Rewley Lecture: Biz Stone and Evan Sharp 'Reconnecting with the Sacred in a Technology-Driven World'

I come from what you might call a stormy childhood. It was emotionally and physically violent in the household, and we grew up poor. I started working when I was eight—this is sounding very Dickensian, but anyway. We had government blocks of cheese, rectangular logs, because that's what you need when you're poor: a lot of cheese. But the silver lining was that the folks who had adopted my mom had left her a little house in an affluent town west of Boston, Massachusetts, called Wellesley—I'm sure you have one of those here. And as a result, I got to go to a really great public school system. So I grew up sort of tiptoeing around the house, a quiet kid, making sure to stay quiet when I was younger. But as I grew up and got into my adolescence, I started to realize that humor, confidence, respect, curiosity, and pushing into life sort of got you places. I had a great high school career, did a lot of things. One thing I'll point out: about two weeks into my freshman year, I realized that having to work after school and having to go to—I had started a lacrosse team, so having to go to practice and go to work—I had almost no time for homework. When I tried to do the homework, I ended up staying up till 3:00, 4:00 AM trying to do it. So I went into each of my teachers after class and said, 'I'd like to talk to you. I'd like to tell you that I have a no homework policy, so I won't be doing any homework.' Each one of them laughed at me. When they were done laughing, they looked at me and saw that I was being serious but respectful. I said, 'You know, I wish I could help you out, but it's the policy. So I will be paying attention in class.' They said, 'Well, it's going to affect your grade.' I said, 'You have to do what you have to do, but again, policy.' So they ultimately—I did this with each and every one very respectfully, and I never did homework in high school. I remember one day throwing all my books and stuff into a locker and just shutting it. My friend Matt Flanagan looked at me and asked what I was doing. I said, 'What do you mean, Matt? I'm leaving.' He said, 'But what about your homework?' I said, 'Oh no, I have a no homework policy. I don't do homework.' He said, 'You can't do that.' I said, 'Matt, it's a free country. You can do anything you want.' I don't think he liked me after that day. My best friend later, many years later, told me, 'When I met you in high school, you showed me that you could hack the matrix. You didn't have to do what everyone said.' I didn't really realize that, but I did a few things like start a lacrosse team, produce a play, do a lot of things that you weren't supposed to do. But it was a great school with great teachers, and I was allowed to do them. It planted the seeds of entrepreneurialism, the idea that you could start something from scratch and take it through, and also a little bit the idea that you could manipulate reality if you needed to to be the way you needed it to be. It was almost magical.

I wanted to be an artist, like Evan. I also poured myself into a computer in a different way. My high school had Macintosh computers, and I found Photoshop. I wanted to be an artist, so I squeezed every bit I could out of learning Photoshop to create art. I got a Chancellor Scholarship for excellence in the arts to go to university, but I wasn't as excited there; I didn't have the freedom I had in high school. So I got a job on the side moving boxes from the attic to the lobby of a publishing house in Boston called Little, Brown and Company. This was just at the time when the art department was switching over from the old techniques of spray glue, X-Acto knives, and stat machines to desktop publishing. It was perfect for me. The art department went out to lunch one day together, and I snuck onto the art director's workstation. I found a book cover that needed designing, designed it, printed it up, matted it up, and slipped it in with all the others to go off for approval in New York City. When the art director came back, he was asking around, 'Who did this? Which of you did this?' He had five designers there. I said, 'Oh, that was me.' He said, 'The box kid.' So I was the box kid. He ended up offering me a role. I thought to myself, 'All these other folks have Master of Fine Arts degrees. I'm skipping ahead in life. Why am I going to school? This is to get this job.' Also, I thought this was an excellent opportunity to apprentice, because he was offering not just a job but to work directly with him. So I quit school and took the role. I ended up designing book covers and getting to know design deeply. He taught me everything he knows, and to this day he's my son's grandfather—he's part of my family. We're still very close. After a few years, I thought I could open my own studio. He filled my head: 'When I was your age, I had a studio.' So I did that. Out in the real world, I had to find work. Someone came to me and said they had a $5,000 budget. I didn't care what they were going to say next. 'Do you do websites?' I said, 'Absolutely.' I had no idea how to build websites, but it didn't matter. I got a book on how to muddle through and build a terrible website for these folks, but it was good enough back then. It was 1997 or something, and they just had to check a box. Then my friends who had graduated from Ivy League schools—they had gone into high-paying consulting jobs—said, 'What are we doing telling other people how to run their businesses? We're smart. Biz, you're the web guy. We should start a startup, a web startup.' I said, 'Of course, absolutely. I'm your guy.' So we started an early social network, a social network/blogging network called Xanga.com, spelled with an X. It's a joke if you have to explain it. If you were Asian American in the year 2000, you know what Xanga is; otherwise, you've never heard of it. For some reason, it took off in that crowd. So I was this accidental entrepreneur technologist. I didn't mean to be, but I just kept saying yes to stuff.

So picking up my thread where we left off, I forgot to tell you that we started Xanga. It actually grew to a million users fairly quickly, which is unusual in 1999/2000. It was just popular, but I quit because my friends were hiring their consulting bros from their previous colleges, and I just really didn't like the way the culture was going. I was too green at the time to realize I could have worked to change the culture, so instead I quit. Then I felt instantly like I was on the wrong side of the screen. So I got a job at Wellesley College for about a year. Blogger, the company that Evan Williams started, was a rival to Xanga at the time. I loved the software and used it, and I also read his blog and was very much intellectually in line with what he was publishing. I read about Google acquiring Blogger in 2003. So I found his email—I'd never met him—and sent him a note saying, 'Congratulations on the acquisition, and also, I kind of feel like I was always a missing member of your team.' I just threw that in there. A week later, he said, 'How'd you like to come work at Google?' I thought, 'First of all, I don't think they'll take me, but I'll be on the other side of the screen, on the right side.' So I said yeah, sure, sounds great. It was that easy. Meanwhile, the founders of Google, Larry and Sergey, were telling Evan, 'We don't want this guy. There's no way we're hiring; he's a dropout. What do we want him for?' But apparently Evan was enough of a pain in the butt that they said, 'Okay, we'll take him.' So I ended up flying out to California—actually, I drove out with two cats in the back of the car, not recommended. I started at Google, and it was amazing. It was kind of like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. I worked on the Blogger team, but I would get up and just go around, look around, see what doors were unlocked, open them, and look in. I said, 'Wow, there's a whole bunch of people in here with a light down, operating a pedal, and there's something with a book. What are you guys doing in here?' They would look up with bleary eyes and say, 'We're scanning every book ever published.' I said, 'I'm not sure that's allowed, but okay, see you later.' I went into another room, opened the door; there was a guy in there, bare-chested, looked like he was up for days. There were TVs all around him and DVRs with wires hanging out everywhere. I asked, 'Are you okay? What are you doing in here?' He said, 'I'm recording everything being broadcast.' I said, 'Okay, keep up the good work.' There was just amazing stuff going on. But as amazing as it was, and it was a huge opportunity for me to get equity in this startup that was really going places—it hadn't IPO'd yet—I did get a sense that if they had an ordered list, a very short one, it went number one: technology, number two: people. And that wasn't my thing. I worked there for a couple and a half years, and they went public. I was able to sell enough stock to get to zero, because I had gone out there with debt. Then on the car ride home one day with Evan Williams, I had an idea. I said, 'You know what? People seem to like these iPods, and you can record your voice in the browser. So isn't it possible to let everyone have their own personal radio program? Wouldn't we be able to democratize that if we...?' He had the big eyes and said, 'Oh my God, yeah, we could do that.' We didn't know it was podcasting, but we thought it was a really novel idea. So I told my boss at Google—who I'd never met before that time—I said, 'I'd like to leave because I'm going to do a startup.' He just said, 'So you hate money?' I asked, 'Did you really say that?' He repeated, 'You hate money.' I think he's still sitting there saying, 'You hate money,' because I wasn't really getting it. I went home to my soon-to-be wife and asked, 'Did we move here so I could work at a search company, or did we move here so I could work with Evan Williams?' It was obvious as soon as I asked the question; she said, 'Oh, this is a no-brainer. You work with money.' Objectively, it was a terrible idea to leave what I left, and that's why the guy was saying, 'So you hate money.' I wasn't really getting it because I was looking at the next thing. But he was right—I didn't hate money, but I was really following what I really wanted to do. I'll update you on that later after Evan tells his story.

Listening to podcast, we weren't recording podcasts. So I went out to dinner one night with Ev and I said, 'What if everything goes right and we just nail it and we become the kings of podcasting? Is that what you want?' And he went like this, because neither of us really cared. We weren't emotionally invested in this. This was a novel idea, but it wasn't like an idea that was coming from an emotional spot. So he said, 'Oh God, no. I don't know. This was a cool idea, but we raised all this money, we're doing this thing, we don't care.' So he said, 'I'll focus on trying to sell this. You take the rest of the team and try to do a hackathon, just break it up and work on whatever.' And we had hired a guy named Jack Dorsey to come work with us at Odeo, and he and I had become really good friends. So the idea of pairing up, we were like two kids in gym class. 'Okay, let's work on something together.' And my main thing was, 'Let's just do something simple.' This whole podcasting thing is so complicated with the recording studio and the browser and everything. So we came up with this really simple idea of attaching text messaging to the web. It's like, 'Oh, you can find out what your friends are up to without even asking them. And if you have something to say, you just say it, and anyone who cares gets it.' I hacked something together that wasn't real, it was like a fake thing. We couldn't build it in time, but we showed it, we demoed it at the demo day of hack day, and everyone said, 'What else does it do?' And we were like, 'What do you mean? It's beautiful in its simplicity. You send a text, it goes to the web. You type on the web, it goes to the text. It's great.' And they were like, 'No, not so much.' None of our own team were like, 'This is a bad idea, this is stupid.' Evan saw that me and Jack were really into it, so he said, 'You guys should just keep working on this.' So we kept working on it, and eventually I think our enthusiasm was so infectious that the rest of the stragglers came over, and then it started growing like crazy. It grew with tech early adopters and also a lot of people who wanted to sign up to say how dumb it was. They clearly had a short opinion on it, and this was the best way to say, 'This thing's stupid and I'll never use it.' That was a lot of our signups. It started growing really fast. I was doing all of the design, all of the UI design, all of the product design and everything. It started as a hack project and it continued as a hack project for many years. That was the mentality. So many things that we did did not have real intention behind them. I'll give you one example. One day, my chore was to put together a little profile of the person who is tweeting. We didn't call it that yet. But okay, what do I have? I have their username, I have their name or pseudonym if they put one, I might have a profile pic. Jesus, I got nothing. Oh, I know what I have. I have the number of people who are following them. I'll put that right next to their name. Okay, good. Next project. What I didn't realize I was doing was driving an incentive. If you have a number next to your name, you want that number to go up like a score. I didn't even think about it, but I was creating the incentive. 'I need more followers.' I didn't even think about it because I had half a day to put that together and then on to the next thing. That's what life was like. I really learned about what happens when you're not very intentional about the design.

You weren't really getting that yet, right?

Yeah. It's funny because we fast forward now to 2017. This is when Evan and I met, and we started having breakfast once a week and talking about stuff. Also in 2017, I had left Twitter to do some other things. Twitter's CEO situation was like a Game of Thrones by 2017. It was back to Jack Dorsey after all these others. He said, 'Look, we're losing great talent, we're losing users, we're not profitable, morale is down, everything's... I need you to come back and make this place special again.' And my wife at first said, 'Hell no.' And she's usually right, so I thought about it for a minute. But then I thought I would really regret it if I couldn't help. So I said I would come back. I did a lot of things, but I think the most important thing that I did was I realized that we had taken off so quickly that we never had a chance to articulate a purpose statement. I like 'purpose statement' rather than 'mission statement' because I believe missions are either accomplished or failed, but a purpose is like an enduring, aspirational thing that never ends. So I decided we needed a reason why Twitter exists. I spent a few weeks to a month crafting a lot of different versions, and I ended up with: 'Twitter exists to serve the public conversation.' I had a feeling that this would help, that it would get a lot of people on the same page. But it helped a lot more than I thought it would. Not least because Jack liked it, we got the rest of the leadership behind it, we really marketed it internally so that it was on the top of everyone's brain. Everyone was hearing this all the time. But it didn't just get people aligned on the same page. It told us, 'Don't do all of this work.' It self-selected out all the people who didn't believe in that purpose. It brought in new people who wanted to work on that purpose. It really had a huge transformational effect. It helped with all the other things that I was supposed to do too. If you're there to serve the public conversation, it naturally follows that you're there to be responsible for the health of the public conversation. So here's governance and here's policies around all these things. Infusing the company with purpose was one of the best things that we could have done.

Yeah. And it also speaks to, might seem obvious, but if you build something hundreds and hundreds of millions of people are using, you just have a responsibility to know it really deeply.

Yeah. What I hear you're talking about is the way intention is just like a technology for consciousness. This is where we start to get a little like why we put 'Sacred' in the title. It's a big deal to us.

Yeah. We're now working together, and our approach is just to be much more intentional, to invite into the workplace the ancient traditions and sacred traditions. If we work by the seasons instead of the quarters, it's not that much of a difference, but it feels like a big difference. When you come into our office, you'll see this little table with framed photos of the people that came before us. We call it our ancestor table. We light a little candle. There might be a little bit of meditation before each meeting. It's just inviting more intentional and more appreciative of the things that came before and weaving them into the future-looking tech that we work on. We even have on our leadership team a 30-year... I'm not going to tell you the word, I keep forgetting the name. Minister? A religious scholar. We have a foremost psychologist in human emotion on our team. We're inviting these types of characters in.

Yeah. And it's valuable. When you're in that place of communion with the divine, you sort of know that everything is just inherently sacred, that everything is just infinitely valuable. I would just add that when you think about what's valuable, you ask somebody, 'What's valuable to you?' and they'll say, 'I don't know, my car. Wait, no, sorry, I'm an idiot. My house. Wait, no, oh God, I'm so rude. My family, my friends and family.' And that's all true, but I think the most valuable thing we have is our lifetime. It's a gift. A lot of souls don't get a lifetime. So you get a lifetime, and the way that you honor that special gift of a lifetime is just to live it a little bit more on purpose. The beauty of honoring it that way is that really you're just rewarding yourself and those around you. It's an amazing way to honor it.

Thank you for the question. You want to go? You should go.

Yeah. And I think the part I would say about that is we've both experienced who you are becomes what you build or what you grow. And it gets really weird when you build something that gets really big. If any of you have kids, you see your own stuff in your kids. You're like, 'Oh God, that's my whatever.' It's just like that with a company or a product. You just see your psyche manifest at a global scale. So it may be a little disappointing, but to me the answer to that is take care of yourself, take care of your community, and trust that what will grow out of that is a much more well-tuned and adjusted thing than would have otherwise happened. And don't have fear. That's the hardest part of it. Evan is my master teacher at that. If you're afraid it's not going to work, you've already lost.

Agreed.

Well, I don't like the trappings. These guys are kind of dragging me kicking and screaming into this. I like to make jokes while we're meditating. It's the best time to make a fart joke. But it's rubbing off on me. I didn't grow up with any kind of church or anything like that. But I'm slowly learning that these very simple practices that you learn from these different religions can be applied to different things. They can be repurposed. They can be very useful. I don't know about falling into the trap. I don't know how. They're that sexy?