Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

by Nick Bilton

  Noah’s relationship with his wife, Erin, was breaking apart. She was a lawyer and he was an artist: two fundamentally different outlooks on life. The foundation of their marriage was caving in on itself, and he had confided to Jack how lonely and sad he felt. Jack could relate. Although he had friends in San Francisco, he was lost too, half punk rocker, half engineer, with dreams of sailing and hopes that Crystal might still fall in love with him. Or that he could quit his computer life altogether.

  “What do you want to do?” Noah asked as he looked out at the empty street, the stench of vodka soaking his breath.

  “I’m going to quit tech and become a fashion designer,” Jack said. “Plus, Odeo is a fucking mess.” No one who worked there even used it, Jack noted.

  Noah sighed, unable to argue with the statement. He had been trying to get people to use Odeo more, setting up Ev’s old beige couch in the center of the room for employees to spew platitudes into a microphone. But the mics just sat there, ignored, relics of the past inside a company that was trying to reinvent the future.

  Jack’s statement that the company was a fucking mess went beyond the sad reality that none of the employees of Odeo were actually using the service they were building. There were far bigger problems.

  For one, the tension between Ev and Noah had worsened. The personality conflicts between the two had boiled over on several occasions, erupting in the office for all to see.

  “I should be running this fucking company,” Noah had barked at Ev in front of employees more than once. “I could do a much better job than you! You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing.” Ev’s aversion to conflict resulted in his simply standing there and taking it, trying to calm his turbulent cofounder with silence but often ending up pummeled by one of Noah’s tirades. The investors were in a tizzy too, not sure who was running the company, an absent Ev or an erratic Noah, and petrified that the five million dollars they had invested in Odeo to build a site that could be the central hub of podcasts on the Web was about to slip away into the start-up sewers.

  The only thing Noah and Ev had been able to agree upon over the past several months was the move to a new, large street-level office at 164 South Park, just off the park.

  But the cofounders’ spats were only one aspect of the drama at Odeo. The other element was the anarchist culture that had been in the DNA of Odeo since day one, special thanks to the hackers who had been hired to program the Web site. Rabble and Blaine had been labeled “the Anarchists” in the office, a name they proudly answered to, as their lawlessness could not be controlled.

  Attempts to quell the chaos often went nowhere.

  One of the more corporate employees, Dom Sagolla, had been hired in October 2005 to help test new podcasting products. He had previously worked at the software giant Adobe and often used corporate jargon at Odeo, trying his best to help institute some organization. In one effort he created a grid of index cards on the wall near his desk. The top row listed all the employees’ names, then, trickling down, more index cards listed each person’s designated tasks for the week. As soon as Dom stepped away from his desk, engineers would slyly walk by, kneel over pretending to tie a shoelace or pick something up, and switch the cards around, placing jobs they didn’t want to do under someone else’s name.

  A daily morning “stand-up” meeting was scheduled by Tim Roberts, a vice president at Odeo. Yet two people always remained seated: Rabble and Blaine. “I’m not standing at your fucking meetings,” Rabble blared when asked to get up out of his chair with everyone else.

  The Anarchists defied any directive. One morning Tim decided to one-up them and announced that stand-up meetings would now be “sit-down meetings, and everyone should take a seat.” As the dozen employees grabbed chairs and settled in for the morning meeting, Blaine and Rabble, without skipping a beat, stood up and proudly remained standing. Everyone else, now seated, started giggling at them.

  But worse than the anarchy inside was the fact that Apple Computer had recently torn a hole in the hull of the company.

  On a Tuesday morning several months earlier, Odeo employees had gathered around their computers to watch Steve Jobs, the venerable CEO of Apple, announce the latest iPod.

  But stunned silence had enveloped them when Jobs declared that Apple was adding podcasts to iTunes. At the end of the announcements, the tech giant sent a brief press release across the news wires with the ominous headline, APPLE TAKES PODCASTING MAINSTREAM. In that brief moment podcasting, which had been the entire company thesis for Odeo, had become a simple add-on for Apple. Ev had known almost immediately that this was a fatal blow for Odeo. How could they beat Apple, which owned iTunes, the biggest music service in the world, at podcasting? They couldn’t. It would be like a tricycle racing a Formula One race car.

  None of this needed to be discussed in the car that night, as the rain fell and the smell of alcohol lingered in the air. Noah continued to talk about the past few months as Jack sat silently staring at the desolate street. This was how most affairs between the two worked: Noah talking enthusiastically, while Jack responded in monosyllables. “So what excites you?” Noah asked again. “What do you want, really want, to do?”

  “I want to go into fashion,” Jack said quietly. “I want to make jeans.”

  “Okay, great, we’re getting somewhere. Tell me what else you’re interested in,” Noah said. “What else do you want to do?”

  Although Jack and the others didn’t know it, Ev had been talking to Noah about shutting everything down, throwing in the dirty Odeo towel. Ev was tired and saw no solution for Odeo. But Noah was trying desperately to sift ideas out of the employees to save the company. Or at least the people in it.

  Jack listed a few items he liked, including music, sailing, and programming. Then he mentioned his “status” concept.

  Several months earlier, Jack had raised the idea with Crystal and Noah on one of their drunken outings. He’d originally come up with it in early 2000 when he was living in a dingy building called the Biscuit Factory, situated in a deep, dangerous part of Oakland.

  At the time, Jack had been using a blogging service called LiveJournal, which was a competitor to Blogger. One of the features LiveJournal offered was the ability for people to show small status messages on their blogs to say what they were doing at that moment. Most bloggers used the feature to write pithy updates about themselves.

  The idea of displaying a status on a computer had come into the public light in 1997 when AOL introduced its instant-messenger service. The company had come across a unique challenge at the time with the way people communicate: How do you let others know that you have stepped away from your computer when they can’t actually see you? The solution was a feature AOL called the “away message.” In a small snippet of text, people could note if they were available, in a meeting, or just busy, so their online friends knew their whereabouts. When teens started using the “away” feature, they took a different approach, often typing in their mood or the music that was currently playing on their computer. Soon nerds like Jack, Crystal, and Noah were copying teenagers and also making their away messages reflect the music they were listening to.

  Unable to sleep one night in the Biscuit Factory, Jack had thought about the quickly evolving status genre, which he was now using with his LiveJournal blog, and wondered if it could be sifted out to be its own Web site. He had gotten out of bed and begun taking notes on the concept, even building a very crude prototype.

  Now, six years later, sitting in the car with Noah, he again mentioned the concept of a one-off site that people could use to share their current status. “You could say what music you’re listening to,” Jack said, “or tell people you’re at work.”

  Noah had always thought that Jack’s idea sounded very clinical. The updates, like Jack’s voice, sounded too brief and monotone to Noah. The idea also sounded similar to Dodgeball, which had launched in 2000 and allowed people to share their location with friends by text message. Plus, there was
Facebook, which was starting to circulate through college campuses.

  Noah stared out the window, processing. The alcohol was starting to wear off. He thought about Erin and their failed marriage. About Crystal and how he wished she were there with him and Jack in the car. A part of him also wanted Ev there; he yearned for the friendship he had lost. He wished they could all be there together, sharing in melancholic talk of loss and failure amid the rain and the empty street, and then it hit him. “I get it!” Noah exclaimed.

  This status thing could help connect people to those who weren’t there. It wasn’t just about sharing what kind of music you were listening to or where you were at that moment; it was about connecting people and making them feel less alone. It could be a technology that would erase a feeling that an entire generation felt while staring into their computer screens. An emotion that Noah and Jack and Biz and Ev had grown up feeling, finding solace in a monitor. An emotion that Noah felt night after night as his marriage and company fell apart: loneliness.

  It was the same sentiment that had driven Ev to feel so passionate about Blogger, sitting there in his apartment, alone, with no friends, able to connect to the world through his keyboard. It was the reason Biz had started blogging from his mother’s basement years ago. The same reason Jack had started a LiveJournal account in St. Louis, spending hours alone in coffee shops talking to people who lurked on message boards, all looking for connections. This status idea could be the antidote to all of this, a cure for feeling lonely, Noah thought.

  “What if it had audio!” Noah said with excitement. “Or what if”—he paused—“it was text messaging instead of e-mail?” Ideas sprang into view. “What if … What if … What if …”

  Jack started to grow excited by the suggestions too. He proposed integrating the idea into Odeo: voice-based status updates. “Maybe it would work if there was the ability to attach an audio file,” Jack said. Then more “what ifs.”

  “Let’s talk to Ev and the others about this tomorrow,” Noah said as Jack got out of the car to stagger home. Then he peeled off into the wet night, his mind buzzing with a vision for the future.

  On February 27, 2006, a Monday, they both hobbled into work, heads pounding from a night of very little sleep. Noah immediately dragged Ev and Biz into a conference room to tell them about his drunken discussion with Jack the night before. Jack watched Noah explain the “status thing” to Ev and Biz.

  “It lines up with the other things we’ve been talking about!” Noah proclaimed.

  They had known since January that Odeo was not going to work. Although people had signed up for the site, they rarely returned. Ev and Noah’s bickering had stalled any new product developments, leaving them in a perpetual stalemate. Then Apple’s entering the podcasting fray had placed one hundred nails in the Odeo coffin. Still, Ev and Noah had known they had to do something, so they’d held a number of meetings with Jeremy LaTrasse, a senior Odeo engineer, and Tim Roberts to try to find a new direction for the dying company—or possibly even scrap the entire company and start anew.

  Changing the focus of a start-up is not like the metamorphosis of a traditional business—like trying to turn a high-end clothing store into a construction company. Instead it is more akin to altering the type of food a restaurant serves. Although the cuisine the customers are served changes, sometimes drastically, the same chefs and waitstaff can be used to make and serve it. Or, in Odeo’s case, the same programmers, designers, and managers.

  The meetings had often taken place at Ev’s apartment, where, sitting at his kitchen table, Jeremy, Tim, Noah, and Ev would sip beers and endlessly throw out suggestions for what to do next.

  Ev’s worst fear was about to be realized: Odeo was going to fail, which meant Ev, the blogging phenomenon, was actually a one-hit wonder. But he reasoned that if he could pivot Odeo into something else, he could save his name in Silicon Valley.

  “What if we killed the audio part of Odeo?” Ev had suggested a few weeks earlier. “Or what if we make it a messaging platform, where you can leave a message for a group of friends to hear?” The conversations about the reinvention of Odeo had been focused on the concept of friends following one another on a messaging platform. The big question Ev, Noah, Jeremy, and Tim were unable to answer in those discussions was what these groups of people would actually want to share with one another. This was where Jack’s status idea fit perfectly.

  When Biz heard the concept, it reminded him of an idea he had been obsessed with at Google. He had owned a phone called a Treo at the time, which had a crude black-and-white screen and was half PalmPilot, half cell phone. He had started suggesting to coworkers that Google should build its own “Phone-ternet.”

  “What the hell is a Phone-ternet?” people would reply.

  “It’s like an Internet, but for your phone!” Biz told those who would listen. “Get it? Phone plus Internet. Phone-ternet?” People just rolled their eyes.

  But now, hearing about Jack’s status concept—mixed with mobile phones, groups of friends, and Noah’s human explanation of it all—Biz, like Ev, was smitten.

  As the meeting wrapped up, Noah had to run to take a phone call, and Ev quickly gave Jack and Biz their orders. “Look,” Ev said as he leaned in to the table and began to whisper to his employees. “I like this idea, but I don’t want Noah getting distracted by something else.” He continued in a low tone. “So I want you two to go off and quietly start working on sketches for this status thing. But don’t tell anyone,” Ev said to Jack and Biz, who were now talking enthusiastically about their secret assignment. “And don’t let Noah get too involved.”

  But it was too late. The idea had been planted in Noah’s mind. The idea had been planted in all of their minds. And together they were about to build something that would change their lives forever.

  Twitter

  The book’s pages silently fell through the air as Noah flipped with his thumb. He had been at it for hours, turning each leaf with the care of a heart surgeon as he studied every word.

  When he came across one that might make sense, he muttered it to himself to see how it sounded aloud. “Worship.” “Quickly.” “Tremble.” Then, shaking his head with disapproval, he continued to flip through the dictionary.

  As the day drew on, he left the office and went home to continue his search for a name to give to the new side project. Finally he stopped, frozen as he stared down at a word, instantly knowing that this might be it. He read the definition, reread it, then quickly dashed off an e-mail to the group.

  Ev’s efforts to keep Noah out of the status project had lasted about twenty minutes. Just as in the early days of Odeo, if Ev said one thing, Noah would do exactly the opposite.

  Ev also had other problems to worry about that week: He was busy pulling together documents for the next board meeting, where he planned to suggest selling Odeo to the highest bidder. Or any bidder, for that matter.

  All the other engineers not involved in Status were busy reluctantly working on what was left of Odeo. The small group immersed in the new project had been throwing around name ideas for a couple of days, though they couldn’t agree on something that worked. Jack suggested the name Status, which others said was “too engineer sounding.” Biz suggested Smssy. “Cute, but no.” Ev had come up with Friendstalker, which was instantly nixed as sure to drive away anyone who wasn’t eighteen years old, male, and very single.

  Although the rest of the group didn’t seem as concerned with the name, Noah had been obsessing about it since the drunken talk in his car with Jack. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and now Wednesday had found Noah searching for a word that made sense. He had skipped lunch with his coworkers all week, burrowed in the back of the office.

  When he arrived at his apartment on Wednesday night, he again sat flipping through the dictionary. But his thoughts kept getting interrupted by text messages, which would trigger a loud dinging noise on his mobile phone. Frustrated by the intrusion, he reached over and flipped the switch to sile
nt, causing his cell phone to vibrate slightly on the table. Noah stopped what he was doing and stared at the phone, then picked it back up again and held it in his hand as he flipped it on and off, watching it quietly shake. Vibrate, he thought, and quickly looked up the word in the dictionary. “Shake, quiver, or throb; move back and forth rapidly.” This immediately got Noah excited.

  Although the status updater was intriguing to everyone, for Noah it had a more personal meaning. As he had explained to Jack in his car in the rain, Status could make people feel “less alone.” Noah’s love life, business, and now friendships, which were all woven into Odeo, were falling apart. This new invention could glue them all back together again, and he reasoned that the project needed a name that could explain such an idea.

  His vibrating phone led him to think of the brain impulses that cause a muscle to twitch. “Twitch!” No, that would never work, he thought. So he continued flipping through the tw’s in the dictionary. Twister. Twist tie. Twit. Twitch. Twitcher. Twitchy. Twite. And then, there it was.

  “The light chirping sound made by certain birds.” Noah’s heart started to pound as he continued to read. “A similar sound, especially light, tremulous speech or laughter.” This is it, he thought. “Agitation or excitement; flutter.”

  A verb. Twitter.

  Twitter. Twittered. Twittering. Twitters.

  As the sun started to set, dimming Noah’s apartment, he wrote a quick e-mail to Ev. “What are your thoughts on the domain name twitter?” he said, then, noting what the tagline could be, he added, “A whole new level of connection. Or something like that.”

  As the name made it to the group, it took some convincing, each person secretly thinking their own name suggestion was the best; they finally all agreed that Twitter was the right choice, and Biz started mocking up logos.

  Since the new site would allow people to share updates via text message, Jack suggested removing the vowels, a theme circulating through the Valley at the time, thanks to the photo-sharing site Flickr. This way Twitter, or Twttr, could use a special five-digit phone number called a short code to send messages. The domain name was available too.