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

  The plan was to give out free drinks, along with the Twitter flyers, to get people to sign up for the service. Their first tweets would be proclamations that Massive Attack, Junkie XL, and DJ Shadow were currently playing music at the Love Parade. Exactly what Twitter was originally designed for. But the idea soon turned into a disaster.

  Strangely dressed and half-naked ravers, many tripping on various drugs—mushrooms, ecstasy, acid—twirled by the Twitter booth, grabbing free drink concoctions that Jack mixed, in exchange for a Twitter flyer being thrust into their hand. But that was about as far as the transaction went. The few people wearing enough clothes to actually put the flyer somewhere likely lost it during the night. The flyers given to others, some wearing nothing more than underwear and large platform boots that raised them off the ground nearly a foot, ended up scrunched into tiny meteors on the floor of the theater.

  Every time Jack looked up at the computer to see how many new people had started tweeting, he saw barely a trickle of sign-ups. The evening wasn’t going as planned. Still, he continued to mix drinks, hand out flyers, and check the screen.

  While Jack played bartender, a raver wandered over to Ray’s computer, dancing and watching the animation of Twitter on the projector, then bumped into the table and accidentally poured an entire cocktail onto the computer’s keyboard. Fade to black. The computer was dead. Ray was distraught, and after friends tried to console him, he wandered outside to cool off, only to find that his brand-new bicycle had been stolen.

  Then things went from bad to worse to fucking terrible. Jack had spent most of the day running around setting up the grand Twitter unveiling, and as he had been doing all of this on his own, he had been exhausted and flustered. To calm his nerves, he had downed one vodka and Red Bull after another. Later in the evening, when Jeremy arrived to help hand out flyers, Jack was so drunk he was wobbling.

  As the last of the leaflets were thrust into people’s hands, the vodka bottles now pouring out mere drops of liquid, Jack and his merry group of ravers moved inside the theater. A solid day’s work complete, they danced to the repetitive beats of techno, their arms reaching toward the sky, hoping to touch the laser lights that melted like drunken stars in the air above them. More vodka, more Red Bull, the digital music sounding like a tempo for each drink. Jack was more drunk than he had been moments earlier. More drunk than he had ever been before in his life.

  As they danced, a girl walked up with sloshed excitement and placed her arm around Jack. Disoriented, he threw his arm around her in response. And just like that, they both came tumbling down to the ground, Jack cracking his head on the concrete floor as he gave a drunken bow.

  When he finally got up, blood was pouring from his brow. He laughed as everyone stared at him, their mouths agape. His coworkers had never seen Jack “let go” like that before. He beamed as Ray snapped a quick picture of the blood streaming down his cheeks.

  Noah, who was also wasted beyond comprehension, immediately came running over. “Lay down! You have to lay down,” he yelled at Jack in a slight panic, “You might have damaged your head.” He rushed off to get a medic. In a matter of minutes Jack was placed in a neck brace on a stretcher and rushed out of the theater, into an ambulance, and off to the hospital. Red lights flashed on the windows like the laser lights on the walls at the rave a few minutes earlier.

  It might have turned out differently if a more seasoned manager had supervised the grand unveiling of Twitter. But instead it had just been Jack, Ray, and a couple of other very junior employees.

  Biz was not a fan of techno music, so had chosen to stay at home in Berkeley with Livy and their rescued pets. They were also completely broke, as credit-card debt had started to pile up again, forcing them to break into a coffee-can piggy bank they used to collect change. Florian was in Germany, held back by delays with his work visa. Crystal was at a wedding, dressed as a bridesmaid with flowers in her hands. Most of the other employees who had originally been hired to work at Odeo had since been laid off.

  Ev was finally taking some time off from work and had set off with Sara on vacation. And Twitter wasn’t top of mind for him. He was in the process of off-loading some of his remaining Google stock so he could buy out the Odeo investors. The prospect of a sale to MySpace or RealNetworks, two of the companies interested in buying Odeo, had gone from freeways to dead-end streets. In the end Ev opted to buy the start-up back from the investors with millions of the dollars he had made from the sale of Blogger—mostly with the hope of preserving his name.

  Earlier in the month, at a Web conference, he had publicly admitted that Odeo had been a terrible mistake and said that he had been lured into the podcasting company by outside forces that would boost his self-image, including an offer to give a talk at TED, one of the world’s premiere technology conferences, and the temptation of being included in a front page business article in the New York Times. “I got sucked in for numerous reasons, including my own ego,” Ev had written in a blog post.

  But as he noted, he wasn’t buying Odeo back to spin off Twitter. Instead he planned to begin a start-up incubator called Obvious Corporation, an idea factory for someone with too many ideas. He didn’t want investment money, he said, because he believed that in such a setting, where he was throwing sloppy ideas against a wall, investors would only get in the way.

  “It may be stupid. It may be naive. It may be selfish and undisciplined. And, frankly, it may not work,” Ev wrote on his blog. “All I know is I’m more excited about work than I’ve been in a long time. And from excitement and bold moves, great things often happen.”

  But such “excitement” diverted his attention from something that was already on its way to greatness, which left young Jack Dorsey, with no management experience or leadership skills, in charge of Twitter. The same Jack Dorsey who was now lying on a hospital bed getting five stitches across his right eyebrow as blood flowed down his face onto the white hospital sheets.

  As the clock neared 2:00 A.M., Jack emerged from the emergency-room doors onto the sleeping streets of San Francisco, his head throbbing. Although the alcohol had now started to wear off, the caffeine in the Red Bull had not, and he was wide awake, his adrenalized heart pounding. So he wandered back to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in a daze and walked back inside, past the slapdash Twitter booth he had set up earlier in the day.

  Crystal had since arrived at the show, shedding her bridesmaid dress for an almost-naked outfit of raver clothes. “What the hell happened to you?” she said to Jack as everyone rushed over to hug him. Jack started to offer his version of the story, then Noah jumped in with his view of the events. Before long, they were quarreling about where, why, and how Jack had fallen.

  “Boys! Boys! Enough!” Crystal said, interrupting them both. “You’re bickering over the same little details.”

  Eventually everyone packed up, beaten, bruised, achy, and still drunk, and called it a night. The grand launch of Twitter had been a flop.

  On Monday morning Jack’s head still hurt from the weekend as everyone sat around in the office talking about the disastrous evening. “So how many new users did we get?” Biz asked, after hearing about Ray’s computer being ruined, about the failed bartending, and about Jack’s head being stitched up.

  “Let me check,” Jack said, twirling around in his chair and logging on to the servers, his fingers dancing on the keyboard.

  After a few moments he twirled back around as Ray, Jeremy, and Biz stood there smiling.

  “Less than a hundred,” Jack said, a defeated look on his face. “Less than a hundred new users.”

  Chaos Again

  The sound of the fire crackled just outside the tent Biz and Jason Goldman, the astrophysics major who had dropped out of college and joined Blogger in 2002, were sharing as they lay in their sleeping bags giggling like teenagers. They had been up for hours chatting and telling jokes as everyone else lay sleeping in their tents nearby. Then Goldman interrupted Biz and asked a question that had b
een on his mind for weeks. “What’s the deal with Twitter?” Goldman said. “I really want to work there.”

  Biz fell silent for a moment.

  It was a Saturday evening and Ev and Sara had organized another camping trip to Big Sur amid the giant redwood trees on the central coast of California.

  Goldman, just like Biz a year earlier, yearned to work with Ev again. It wasn’t just that they enjoyed being around their friend but also that Ev was an entirely different kind of boss to work for, always giving people creative freedom to explore ideas. At Google, where they had both worked, ideas were put on spreadsheets and crunched with numbers to see if they were really worth exploring.

  This wasn’t the first time Goldman had expressed interest in working at Twitter. He had made his request in May during a last-minute trip to Las Vegas with Ev and a group of friends that had included enough partying to see the sun rise over the Nevada desert. He had asked Ev and Biz a couple of times at social affairs in San Francisco. Now he was trying again in a tent.

  “Twitter is kind of Jack’s thing right now,” Biz said, “but you should talk to Ev in the morning and ask him.”

  The following day they awoke late and Ev and Goldman stood stirring scrambled tofu (Ev was a staunch vegan) on the camping stove. Biz was lying on a bright multicolored beanbag that they had stolen from Google’s office. Goldman tried his question again. But the response wasn’t what Ev wanted to hear. “You’ll have to come in and spend some time with Jack and we’ll see,” he said.

  So Goldman did just that and started wooing Jack, stopping by the Twitter offices to talk his way into the company. But Jack said he wasn’t in a position to hire anyone either. “It’s really up to Ev,” he told him. “You’ll have to talk to him.”

  As Goldman soon learned, this runaround was typical for Twitter. When an engineer asked someone a question or when there was an SMS contract to be signed or when someone like Goldman was trying to get a job, the decision-making process was like a carnival.

  After Noah had finally and officially left the company, the power vacuum had not been resolved as Ev had hoped; rather, it had spun into another orbit. No one to make a decision. No one to revoke the few bad decisions that had been made.

  Having successfully returned the Odeo investors’ five million dollars from his Google earnings, Ev’s mind was elsewhere, focusing on Obvious Corporation and sifting through his ideas. He was still involved in Twitter and was the sole investor, having allocated one million dollars of his own money to nurture the company, though he was trying to leave Jack and Biz to run the operation. But it wasn’t much of an enterprise yet. The site was growing slowly, with only a few thousand sign-ups. Goldman, like everyone who already worked at Twitter, was enamored with the idea as soon as he heard it and wanted to work there.

  Eventually, after months of negotiations, Ev agreed to hire Goldman, albeit with a caveat: He would be part time at Obvious and part time at Twitter, a hybrid Twitter employee without a completely defined role.

  Goldman had been in a similar situation with Ev before, five years earlier in 2002, when he first joined Blogger as a part-time employee before it was sold to Google.

  Goldman’s job at Blogger had been a mishmash of stuff. In addition to answering support e-mails complaining about the outlandish content on Blogger, he’d fixed the dripping sink, searched for a new office, managed the accounting, and helped Ev with the paperwork for the Google acquisition.

  Five years later, in February 2007, on his first day at Twitter, it was apparent this job description would be almost exactly the same: a little bit of everything. And again, a lot of confusion.

  Although Jack had taken a lead at Twitter, it was clear that no one was actually in charge. Companies often take on the traits of their founders and first employees, so Twitter, which was nurtured out of Odeo, a seedling from Noah’s chaotic brain, was still operating as an anarchist-hacker collective with no rules.

  Many of the employees did what they wanted, where they wanted—that was, if they wanted to do anything related to their daily job at all. Rather than fix the servers, people built their own little trinkets and apps that fed into Twitter. Jack had no luck taming them. There was also a tremendous amount of rivalry between him and his coworkers as, just a few months earlier, when Odeo still existed, Jack had been working below all of them.

  Goldman was immediately caught up in the Lord of the Flies–like power vacuum. Technically he reported to Jack while on Twitter, but he was also reporting to Ev on Obvious and was possibly Jack’s superior, as Obvious technically owned Twitter.

  Still, just as in his early days at Blogger, Goldman dove into his new mishmash job and tried to institute a sense of order amid the chaos.

  One of his first tasks was to work with Jack to help make Twitter friendlier for newcomers to understand. The service allowed people to perform actions through text messages with the ability to do things like “follow” or “unfollow” others. But there were other verbs that were puzzling to people on the site and needed to be culled. So the cutting began: “Worship” ensured that people received every single update from someone they followed. (Gone.) “Sleep” allowed people to pause updates they received. (Too unclear.) And a long list of other options were nixed.

  There were, of course, much bigger problems than the question of which verbs to use on Twitter. Since the site had been built as a prototype in two weeks using a relatively new programming language called Ruby on Rails, it was rife with shortcuts and code problems. It was as if someone had rushed to build a skyscraper and in the time crunch had chosen to put together the structure with cardboard, glue, and tape, rather than nails, wood, and concrete. Worse, people were now moving into the building before construction crews could replace the flimsy materials with real ones.

  And then there was the biggest problem of them all: trying to explain to people what Twitter actually was. Everyone had a different answer. “It’s a social network.” “It replaces text messages.” “It’s the new e-mail.” “It’s microblogging.” “It’s to update your status.”

  As a result, most newcomers didn’t understand what to do when they first arrived on the site. People would sign up and send their first tweet, which often looked like one of the following missives: “How do I use this?” “What the fuck is this thing?” “Twitter is stupid.” “This is dumb.”

  The confusion led to one of the first topics that Jack and Ev saw differently. Jack saw Twitter as a place to say “what I’m doing.” Ev saw it as more like a mini blogging product. Both of them thought the way people had used it during a mini earthquake the previous summer held clues to what Twitter could be.

  It was just after eight o’clock one night in late August 2006 when Jack’s phone vibrated on his office desk. He reached over and saw a text message from Twitter, sent by Ev, and started to read, “Did anyone just feel that eart—” but before he came to the end of the message, he felt his chair shake a little. He looked up and away from his phone and saw the plant on his desk waving at him, its leaves swaying in the air like someone calling to a friend.

  “Whooooa,” Jack said as his desk briefly quivered like setting Jell-O. “Did you feel that?” he asked as he turned to a few others in the office.

  Before they could answer, his phone vibrated again. He looked down and continued to read Ev’s original message, “Did anyone just feel that earthquake?” Then the next tweet from someone else: “Wondering if I just felt an earthquake.”

  As a pop of adrenaline kicked in, Jack quickly typed, “Just felt that earthquake. No one else here did.” At the moment he hit “send,” a string of other messages started streaming into his phone like letters falling through a mail slot to the floor. “Agh earthquake,” wrote one friend. “Yep. Felt the quake,” wrote another. Then a handful of other earthquake tweets. “I felt the earthquake but Livy didn’t believe me until the twitters started rolling in,” wrote Biz. Finally, another person announced that it was a “4.72 magnitude jolt.”
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  The quake didn’t cause any damage, except for some frayed nerves and a few crooked pictures now hanging on the walls. But for the small group of people who had experienced the event on Twitter, it felt strangely different.

  On the day of that small earthquake only a few hundred people were using the service. Of the fifteen thousand tweets sent across the network up to that point, almost all had still been focused on the original concept: “What’s your status?” a question that often invited a narcissistic response.

  Sharing the quake on Twitter had been a moment that was about the status of something bigger than each individual. Although the people on the site were all in completely different locations, time and space had briefly compressed. It was as if someone had pulled the end of a hanging thread on a sweater, forcing the fabric to scrunch up closer together. Or as Noah had originally foreseen, months before anyone else, Twitter had been used to “help people feel less alone.”

  For Ev it was another clue in a theory he was developing about Twitter’s role as a way to share news, not just status—Twitter as a communication network, not just a social network. He told Jack about the concept of Twitter as a news network, but Jack disagreed, instead seeing the earthquake tweets as an example of the speed of Twitter. He focused on his phone vibrating a few brief seconds before his desk had become a puppet without a puppeteer.

  Jack had continued to see Twitter as a way to talk about what was happening to him. Ev was starting to see it as a view into what was happening in the world.

  While these little newslike events went mostly unnoticed by the public, philosophically Jack and Ev were developing different viewpoints as to what Twitter was. And what it had the potential to be.

  And the Winner Is …

  It was early evening on Sunday, March 11, 2007, as Ze Frank, a comedian and actor, looked out at the sea of heads bowed over the soft glow of phones. He continued talking as he paced across the open stage. His boyish blond hair bounced with each step in unison with the orange balloons in the background behind him. He was trying to add anticipation as he spoke, announcing the list of contestants for best start-up in the blog category at South by Southwest, the annual technology conference in Austin, Texas, that is the closest thing nerds have to the Oscars.