by Nick Bilton
“What’s that?” Biz asked.
“Let’s just say you won’t be afraid of flying.”
He accepted the job and popped a giant, round antianxiety pill as he boarded the plane. On the flight, half-dazed and half-ecstatic that he had “overcome” his phobia of flying, he spent most of time slurry and chatting excitedly with any passenger who would listen to him.
Biz’s jovial mentality became apparent to Google executives the moment he officially started at the company. He didn’t just come to Google and slip into the company’s culture of quiet and insular engineers. Instead, Biz held his own ticker-tape parade in the form of a fake press release on the Internet to announce his new job.
“Google Inc. has acquired the entire staff and some of the intellectual property of Genius Labs, a Boston-based blogging entity comprised entirely of Biz Stone,” he wrote on his personal Web site on October 7, 2003, in a post titled “Google Acquires Genius Labs.” “Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.” He concluded his fake release with a joke at his new employer’s expense. “Google’s free snack and coffee program has drawn accolades from industry elite and their innovative search technologies are also very nice.”
When he arrived at the search engine, his comic routines saw him shuffle between bosses. Like Ev, Goldman, and the rest of the Blogger team, Biz often felt out of place amid the company’s cutthroat, businesslike mentality. Like a group of unpopular kids at school, the Blogger misfits would eat together in the company’s cafeterias, drink in their own corner during the company’s weekly Friday addresses, and crack jokes at the expense of the straitlaced programmers.
Ev wasn’t like any traditional boss Biz had worked under before. When Ev hired someone new, rather than wait to trust them with confidential information or important tasks, he chose to trust them immediately. Biz felt a sense of confidence and pride that Ev treated him this way, and the bond between the two quickly tightened. Before long, fueled by their collective comic relief, Biz, Ev, and Goldman became best friends.
After Ev left Google in 2004, Biz was miserable, as his new bosses at Google didn’t trust him or treat him with respect. So in 2005 he decided he had had enough and wanted to follow Ev to his next project. This came with a conundrum: He would have to leave millions of dollars on the shiny Google table in order to take a new job at the grimy podcasting start-up Odeo, working with Ev again and his new, wacky business partner, Noah.
“We didn’t move out to California so I could work at Google,” Biz told Livia as they discussed the millions of dollars they would be throwing away. “We moved out here so I could work with Ev.”
Given how close their friendship had grown over the past two years, the decision was easy. He went into work the following day and turned over his white Google employee ID, and the money that came with it, in exchange for the freedom of start-up life.
When he started at Odeo on September 6, 2005, he quickly realized it was a much bigger change than he had anticipated. His unlimited free meals, free snacks, free buses to work, and free inexhaustible everything at Google were now replaced with an office where homeless people slept in the stairwell, the only free transportation was his two feet, and the only free food or drink was a beer after work if Ev picked up the tab.
The cultural difference was incalculable. The sterile, robotic culture of Google, with its know-it-all engineers and bossy bosses, was now replaced with tattooed hackers with a do-what-you-want mentality. A group of people who had nothing but disdain for the Googlers of the world, who made a point to always tout their degrees from Stanford and MIT, the Odeo employees were all dropouts from midtier colleges.
And Biz, working alongside his best friend and former boss, among the homeless people and the chaos, the grime and grunge, felt right at home.
II.
#NOAH
Troubled Waters
It was late 2005 as the boat emerged from the thick fog and the Odeo employees looked out at the view. The Golden Gate Bridge glowed orange in the distance as the sails clanked against the mast as the wind thrust them forward.
“We’re about to head to the Tiburon Marina,” Ariel Poler, one of the Odeo investors, said as he steered his boat through the salty air and across the San Francisco Bay. “Sam’s is open; that’s excellent,” he added, squinting into the distance.
Noah was hyperactively filming as he interrogated his coworkers for another short video he would later post to his blog. He butted the lens of the camera up against people’s faces like a child showing off a lollipop. “Tell us about it?” Noah asked Biz, looking for a play-by-play of the relatively uneventful boat outing.
“It’s good. We didn’t lose anyone on the way over here, but maybe on the way back, one or two guys,” Biz said to the camera, scrunched up to keep warm as the wind scraped across his orange jacket. Ev, who was sitting to his right, his eyes concealed behind his dark sunglasses, said, “We can afford to lose one.”
Ev was joking, mostly. Although he wouldn’t throw him over the side of the boat, Ev would have happily thrust Noah over the rails of Odeo.
Ev and Noah were at odds on almost everything. The colors of logos. The type of products they should focus on. Who was in charge. They couldn’t even agree on when to open Odeo to the public.
“No. It’s not ready!” Ev had said one afternoon earlier in the year, shaking his head from side to side as Noah tried to negotiate with him. “I’m telling you, I’m CEO; I’ve done this before; I don’t want to put the site up yet!”
Rabble and Ray, the young Flash designer who had been hired while Odeo was working out of coffee shops, leaned back in their chairs to get comfortable for the next Noah-versus-Ev debate. Ev wasn’t ready to announce his new disruption to the world just yet. He had always had a difficult time making decisions and pressing the final launch button. Noah, brimming with excitement and eagerness, had not.
Unbeknownst to them, the winner of this debate wouldn’t count. Rabble decided. “It’s live,” Rabble told them, a mischievous grin on his face, his chaotic hair pulled back in a ponytail. Ev and Noah continued to bicker. Again Rabble told them, “It’s live, guys,” now speaking up to ensure that they stopped talking. “I just turned the site on.”
They stopped arguing and looked over at him. Noah smiled from ear to ear. “No way!” he said. Ev just shook his head.
The site they had just unintentionally launched hoped to be the Web’s central destination for podcasts. It would allow people to create and record audio files, then share them with other people on the Web using an Adobe Flash–based widget called Odeo Studio. All of this would be completely free.
With Ev’s name attached to the company, Odeo had received press and awareness throughout 2005 that had brought the attention of investors, including Ariel Poler, who presumed that podcasting could become a competitor to radio, just as blogging had done to publishing. In August 2005, with no business model, Odeo had received five million dollars in funding from Charles River Ventures and a number of other smaller investors—a bet on podcasting and Ev, not necessarily on the company or the people working for it.
With a slew of money in the bank to hire new engineers and take the company in any number of podcasting-related directions, Noah and Ev hadn’t been able to agree on anything. As the first month flush with cash had passed, Noah had started complaining to the board, calling George Zachary, the lead investor in Odeo, to voice his displeasure with Ev’s lack of leadership and inability to make decisions. On several occasions Noah had tried to stage a mutiny and suggested that the board remove Ev as CEO and install Noah as the new captain. Ev, who had an aversion to conflict, decided to deal with the contention by simply ignoring it. On most days he skipped going into the office altogether, rather than face the wrath of frenetic Noah.
“Who would you lose? Who could you afford to lose the most?” Noah asked Biz and Ev on the boat as they floated through the chilly water, smiling, as he already knew the answer.
“Oh, that’
s a tough choice,” Biz said as he looked over at Ev, who didn’t answer.
“Probably me,” Noah said sarcastically, then flipped the camera around to document his own face, his broad smile filling the frame, buglike sunglasses wrapped around his eyes. “Probably me, probably me,” he said, laughing slightly.
Biz and Ev didn’t disagree.
Noah set off like a rogue Ping-Pong ball, bouncing around the boat to film everyone else.
Jack was standing on the bow in a uniform of denim—dark jeans and a matching jean jacket. His messy, dark hair slapped around in the wind as he stood daydreaming. He loved to sail, and the day trip reminded him of an earlier goal he had set for himself, to soon buy a boat and skipper it, alone, to Hawaii: a 2,400-mile journey that, according to his research, would take about a month.
As Ariel’s boat slowed at the dock, the group stepped onto the rustic planks, stretching their legs and collectively looking like a giant caterpillar waking from a nap.
Although this was the first boat outing for the Odeo crew, it was another field trip for a small group of mismatched employees who, for a brief moment, were becoming close friends—at least some of them were.
As on most of their excursions, alcohol would be used to help lubricate the afternoon’s conversation. They soon found themselves rocking back and forth on the white plastic chairs outside Sam’s Anchor Cafe, seagulls sniping at their food. They sipped glasses of wine, telling nerdy jokes and laughing at one another.
Jack sat quietly listening. He never really said much. When he did speak, it was in two- or three-syllable sentences, as if he were rationing how much he could say aloud during a single day. It wasn’t clear anyone would have listened to him anyway. He was, after all, one of the most junior people at Odeo. The deckhand on a boat; a lowly private in the army; a contract programmer at a start-up. Although Ev rarely interacted with Jack, he referred to him in the office as “the idea guy” because of his wacky concepts. Some were totally bizarre, like his suggestion to create a start-up that would allow programmers to team up and work together, but not in a traditional way. The idea was that while one person wrote code, the other programmer would massage his or her shoulders; then they would switch.
Jack often told his coworkers about a new movie, book, or album they should watch, read, or listen to or about an upcoming art show or party they could all attend, helping sew together friendships between his office mates.
Often, though, Jack would simply sit quietly, absorbed in his own thoughts. But his daydreaming inevitably hit a dead end as the group of beer-sipping geeks’ conversation quickly arrived at its final destination: work. This was often the case. Breakfasts, lunches, dinners, drinks, dancing in clubs were often punctured by work-related chatter.
It was these conversations—Noah, Ev, Biz, Rabble, Jack, and a handful of other Odeo engineers talking about the past and the future—where a potion started to stir together that would ultimately transform the podcasting company, which was going nowhere, into one that would change the world and all of the people gathered on the dock at Sam’s that day.
At times Ev and Biz talked about their days at Blogger and how people used the service to share news. To tell stories. To disrupt media.
On one of the group’s outings, Rabble and Blaine shared tales of their hacker days using mobile phones to help antiwar and antigovernment demonstrations evade the police. Noah talked about pirate radio stations. Jack mentioned his days as a bike messenger.
Others discussed competitors, including Dodgeball, a location-based messaging service that had started to gain a lot of traction in New York City.
Jack took it all in, processing the ideas he heard and he sat silently, as usual. But that was all about to change in the office. There was a new Odeo employee starting the following week.
A girl.
“Oh, that’s Crystal,” Jack was told when he asked about the woman in the office. “Not gonna happen; she has a boyfriend.” Still, Jack was immediately smitten. And understandably so. Crystal Taylor had pin-straight black hair, deep welcoming eyes, and a smile that could stop traffic. Her slight frame made her seem like a pixie from a children’s fairy tale.
During her first week at Odeo, Jack made endless excuses to talk to her. He would stand nervously fidgeting with something on her desk, staring at her at lunch, awkwardly playing with his nose ring. He eventually picked up the courage to ask Crystal what kind of music she was listening to on her headphones. The conversation quickly led to the type of bands they both enjoyed, and Crystal asked him if he wanted to join her and a group of friends to see a show.
“Yeah, I’d love to,” Jack said, excited, nervously peering away from her. “I’ll call you later to figure out where to meet.”
“Call me?” Crystal said, confused. “I don’t really use the phone. Can you just text me?”
“Umm, what’s a text?” Jack asked, slightly embarrassed.
“Um, text messages, helloooooo? You’ve never used text before?”
In today’s age, such a conversation might be like asking someone if they had ever heard of the Internet, or cars, or this giant ball of fire in the sky called the sun. But in 2005, although it had taken off in other countries and with teenage girls in the United States, text messaging was a relatively esoteric form of communication for most of America.
“No,” Jack said solemnly. “I’ve never heard of texting. What is it?”
“Here, let me show you,” Crystal told him as he stood nervously watching her explain how to send an SMS from a phone with a tiny two-inch black-and-white screen, a form of communication that until then had been lost on Jack but had spread in the rest of society like an epidemic that afflicted only girls with cell phones.
Jack was a quiet engineer at the time, and with his Raggedy Andy hair and fear of face-to-face communications he had not had the opportunity to interact with too many girls, most of whom texted. That was, until he met Crystal.
Although she told him she had a boyfriend, Jack was obsessed. He soon found out she liked juice, so at lunchtime he would show up with a bottle and place it on Crystal’s desk to surprise her. But when that didn’t garner much response, his head hanging, he tried one of his signature moves with the ladies: making the perfect origami crane.
He had first learned how to make the perfect paper version of the long-necked and long-tailed bird after he decided to craft one thousand of them as a gift for a friend’s wedding. He had meticulously folded each one, on his own, until he was so perfect at crane making that he could do it from memory with his eyes closed. He decided such a gift was now worthy of Crystal.
One morning he rushed into the office early and placed a crane on her keyboard. He then slyly sat at his desk, silently pretending to work when she arrived with her cup of Tully’s coffee to be met by a little paper bird staring up longingly from her computer. At first Crystal put the crane to the side, smiling at it and moving on with her day. Then she received another the next day. And another the day after that, until finally she grew upset at Jack’s relentless passes, especially given that she had a boyfriend.
“You don’t need to get me juice,” she said to Jack as she stormed over to his desk, reminding him that she was in a relationship. “And it’s really sweet that you’re putting the cranes on my keyboard, but you can stop now.”
“Did you see which letter I put them on?” Jack said excitedly, almost ignoring her request to respect her boundaries. She had not seen that the cranes had each been placed on different letters, which were going to spell out her name. “No!” she said, annoyed, and turned around to leave. But he pressed on, determined that something would eventually happen with Crystal.
He was more successful with the friendships he forged with his coworkers.
With each social event, flocks were being shaped, people bonding like some sort of strange chemical concoction separating and coagulating back together again. At one end of the spectrum there was the Blaine and Rabble posse, sticking to their an
archistic, antieverything mentality. At the other end were Ev and Biz, dinner-party mavens who enjoyed a quiet evening of wine around a long wooden table. And in the middle were Noah, Jack, Crystal, and the rest of the mess, who soon became an inseparable group of friends. Sometimes they went to music shows together or foreign films. To wine bars and dive bars. For long walks and short bike rides. They were best-friend club kids who enjoyed drinking sake out of square boxes and dancing long into the night to music that sounded like a fax machine.
Although the groups sometimes overlapped, with Noah going to Ev’s parties and Ev getting beers with Noah, they mostly kept to their own boats in the same waters. And although they didn’t know it yet, the waters they were in were about to become even more fraught with mayhem and chaos. These waters would eventually see half of the crew of the HMS Odeo thrown overboard.
Status
I think I’m going to leave Odeo,” Jack said as Noah pulled his car over to the side of Valencia Street. The rain was falling so heavily against the window that it sounded like buckets of marbles slamming against the glass. As the car came to a stop, the street was completely desolate. A faint blue light hovered on the stereo, reminding them both it was approaching 2:00 A.M. and sleep deprivation followed by the usual intense hangover would greet them in a few short hours when they awoke.
It was late February 2006 and they were nearing the end of another long night of dancing, vodka and Red Bulls, and long conversations about love, loss, and loneliness.
