Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal Page 8

  His friendship with Noah had already started to wane after a recent discussion about Crystal.

  Over the past year, Noah, Jack, and Crystal had become best friends, eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner together several times a week, drinking excessively at night, and on weekends dancing late into the morning. In April they had all set out with some friends to Coachella, a massive music festival seven hours south of San Francisco. They danced in the desert to the Chemical Brothers, Girl Talk, and Imogen Heap and slept next to one another in the desert. But Noah had noticed Jack’s increased attention towards Crystal as he followed her around the concert like a security guard.

  One evening Noah pulled Jack aside and told him the infatuation with Crystal was unhealthy and he should “chill” a bit. Jack became defensive and accused Noah of trying to push Jack aside so he could be with Crystal instead. “Huh? I love Crystal, but I don’t want to date her,” Noah protested, a look of total bewilderment on his face. But Jack’s mind was already made up.

  Now, as Noah sat in the office, drunkenly describing how he had signed people up for Twitter and pulled back the curtains on the top-secret project, Jack was again upset that Noah was meddling. First Crystal, now Twitter. Jack’s feelings toward Noah were turning from love to disdain.

  And he wasn’t alone.

  The following morning the Odeo and Twitter employees came in to work to discover a handful of blog posts discussing this new strange thing called Twitter.

  Mike Arrington, who ran TechCrunch, a popular Valley tech blog, wrote that Twitter had launched officially and “a few select insiders were playing with the service at the Valleyschwag party in San Francisco last night.” But Arrington didn’t seem too impressed by the new service. He questioned its privacy issues and, in a direct slam to Ev, wondered why Odeo, a podcasting company, was wasting its time on side projects.

  Although Om Malik’s blog post was kinder, showing interest in the new Twitter contraption, he gave all the credit to a certain drunk cofounder he had shared cigarettes and vodka with the night before. “A new mobile social networking application written by Noah Glass (and team),” Om wrote.

  Ev tried to fix the press afterward, but it was too late. And although Noah didn’t know it yet, his drunken media announcements were about to have serious consequences.

  The Green Benches

  South Park was eerily still and quiet in the dark. There were no children playing on the swing sets. The green park benches were empty. The lights of the matchbox-shaped buildings that surround the park were all off, their cafés, restaurants, and offices long since closed for the day. The sole exception was number 164, where a dim yellow glow whispered through the cubed windows that faced the street.

  Inside, the clocks on the walls swept silently past midnight. Yet in the rear of the building, past the empty desks with darkened computer monitors, was Noah, doing what he now did on most nights. Sitting alone.

  It had become an evening routine. Some nights he cried while painting large, elaborate murals. Other times he played music, rattling his fingers against the strings of his guitar while he sang melancholy music. He often sang about love into his webcam, a dark-brimmed hat covering his welled-up eyes.

  His marriage was essentially over; his start-up, Odeo, a decomposing corpse. His relationship with his closest friends, who were also his coworkers, was in complete tatters too.

  So Noah did what Noah did best. He turned to the magical Internet in search of solace. He talked to his webcam. His blog. And, of course, Twitter.

  He was using Twitter for exactly what he had hoped it might be used for: curing loneliness. Noah had understood the concept well before everyone else had. “It can be whatever you want it to be,” he had written on his blog a few days earlier. “The fact that I could find out what my friends were doing at any moment of the day made me feel closer to them and, quite honestly, a little less alone.” Sadly, of course, his hypothesis had proven false and his sadness wasn’t being lessened by friends far away. Which was why he had been spending night after night solitarily hiding in the back of the office, unwanted.

  His state of affairs was mostly his own doing.

  In early June, Crystal had started helping with Twitter, adding her support prowess and answering questions from early testers of the site. Although it was still secret at the time, employees were allowed to give out private invites to close friends and family.

  At around lunchtime on July 5, Dennis Crowley, a well-known entrepreneur who ran Dodgeball, which had recently been acquired by Google, e-mailed Twitter asking if he could join. Crystal, unaware of who Dennis was, happily responded with a code that activated his account. Moments later, when Noah saw Dennis’s name stream across his computer monitor with the usual first tweet, “just setting up my twttr,” Noah became enraged, storming out of his office like a wrestler into a ring.

  “What the fuck is going on?” he bellowed as everyone’s head’s snapped around, startled. “Why the fuck did we approve Dennis Crowley’s account?!”

  “I don’t know who he is …,” Crystal said, a timid look of shock and fear in her eyes as she stared back at Noah.

  Noah tore into a rampage. “You have no idea what you’ve just fucking done,” he yelled, pacing erratically. Crystal burst into tears.

  “Calm down, Noah,” employees said to him. “You’re overreacting. It’s not that big of a deal.”

  “This is fucking war!” Noah yelled as Jack also tried unsuccessfully to pacify him. “This is fucking war! This is our enemy. We need a war map. They’re going to attack us; we need to destroy them.”

  Everyone tried again to mollify Noah, but he continued yelling, a panic saturating him as he eventually stormed back into his office.

  A few days later he had another outburst, sending an almost frantic e-mail to George Zachary, an investor in the company and a member of the Odeo board: “I would like to talk with you about twttr,” Noah wrote in the e-mail. “It is important that I speak to you as soon as possible.” Noah had been arguing that Twitter should be spun out as its own company and he should be the CEO. Technically, what happened to Twitter was up to the investors who had originally financed Odeo, as they were now unintentionally paying for the development of this experiment.

  Ev hadn’t originally been against the idea. He knew Noah had given everything to the new project. Two months earlier, in May 2006, Ev had even e-mailed the Odeo board suggesting that they spin Twitter out into its own company with Noah at the helm: “Why not set up Twttr, Inc. as a separate company—perhaps not wholly owned, but mirrored ownership, seed it with $500k or so and let Noah see what he can do,” Ev had written enthusiastically. But the board was not interested in Twitter; if Ev and Noah didn’t want to continue with Odeo, the investors wanted to sell it to the highest bidder and get their money back. They saw the side project as just another Ev distraction.

  “Ev, we are going to have a disaster situation occur shortly if we slow down selling the company,” George Zachary had responded. “My patience is really getting pushed here and I am close to out of it.”

  Now, as the discussion was being raised again about spinning out Twitter, Noah’s erratic and manic behavior had slowly chipped away at the prospect of his running it—or even Odeo.

  Noah was also becoming paranoid about Ev. On more than one occasion he solemnly pulled Jack aside and confessed his fears. “Ev’s trying to push me out of the company. I can feel it. We should get out of here and start our own thing,” he whispered to Jack. “We should go off and start our own Twitter.”

  But Jack knew what was going to happen next and told Noah to stay put and see how things unfolded before doing anything. “Wait,” Jack said. “Don’t do anything yet. Let’s just wait.”

  “But Ev is trying to kick me out of the company,” Noah replied.

  Noah’s hunch was only half-correct: It wasn’t just Ev who wanted to kick Noah out of the company. It was everyone else too.

  Twitter was barely a newborn a
t the time, but there was already squabbling over who had fed it, who had let others go near it. For a while the entire site had existed solely on Noah’s IBM laptop. Then Jack had taken charge of the engineering side of Twitter and, each morning, assigned programming tasks to Florian, who was now working remotely from Germany. But late at night, while Noah was sitting alone in his office catching ideas that were falling out of the dark, brief stints of passion amid his depressed state, he was also telling Florian what to work on. Jack would arrive in the office the next morning to find a list of tasks completed, but not his list: Noah’s.

  Ev was torn over what to do about Noah’s outbursts and media hijacking. Jack helped him decide. One afternoon Jack asked Ev if they could talk privately. “You can’t tell Noah about this conversation,” Jack said. They were, after all, still “friends.” Jack said that Noah was interfering with Twitter, that he couldn’t work with him anymore, and that Jack was thinking about quitting. When Ev asked where he would go, he proclaimed that he would happily leave and go into the fashion industry. Then Jack threw down the gauntlet: “If Noah stays, I’m going to leave. I can’t work with him anymore.”

  For Ev the answer was simple. He knew Noah’s life was falling apart, but he also saw that he was scrambling to hold onto anything tangible as he fell, and he risked taking the dying Odeo and the newborn Twitter with him.

  So after conferring with the board, at around 6:00 P.M. on Wednesday, July 26, Ev and Noah walked outside to the park benches. Noah knew exactly what was going to happen next. The park benches were an Ev tell.

  Although Ev’s gut told him Twitter was going to be something, at the time it was still just a side project. Odeo, on the other hand, was dead on arrival. As a result, Ev had started laying people off over the past months.

  Layoffs always followed the same pattern. At this point Ev had it down to a science: He would walk over, tap someone on the shoulder, and quietly say, “Hey, let’s go for a walk.” He’d said it to Rabble, Dom, and a few others on separate occasions. His hands were often half in his pockets, his elbows slightly bent. He would slowly move his head at an angle, back and slightly to the right, to motion toward the door.

  Together they’d walk out of the building and cut left, taking the few brief steps to South Park. There they would sit on a green park bench and Ev would deliver his eulogy.

  “Things have been rough at Odeo lately,” he would say. A sort of “It’s not you, it’s me” breakup. Some people cried; some felt relieved. (Rabble had been elated when he was let go by the Man.) But there was one person who was angry.

  “I won’t fucking leave,” Noah barked at Ev as they sat on a bench. Noah then spun into a tirade about Odeo and about Ev’s rarely being present at the company, about Noah’s overseeing Twitter, nurturing it, feeding it, helping realize its ideas along with everyone else.

  “I don’t see a role for you moving forward,” Ev explained. “If we don’t sell Odeo, Twitter will become our main focus, and I don’t think we can work together well on it.”

  Noah tried to plead, arguing that he wanted to oversee Twitter, but Ev knew it wasn’t possible. Everyone was fed up. They had long since reached their limits. And Jack, the most important developer on the Twitter team, would leave if Noah stayed. Ev had already decided, and that decision was the only one that counted. When Noah had agreed to make Ev the CEO in exchange for the early funding for the podcasting start-up, he had also given Ev the ability to make carte blanche decisions. Noah had never anticipated that the power he’d handed to his friend and neighbor would be used to fire him, the founder of Odeo, from the company.

  Ev gave Noah an ultimatum: six months’ severance and six months’ vesting of his Odeo stock, or he would be fired and the story would not be pretty publicly. He didn’t mention Jack’s ultimatum; he didn’t even mention Jack’s name. “Take the rest of the week to think about what you want to do,” Ev said.

  Noah left the office that evening, sullen and sad, angry and defeated, believing Ev was kicking him out of the company to conserve control of Twitter. Noah needed to douse his sadness in liquor. He met up with Jack and another friend at a nearby club, where they drank and danced late into the night.

  As they stood at the bar ordering drinks, Noah told Jack what had happened. Jack appeared dumbfounded by the fact that his friend had been pushed out. He never mentioned that he had handed Ev the gun with which the final shot was fired. As the night came to a close, Noah hugged Jack good-bye and went home alone.

  Noah spent the next few days riding his bike around San Francisco trying to calculate what to do. He cycled along the Embarcadero, watching the boats as they bobbed in the bay. He wrote in his journal as he lay in Dolores Park, the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark playing in the background. And he sat along the edge of the world as people played with massive kites in the wind. “Watching colorful parachutes trace the shape of infinity as they fall to earth,” he tweeted.

  Ev had expected Noah to battle for power and control of Twitter. But no matter how much Noah wanted to be a fighter, he wasn’t. He didn’t fight because he didn’t know how. When he was kicked by a horse, he just walked away.

  Noah didn’t fight because he realized it wasn’t power that he had been after when he started Odeo. More than fame and more than fortune, he had just wanted friends.

  Two weeks later, faced with no other choice and no one in his corner, Noah resigned. He stopped by the desolate office on a Saturday afternoon, packed his life into cardboard boxes, and let the beige door slam behind him, no longer an employee of two companies he helped start.

  III.

  #JACK

  A Bloody Mess

  Acrimson stream of blood flowed down Jack’s cheek, past the drunken grin on his face, turning left onto the crest of his black T-shirt and finally stopping, in small red pools, on the white sheets of the hospital bed. A sour smell of alcohol lingered in the air.

  The room swayed a little, moving to and fro like a boat at sea, sloshing around in the countless vodka and Red Bulls Jack had drunk throughout the evening.

  It wasn’t how the grand public launch of Twitter was supposed to end up: Jack in the hospital at around 2:00 A.M., covered in blood, and Noah, Ray, and a few others still dancing at a rave a few blocks away. But in hindsight, it was as predictable as nightfall that the public debut of this tiny social start-up would end this way.

  It had all begun before Noah had been fired from Twitter. One evening, while out drinking and dancing, Jack and Noah tried to explain Twitter to a DJ friend of Crystal’s. “It can be used in clubs, for finding out what your friends are up to or what they’re listening to; it was great at Coachella,” they said while sipping sake in a dark San Francisco bar.

  “Oh, you guys should totally launch it at the Love Parade in September,” the friend replied, excited by his own epiphany. “I’m throwing a party there and you can set up a booth.”

  Although Noah and Jack had been planning to attend Love Parade, the burgeoning techno-music festival that would soon land in San Francisco, Jack was skeptical of the idea, doubting whether the rave was the right venue to use as bait for luring the nontech public to Twitter.

  “This is why we built this thing!” Noah told Jack before he was let go from the company. “For concerts and music shows!” And, as he noted, what better place to launch it than the biggest rave in San Francisco?

  It was the summer of 2006 and Twitter was just a speck of dust at the time, a small town in a big city of bigger start-ups. Barely 4,500 people had signed up for the site since Noah had first announced it a few months earlier at the hoedown—a smaller portion of whom were actually tweeting on a daily basis. It was a bare-bones operation too—still a vestige of Odeo, which had been reduced to a half a dozen employees.

  Although it wasn’t an official company yet, Twitter had been growing slowly over the summer with a lot of “firsts.” There was the first tweet of a car crash. (Not to worry, everyone was okay.) A blogger announced that he had been fi
red from his job. (He soon found new employment.) In August, Ev tweeted that he had asked Sara to marry him. (She said yes!) And there was a lot of egotistical banter among the Twitterers. People had been sharing their lunches, dinners, and breakfasts. Cappuccinos, sake, and wine. Uncouth first tweets about sex, masturbation, bathroom schedules, drunk epiphanies, and several other topics flew out of people’s phones and into plain sight.

  But still, this repartee hadn’t moved beyond the tech nerds. So Jack followed through on Noah’s suggestion and decided the Love Parade would be the perfect venue to bring awareness of Twitter to the music-loving mainstream.

  The group quickly set to work.

  Ray, the young designer from Odeo, who had been spared in the layoffs, made a flyer that they would hand out to the ravers providing instructions on how to sign up for Twitter. Jeremy and Blaine prepared the servers, ensuring that the site could handle the flood of new sign-ups. On the day of the event, Jack procured a large folding picnic table that he set up near the entrance of the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, home of the main Love Parade dance party. As night started to fall, Ray, who had donned a black top hat with his white T-shirt for the occasion, hooked up his laptop to a pathetically dim projector that would show people’s tweets using a little animated character called Celly. Jack rushed back and forth to a liquor store around the corner to buy cheap bottles of vodka and plastic cups.

  Although Noah no longer worked for Twitter, or even what was left of Odeo, he was still friendly with some of his former coworkers and was happy to help in any way he could. But on that night he was there more for the rave than for Twitter and dressed appropriately, looking as if he had just walked out of a haunted house, wearing pink bands around his wrists and neck and painted black stripes across his lips.

  When everything was almost set and ready to go, Jack pulled his phone out of his pocket and tweeted: “At the love parade after party setting up the twitter booth!”