When I was a little boy, I was afraid of the dark. I signed up for the classic childhood anxiety that there were monsters under my bed and in my closet. For a while I had an agreement with the monsters. I would lay in my bed and tell them…

An early experience in making my own rules came when I entered high school. In the first weeks of my freshman year, I tried to do everything right. I did what I was told to do — and this included my homework. After lacrosse practice and my after-school job at…

During the time I had returned to Twitter (2017–2021), at some point I was asked to write a Tweet-length (then, still 140 characters or less) bit of wisdom at the top of an essential weekly email update sent to the whole company. I did it for just shy of a…

In Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From, he writes about how good ideas assemble themselves from spare parts we have lying around. To illustrate, he tells a story set in the Indonesian city of Meulaboh. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the hospital in Meulaboh was given eight…

The year was 2008, about one year after officially founding Twitter. It was a Monday. I woke up in our little place in Berkeley and, for some strange reason, decided to wear a pressed white dress shirt for the day. I never wear a shirt like that because I always…

Jason Goldman read my last piece about my return to Twitter in 2017 and highlighted the phrase, “the how of which is its own story” with the commentary of “tantalizing!” so I thought I’d go ahead and tell that story here. In May of 2017 Ben Finkel and I decided…

When I was asked to come back to Twitter in 2017, (the how of which is its own story) I was initially tasked with three things: Improve morale, revamp policy, and give the company a clear purpose. We had never articulated a purpose which meant if you asked any employee…

When my son was born and throughout his diaper wearing career, I participated in many changes. I considered it both an act of love and something to master — swift, neat, and gentle! And, I was especially good at changing him in an airplane bathroom. …

Hosted in the Metaverse Everyone had to endure major life changes and upheaval in 2020. We also had to hear a new term way too many times — ‘social distancing’. But the phrase was never right because it was really about physical distance. The truth is that we have grown…