My first startup was a failure. My second was Twitter. That's not a bad track record, is it? Please, please, please give the warmest welcome to Biz Stone. Biz, come and join me, please.
There's something really interesting. A theme all the way through the book was many of us are fixated on getting the right solution. What I've picked up with is you're fixated on being able to ask the right questions of people and then listen and learn.
Well, listening and learning, that's the key thing. I mean, the way I develop applications is to start. You have to start somewhere. You always start somewhere. It's usually wrong. Wherever you start is usually wrong. I started out as an artist and then I became a graphic designer. The best way to design something is to start somewhere and then sort of sit back and from a high altitude view watch for patterns and look for what people are trying to do and then reinforce those things. There was a campus somewhere in California, a college campus. Normally when you build a campus, you build the buildings and then you build the pathways between the buildings. This architect decided that he would build the buildings and then not pave anything. He would wait until the footpaths emerged and then he paved them. Beautiful, because you always see on campuses the little shortcut. You guess where the good paths are, but then you see where people really go. But he had the foresight to wait and see. And it's kind of like that sort of thing.
There was a blog that I followed, and it was Evan Williams. And he was the founder of Blogger, the software that I was using. And I followed his blog because I found that I had a lot of intellectual, philosophical alignment with him. And I was like, I really, you know, this is the guy that I think I should be working with. And I just kept thinking about that. And when Google acquired Blogger in 2003, I finally dropped them a note. I had never met him. I had only followed his thoughts through his blog. And I dropped him a note and I said, you know, I always felt like I was a missing member of your team. So if you ever have any room over there at Google now, you know, I'd be very much interested in talking to you about this. And he wrote back, how'd you like to come work here? And it turns out that he too had been reading my blog all along and had the similar... I was shocked to find this out.
But did you, you know, when you send something, there's a recurring theme here that you back yourself all the time. You send him an email, you contact him effectively saying, you know, I could be the missing person on your team. What response did you honestly expect to get back?
Nothing, you know. I didn't expect anything back. You just try it and see what happens. Yeah, I just told them what I really felt, you know, because I really felt like they're missing me. They have all of these engineers, but they don't have someone who's bringing the social part to social. Early social media, it wasn't called social media yet, but that... they were missing that human element.
Did I come out to California to work at Google, or did I come out to California to work with Evan Williams?
And the answer was that I came out to work with Evan Williams. So I had to quit Google and follow him.
How difficult was that decision? You're in one of the most fabulous companies, most creative companies ever.
Yeah, well, it would have been difficult except for the fact that my wife was so supportive and the answer was so clear to that question: why did I move out here? And for the first year, we started a company based on this idea that I had had in one of our car rides home, that we could democratize radio like we democratized the sharing of information on the web. Because these things called iPods were catching on, and there was a way to record your voice in the browser, turn it into an MP3, and write software to sync it to an iPod. So we could let anyone have a radio station. And we thought, well, that's a great idea for a company. So we started this company called Odeo. But the thing is, it wasn't catching on. We didn't enjoy podcasting. Apple decided to put podcasting in iTunes, and we thought, well, that's a good place for it. So for the first year after leaving Google and watching the stock price skyrocket ever so much higher, I had my calculator out and I was just like, oh my God.
And did you leave stock behind you?
Yeah, yeah. I left what ended up being worth millions of dollars behind. And so for the first year I was like, oh my God, what have I done? This was my chance. But it worked out. So it all worked out.
