by Nick Bilton
Jack had always been a big fan of routine, so each day when he arrived at Caffe Centro, he sat in the same place, butted up against the window on a rickety wooden chair, able to watch the world float by like a silent movie.
On sunny days he sat in the park, his computer half buried in the grass like a predator as he tried to mooch wireless Internet from a company that left its network open. But as the saying goes, the coldest winter you will ever spend is a summer in San Francisco, which was true on a gloomy June day in 2005 as Jack found himself confined to the great indoors.
He was particularly melancholy on this afternoon as he sat looking out at the sparse park. The life he was living in San Francisco wasn’t exactly what he had expected. When he’d left St. Louis years earlier, eventually landing in San Francisco after a stint in New York City working for a bicycle-messenger company, he’d hoped desperately to work for a real start-up, yet he hadn’t had much luck.
As he sat calculating how he could get out of his dead-end job, he noticed someone familiar walk by the window. Jack had never actually met the man before, but he recognized that short black hair, the pointed nose, the slightly square stubbly chin, and those signature bright-colored sneakers. There were numerous stories on the Internet about him and the company he had sold for millions of dollars. The man continued to walk past Jack’s window, then, to Jack’s surprise, he wandered into the café and stood waiting in line to order.
The man didn’t notice Jack staring at him, methodically studying his every move; if he had seen the visual intrusion, he might have felt slightly violated. But Jack saw it as a sign and quickly opened his computer, popped open a Web browser, and searched for “Evan Williams e-mail” address in Google.
Jack didn’t have a traditional résumé. His most recent CV had been used to apply for a job at Camper, the shoe store. He had spent hours tweaking and designing the red and black lettering, choosing the spiky yet elegant Futura typeface to represent himself. He split his résumé up into three sections: Jack. Life. Love. There was no last name. Just Jack. Camper never offered him the job. But still, he pulled the résumé up on his computer, took out any references to shoes, and sent a near replica to Ev saying that he had just seen him at the café and was he hiring? A few back-and-forth e-mails later, Jack was told to come in for an interview.
Odeo had since stopped using Ev’s old apartment in the Mission and now lived in a larger space a few blocks from the park off Third Street. The space was wide and open, but it still had the telltale signs of a scrappy Ev and Noah production.
The desks in the new office were cheap and rickety, with Formica tops and metal legs. (Some of the furniture Ev had purchased from a sidewalk sale of an old church that had closed down.) Although there was a large arched window at one end of the room, it managed to brighten only a few feet of the loft. It was as if the light were afraid to come too close to the grimy Odeo hackers. A small, tattered Oriental rug had been placed on the floor, seemingly to brighten the area. The worst part about the entire space was the shared bathroom down the hall. It smelled so bad that people would place their T-shirts over their faces as they shuffled inside to avoid the vile odor. The stairwell stank too, as it had become an impromptu shelter for a number of homeless people who lived in the area.
When Jack stepped out of the building’s creaky old elevator into the Odeo offices, it was eerily quiet. A few scruffy geeks tapped on their keyboards. White IKEA curtains hung from the ceiling to cordon off sections of the large room. Jack was directed to the conference room.
When Ev walked in, he pulled up a chair and began with the usual banal questions about Jack’s past employment, where he was from, and how he’d ended up in San Francisco. But before long the interview was interrupted by a series of loud thuds that could be heard coming down the hall. Then the door swung open, slamming into the wall, and a large man came bustling in. “Hey! What’s going on, guys?” he said with verve and excitement. “Hey! Hey. I’m Noah!” he said to Jack. “Noah Glass.”
Noah was carrying a huge bowl that was brimming with salad; as he charged into the room, pieces of lettuce fell haphazardly from the bowl to the floor. He settled in at the far end of the table, several seats away from Jack and Ev.
“So, you do dispatch?” Noah said to Jack, as though Ev were not there.
Jack, a bit confused by the spectacle, looked over at Ev, who had a strained look on his face. They both peered back at Noah. “Yes, I used to write code on dispatch systems for bike messengers,” Jack said.
“That’s cool, that’s cool,” Noah said, nodding his head. “Well, what we do here, that’s kind of like dispatch,” he said while taking a giant bite from the salad bowl, lettuce hanging from his mouth like fangs. “Yeah, we make sounds, as a podcast, and then”—another pause as his brain calculated what he would say next—“then, these podcasts are dispatched to users!”
Ev stewed silently as Noah rambled. The relationship between the two had become increasingly strained. It was unclear who was making the decisions, and Ev, often the recluse, would sometimes be overshadowed by Noah, who tended to be the most boisterous voice in the room. Of course, Jack didn’t know any of this yet.
When the interviewed ended, Jack was introduced to Rabble, who asked a few pertinent questions about his programming skills but really wanted to know his political biases.
While Ev and Noah had been sparring over who made the decisions in the company, Rabble had recruited most of the engineers at Odeo, often hiring friends, typically those who had the same fuck-the-man, hacker mentality that he did. One friend, Blaine Cook, a slim twenty-four-year-old Canadian hacker with long blond hair, had come on board to help with the back-end programming code. Another former hacktivist who had helped with antigovernment protests had also joined, working remotely to help set up the servers that would store all the Odeo podcasts.
Some of Rabble’s friends were too antiestablishment even to work for Rabble. When he called one, Moxie Marlinspike, a lanky security researcher and hacker with long, thick, shaggy dreadlocks, he blatantly refused to join the clan. “I’m not working for you fucking dot-coms,” Moxie told him.
But given the choice between hiring a hacker and hiring a hack, Rabble always chose the former. On one occasion someone with a corporate background had applied for a job at Odeo. Although Ev wanted to hire him, Noah and Rabble were petrified that he would set up a lot of meetings. (“I don’t want to have to go to meetings,” Noah had pleaded.)
So Jack, who had tattoos and a nose ring and openly talked about his time in St. Louis spending every waking hour plodding through hacker message boards online, was a perfect fit.
Jack also had an anarchist background. One of his tattoos, on his right leg, was a black and orange star, which was a symbol for an anarchist group. He had been vociferous for years online about his contempt for war and corporations. He’d written about these issues on his own personal Web site, which he called gu.st, and also posted some rants about the perils of capitalism, his disdain for banking institutions, and Americans’ thirst for oil. He also frequented message boards promoting feminism.
As Jack walked out of the building, playing the interview back over in his head, he knew he would get the job. Bumping into Ev in the coffee shop was a sign, he thought.
Jack had an uncanny ability to tie moments and things like this together, even if they had nothing to do with each other. His other tattoo was a perfect example of this trait. A black, long blob of ink in the shape of an S covered most of his left forearm, but underneath there was a hidden story. Under the dark, curvy S, the tattoo had originally read, “0daemon!?”
The meanings of the tattoo were endless. The word “daemon,” he explained, refers to a computer program that lives in the background. To Jack, this signified what he saw in himself, a person who lived “behind the curtain” and had little influence. The exclamation mark on the tattoo was meant to show his excitement for life. The question mark, his level of curiosity with the world. He als
o had chosen to have the word placed on his arm upside down.
But that tattoo had since been covered up. He’d explored multiple career paths and at one point worked as a massage therapist. While people had lain half naked on his massage table, peering up at his arm, they had thought “daemon” had actually said “demon,” and that Jack the masseuse was into devil worship. Needless to say, most people had come for a massage only once.
Jack was hired as a freelancer almost immediately and fit into the culture of Odeo seamlessly. He had a hacker mentality, no degree, and a love for programming. He also had a solid work ethic and completed any given task with speed and accuracy.
He had learned to program young, helping his father, Tim, with work-related projects. As a child, rather than ask for toy guns or cars, Jack had stared longingly at RadioShack fliers, cutting out clippings to hang in his room of the calculator he wanted to get as a Christmas gift. He had also dabbled in his own fair share of hacking, once getting a job in New York City by breaking into a company’s Web site to show how vulnerable it was. Jack programming the Odeo Web site was like a seasoned car mechanic fixing a lawnmower.
Still, he was methodical in his work. His headphones would go on, a programming book spread open on his desk, and code would start raining down from his computer monitor. Before long he began winning the Getting Shit Done Award, a contest that Ev set up to reward the hardest worker of the week. On Fridays a hat would be passed around the office and everyone would drop in the name of the most productive employee of the week. After Ev and Noah tallied the votes, the winner would be announced.
“The Getting Shit Done Award goes to …,” Ev would say, pausing for dramatic effect, “Jack!” Then people would clap and Jack would smile, brimming with pride as he stood up to accept his reward. Some prizes were monetary; others were gadgets.
Though most people in the office liked Jack, they weren’t shy about telling him his ideas were a bit strange. He was always experimenting with peculiar concepts. One day he showed up to work with a white T-shirt that had his cell-phone number sewn onto the front in giant, dark numerals. He explained to a coworker that it was an experiment. He planned to walk around the streets of San Francisco with his phone number on display like a walking billboard, waiting for people to call. Although most people ignored the walking number, a few people decided to dial it.
“Hello?” one person said.
“Hello,” Jack replied, monotone.
“Who is this?”
“This is Jack. Who is this?”
The conversations soon devolved into the awkward banter that is usually reserved for the moment you run into an ex on the street. Needless to say, the calls ended quickly.
Jack had done similar bizarre experiments before joining Odeo. In 2002, in his early twenties, he had become enamored with eBay. At the time, he was destitute and didn’t have anything to sell, so he set up auctions where he offered to read the famous children’s book Goodnight Moon over the phone to the highest bidder. He somehow managed to sell his reading service to four different people—one of whom paid one hundred dollars to listen to Jack, a perfect stranger, read. “Goodnight clocks and goodnight socks,” he said into the phone. “Goodnight little house and goodnight mouse.” He finished, “Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.”
Yet even with his proclivity for weirdness, he quickly bonded with several of his new coworkers. Most nights he would venture out with Noah, Ray, and a few other Odeo programmers, exploring the city on bikes together or sometimes setting out on foot. They would dip in and out of clubs, music shows, and hookah lounges or go on unmethodical explorations of the city’s wine bars, sake dens, and art galleries. Almost every morning was met with a hangover.
But for now, Jack had found what he had spent his life looking for. A job with someone he looked up to: Ev. A group of coworkers who had a hacker spirit: Rabble and company. And a new friend: Noah.
@Biz
It was early October 2005 when Biz Stone sat down in a small conference room with his boss at Google. The company’s logo was spelled out in bright blue, yellow, green, and red letters on the wall behind him, as if it belonged in a kid’s play den. Red beanbag chairs sat close by. Biz’s smile seemed appropriate in the room’s festive atmosphere as his tousled blond hair fluttered atop his head.
“I’m quitting!” Biz said with a giant grin.
His boss looked at him, unsure if Biz, the Google jester, was joking or serious.
“Nope,” Biz continued. “I’m quitting.”
“You don’t care about money?” his boss asked.
“Yes. I do care about money.”
“Biz, you do realize that if you quit now you have to give up all your stock options?” his boss said. He reminded him that he had only been at Google for two years, which meant his stock had not vested and wouldn’t for another two years.
“How much am I leaving on the table?” Biz asked.
“More than two million dollars,” his boss said, confident that such a number would sway the young employee’s decision. For most people two million dollars or zero dollars was an easy financial equation. It was for Biz too. He just did the math a little differently.
Biz was far from rich. He had finally paid off fifty thousand dollars in credit-card debt he had been battling for years and was now living month to month in a small Palo Alto apartment with his wife, Livia, and their ark of rescued dogs and cats.
Yet having zero dollars in the bank, while he worked at Google—where even the chef was worth several million dollars—wasn’t a new experience for Biz. That was, after all, exactly how he had been raised: poor among the rich.
He had grown up in Wellesley, an affluent suburb of Boston, where the town’s median family income was well into the six figures. Though Biz’s neighbors were often absurdly wealthy, the Stone family’s life was rather different.
Biz was raised on food stamps.
His mother had been adopted by a kind Swiss couple as a child, and when they passed away, their large house was left to Biz’s mother and her children.
Feeding several hungry mouths was difficult as a single mother, so she developed a plan: Sell the house they owned every few years and downgrade to a smaller place in Wellesley. This way her children could take advantage of the county’s fancy schools, and they could use the money from the house sale to pay the bills. Four years later, do it all again. Sell and downgrade.
So Biz was raised in houses that shrank as he grew. Everything was rationed. Haircuts, for example, happened at home, with his mother placing a round bowl atop his mopey head and snipping anything that hung below the edge.
As a boy, Biz was a little idea generator. On weekends he would often visit a family friend who was an electrician, and he spent hours in the man’s basement building strange gizmos. In one instance, Biz rigged a doormat with a buzzer that blared when someone came to the front door. Another endeavor, which failed, was an attempt to build his own scuba gear out of Coke bottles and rubber tubes.
But most of Biz’s time was spent with his best friend from third grade, Marc Ginsberg, whose father was wealthy enough to own a computer. Biz spent days on end at Marc’s house, staring through his round Coke-bottle glasses as he used the Ginsberg family’s Apple II machine, playing video games and drawing on the built-in graphics program.
As Biz grew up, his father, a Boston car mechanic, turned absentee and on the rare occasions he did come home he would spiral into a drunken rage on Biz’s mother—on more than one occasion she ended up in the hospital. She eventually kicked him out of the house, and he was only allowed to see his kids on Sundays; Biz decided to stop the weekly visits soon after his sixteenth birthday.
Such a traumatic upbringing would normally turn a young boy into a recluse, maybe someone who needed decades of therapy. But not young Christopher “Biz” Stone. No, it made Biz into a complete and utter goofball. From early on he was cracking jokes to make his mom and sisters feel better after one o
f his father’s drunken tirades. He was the class clown in high school. He dropped out of college twice, from Northeastern University and from the University of Massachusetts, but while at each school he spent his time making his university friends laugh, rather than focusing on homework. The jokes continued into every meeting at Google.
While Biz’s sense of humor helped him in his career and in social settings, the jokes were also used to avoided conflict at all costs, which allowed people to take advantage of him at times, especially in the workplace. Between 1999 and 2001 he worked at a blogging network called Xanga. His coworkers there walked all over him as they took the company in a direction Biz thought was unethical by deceiving people who used the service and harvesting private information about them for profit. Rather than stand up and fight, Biz chose to quit.
After racking up bills and hanging out in his mother’s basement, he eventually went in search of a job at Blogger. At that time, in the summer of 2003, Ev had been working at Google for a few months, trying to settle into the giant company. Biz had read about Ev and his “push-button publishing for the people” philosophy and wanted to help spread the word about blogging too.
In mid-2003 Biz sent Ev an e-mail to say that he, Biz Stone, was the “missing member of the band.” After a few phone interviews, some jokes, and ethical discussions of the importance of blogging and how it allowed anyone with a computer to publish content, Ev decided he wanted to hire Biz. But Google didn’t feel the same way; Biz had no programming experience and was a college dropout. It took some convincing and politicking, but Ev was finally able to offer him the job.
After Biz received the offer letter from the search giant, the deal almost crumbled. At some point in his childhood, Biz had developed an inordinate fear of flying. He would go between Boston and New York City only on a multihour train or bus ride, rather than hop on a short fifty-minute flight. When he realized he would have to fly out to Mountain View, he declined without giving the real reason. Google, which at first had said no, did not like to be turned down, and the company kept adding money and stock options to woo him. When Biz explained the situation to a friend, the friend replied with one simple word: “Valium.”
