Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal Read online

  Biz and Ev had driven down to Facebook’s campus a few days earlier to meet with Mark. Like most meetings involving the chief of Facebook, it had been almost unbearably uncomfortable.

  When Ev and Biz arrived at Facebook’s campus, they were given what seemed like an endless tour, then ushered into a small office space with Mark. The room was gray and relatively sparse, looking more like a Russian prison than part of the office of the hip social network. Given the limited seating options, Biz and Ev chose a tiny two-seater couch that butted up against the wall. Facebook’s boyish CEO had rushed to take the only other seat in the room, an almost high chair that sat above them on a higher plane. Facebook and its CEO looking down on Twitter and its CEO.

  “Should I close the door or leave it open?” Ev asked.

  “Yes,” Mark replied.

  Ev looked at Biz, who shrugged. “Yes I should close it, or yes I should leave it open?” Ev asked.

  “Yes,” Mark said again.

  Ev decided to play it safe, leaving the door half-open and half-closed. Mark started talking, pausing slightly as he spoke from a script in his head. Every word was calculated, every sentence plotted, every comma mapped out; he was like an army general meeting on the battlefield to discuss merging armies.

  “What do you think your valuation is right now?” Mark asked as they both sat uncomfortably across from and below him, peering up at a boy who could, hypothetically speaking, quite happily buy them or murder them, all with the same exact expression on his face. “Throw out a number,” Mark said.

  Ev paused, looking at Biz, then fired off a shot. “Five hundred million.”

  Silence filled the room. Mark looked at them, unfazed. “That’s a big number.”

  “That’s what we believe we’re worth,” Ev said.

  But Mark had already known that Twitter believed it was valued at five hundred million. Jack had told him so.

  Although Biz and Ev didn’t know it, Jack had also been meeting with Mark. Which was why Jack had called Mark right after he had been fired, to tell him what was going on and to set up a secret meeting that was not about the sale of Twitter to Facebook anymore—Jack had no control over that aspect of Twitter now.

  No. Instead, Jack Dorsey, the cofounder of Twitter, was going to try and get a job at Facebook.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing we can do?” Mark had said on the phone to Jack when he had called the day he had been fired. “I bet there’s something we can do to keep you as CEO.” Jack had been a little stunned by Mark’s remark, unsure what such a statement could possibly mean. “Er, no, I don’t think there’s anything we can do,” Jack had replied nervously.

  Mark wasn’t happy. His attempt to seduce Jack had been going well, and he had been methodical, starting with a phone call between the two that was organized by Matt Cohler, a mover and shaker in the Valley and an early Facebook employee. Then there had been an in-person meeting between Jack and Mark. More wooing. More romancing.

  And it had worked.

  Days after their meeting, an e-mail from Mark had arrived in Jack’s in-box with an ominous subject line that simply said “T.” In the long message he had laid out point by point the reasons why Twitter and Facebook made sense for each other: that together they could change the world, connect people, make billions of dollars. Then, as Mark often did when he was trying to buy companies, he had noted that if the founders chose not to sell, Facebook would continue “to build products that moved further in their direction.” A threat with a kiss: You join Facebook and we live happily ever after. Or you say no and we do everything in our power to destroy you. Another possibility to get fucked.

  Jack hadn’t needed threats. He had been sold. Yet as the deal had approached the finish line, as Jack had been ready to press his foot on the gas pedal, Ev had taken the keys out of the ignition, thrusting Jack out of the driver’s seat, spinning the wheel, and turning the company in a completely different direction.

  Although the prospect of selling Twitter for five hundred million dollars was appealing to everyone on the board—and a far cry from the twelve million Yahoo! had offered just a year and a half earlier—and although Ev was worried Facebook would try, by any means, to destroy Twitter, he didn’t believe in Facebook’s mission.

  “It seems to me, there are three reasons to sell a company,” Ev wrote in an e-mail to the board outlining why they should decline Facebook’s offer. 1. The price is good enough or a value that the company will be in the future. (“We’ve often said Twitter is a billion dollar company. I think it’s many, many times that,” Ev wrote.) 2. There’s an imminent and very real threat from a competitor. (Nothing is going to “pose a credible threat of taking Twitter to zero.”) 3. You have a choice to go and work for someone great. (“I don’t use [Facebook]. And I have many concerns about their people and how they do business.”)

  Ev saw Blogger, Odeo, and now Twitter as serving a much more important purpose than just becoming big businesses. These start-ups he had helped build were all designed to give people across the planet an equal voice, to help those without power stand up to those who abused power. Twitter, he believed, which could work via text message on any phone or using a Web browser, could be the ultimate tool for that. He presumed that Facebook was more concerned with being a corporate money machine.

  Jack wasn’t completely convinced by Ev’s decision not to sell to Facebook and replied to the message, “If the numbers are right, there’s a success story in either path.”

  But it didn’t matter what Jack said. He had no voting rights anymore. He was an invisible chairman, sitting in Ev’s board seat, his title a conciliatory prize from Ev to help Jack save face when he was let go.

  After a private call with the board on October 30, the people who did have power agreed that there was no interest in selling to Facebook. Later that evening Ev called Mark, telling him he was “honored by the offer” to buy the company, but “Twitter wanted to remain independent.”

  Although the call ended amicably, Mark did not like to lose, and he switched his battle plan from trying to buy Twitter to trying to hire Jack. He reasoned that such a move could show a lack of confidence in Twitter—its cofounder moving in with its biggest competitor. If such a move were to happen, publicly it could have been seen as revenge upon the people who had ousted him, or a battle of Jack’s and Ev’s product ideas. So the conversation between the two progressed. Mark asked Jack to meet with Chris Cox, who ran product at Facebook, at the local Peet’s Coffee in Palo Alto. They chatted for a while, Jack sharing ideas about social networks.

  A few days went by and Jack got on the phone again with Mark.

  “So what do you think?” Mark said. “I think you’d be a great fit for the company.”

  “What would my role be?” Jack asked. “I’d want to run product there.”

  But they both knew that wasn’t an option. That role was taken by Chris Cox. All of the other senior roles Jack would fit into were already filled too. “Why don’t you just come here and we’ll figure out a position for you?” Mark said.

  Jack sat there, the phone pressed to his ear, thinking about Mark’s offer. Although no one in the media knew that Jack had been fired from Twitter—the narrative had been sold as “Twitter’s CEO and chairman switch roles”—the story that was out there had been picked up by the mainstream press, and Jack knew that if he was going to make the jump to Facebook, that news would similarly be splayed across the headlines. Such attention would be a double-edged sword. Sure, it would be payback toward Ev, Fred, and Bijan for pushing him out of the company, an embarrassment to them that the cofounder of Twitter had jumped to its biggest competitor. But he knew it would also be a stamp on his image. If the headlines read, JACK DORSEY, TWITTER COFOUNDER, JOINS FACEBOOK AS EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT OF PRODUCT, it would be a win for Jack. But if the headlines read, JACK DORSEY, TWITTER COFOUNDER, JOINS FACEBOOK WITHOUT A FANCY JOB TITLE, then it would be ten steps back in his career.

  “Let’s just keep
talking and see if we can find the right position for me,” Jack told Mark. “I’ve got to think about this, and if I’m going to come there, I want to do it right.”

  Fight or Flight

  As 2009 rolled into view, Jack set off in search of what to do next. Now that the possibility of working at Facebook had been put on hold indefinitely, he had no idea what lay ahead. But he was sure about one thing: He was determined not to follow in the footsteps of the cofounder who had left Twitter before him.

  Since his ousting, Noah had fallen off the face of the earth, no longer showing up at parties, conferences, or bars—and no one seemed to have noticed.

  Before disappearing, and before Jack was fired, Noah had e-mailed Jack twice to ask if they could meet to talk. But Jack had never responded. At the time, he’d had more important things to do.

  Then, in late 2008, Noah decided to try Ev. Although they were once inseparable friends, they had not spoken since South by Southwest a year earlier. Ev agreed to meet with him at the new Twitter offices on Bryant Street. When Noah stepped out of the elevators and through the new front door, he entered a different company. Dozens of engineers buzzed around, fancy stickers were tacked to the walls, and wide glass windows lit the large, loftlike space as the soft hum of cars trundled by outside.

  On that particular morning so many people were in meetings that there were no conference rooms available, so Ev and Noah sat in the open living-room area on two gray couches, the same place Jack had stood a few weeks earlier and announced his exodus to his employees. No one stopped by to greet Noah, as most of the employees didn’t know who he was. After some small talk, Noah dove right in. “I feel like I’m being written out of history,” he told Ev. “I had a lot to do with the creation of Twitter, and I’d like to be included in the story.”

  Noah had repeatedly felt slighted by events that had taken place, and he felt he needed to talk to his cofounders. Noah had tried to divert his attention elsewhere over the past two years and had attempted to birth other start-ups. Yet most of his ideas, though brilliant, were shuttered by the past. It wasn’t a lack of skills or creativity or money—he’d made a couple hundred thousand dollars from the sale of Odeo to Ev—that became roadblocks. It was that he felt betrayed by his friends and coworkers. As the relationship between Jack and Ev had severed, Ev started to feel bad for what had transpired with Noah, though he still didn’t tell him Jack had been the main catalyst for Noah’s firing. Ev had offered to give Noah a small portion of stock from his personal equity share of the company—a gesture that helped soften the blow but didn’t change Noah’s sadness.

  Ev had often been generous with his money. In the early days of Twitter, Jeremy’s house in West Oakland had been robbed; thieves tore down the front door and took his family’s computers, important documents, and his four- and seven-year-old boys’ pink piggy banks filled with almost two hundred dollars in change. When Ev found out, he quietly pulled Jeremy aside in the office, handed him his personal credit card, and told him to replace everything that had been stolen, without expectation of receiving anything back.

  Ev had done the same for Biz when he was running out of money, writing a check for fifty thousand dollars to help cover his bills and mortgage payments.

  But money wasn’t enough to help Noah. By the time Noah sat on the couch to talk to Ev, Twitter had practically become particles in the air that everyone was breathing, which for Noah was particularly bittersweet. It was as if he had helped invent the sky, choosing the color palette that would hover above everyone, and then, banished by its other inventors, was unable to escape from it.

  In Silicon Valley, where people have an incredibly difficult time talking about anything other than technology, Noah felt like he was being stalked by his past with every turn and conversation. The little blue Twitter logo lingered on the chalkboards of bars, on the menus of restaurants, on food trucks, in conversations. Like everyone else in the area, he couldn’t get away from it. “Are you on Twitter?” new friends would ask, unaware of his role in the creation of it.

  “Look, I know you were a big part of the early story,” Ev said to Noah on the couch, “but it’s a completely different company now.” After a brief chat about the past, Noah left the office that day, the door to the busy and flourishing Twitter offices closing behind him. And then he was gone.

  He packed his life into boxes, sent one last tweet from San Francisco—“Ha! I just bought a giant semi truck. Trying to figure out how to drive the fucker. Got a place in Venice beach. Moving this weekend :-)”—and drove south to Los Angeles, the windows down as a different air flowed into his car. On the radio he heard some of the same music from the trip he had made a couple of years earlier with his former best friend, Jack, on their way to Coachella. But on this trip he was lonely. He tried to find solace in Twitter, sending a few messages about his journey, but that only made him feel worse. No one replied to his tweets. His original vision of a product that would allow him to talk to his friends didn’t matter if he had no friends to talk to.

  When he pulled up to the sunny land of Los Angeles, he soon settled into a lofty warehouse space near Venice Beach and tried to start a new life.

  For a time he started to feel a happiness he hadn’t felt in a while, but it was short-lived. Stories about Twitter had started to crop up on the business and technology pages of news outlets and into every crevice of culture. Even the sports section had been covering Twitter.

  On a Wednesday morning in November 2008, an article in the New York Times announced that Shaquille O’Neal, the seven-foot-one behemoth of a basketball player, had joined the service.

  Although Twitter had savored fake accounts since its inception, these lampoons were now starting to draw the attention of the real celebrities. A fake Shaquille O’Neal had graced Twitter for some time. That account was now going to be replaced by the real Shaq, who was going to bring his celebrity friends with him. And where the celebrities went, their fans followed. The same fans who now lived on Venice Beach, in Los Angeles. Noah’s new neighbors.

  Soon, just as in San Francisco, the blue bird appeared. “Hey, have you ever heard of Twitter?” people asked Noah in bars along the Venice boardwalk. “Whoa, why do you have so many followers?” they said in coffee shops on Abbot Kinney Boulevard.

  Twitter’s prominence in the headlines reached a pinnacle during an event dubbed “Miracle on the Hudson,” when an Airbus A320 with 155 passengers on board took off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport and was struck by a flock of birds. It landed safely in the Hudson River. A picture of the passengers escaping from the downed plane landed on Twitter, taken by a tourist on a ferry who had snapped a photo with his phone. And then it was all over the Web, magazines, and the nightly news.

  Twitter. Twitter. Twitter. Twitter. Twitter.

  Noah couldn’t escape and he tried to retreat more. He turned off his phone, his computer, anything connected to the Internet, hoping that distance and time would heal his wounds.

  At the end of 2008, Jack was starting to go through the same thing as Noah. But he chose to deal with it in a completely different way. Shortly after he was fired from Twitter, Jack, like Noah, was despondent. Like Noah, he traipsed through San Francisco, miserable and seething with resentment. And like Noah, he went on a walkabout to try to figure out what to do next. But that was where their paths diverged.

  Although Jack had lost some of his equity when he was pushed out, the board had agreed to give him a two-hundred-thousand-dollar severance salary for a year after he was fired. He had always been careless with money, taking it in with one hand and handing it out with the other, so he set off to live life and wait for the right opportunity to present itself. He fell in love with a ballet dancer in San Francisco, a relationship that soon ended. Then he visited his friends and family in St. Louis before traveling to New York to get his regular haircut and favorite cappuccino and wander through the Earnest Sewn jeans store.

  And then, finally, Jack found what he was loo
king for. On a return trip to St. Louis, he met up with his old friend Jim McKelvey, and they started to discuss ideas for a new business they could start together. Jim blew glass for a living and made elaborate glass art sculptures (along with pipes) that he sold to stores and collectors. He told Jack that one afternoon he had missed out on the sale of a large glass sculpture because his customer didn’t have enough cash. They started to discuss a product that would allow people to make such a purchase using a cell phone and a credit card and got to work on an idea they would first call Squirrel, then rename Square.

  Jack appeared to have another side project too: revenge. Unlike Noah, who was doing his best to forget and forgive the betrayal by his friends, Jack ran in the opposite direction, unable to flush the resentment he felt toward Ev, the board, and now Biz too, out of his mind.

  Jack began obsessing over every news article, blog post, and status update about Twitter. Each time he read an article where Jack Dorsey wasn’t acknowledged as the creator of Twitter, his blood temperature rose a degree. Each time a celebrity tweeted that they were visiting Twitter’s offices, and Jack wasn’t there to meet them, his wounds deepened.

  Ego affected them all: Noah, Jack, Ev, and Biz. They were all driven by it. For Noah ego became a tool for reflection, for trying to understand whom he had wronged in the past and how he could be a better person in the future. For Jack it had the opposite effect, causing him to obsess over who had wronged him in the past and how he could return to the spotlight in the future. And what better way to achieve this goal than to eclipse other people’s egos?

  Although Jack didn’t have a say in the daily operations of the company, he chose to accept any press requests that came into his personal Twitter e-mail address, which he was allowed to keep as a silent board member.

  He started to meet with reporters and bloggers, and sometimes narrated a story about the invention of Twitter that excluded everyone else’s role from the history of the company. No mention of Noah, Biz, Jeremy, Crystal, Blaine, Florian, Jeremy, or Tim. No mention of the other people in the room when Twitter was created or their role in the brainstorming sessions at breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and the hack days. And certainly no mention of Ev.