Notes: “Hatching Twitter”
Notes on Nick Bilton’s novel about Twitter’s inception
I recently completed Nick Bilton’s “Hatching Twitter,” which offers an inside look into the founding of everyone’s favorite 140-character broadcast network. Prior to reading it, I’d had no idea that Twitter had been so messy behind the scenes, but I was actually happy to discover that it had been. Twitter’s plight offers plenty of lessons for startup founders and I’ve summarized some of them here:
On recruiting employees
As Noah Glass watched Ev Williams and the programmers at Blogger working in Ev’s apartment, he “yearned to join a group of friends huddling together trying to change the world with code.”
Lesson: When recruiting potential employees who are toiling away at large companies, pitch them on “joining a group of friends huddling together trying to change the world with code.” Just as Noah Glass craved this, so do many others. It’s far more exciting and psychologically rewarding than being a cog in a giant machine dedicated to little more than making money.
On motivating employees
Early on at Odeo, Ev motivated his team by giving out the “Getting Shit Done Award” at the end of each week to the week’s most productive employee. The winner, chosen by a vote of all the employees, was rewarded with a prize—sometimes money, sometimes a gadget.
Lesson: The key to this motivational tactic was not the physical prize; it was the sense of pride the winner felt as she was recognized in front of her co-workers. Humans crave positive feedback and recognition and, if you give it to them, you’ll find yourself with employees who like and want to work hard for you.
On ideas
Noah recognized that Twitter offered a deeper value than simply keeping up with whatever your friends were doing.
This status thing could help connect people to those who weren’t there. It wasn’t just about sharing what kind of music you were listening to or where you were at that moment; it was about connecting people and making them feel less alone. It could be a technology that would erase a feeling that an entire generation felt while staring into their computer screens.
Lesson: Self-determination theory posits that humans have three innate psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The third, relatedness, is the desire to be connected to other people who care about you. Intentionally or not, Twitter filled this need for people stuck behind a screen all day and that has been a large part of what has made it so successful.
On explaining your product
For a long time, Twitter’s founders struggled to explain to people what Twitter actually was. Everyone had a different explanation—a social network, microblogging, updating your status, etc. — which caused confusion for new users.
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.”
Lesson: It’s extremely important to succinctly and clearly explain what a product does and what value it offers if you want users to understand what to do with it.
On workplace culture
Jason Goldman and Biz Stone loved to work for Ev because he gave his employees creative freedom to explore ideas. By contrast, “at Google, where they had both worked, ideas were put on spreadsheets and crunched with numbers to see if they were really worth exploring.”
Lesson: Employees don’t like to feel constrained, especially when they feel that they have more to offer than the constraints will allow. Furthermore, removing these constraints demonstrates to your employees that you trust them, which makes them proud and increases their devotion to the company.
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Because of Twitter’s roots, the company was a mess in its early days.
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.
Lesson: It’s important to figure out how you want your company to feel from the outset and behave in a way that establishes this. It’s not enough to simply announce to your employees what you want it to be in a meeting or via a “Company Culture Code” document.
On CEO commitment
While Jack Dorsey was Twitter’s CEO, he also liked to make room for a lot of extracurricular activities (e.g., learning to draw, yoga, sewing, socializing, etc.). This upset Ev, who saw that Twitter was struggling and believed that Jack wasn’t showing enough commitment to his job. Eventually, Ev confronted him:
“You can either be a dressmaker or the CEO of Twitter,” Ev said. “But you can’t be both.”
Lesson: Ev was right. There are only so many hours in a day and, because of this, you must sacrifice time that you’d like to spend doing other things if you want to be a good CEO. The company needs you.
On the importance of focus
Ev’s first attempt at starting a company flopped because he was never able to stay focused on a single idea.
He knew the company hadn’t failed because it didn’t have enough work. Quite the opposite. It had cracked because each week Ev would come in and announce to his friends and employees that he had a new idea, a new project, a new focus. When [the company] had finally focused on a single project, Ev couldn’t make a final decision about when to release it. He had been like a geologist searching for oil and changing the drill site before his workers had even cleared the ground to start digging. Eventually the projects had piled up and fallen under their own weight.
Lesson: It’s difficult enough to execute against just one idea. If you spread your attention across a bunch of ideas at one time, execution becomes nearly impossible. Focus.
