Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind by Biz Stone

Author:Biz Stone
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Business, Self-Help / Creativity, Computers / Web / Social Networking, Business & Economics / Entrepreneurship, Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-03-31T18:30:00+00:00

A year after we officially launched Twitter Inc., our office was having startup pains. One problem we had was with the international carriers. In the United States, we’d worked out deals with most of the phone companies. With our short code, 40404, the Tweets people sent were basically free. But in Europe and Canada, we were still paying the bills for every Tweet that went through. One month our bill was six figures! The international carriers hadn’t agreed to make the Tweets free.

Our international system was so jury-rigged that it was running from a single laptop. There was a handwritten sign above it reading DO NOT UNPLUG. The sickeningly large bill was my breaking point. When it arrived, I walked over to the laptop and pulled the plug. I unplugged international Twitter. Then I posted to the Twitter blog, essentially saying, “We just turned off all international because it’s too expensive.” I figured if enough people cared, the carriers would call us to make a deal. Eventually that happened.

The graph of our growth in 2008 looks very steep, and it felt steep to us. But if you look at it in the context of the years that followed, it seems flat—so dramatic was our growth. We weren’t yet worried about making money. Our investors understood that something like this had to get very big before it would make money. Evan always said, “There’s no such thing as a service with one hundred million active users that doesn’t make money. Don’t worry.”

Meanwhile, our tech was as troubled as ever, breaking constantly—and the faster we grew, the harder it was to keep the service up and running. The company’s growth was in spite of itself.

Our popularity lit a fire under the board of directors. Like the rest of us, they wanted Twitter to work. Jack, our CEO, was an engineer. He’d never run a company before. Someone with leadership experience needed to take the reins. So they decided to remove Jack as CEO and put Evan in his place. Needless to say, this caused some bad blood.

When they told me they were going to let Jack go, I pleaded with the board to allow him to stay on for another year to prove himself, but three months later, in October 2008, they yanked him without informing me. I found this out on a Wednesday morning when Evan asked me to meet him at his apartment, two blocks from our office, in half an hour. When I arrived, I found that Ev had also assembled Jason Goldman; our chief technical officer, Greg Pass; and our chief scientist, Abdur Chowdhury. Greg and Abdur had joined Twitter with our July 2008 acquisition of Summize, which gave us the technology to let people search public Tweets. The four of us were probably the last top-level people to hear the news.

We walked to Ev’s place. There, Ev said, “The board has decided to remove Jack and replace him with me as CEO.” There was a brief moment of silence.

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