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

by Nick Bilton

  As they revved the engine to begin development of Twitter, Tim Roberts, who was still director of product at Odeo, quickly put up a giant red STOP sign. In a meeting with Ev to explain Twitter, Tim voiced concerns. “First, we will need a lot of people in order for this to work properly,” Tim said, also following up his concerns with an e-mail. But more aptly, he warned, “explaining what this is” was going to be very difficult.

  Ev reluctantly agreed and, after a long discussion, decided it was best to explore other ideas in the office before focusing exclusively on Twitter. While Jack, Biz, and Noah continued talking about the Status idea, Ev decided to hold one last “hack day.”

  They had first organized a hack day, or hackathon, in early February, when Odeo was truly going sideways. Ev presented the idea as follows:

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, It is my pleasure to announce to you Odeo’s first Hackathon,” Ev wrote in an e-mail to the company on February 6, 2006. “A hackathon is a day-long event where everyone cranks on something valuable to the company, but not what you’re ‘supposed’ to be working on.”

  The ground rules were laid out: Hacking would begin at 9:30 A.M. and would stop at 6:30 P.M. when Ev rang a bell. Afterward, over beer and takeout, people would present their hackathon projects. Collaboration was encouraged, but there were some rules, specifically that certain people (like the office troublemakers) should try not to work together. “What should you work on? More or less, anything you want,” Ev wrote. “This means it should be conceivably related to Odeo—something we would consider shipping. But that leaves a pretty wide berth.”

  During the first hack day in early February, Jack had been out of the office for the week and was unable to attend. There had been others since, but the following week’s would be the last hackathon. As people zigzagged between one another’s desks the next day inquiring about teams, the office felt like an elementary school when students are told to grab a partner and a coloring book.

  As the hack day began, groups ventured into their own corners, flush with ideas. The hackers were all trying to answer the basic question Ev had asked: If you were to start a new company today, or reinvent Odeo, what would you build?

  Florian Weber, a young German contract programmer who had been hired temporarily to help with Odeo, grabbed Jack and Dom, and the three ventured to get burritos at Mexico Au Parc at the end of South Park. They then wandered over to the old brown rickety swing set to eat and pass around ideas. Jack pulled his black beanie a little tighter around his ears to fight off the cold as he mentioned the idea for the status updater to Dom and Florian, who until then had never heard of it.

  “Why wouldn’t you just use voice?” Dom asked.

  “Well, you could,” Jack said, but then explained that via text message, people could send their status from a noisy club, where it’s almost impossible to make a voice call.

  Florian, who, like Jack, often enjoyed going to all-night raves, nodded enthusiastically. “Then we’ll be able to know when parties are going off,” he said.

  “What are other use cases?” Dom asked.

  “My mom could use it too,” Jack said, so she could see what he was up to.

  Eventually, everyone meandered back to their desks to sketch out their respective ideas. Mouses skimmed across the table. Keys tapped. As the haze of the San Francisco night started coloring the sky, the ding of a loud bell broke the silence, announcing that it was 6:30 P.M. Everyone shuffled into the front room, beer cans cracked open, bottle tops hitting the floor, and people began presenting their concepts.

  All of the final hack-day projects ended up looking sort of similar. Twitter was presented, as well as Off the Chains, Ketchup, ShoutOut, and a few other ideas, each with similar aspects of sharing and friends and text messaging. After the presentations concluded, people left for the day and Ev said he would mull over the projects.

  A few days went by and Ev composed an e-mail to Noah and a couple of other Odeo execs. Jack was so low within the company, he wasn’t included in the message.

  “In terms of our new projects, I feel most strongly about Twitter (aka, Twttr). We could have a lot more discussion, and I may change my mind, but I think I just need to make a call at this point, and my gut is pulling me to Twitter,” Ev wrote in the e-mail. “Jack is chomping at the bit to build the thing.”

  Ev then gave the go-ahead to start building.

  (“The light chirping sound made by certain birds.”)

  It was agreed that Jack and Biz could take two weeks to pull together a prototype. Florian would be the main engineer. Noah would oversee development of everything. Jeremy could help with Twitter when needed. Everyone else, including Rabble, Dom, Crystal, and Blaine, should stay focused on Odeo as they continued to search for someone to buy the podcasting company.

  (“A similar sound, especially light, tremulous speech or laughter.”)

  Tim Roberts still wasn’t sold on the idea. “I feel like i am a dissenting voice here, which is awkward,” he wrote in an e-mail. “But I continue to have some very fundamental questions around Twitter and its chances for success.”

  (“Agitation or excitement; flutter.”)

  But it was too late for dissension or questions of chances for success. Ev, Noah, Biz, and Jack had a new obsession. This was what they wanted to build.

  (Twitter.)

  Just Setting Up My Twttr

  Jack stood up, thrusting his arms into the air like Superman about to take flight as he shouted, “Yesssssssss!”

  Rabble and Blaine, sitting close by, looked up at Jack as if he had lost his mind. Mr. Quiet never yelled or stood up abruptly, but something had catapulted him out of his seat like a zap of electricity. Jack looked back at them with an animated grin as he quickly settled back into his chair and began coding again.

  “What?” Rabble asked him, annoyed. At the time, Rabble was essentially sitting around waiting to get fired—which wasn’t far off—and writing code for his next hacktivist project.

  “I got the site hooked up to update a status,” Jack replied as he fidgeted with his computer. Their conversation was interrupted by another loud “Yesssssss!” from the back room as Noah jumped up, his arms thrusting in the air too. “I saw the update! I saw the update!”

  Technically, this wasn’t the first status update. Before the hack day, Ev had decided to build his own crude version of Twitter using some old Blogger code and his personal EvHead blog. He called his experiment a “Twitlog,” and although it was a rudimentary version of the concept, it gave him a glimpse into what a Twitter-like experience would be. For his first update he wrote, “setting up my twitlog,” a few minutes later adding, “hmmm … will it work?” He then spent the next few days updating pithy Twitlogs from his phone. “Eating a vegan peanut butter cookie. Mmm.” “Wishing Sara was here.” “Walking to work.” “Eating a vegan burger in Salt Lake airport.”

  While employees watched Ev’s Twitlog experiment to see if these updates were interesting, Jack and Biz dove in headfirst on the real Twitter, Florian building the back end of the site, Jack working on the front end, and Biz designing the look and feel. Noah set out to oversee the development of a Twttr logo, which, after days of trivial iterations, ended up looking like a hideous green blob of goo. Jeremy, Blaine, and Tim helped with code problems when needed.

  To keep the site simple and clean, Jack’s original status concept had envisioned that, as with instant messenger, people would have only one status message visible at a time. If a person updated their status, the previous update would vanish forever and be replaced with the new Twitter message. But Ev had argued that like blogs, status updates should be in a stream format, showing up chronologically. After Noah spent a few days following Ev’s Twitlog, he also suggested adding a time stamp to each update so people would know when it had been posted.

  For several days Noah, Biz, Jack, and Florian worked away. There were bugs. Problems. Roadblocks. Things were digitally taped together, held in place with makeshift snippe
ts of code. Then finally, two weeks later, Jack sent what would be the first official Twitter update. On March 21, 2006, at 11:50 A.M., Jack tweeted, “just setting up my twttr,” like the first message Ev had sent on his Twitlog a few days earlier.

  And with this collaboration, it all started to come together. Jack’s concept of people sharing their status updates; Ev’s and Biz’s suggestion to make sure updates flowed into a stream, similar to Blogger; Noah adding timestamps, coming up with the name, and verbalizing how to humanize status by “connecting” people; and finally, friendships and the idea of sharing with groups that had percolated out of Odeo and all the people who had worked there.

  Biz was working from home in Berkeley that day. But he was on instant messenger and saw the words “just setting up my twttr” appear on his cell phone. He quickly messaged Jack. “Just got your status on my phone!” he said, then, giving a nod to Alexander Graham Bell when he demonstrated the telephone for the first time in 1876, Biz wrote: “Watson, come in here please!” They started talking on instant messenger:

  Jack: Nice! Update yours. I’m following

  Biz: Hey, that makes me think of a good tagline for twitter “do you follow me?”

  Then Biz signed up and sent his first tweet: “just setting up my twttr.”

  “Got it!” Jack replied. Then nine minutes later, it was Noah’s turn: “just setting up my twttr.” Then Crystal and Jeremy thirty seconds later. Then Tony Stubblebine, another senior Odeo engineer. Florian. Ev. And the other employees started to follow along.

  Jack tweeted again: “Inviting coworkers.” Biz: “Getting my odeo folks on this deal.” Dom joined. Rabble. As everyone peered at their phones and computers trying to decide what to type, Dom excitedly tweeted, “oooooooh,” followed by Jeremy: “Oh shit, I just twittered a little.”

  Each update was followed by a chorus of other phones vibrating as everyone simultaneously felt the messages. Tim Roberts joined. “Oh this is going to be addictive,” Dom wrote. “Wishing I had another sammich,” Biz wrote. “Lunch,” Jack typed. “checking out twttr,” Ev said. “Oh man, this twitter tickles my nose,” Jeremy said.

  And that was it. A spark of life. Tweets.

  “using twttr.com,” Biz wrote as he continued to test the site. The first version of the Web site was crude and simple. “What’s your status?” sat at the top with a rectangular box below, then an “update” button that allowed people to share their status. Like a blog, a stream of updates flowed below.

  Jack left the office at around six o’clock that evening, walking over to his evening drawing class, excited that Twitter was working, and announced that he was “Drawing naked people.” Then for the following few hours they were like a bunch of children at a sleepover wishing each other good night. Like a group of friends talking about what they had done that evening, they all sat separately, together, having a conversation. Tweeting.

  Adam: “pumping iron.”

  Noah: “Oh crap, I think I might be getting that f’in cold.”

  Jeremy: “fantasizing about jack drawing naked people mmmmmmmmmmmmm … naked people.”

  Dom: “Heading home.”

  Jack: “sleep.”

  Ev: “wondering if updates are working.”

  Ev: “happy that they are.”

  Biz: “having some coffee.”

  Tony: “thinking about polyphasic sleep.”

  Noah: “biz wont leave me alone.”

  Crystal: “Aerobics Supah Star.”

  Jack: “n bd readn, wrtng txt spk.”

  Biz: “accessing twttr on my treo web browser.”

  Jack: “sleep.”

  Noah: “late night at the office. missed lost :-(”

  Crystal: “cleaned the bathroom, ate a salad, going to bed soon!”

  Noah: “bed time for me. goodnight.”

  The Cowboy at the Rodeo

  It was late in the evening when the door to the Odeo offices burst open and Noah stumbled in, drunk.

  “Jack!” he bellowed across the room, barreling toward him with the elation of a child just home from school but with the pungent smell of a drunk. Jack slipped his headphones off and looked up with a tired expression. “Hey, Noah.”

  “I might have just fucked up,” Noah said, clapping his hands in the air and dropping into a chair next to Jack. “You guys might be kinda pissed at me.”

  “What’d you do?” Jack asked, unsure how this particular Noah production would play out.

  “I think I just announced Twitter to the media,” Noah said, spiraling into a ramble about this great party, Om Malik, cigarettes, free drinks, and a mechanical bull.

  It was mid-July 2006, and the Valley had the feel of an amusement park that had just reopened for business. Exciting new social rides were being built on the plots that had once belonged to pet-food Web sites and other pedestrian ideas from the late nineties. And now admission was free. You simply paid in privacy by giving up your personal information for access.

  The new Valley had a new name too. Web 2.0! New and improved: the social Web. MySpace and Friendster were the chatter of the late-teen world, and this nascent thing called Facebook was spreading around college dorm rooms with the velocity of a common cold. Flickr, the social photo site, had recently been purchased by Yahoo! for almost forty million dollars, a small gold mine in those days.

  Like children mesmerized by an enigmatic snow globe, people outside the Valley were once again peering in, wondering how they could become part of this wonderland, how they could own a snow globe that, if shaken properly, would send not snowflakes but money fluttering down to land neatly in their hands.

  But among the boundless wealth beginning to swirl around the Valley there was also a slew of broken start-ups, like Odeo, that were going out of business. Which is how Noah had ended up drunk at a party, extolling himself as one of the creators of Twitter.

  A couple of Valley entrepreneurs with a witty sense of humor about the roller-coaster mentality of the tech scene decided to capitalize on the demise of these start-ups and started a monthly club called “Valleyschwag,” where people would pay a twenty dollars a month to receive a bag of random swag. Each month’s goodies, wrapped in brown burlap, included T-shirts, stickers, pens, and mouse pads from the companies that were about to disappear in an elaborate magic trick of their own making.

  To help commemorate these dying companies, there was a party called the “Valleyschwag Hoedown.” Earlier in the day, before the festivities began, the Valleyschwag organizers needed more junk to hand out at the hoedown. It was no secret that Odeo was dying, so one schwag organizer stopped at its offices, where Ev led him into a closet filled with gray T-shirts with pink Odeo logos. “Can I take some for the party?” the organizer asked.

  “Sure,” Ev replied in a chagrinned tone. “Take as many as you want.”

  As the hoedown got under way, bales of hay sat in the corner of the room and Noah arrived, gleeful about Twitter, a product that until that evening very few people knew about. After swigging shots of vodka with well-knowns from the tech scene, eating a dry piece of hoedown cake, dancing with girls in cowboy hats, and riding the rented mechanical bull with a cardboard horse head taped to the front, Noah found himself standing outside, drunk and smoking cigarettes with Om Malik, a blogger who covered the tech scene. They leaned up against a large yellow school bus called “Lola” that had been brought in for the party.

  Noah, unable to contain himself, took a few manic drags of his cigarette and excitedly told Om everything about the new site. “It came out of a chat in my car on Valencia and Fourteenth after a night of heavy vodka drinking,” he slurred. “Give me your phone. I’ll sign you up!” Noah said, a cigarette now hanging from his mouth like James Dean. He pressed a few buttons, then handed the phone back, briefly explaining how Twitter worked.

  “Looking 4 food,” Om tweeted, then inhaled a last puff of smoke and stuffed his phone back in his pocket.

  After pulling the cat out of the bag by its tail, Noah de
cided it would be best to sign others up too, and he turned into a traveling salesman at the hoedown. “Give me your phone! I’ll sign you up!” he yelled to people over the sound of country music. Before he knew it, he was standing there, drunk, in the middle of the hoedown, people swirling around him in cowboy hats, a tiny ocean of alcohol in his little plastic cup. He soon realized he should tell Jack and the others back at the office about his impromptu media conference.

  Noah’s excitement about Twitter had been palpable for weeks. A few days earlier the Odeo board members had arrived in the office to attend a quarterly board meeting and hear updates about potentially selling the podcasting service. But before the meeting began, Noah and Ev wanted to demo Twitter to the investors. Jack came into the conference room for the show-and-tell, which was his first time attending a board meeting, and sat dead silent as Noah gave an impassioned demonstration of Twitter.

  “What do you think?” Noah asked George Zachary, the lead Odeo investor, after his demonstration. “It’s amazing, right? It can allow you to connect with your friends!”

  George stared at Noah with a confused look, quietly wondering to himself why anyone would want to “connect with their friends” when those friends were sitting right there. He thought the group of programmers had smoked something before the meeting and looked around uncertainly. Still, Noah continued with animated examples of Twitter’s ability to connect people.

  A few days later, when Noah stumbled in from the hoedown and announced that he had told the blogosphere, Jack acknowledged that it wasn’t a big deal, brushed it off, and got back to work. Like Ev, Jack was grossly averse to conflict, at least the kind that happened in plain sight.

  Secretly, Jack was furious.