Hatching Twitter Part 15

Then Jack started hiring former Apple employees at Square. But their interviews were different from those of other candidates. "Did you have the opportunity to work with Steve Jobs?" Jack would ask. "Can you tell me a little about his management style?" During discussions with former Apple employees who had been hired at Square, Jack heard that Jobs didn't consider himself a CEO but rather an "editor." At some point Jack started referring to himself as "the editor, not just the CEO" of Square. During one talk to employees, he announced: "I've often spoken to the editorial nature of what I think my job is. I think I'm just an editor."

Jack started saying "No one has ever done this before" about his products, an exact quote from a Jobs interview in early 2010 at a conference. Jack then adopted Jobs's terms to describe new Square features, words like "magical," "surprise," and "delightful," all of which Jobs had used onstage at Apple events.

Before long, like someone undergoing minor plastic surgeries until he resembles his idol, Jack no longer looked and acted like Jack Dorsey: He began acting like the second coming of Steve Jobs. The Beatles, the Gandhi references, the "editor" t.i.tle, the design ethos, the daily uniform, and the quotes all contributed to what happened next.

The tech blogs, now believing that Jack had founded and built Twitter on his own, that he had come up with the idea when he was just a child-which Jack insinuated to dozens of media outlets-and that he possessed the same principles as Jobs in both design and management, started asking: "Is Jack Dorsey the next Steve Jobs?" (They inevitably answered: "Yes.") It wasn't a grand master plan by Jack to copy Jobs. Rather it was dozens of little plans that added up to a re-creation.

In many respects it was Steve Jobs who helped create Jack Dorsey. Jobs was notorious for denying access to reporters. He had trained the media to behave exactly how he wanted them to-when he spoke, they listened, which was his best magic trick of all. So when he took a leave from Apple after falling ill in 2009, the media went in search of the next Steve Jobs. Jack walked like that duck, used the same quotes as that duck, wore the same gla.s.ses, had the same principles, and the same astounding theories on design as that duck. He even listened to the Beatles!

But for Jack, cultivating Steve Jobs 2.0 wasn't just about creating an aura of visionary; it also had the unintended consequence of lighting a fire that Jack had been trying to start since he had been ousted from Twitter. A fire that would smoke Ev out of the company too.

On a late afternoon in mid-2010, Mike Abbott, who was vice president of engineering at Twitter, asked Jack if he could stop by the Square offices to chat. Abbott had no idea that Jack's t.i.tle as chairman of Twitter was a veneer. Along with the rest of the world, he believed Jack was powerful in high-level decisions at the company. And like most of Silicon Valley, he believed that Jack Dorsey was the heir apparent to the Steve Jobs mystique.

They began meeting on a regular basis, discussing design and projects within Twitter. And then one afternoon the opportunity presented itself.

"I need your help," Abbott told Jack. "We have no direction at Twitter, and I don't know where the company is going." Abbott explained that he didn't like working with Greg Pa.s.s, now Twitter's chief technology officer, that he didn't think Ev had solid direction, and that he needed Jack's help and guidance. "I don't know what to do," Abbott admitted.

It was the moment Jack had been waiting for. Fenton had always been on Team Jack. But the other board members, specifically Fred and Bijan, were still very wary of Jack, believing that he had almost sunk Twitter with his inability to lead in the early days of the company.

Now a senior executive at Twitter was asking Jack for help. Like Jobs, Jack understood that he could whisper in one person's ear and those murmurs would turn into shouts somewhere else. So Jack began speaking softly.

"I consider the vice president to be the equivalent to the CEO, and if you've spoken to Ev and it's not going anywhere, you need to go to the board," Jack told Abbott. "Talk to Fenton, talk to Bijan, to Fred-whoever-about your concerns. Talk to the other senior execs."

Abbott did just that, calling the board to raise his concerns about Ev and Goldman and voice his fears that the company wasn't heading simply in the wrong direction but in no direction at all.

Abbott started telling other vice presidents at Twitter to meet with Jack too. The whispers eventually made it to Ali Rowghani, who had been hired as the chief financial officer at Twitter and was also frustrated by Ev's slow decision making. Ali set up a meeting with Jack at Blue Bottle Coffee near Square's offices. There, amid the aroma of five-dollar cups of coffee, Ali lamented the state of the company. Adam Bain, who was building revenue at Twitter, traipsed off to meet with Jack too. And then d.i.c.k followed too.

It wasn't that the company was falling apart. Quite the contrary. Twitter had secured the search deal with Google and Bing and was also now experimenting with advertising ideas, creating a new type of business experience where people could turn tweets into advertis.e.m.e.nts. The site was also finally on the mend. The engineering team had come up with an extensive long-term plan to rebuild the entire back end of Twitter, fixing the legacy problems that had plagued the company since its inception.

The problem was Ev. He was still unable to make a decision. He communicated infrequently with the board and senior staff. Some, like Mike Abbott, took it personally when they were not included in high-level conversations and decisions.

Ev was running a company that even the most experienced executive would have struggled to manage. What had been small problems at a tiny start-up like Odeo were big problems in a company that had grown as quickly as Twitter. Those big problems, when shown to the board under Jack's magnifying gla.s.s, would prove to be fateful for Ev.

At the time, Ev had set out to completely redesign Twitter, giving it a much-needed face-lift. He recruited his most trusted employees and set up what they nicknamed the war room in one of the conference rooms to brainstorm ideas. Each day, Ev huddled up with his small group of designers and programmers, with pictures and inspirations hung all over the wall, redesigning the site.

Ev buried his head in Twitter's redesign, ignoring most of the daily ch.o.r.es of a CEO. And across town, just a few blocks from the Twitter offices, Jack was offering friendly advice to the people not involved in the project: You should talk to the board. You should talk to Fenton. Tell Fred. Bijan. Tell them all that Ev isn't doing a good job. Tell them your fears for the future of Twitter. Jack even ensured that some people voiced their concerns to Campbell, Ev's coach.

Although it was not normal for a CEO coach to come to board meetings, Campbell would often arrive unannounced at Twitter board meetings and insert himself into the goings-on of the company. People were confused by the spectacle, but given that he was not a normal CEO coach, they simply stood back and watched.

With the whispers now entering Campbell's ear, he too was starting to voice concerns about whether Ev was the right CEO for the job. But he didn't tell Ev; instead he spoke to Fenton about the private coaching sessions going on between Ev and Campbell. Fenton then told Jack about those sessions. Like a s...o...b..ll rolling down a mountaintop, acc.u.mulating every speck of dirt it encountered and growing darker and larger with each tumble (with each meeting, with each call to the board), the case against Ev started to gather an unstoppable momentum.

Russian-Roulette Relations.

The snipers started showing up in the early morning. Dressed in all black, they climbed to the roof. Then, standing on gray concrete slabs, they unpacked long metal rifles and fine-tuned their scopes. Walkie-talkies could be heard giving off spurts of static as the masked men spoke to each other in Russian.

For two weeks, black suits had been sporadically appearing at the Twitter offices at all times of the day. They swarmed around cubicles like ants in search of food, checking every nook and cranny of the building. Their shiny sungla.s.ses concealed their eyes; handguns were shrouded underneath dark blazers. Some had ferocious-looking dogs that sniffed the building for explosives.

They peeked out of windows, quietly pulling back the blinds to peer down at the busy San Francisco streets below.

"We will need a map of all of the exits and elevators," one of them said in his thick Russian accent to a Twitter employee. The elevators would need to be shut down for the visit. "We will put the metal detectors at the entrance of the offices."

After d.i.c.k had joined as COO, the company had gone on a hiring spree. By late 2009 Twitter had grown its workforce from 30 to almost 120 employees, including freelance contractors. So in November of that year the company moved into a new office at 795 Folsom Street, occupying the sixth floor of a large beige building that had been the home of several start-ups. By June 2010 that office housed almost 200 employees.

At a recent Twitter conference called Chirp, which was organized by the company, Ev had announced that more than one hundred million people had signed up for Twitter and three hundred thousand new people were joining the site each day. Ryan Sarver, who ran the company's third-party tools, told the audience that one hundred thousand applications were on Twitter too. Those apps, he said, were interacting with the site three billion times a day. The cherry on top of these Twitter numbers had also started to scare Google: People were now searching Twitter six hundred thousand times a day.

Sara had been recruited to redesign the new office s.p.a.ce. The funky look featured a large red @-shaped light that hung above a blue, modern couch, lots of bird-related stickers, and hip designer accents like three wooden deer heads. There was even a DJ booth in the company's dining room.

Increasingly, government officials had been making the rounds at Twitter. John McCain had come in on a weekend, taking a tour of the office and meeting with executives to understand more about Twitter's role in government-and how to use it to not lose elections. Gavin Newsom, then mayor of San Francisco, had started showing up on a regular basis, coming for town-hall discussions and meetings with Ev. And Arnold Schwarzenegger had stopped by for a Web chat.

But June 23, 2010, was different. Dmitry Medvedev, the president of Russia, would be arriving at Twitter's headquarters to take a tour of the office and, as he put it, to "see with his own eyes" the hottest start-up in Silicon Valley. He also planned to send his first tweet.

It was a stark example of how the world's stage was changing. On previous visits to the United States, leaders of other nations would meet with newspaper and magazine editors. Now, rather than fly into New York City and make the rounds at Esquire, Time, or Newsweek, officials were dropping in to Silicon Valley to see the companies that were changing the way the world communicated.

Twitter would be the first part of a three-day trip to the United States by President Medvedev to bolster relations between America and Russia. He planned to stop by the Valley for a few meetings, including one with Steve Jobs. (Medvedev's hope was that he could explore how to build a Silicon Valley equivalent in Russia.) Then, after meeting with the nerds, he would be off to Washington to meet the suits: first President Barack Obama, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, and other high-level U.S. generals and economic advisers, to discuss national-security issues, counterterrorism efforts, nuclear treaties, and the global economic crisis.

But first, before anything, Medvedev had something more important to do: He had to tweet.

There was, however, one slight problem.

For the past few months Twitter had been drawing more attention than ever before. The office had become Grand Central for celebrities, who often arrived unannounced, then proudly tweeted their locale for all to see. Visiting the company's offices had become a pilgrimage. As a result, Twitter's every breath was being picked up by press outlets from San Francisco to the Vatican. There was barely a publication on earth that hadn't mentioned Twitter.

Just a couple of weeks before the Russian president had announced he was stopping by the company for a visit, Twitter had been the cover story in Time magazine. The article had been t.i.tled, "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live."

Steven Johnson, the bestselling book author who wrote the piece for Time, used the cover story to put to rest the common misconception that Twitter was only a place to tell all of your friends your favorite "choice of breakfast cereal."

Rather, Johnson noted, "as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth."

"Partially thanks to the move from asking people to talk about their status to talk about what's happening [Twitter has become] a pointing device instead of a communications channel: sharing links to longer articles, discussions, posts, videos-anything that lives behind a URL," Johnson wrote. "It's just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit."

As a result of all of this attention, hundreds of thousands of people were joining Twitter every single day. At the peak, more than twenty thousand were signing up for Twitter accounts in a single hour. (It had taken eight months to reach the twenty-thousand-user milestone in 2006.) Even the best-engineered Web site on the Internet would have had trouble handling such attention. But for Twitter, which was still being held together by chewing gum and masking tape, the crowds had been like a whale trying to fit into a goldfish bowl.

There were several reasons the site would disappear into its own black hole. A Twitter engineer could upload bad code that would completely disable the site. A server could fail and, like dominoes, bring down a dozen other servers. But there were more severe problems too. After the revolutions in Iran, in Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East, Twitter was now a zone for rogue governments to attack, and bad guys with good computers were now trying to overthrow Twitter. Some hackers, proving to be deft at their trade, managed to hit the bull's-eye on several occasions, knocking the site completely off-line. As luck would have it, the moment President Medvedev's entourage of black cars pulled up to the beige building on the corner of Folsom and Fourth streets, one or all of the above had happened to Twitter.

The surrounding streets were now blocked off in all directions, with San Francisco police cars and dump trucks being used as roadblocks to foil potential a.s.sa.s.sination attempts. The Russian agents and United States Secret Service emerged onto the street, surrounding the president's car as his black, shiny loafers stepped out onto the street.

Ev paced upstairs. He had been nervous about the president's visit and had even dressed up for the occasion, wearing a beige b.u.t.ton-down shirt and black blazer. Biz stood off to the side with Mayor Newsom, who was sipping from a Starbucks coffee cup so large it looked as if it would last a week.

"Nice of you to dress up," Ev had joked to Biz in the morning when he walked into the office. Biz was wearing disheveled sneakers, baggy, worn-in jeans, and a zip-up cargo jacket. He looked as if he had just run to the deli to pick up a carton of milk, not come to meet the president of Russia and an entourage of global press.

Goldman, the vice president of product, was situated on the third floor with the engineering team. As one of the most senior people at the company, he had agreed to manage any problems that arose while the president sent his first tweet.

Out on the street, President Medvedev looked up at the building as he was directed inside by his security detail. He walked past the Subway sandwich shop to his right, through the open gla.s.s doors, and across the marble-floored lobby and into the elevator. He didn't need to wait for an elevator, because for the next several hours the only person who would be able to enter or leave the building or travel between floors would be him.

Goldman stood like a general surveying the team of engineers who were watching over the site. As the president slowly rose through the building past the third floor, an engineer looked up at Goldman and said three dreaded words: "The site's down."

"What do you mean, the f.u.c.king site is down?" Goldman asked. Like someone who had just fallen into a pool of icy water, he went numb. He started to mentally envision the worst-case scenarios.

There had been meetings over the previous few weeks with the White House, the State Department, the San Francisco mayor's office, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's office, and the Russian emba.s.sy to play through the meticulously planned visit. The plan: After the Russian president sent his first tweet, the White House would retweet it. Barack Obama would reply, congratulating him on his tweet, as would the mayor and governor, all welcoming the Russian president to Twitter and to the United States.

But that wasn't going to happen without a Web site. Worse, as Goldman was confined to the third floor until the president left the building, he couldn't run up and tell Ev and Biz. He tried to text them both, but without knowing what was going on three floors above, Goldman didn't know whether the president was there or if they could see their cell phones.

As the elevator door opened to the sixth floor, the president emerged, shaking Mayor Newsom's hand. He was then introduced to Ev, Biz, and d.i.c.k.

As Biz reached out to shake Medvedev's hand, his phone vibrated in his pocket. It was a message from Goldman, explaining the situation and urging Biz to do everything in his power to delay the first tweet.

Biz showed his phone to Ev, who peered at the screen with a fake smile. "Shall we?" Mayor Newsom said as he led them down the hallway. Biz tried to delay, walking as slowly as possible as everyone went ahead. At one point a public-relations employee who had found out the site was off-line tapped d.i.c.k on the shoulder and said the same words that he had read from Goldman. "The site's down."

d.i.c.k turned with a look of confusion and shock. "Like, totally down?" he asked as his eyes widened. Biz continued walking glacially, trying to come up with any excuse to delay the group from tweeting. "Oh, we should show him the electric bike!" Biz said as they zigzagged like lost drunks through the office.

Twitter employees stood to the side as the group made its way through the cubicles, Biz's feet moving with the speed of an infirm ninety-year-old man, doing his best to slow the inevitable arrival in the cafeteria, where the first tweet was scheduled to leave American soil.

They continued strolling, slowly. Very, very slowly. They walked past some of the artwork Ev and Sara had chosen for the office, at one point catching a glimpse of one of Ev's favorite pieces of art, which sat in a black frame and, in a bit of irony, was hung upside down. It read: "Let's make better mistakes tomorrow."

Ev loved that poster. He had tweeted about it when it first arrived in mid-December, late on a Thursday afternoon, showing off a picture to his Twitter faithful with the t.i.tle "New sign at Twitter HQ." But with the site down and the Russian president just a few feet away from the cafeteria, they could do without today's mistake. Or tomorrow's.

Goldman dripped with sweat as he paced behind the engineers, who were doing everything they could to get the site back up, frantically talking to servers and code consoles. "What's going on, guys?" he said. "Talk to me; tell me we've got the site back online." The engineers were trying every trick in the book, trying desperately to figure out what was wrong.

Upstairs, Biz and Ev were unable to hold off the president any longer. They walked into the cafeteria unsure of what they'd find on the computer. It all happened in slow motion, the pops of flashes from the media in tow as the president approached the podium, his fingers reaching out to touch the keys of a laptop set up for the first tweet. Ev looked over at Biz, who had no idea what was going to happen. Would the site work? Would this be the biggest embarra.s.sment possible for the company, a media storm from San Francisco to St. Petersburg calling Twitter and American technology a joke?

Then the G.o.ds intervened. "We're back!" an engineer yelled as he leaned back in his chair, looking at Goldman. A sigh of relief enveloped the room.

"h.e.l.lo everyone!" Medvedev typed slowly in Russian into the Mac computer at the podium, "I'm on Twitter, and this is my first tweet." Ev had a microphone in his hand, narrating to the employees and the media what was happening. As Medvedev pressed "send," he looked up to the projector in front of him and smiled. The president then gave a thumbs-up with his left hand, beaming like a child who had just figured out a complicated puzzle. Biz, who was standing behind them both with his hands cupped in his jeans pockets, smiled as the screen's reflection glimmered on his gla.s.ses.

"Holy f.u.c.k," he whispered to Ev as the president walked forward to talk to Mayor Newsom. "That was close."

Secret Meetings.

The front door to Jack's apartment swung open and d.i.c.k walked in. He wandered down the hallway to the kitchen, which opened out onto the living room, then continued around the corner and over to the fridge. He pulled the handle back and then nodded as he peered inside. "Yep, just as I figured," d.i.c.k said to Jack with a smile as he looked back at the fridge, empty except for a couple of bottles of water and beer. "It looks like a bachelor pad, all right."

As Jack laughed, d.i.c.k turned and strolled into the living and dining area to shake hands with Fenton and the few others who were in attendance, including an outside public-relations consultant Fenton had hired to help with any media-related issues that might arise from the meeting they were about to have.

Jokes then ceased as the meeting got under way.

It was the second of two private meetings that had taken place in Jack's Mint Plaza loft over the summer of 2010. It had been a few months since Jack had started to convince the board and senior Twitter employees that it was Ev's turn to be fired as the CEO of Twitter.

Jack had had no problem convincing Fenton that Ev was the wrong person to run the company. Fenton had happily slurped up the Jack Kool-Aid since day one. But Jack had found it much more difficult to convince the rest of the board.

Yet after Abbot, Ali, and other senior staffers complained to the board about Ev's recent management choices, the near miss with the Russian president, Ev's slothlike decision-making process, and his insistence on hiring friends, the tide had turned.

Ensuring that the right things landed in the right people's ears, Jack had spent the summer moving people around like p.a.w.ns in a chess match against his nemesis. The problem was, Ev had no idea he was playing. These private meetings taking place at Jack's apartment, at Blue Bottle Coffee, and at Square's offices? Ev had no clue of their existence.

After Jack had left a year and a half earlier, Fred and Bijan had believed that Ev was the right person to run Twitter. And Ev had quickly proven himself to them. But now, with revenue growing slowly and an entirely new set of problems having arisen with the ma.s.sive growth spurts Twitter had experienced through 2009, the first investors were both questioning whether he was the right leader to take Twitter to the next level, which would include making the company consistently profitable-then, if all went according to plan, taking Twitter public. Their fears had been heightened when Jack had indirectly whispered in their ears that they could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in investment money with Ev at the helm.

Of course, Ev didn't have a chance to a.s.suage anyone's fears. As far as he knew, everything was just fine at Twitter. He held his weekly meetings with Campbell, receiving his boisterous pep talk. "You're doing a f.u.c.king great job!" Campbell would bellow. At board meetings Campbell would appear to listen to Ev's presentations on the state of the company. After Ev's sermons were done, the coach would clap loudly and hug his protege, proclaiming again to everyone in the room that Ev was "doing a f.u.c.king great job!" and asking them to clap (none of this was a usual occurrence in a corporate board meeting). Then, after Ev left the room, proud that his mentor thought he was doing such a great job, Campbell would shout at the group: "You gotta get rid of this f.u.c.king guy! He doesn't know what the f.u.c.k he's doing!"

For some of the senior Twitter staffers, including Ali, the entire ordeal had come down to one major issue that could take Twitter out at the knees.

Over the past year a company called UberMedia had been building and buying a number of third-party Twitter applications, including some big-name Twitter apps called Echofon and Twidroyd. UberMedia was managed by a shrewd businessman, Bill Gross, who was on the verge of buying another app, arguably one of the largest, called TweetDeck. But Gross had a much bigger plan in mind than just buying up third-party Twitter clients.

Gross's plan was to build a Twitter-network clone that could be used to divert people away from Twitter to an entirely new service, one where Gross could make money on advertising. He had also developed a business relationship with Ashton Kutcher and hoped to bring him into this new venture.

When Ali and d.i.c.k found out about the TweetDeck deal, they realized that such a sale would give Gross ownership of 20 percent of all Twitter clients. Ali and others at Twitter wanted to buy TweetDeck before UberMedia did. But Ev couldn't make a decision. He wondered if the tens of millions of dollars TweetDeck would cost would be worth it. One moment Ev agreed to buy the app, and the next he changed his mind, stalling the decision again.

At Jack's loft during the first of the private meetings, the group that met had made a pact on three things: first, that they would agree to stand together against Ev and Goldman no matter what happened; second, that they would remove Ev as CEO; and third, that they would ask d.i.c.k to become the interim CEO until they found a suitable replacement. Finally, they would bring Jack back to the company. Although Jack wanted to be CEO, he knew he couldn't do it while running Square at the same time, but just returning would be enough. At least for now.

Then there was the second meeting, where they told d.i.c.k part of the plan. He was being picked, they explained, because the employees trusted him and he could help as a transitional CEO until they found a permanent replacement. This they couldn't do until Ev was out.

Back at the Twitter offices, Ev was oblivious to the coup. He was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with pride about the latest Twitter numbers: People were sending more than two billion tweets a month on the service, and millions of new accounts were being created each week. He was also exhilarated by the new and improved, redesigned version of Twitter he was planning to launch on September 14, 2010; it had been code-named Phoenix internally. Externally it would be called #NewTwitter and would take short snippets of media and embed them directly within a tweet. No more clicking off to other Web sites to see photos, videos, or links people were sharing; they would all exist within Twitter in little side panes. The 140-character tweet was becoming an envelope with more information inside.

Although Twitter was now making more money with its advertising products, Ev wasn't as concerned with the revenue side of the operation, which was more fuel for the board's desire to oust him as CEO. d.i.c.k, on the other hand, had been leading the charge to make Twitter profitable, which contributed to the board's decision to ask him to be the interim CEO when they thrust Ev out of the company.

For Ev life was going according to plan. He and Sara were starting to try for a second child. He had cashed out a small amount of his Twitter stock, giving him millions of dollars to buy a new house in San Francisco and a second home in Tahoe, three hours northeast of the city, to go skiing with his family. Ev had continued to try and help the people close to him, giving money away in undisclosed ways. At a friend's art opening, he anonymously purchased the artist's work. He had also started to give vast sums away to charities, secretly donating hundreds of thousands of dollars. And taking care of his friends and family by paying off debts for those closest to him.

Ev didn't know anything about the private meetings or his lieutenants talking to the board or that his conversations with his coach would make their way back to Fenton and then Jack.

As far as Ev knew, he was "doing a great f.u.c.king job!"

The Clown Car in the Gold Mine.

It was mid-September 2010, the sun shining brightly through the window as Ev stood in his office, scribbling Twitter-related ideas on his whiteboard. Outside his office door, rows of cubicles were pulsating with the quiet murmur of keyboard taps and mouse clicks. The street below bustled with cars floating by.

He looked up to see Campbell filling the doorway like a linebacker.

Ev smiled, happy to see the Coach for their weekly session. Ev was in particularly good spirits; #NewTwitter was garnering good reviews from the tech critics. He was especially looking forward to a party planned that evening to help celebrate the employees' months of hard work. The New York Times was also working on a large Sunday business profile about him: the billionaire farm boy who helped invent Blogger and Twitter. The man behind two companies that had changed media and the way people communicate.

But Campbell looked troubled. "Have a seat," he said solemnly to Ev. "This is going to be hard. We're going to have a hard conversation."

Ev fell onto the couch, not sure what he was about to hear from Campbell. His mind started to race with possibilities. And then, like the thud of a bird flying into a clear gla.s.s window, Campbell told him. "The board wants you to step up to the chairman role."

Ev was confused. "What do you mean?"