sent it out to people—with real knowledge, real experience. It was better than artificial intelligence—it was actual intelligence. It might be the future of search. People helping people. It sounded likea thing! A startup! That was our walk.

  The next day, I called Ben. “I’m still thinking about this.”

  He said, “So am I.”

  The simplest way to explain Jelly is that it’s a tool for people to help one another.

  It’s not about technology. It’s about people. It’s such a simple concept. Forwarding a question to a friend who might know the answer. People helping other people is the coolest thing in the world. This idea makes use of our already connected society. How could all those friends, followers, and contacts help one another? This was what we’d all been working for: a way for us all to be citizens of the world.

  Ben and I couldn’t shake the idea.

  We decided to name it Jelly because jellyfish have no brains. Instead, they have what’s called a “nerve net.” In the face of a challenge, it takes only one loosely connected neuron out of millions to fire, and suddenly many individual jellies become one and serve as a brain for the group. When the challenge has passed, the jellies go back to floating along, doing their thing.

  Jellies have been around for about seven hundred million years (which is pretty good for something without a brain). But the idea that groups of individuals can accomplish something together that they cannot do alone because they can coordinate instantly via loose connections is a glimpse into the future.

  This is how we envision Jelly working. Only now, in this unprecedented age of mobile connectivity, can a world of individual people instantly react to the questions of others in a way that makes the whole smarter than the sum of its parts. The true promise of a connected society is people helping one another. That’s why we decided to make Jelly.

  I ran the idea for Jelly by some of the people I most respect, secretly hoping they’d say it wasn’t worth my time, because I knew that if I started this, I’d have to give it everything I had. I began with Jack Dorsey.

  “Stop talking,” he said. “It’s uniquely suited to you. It’s all the things you hold dear. You have to do it.”

  I tried it out on three friends I consider brilliant: Jack, Kevin Thau, and Greg Pass. I’d always referred to Kevin as “Twitter’s most beloved employee.” He joined in 2008 to run mobile strategy and wound up leading all our mobile initiatives. Greg Pass was a founder of Summize, and Twitter’s first chief technology officer. All three of my guys were telling me I had to do it. And Ben Finkel wanted to quit Twitter and start it with me. Then Livy and I went to dinner at Kevin Thau’s house. For the third time, he said, “So Jelly. I’m in.”

  I said, “Is that what the kids are saying these days? ‘I’m in’ means you think it’s a good idea?”

  He said, “It means I want to work with you.”

  Suddenly I felt sick to my stomach; I might actually have to go ahead with this. Kevin had twenty years’ experience in the mobile industry. He’s an all-around business athlete—a technical guy, a business guy. If I had the support of both Kevin and Ben, I knew I’d be capable of turning the idea into a bona fide company.

  I’d always seen myself as Best Supporting Actor to Ev’s Best Actor. Working with him had been amazing; it changed my life. I’ll always consider him a good friend. But on my own now, I felt a new surge of self-confidence.

  Still, part of me was disappointed. I liked working three days a week at Obvious and spending the rest of the time with my newly increased family. Hence the churning stomach. But I couldn’t let this idea go. Jelly would let people help each other. It would be a mobile application that looked like a search engine, but there’d be a big difference—it would be people answering queries, not computers.

  Wouldn’t it be great if everyone were always able to hold in their minds the notion that there are people who need help? Wouldn’t it be great if everyone were always able to hold in their minds the notion that there are people standing by to offer help?

  The best swing you can take at global citizenship is to cultivate empathy. It all starts with the ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes. This old lady is cursing at me because I scratched her car. I’m not going to yell back at her. I’m going to listen to her. I have my own whole thing going on right now, but there are other people besides me. They have problems; I can help them. If you exercise that muscle, if everyone does, then we’re headed in the right direction for the future.

&nb
sp; Jelly isn’t going to save the world, but maybe it will nudge the world toward greater empathy. I decided to give it a go.

  I began my working life as Biz Stone, Genius. I knew that I was a guy who could do something, but I wasn’t sure exactly who I was, what I believed, or what I wanted to accomplish.

  Now I’ve figured out what I’m doing, and I’ve stopped calling myself a genius. Instead, I’m a guy who believes in the triumph of humanity with a little help from technology. It might not be as pithy or as grand as genius, but it means a whole lot more to me.

  And so I created Jelly to carve its own specific niche in the world of technologies that connect humanity. Whether my new company will be a success is unknown, but it is driven by the principles that most inspire me.

  I’ve said to our team that if we can get hundreds of millions of people to enter into their daily muscle memory the idea of helping another person, we may be able to have a positive impact on the global empathy quotient. Jelly’s big, aspirational vision of the future is to build worldwide empathy.

  On some kind of cumulative, subconscious level, humanity has found its way into the most hyperconnected time in our history. We can share digital photos with a retro look, we can play games with friends of friends, and we can follow the pulse of the planet in 140 characters or less.

  However, there is something far more important in store for humanity now that we live this way.