Start-up lessons from the Twitter Story
When people in the start-up circles normally talk about Twitter, they might talk about how some 1600 Twitter Employees — two-thirds of the staff turned millionaires after the recent Twitter IPO or they might talk admirably about Jack Dorsey as Founder of both, Twitter and Square or they might talk about using Twitter as part of their business process (marketing, customer engagement) or they might just talk about how Twitter changed the way the world shares news and played a pivotal role in the revolutionary Arab Spring movement.
However what most people might not be aware of is that Twitter is also the perfect example of all that can go wrong with start-ups especially the politics. If anyone is interested in learning about start-up politics, you must read the book Hatching Twitter. A wired article also talks about it and it is probably going to made into a TV series comparable to the Facebook movie.
Credits — http://hatchingtwitter.com/
There are definitely some good lessons to be learned from Twitter.
But before that, the star cast.
Noah Glass as Noah, Ev Williams as Ev, Jack Dorsey as Jack and Biz Stone as Biz.
Start-up meet-ups and VC networking is overrated
Twitter was born inside a company called Odeo that was building a pod-casting platform. Noah started Odeo in his apartment and was working on it all by himself, struggling to make ends meet. Ev was Noah’s neighbor. Ev was struggling for a while trying to run a blogging company. Then things turned better for Ev and his company, Blogger, was bought by Google turning Ev into a Silicon Valley celebrity. Noah had become good friends with his neighbor and asked Ev for money to build his company. Ev agreed on the condition that he become CEO. So Odeo was formally born.
Noah hired a hacktivist called Rabble with that money. Rabble was in town for some political demonstrations and he knew Ruby on Rails (which in 2004 had just been released) which was what made Noah hire him. He stood out from the others who had applied.
Jack was at a Coffee shop when he recognized Ev. He quickly picked up his resume which he had made to apply for a job at a shoe company, edited out the shoe references and mailed Ev asking if they were hiring. They met and Jack was hired as a freelancer.
Biz gave up his million dollar stocks at Google to join Ev at Odeo. Ev had recruited Biz to Google when Blogger was acquired despite Biz not having any programming experience and being a non-Ivy league college drop-out because Biz had a vision about blogging that aligned with Ev.
Neighbors, guy from the coffee shop, former colleague. That’s how the Twitter founders met and got their first investment. No start-up meet-ups.
Pivoting is not always going to be a clear process
Odeo was a pod-casting start-up and they were not doing great. Most of the employees themselves weren't interested in using the product despite being a ‘market-fit’ to it. Many were thinking about quitting. Jack was one of them. He just happened to mention to Noah that he wanted to quit and maybe do something with jeans and the fashion industry. He also mentioned something about sharing status updates via text messages (At that time apart from teenage girls, no one really knew about or used text messaging). He talked about other things too. Somehow Noah got excited about this status update thing, organized a hackathon at Odeo where Jack built the status update sharing platform as a hack along with Florian and Dom. Noah even came up with the name Twitter. Most of Odeo was still working on pod-casting and it was only Jack and team trying out Twitter. Noah launched Twitter as drunken banter and it was just picked up by the media even when there was no intent to actually launch Twitter. More details in this original “Odeo releases Twttr” article on Techrunch from July 2006.
Despite the media hype, Twitter did not have many takers. Noah was fired from Odeo (and Twitter which he unofficially founded). Ev, then the head of Odeo couldn't really convince the investors about Twitter and had to put in his own money to return the VC money they had taken for Odeo. Finally Twitter actually picked up at the SXSW in March 2007. Here is an article about Twitter winning the ‘Best start-up award’ at SXSW. Even then Twitter had $0 revenues and would continue to do so for some years after that.
So over a year and a half later, several years after being into pod-casting, after firing one of the founders and plenty of confusion on what exactly Twitter was, Twitter actually became a proper product from a hack, a hack that could be built in a day.
Product Development is far from perfect
Starting from the initial days of being a hackathon project, Twitter was largely held together by code glued together. Even when Twitter had grown to a large company, the database never had backups which meant that if Twitter’s database servers went down, all the tweets would be gone. Then there was the conflict between Jack & Ev on what exactly Twitter should be. A place for people to share their status or a place for people to report news. That meant there were a lot of decisions not taken on what features the product would have. Even the question of whether Twitter should be a web thing or a mobile thing was in doldrums, especially because Ev was concerned that Jack was piling up too many bills from phone companies on account of the text messaging part and so they were burning too much cash. Then there was the issue of site reliability. Twitter seemed to have more downtime than uptime. The fail whale was a common sight. When the Russian President visited Twitter’s office to officially send his first tweet, which was supposed to be replied to by President Obama and re-tweeted by a bunch of diplomats as a sign of diplomatic relations between the United States and Russia, the site went down recovering just in time the delayed Russian entourage hit the send button.
Source — Mashable
So despite Twitter being what it was, the product was far from perfect for several years after they first launched.
Everybody wants a piece of you when you are famous
Twitter had a bunch of acquisition offers starting from $12 million from Yahoo! and going up-to a $1 billion from Facebook, Microsoft and others as it got bigger. There was a lot of hostility between Facebook (including Mark Zuckerberg himself) and Twitter. All celebrities wanted to own Twitter. Ashton Kutcher, Lady Gaga, Snoop Dog. Even Al Gore, the former Vice President of the United States, got drunk with Ev and Biz hoping Twitter would partner with his TV channel.
Twitter was not sold. It wasn't about the money, it was initially about prestige (Ev’s reputation as a one time wonder with Blogger). Then it was about valuations. Then it was about vision.
Politics is everywhere
Noah, who made sure Twitter came into existence, was forgotten. So were a lot of early employees at Odeo and even those who helped build Twitter in its initial days. They haven’t made a dime of the billions the other people are making out of Twitter. Jack had a romantic interest with another employee of Odeo called Crsytal and then when she started going out with Goldman (almost another co-founder of Twitter), Jack was furious. Jack was thrown out due to his lack of competence as CEO and he took revenge by throwing Ev out two years later and returning to Twitter. Media and limelight were stolen. Ev hired Dick Costolo , a friend, to head operations at Twitter. Soon Ev was fired and Dick was made CEO. Biz, the other founder, soon left Twitter. This New York Times article titled “All is fair in Love & Twitter” provides more insight.
So yeah, make sure all contracts and agreements are on paper and conflict resolution is an integral part of it. Because Politics is going to be everywhere.
P.S. — Also to note is that Medium, the blogging platform on which this was originally published is founded by Ev and some of the other people mentioned in this article like Goldman are also associated with it.
