Biz Stone Speaker | The Birth of Twitter | Contact Agent

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.

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.

And the answer was that I came out to work with Evan Williams. So I had to quit Google and follow him.

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.

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.

So it turns out that if you build something because you think it's a good idea but you don't actually use it yourself or enjoy it yourself, then you're lacking what I refer to as emotional investment. And you need that. You have to have emotional investment. Success isn't guaranteed if you have emotional investment, but failure pretty much is. And we just had an honest, very frank conversation, Evan and I. I said, even if we do figure out a way to succeed at podcasting and we become the kings of podcasting, is that what you want to be? And he said, no. And I said, neither do I. I said, what are we doing? So Evan had a smart idea. He was the CEO of Odeo. He said, why doesn't everyone just take two weeks and just build something completely different? Build something you want to build. Build something that you enjoy. And let's just see what happens. I'll try to sell Odeo. And so one of the programmers, Jack Dorsey, and I had become friends, and we had found every excuse to work together. And this was we knew we would pair up. So we paired up and we decided to make Twitter as our project. He said, how about this idea? Do you think this is something? How about if you could just glance at a bunch of updates from your friends and know what your friends were up to without asking them? And he showed me, he referenced the AOL Instant Messenger status field, which you could set to away but you could also type anything in it. So he showed me, look at my 12 friends. Look how this one's saying he's out sick, this one's saying he's bored, this one's listening to the White Stripes. Do you see how just without even asking them I can get a sense? And I said, that's interesting. And I said, you know, we could hijack text messaging to build us a network on top of this. And we got excited. We cobbled together a prototype in two weeks just to demonstrate it to our colleagues. They were very underwhelmed. But we liked it. There was something to it. And very early on in the prototyping phase, something happened. It was a heat wave, and my wife and I had bought this tiny house in Berkeley, California. Really tiny, it was 400 square feet. And I had watched this program when I was a kid called This Old House. And in this show, they would always rip up the wall-to-wall carpeting to reveal the beautiful hardwood floors. So I decided I would do that. And I started in the middle and I just cut a big hole and I revealed no floor. And so there I was, sweating, ruining my house, cursing the fact that I had even... why would I think I could do this? And then my phone buzzed in my pocket, and it was a tweet from Evan Williams. His tweet was, sipping Pinot Noir after a massage in Napa Valley. And I laughed out loud at the incongruity of these two events. And then I had sort of an out-of-body experience. I realized I was laughing at something that I was building. It was making me laugh. And that's when it clicked that there was that emotional investment. And that's what carried me through the first year of everyone saying that Twitter was just a waste of time, it was useless. The biggest critique of Twitter was, Twitter is useless. To which Evan Williams replied, well, so is ice cream. Should we ban ice cream and all joy?

So we had been working on Twitter for about a year in a bubble, having fun, laughing. But then I heard a story about a guy who was at a pub and he wanted to talk about his projects with some colleagues, but the pub was too loud. So he sent out a tweet that says, how about we move to this other pub so that we can talk about projects? And he named the other pub. And in the 8 minutes it took him to walk to the other pub, it had completely filled to capacity with a line around the block. So his plan backfired. But what had happened was he had sent out a tweet. A percentage of the people who follow him thought that was a good idea, sent out the same tweet, and so on. And what happened was this concentration of humanity arrived at this pub. And the metaphor that came to mind was that of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight. Something that looks incredibly choreographed, incredibly practiced, but the mechanics of flocking are actually very simple. It's one bird looking at its neighbor bird's shoulder and just following it. And so on, so that a lot of individuals from moment become almost one organism and then go back to being individuals again. And that was what we were seeing. That's what happened. And I thought to myself, there's no technology on Earth that allows humanity to suddenly become one organism and then go back to being individuals again, because of the instantaneous real-time nature of the product and the broadcast aspect and the idea that you could sort of retweet and reverberate an idea could go from one person to a million in seconds. And that sent chills down my spine. I thought this was a party, but what if it had been something serious like a disaster? And so we went back two days later, we formed Twitter as a corporation, and then all hell broke loose after that. We just watched it grow and we listened to what it wanted to be. And we saw things like the hashtag emerge. What are people trying to do? It looks like they're trying to tag their tweets with a certain topic. Well, why don't we hyperlink that to a search so you can see everything? Fabulous. And then we saw people addressing other people using the at symbol before their Twitter name. What they were trying to do was publicly address the person so that it wasn't a private address. They wanted other people to know that they were addressing that person, and they wanted the other person to see the tweet. So we turned that into a conversation. So we let the application or the platform tell us what it wanted to be.

So two things there. Social responsibility should be taken into consideration at the very beginning. And startups are uniquely positioned to be able to build doing good by doing well into their model from the beginning. It's harder for an established corporation to figure out how to weave that in, but a startup can put that in in the beginning. I hired a corporate social responsibility person two years before we hired our first salesperson. Why? Because I think that the future of marketing is philanthropy. People are drawn to meaning. If there's a product or service that they know is supporting a certain cause, they'll choose it over its competitor. Also, you attract more talent if your platform and your company, your organization, is passionate and committed to some causes. You'll get the talent that might otherwise go somewhere else because they want to know that just by showing up at work, they're doing something meaningful in the world. It has something to do with this hierarchy of needs. Once you attain a certain level in life, you look for more meaning. And so I think the future of marketing is if you have a $5 million marketing budget, you spend $4 million on a cause and you spend $1 million making a big deal about how you gave away $4 million.

Well, first of all, just to address the Arab Spring, just because the Twitter name got associated with the Arab Spring, I like to remind people that it's all about the people, the brave people who are bleeding and dying in the streets and willing to fight for what they thought was right. And they reached for the nearest technology. By no means was Twitter the cause of this. When the Berlin Wall came down, AT&T didn't say, telephones did that. Were calls made? Yes. But we have to underscore the idea that Twitter is not a triumph of technology, it's a triumph of humanity. The technology is there to support humanity's bravery and good deeds. But the flip side of that is everything casts a shadow. So in a strange way, even if you're uncomfortable with the content, you can be proud of the fact that you are supporting the freedom of speech. When I drew that little bird for the first time, I was really just drawing a bird because I wanted to see if I could draw a bird. And then I thought, wait a minute, a bird in flight is the perfect example of the freedom of expression. You can use something like Twitter to place yourself in someone's shoes halfway across the world and have a moment of empathy with them. The more you do that, the more you understand that you're not just a citizen of a particular city, state, or country, but a citizen of the world. And if we can start thinking of ourselves as citizens of the world and we can start connecting and collaborating together, we can start getting things done in one year that it would normally take 100 years to get done. And this would be a fantastic outcome and vision for the future of social media.

Thanks so much.