Hatching Twitter Part 19

The new office, d.i.c.k explained, meant that it was time for Twitter to grow up as a company. To end the rolling site outages and a long list of other problems that had plagued Twitter's infancy.

"We're leaving the motto of making better mistakes tomorrow in the old building," d.i.c.k said. "That's not the type of company we are anymore."

What's Happening?.

Each day, Chris Hadfield, the commander of the International s.p.a.ce Station Expedition 35, peers out the domed window of his s.p.a.ceship, holds up his digital camera, and captures small, square snippets of Earth. He then swims through the air back to his sleeping pod, loads the images onto his computer, and tweets them. These are images that most of the seven billion people spinning below him will never have the opportunity to see in real life.

He captures images of the Middle East, where protests against dictators are still organized using Twitter. He captures Rome, where the pope now talks to millions of Catholics in 140-character sermons. He captures Washington, where the president of the United States regularly addresses Americans in tweets. He captures Israel and Gaza, where a war as old as religion itself now rages online, on Twitter. He captures images of hundreds of millions of people who tweet to one another billions of times a week, in every language and from every corner of the globe.

On January 24, 2013, he happened to be pa.s.sing over San Francisco and snapped a picture of the city where Twitter was born. Then he tweeted the image. If you look closely at the photo, you can see the Golden Gate Bridge, its vast red columns reaching into the sky, surrounded by San Francis...o...b..y. The same bay where a few years earlier, a group of friends who worked at a small, failing podcasting company called Odeo sailed across the water to share a drink at Sam's Anchor Cafe. That group of nearly a dozen people who would all contribute, in their own special way, to the creation of Twitter.

If you were able to look closely enough at Commander Hadfield's photo, zooming into the intricate web of city streets, houses, and office buildings, the parks and beaches, you would be able to see Jack, Ev, Biz, and Noah wandering the city-separately, together.

In the summer of 2012, Noah anxiously walked into a doctor's office with his girlfriend, Delphine. They approached the counter, told the nurse who they were, and filled out the appropriate paperwork. They then sat in the waiting room, hands clasped together, holding each other's hearts.

Noah had moved back to San Francisco in mid-2011, realizing it was time to get back to life. Back to a different life from the one he had left two years earlier. He had placed everything in cardboard boxes in LA and driven north where he had once gone south. Although Twitter wouldn't have existed without Noah, Noah now didn't exist because of Twitter.

Time heals all wounds, but some leave very visible scars. So he settled back into the same city, differently, renting a loft apartment with Delphine in a different neighborhood from the one he had lived in years earlier. He made new friends who didn't work in technology. People who wouldn't become business partners.

Then, in July 2012, they received the news and made an appointment with the doctor.

Their name was called and they walked down a hallway, opened a door, and entered a relatively dark room. There were screens everywhere. Blinking lights. Beeping noises. Delphine was told to lie on the bed and lift her shirt as Noah watched nervously. The doctor reached over and pressed a number of b.u.t.tons on one of the machines, then started to gently rub gel on Delphine's stomach. Noah grasped her hand tightly.

There was a long pause as the doctor looked at the screen on the machine, then back at Noah and Delphine.

"Congratulations," the doctor said with a smile. "You're going to have a little baby girl." Noah looked at Delphine as tears welled up in his eyes, then started to trickle down his face. She looked back at him and smiled, an affectionate, happy smile. A loving smile. Then Noah buried his head in his hands and wept. He had cried hundreds of times over the years, cried a million tears. He had cried alone. In his bed. In his truck. But this was different. This time he was crying out of joy. He had always wanted a baby girl, dreamed of a little girl he could hold in his arms and cuddle and kiss and care for. And love. A little girl he could love. And here she was.

It was in that moment that he realized this was what he had been searching for in mid-2006, when he sat at his computer and typed a short blog post about the name of the latest project he was starting with his friends: Twitter.

He had explained what this new project could do: "The fact that I could find out what my friends were doing at any moment of the day made me feel closer to them and, quite honestly, a little less alone."

That feeling he had been searching for when he helped start Twitter was a hope that a technology could connect him to people. Yet it was the hand he was holding at that moment, Delphine's, that was the real connection he had always been searching for. The technology in that room, the screens, the beeps, had also done what Twitter had never been able to do for Noah. They had allowed him to feel a connection to someone who wasn't there. The technology had connected him to his baby who wasn't born yet.

Noah collected himself, wiping the tears away from his eyes as he looked at Delphine and kissed her. They walked out of the doctor's office, the warm sun drying his moist face, and peered up at the sky as birds floated by, lightly chirping, flapping, and tweeting in the warm San Francisco sun. He looked down at Delphine's hand, grasping it as they walked, together. Compared to his former cofounders, Noah made very little money from Twitter and Odeo. One day in the future he hopes to take the small sum he has saved to try his hand at another start-up.

On April 6, 2013, Noah tweeted for the first time in more than two years: "Cheeks stained with glorious tears of joy and absolute humility I celebrate the birth of my daughter Oceane Donnie Marie-Louise Poncin Gla.s.s."

Some mornings, Biz and Livy wake up in their two-thousand-square-foot home across the bay in Marin County, their heads resting atop puffy pillows as the sun streams in through their windows. "Hey, Livy!" Biz says as they look each other in the eye. "We're rich! We're rich!" At which they both giggle like children who have a secret pile of candy under their bed. They remind each other that as Twitter was just hatching, they lived a very different life. On some mornings they recite the story of a certain day, five years earlier, at the Elephant Pharmacy in Berkeley.

It was a late weekend afternoon, and Biz and Livy wandered into the kitchen of their small, box-shaped home and opened the fridge. It was completely empty. Just a cave of white plastic. They wandered to the cabinets: empty. Their wallets: empty too. Livy looked at Biz and with a sad smile asked what they were going to do. They were tens of thousands of dollars in credit-card debt at the time. Bills landed with a thud on top of more bills. They had already borrowed money from Ev twice, which had since dissolved. Their tweets lamented their current state: "we're paying bills."

They were broke and had no options. Well, almost no options.

"I bet you there's a lot of change in this can," Biz said as a he grabbed the coffee can the two had been using to collect spare change. It was your typical homemade piggy bank, round and metal with a plastic top. Each day the Stones came home and dropped dimes, nickels, and pennies inside-sometimes a few quarters would mix in too. Clink. Clink. Clink. The echoes grew quieter over time as the piggy bank filled up. Now, broke and hungry, they decided it was time to cash in. They walked down Cedar Street, the coffee can in hand as if it were made of gla.s.s, and arrived in front of the Elephant Pharmacy in the Gourmet Ghetto. They walked inside, through the gla.s.s doors, and stood in front of the green Coinstar machine.

Biz began tipping the coins into it, carefully grasping the side of the can as Livy stood behind him and watched. They had a.s.sumed that they could get thirty dollars-maybe even fifty!-from the coin collection, but the number displaying the total kept flipping higher and higher. Before long, they were approaching sixty dollars. Then past seventy. Eighty. And still it kept going.

"Oh my G.o.d! Oh my G.o.d!" Livy said, clapping her hands with pure excitement as she jumped up and down in place.

"Are we in Las Vegas?" Biz asked as he looked back and forth between her and the rising number.

"Oh my G.o.d! Are we going to pa.s.s one hundred dollars?" she asked as the numbers continued to flip. Silence fell over both of them as the machine continued to $90. Then $91. $92. Livy began jumping in place again, her hands in the air, and yelped as they pa.s.sed $100, coming to rest at $103. They both wore smiles so wide they looked unreal. Happiness at the bottom of a coffee can.

Once they collected their winnings, they traipsed off to Trader Joe's, where they loaded up on food-chips and dips, bread, a six-pack of cheap beer-and they went home, happy. The crinkle of their grocery bags accompanied them as they wandered back up Cedar Street.

Years later, their lives had become very different. Biz can sometimes make upward of half a million dollars to give a fifteen-minute public talk. Their bank account, which once began with a negative symbol, now ends with seven zeros.

When people ask Biz about his wealth, he tells them that money rarely changes people; it often just magnifies who they really are. Biz and Livy still drive their old Volkswagen and Subaru to work. Biz still dresses as if he walked out of a thrift store. And the majority of the money they make goes to the Biz and Livia Stone Foundation (a nonprofit they founded that gives money and support to organizations that make it easy for anyone to help students in need) and a number of animal-related sanctuaries. As a result, a few mice now have a warm home on a farm.

In early 2012 Jack sold his loft in Mint Plaza, saying good-bye to the nearby homeless glut of the Tenderloin, and moved to the glitziest part of the city. His new home, for which he paid almost twelve million dollars, isn't visible from the street. It sits behind a large wooden gate and down a steep driveway, hidden from view by old, swaying trees. The rear of the house, which is an endless wall of gla.s.s, sits atop a giant, jagged, rocky cliff face at the edge of the world.

Each night, when Jack comes home from work, he types his pa.s.sword into the keypad that opens his front doors, then walks inside his empty gla.s.s castle in the sky. The rooms in the house are all spa.r.s.e. In the living room there are only a couple of pieces of furniture, including the same Le Corbusier couch and chair Steve Jobs once had in his home.

Through the living room there is a set of gla.s.s doors that open onto a balcony that sits out over the rocks like a magic carpet floating atop the moist air. Some nights Jack wanders out there alone and looks out at the bay. Below, the waves crash against the rocks, making a roiling sound like ferocious lions locked in a dungeon.

By 2013, with a net worth of a billion dollars, it might seem like Jack had "won." But to some of the people who knew him when he arrived at Odeo eight years earlier, it seemed quite the opposite. Back then he had joined the company as a quiet young programmer in search of friendships and a mentor. He had found the mentor, sort of, in his emulation of Steve Jobs. But he lost friends when he used those same people as a ladder to climb to the top.

Jack is often featured on the covers of magazines. He's been profiled by 60 Minutes as a visionary and touted as a playboy billionaire who parties with the stars in gossip rags. He is often spoken of as the next Steve Jobs and the sole inventor of Twitter.

From his balcony, as he watches the dark ocean down below, he can hear the sounds of boats heading back from sea, their horns blaring as they return to port.

In early 2013, on the nights that Jack stands out there alone, as the smell of the bay drifts up the sides of the rocks, he looks out at the ocean and plots his next moves. His plans for Square, where he has become an adept leader, growing the company into a multibillion-dollar business. His plans for Twitter, where he one day might return as CEO. His plans to one day become the mayor of New York City.

But during those moments when he feels truly lonely-when the ocean, the sirens, the rocks stop calling to him, he walks back inside, closing the gla.s.s doors behind him, and reaches into his pocket, pulling out his smart phone. He slides his finger across the gla.s.s screen, then places it on the blue icon with the little blue bird. And he talks to Twitter.

On Monday evenings, just before five o'clock, Ev rushes out of Obvious Corporation, which he reopened for business after officially leaving Twitter. His office is in a nondescript building on Market Street, just a few blocks away from Twitter's headquarters. He dashes home to eat dinner with his family. Then they wander upstairs for their nightly ritual of reading together-their favorite part of the day.

Ev was despondent for months after leaving Twitter. He started to piece together what had happened to him, learning more about the private meetings between Jack and others. He played back in his head over and over conversations where people who worked for him had acted surprised at the news of his firing. Some of those people had actually been involved in the coup.

On Tuesday evenings Ev works late, often the last person to leave the office as he sits sketching out ideas for new projects, the glow of a computer screen lighting his way.

His Twitter stock and other investments are now nearing two billion dollars, sure to continue growing as Twitter pursues its goal of becoming a hundred-billion-dollar company.

On Wednesday evenings a cooking teacher comes to the house. Four-year-old Miles and Ev and Sara's second boy, Owen, now fourteen months old, learn about vegetables, soil, and farming.

In 2012, a year after Ev officially left Twitter, thinking of what had taken place behind his back, he sat down with Sara and they asked each other the following questions: How can we raise our children to never act this way? How can we raise them to be honest and caring? How can we make a road map for the kinds of parents we want to be and the type of family we want to raise?

They came up with two solutions. First, the money they have made over the years would go into a trust. When Miles and Owen grow up, they will be responsible for giving it away to charities, organizations that exist to try to make the world a better place. Second, they would develop a weekly schedule to adhere to, ensuring that family comes before anything else.

Weekends are special for Ev, Sara, Miles, and Owen. On Sat.u.r.day mornings Ev makes waffles. They are often bizarre concoctions, with Ev adding nuts and seeds and other strange ingredients.

Miles, like his dad, is a daydreamer, and he often just sits and stares into s.p.a.ce, thinking. On Sunday mornings the two daydreamers go on an adventure together, always taking the train through San Francisco to a museum, a park, or the bookstore.

Ev and Sara noticed early on that, like Ev, Miles is shy and sometimes socially awkward. As much as they want to change that in him, they know they can't. But they also know that technology won't change that either, so the kids are strictly forbidden to use iPads, iPhones, or televisions. Human interactions are encouraged. So are physical, paper books.

So Sunday nights, before the weekly schedule begins anew, it's time for the nightly ritual, the best part of each day.

On one side of Miles's bedroom there is a wide, oval, gray couch. It's big enough for the entire family to squeeze onto. Directly across the room there is a stacked bookshelf. On it there are dozens of print books of all shapes and sizes. Children's books. Books about b.u.t.terflies and pirates. Encyclopedias.

Each night, as Ev drops down onto the couch, Sara next to him with Owen in her arms, Miles runs across the room, his feet briskly flying across the gray carpet to grab his favorite book: The Astronaut Handbook, a story about a group of kids who want to become astronauts when they grow up. Miles bounds back across his bedroom, handing the book to his father. Then together, as a family, they read as Miles stares out the window, just as Ev did on his father's green tractor as a child, up into s.p.a.ce.

From time to time the astronauts on the s.p.a.ce station host a question-and-answer session on Twitter. People ask 140-character queries that are sent via cybers.p.a.ce into real s.p.a.ce, where astronauts who live for sixth months at a time in small s.p.a.ceships that circle Earth do their best to explain what it's like to live in a gla.s.s capsule hundreds of miles away.

In one recent session, a woman on Earth asked whether it was lonely in s.p.a.ce.

"In the centre of every big city in the world, surrounded by noise and teeming millions of people, are lonely people," Commander Hadfield wrote. "Loneliness is not so much where you are, but instead is your state of mind." Then he explained that the few people who live on the s.p.a.ce station can contact their families through a number of technologies designed to connect people, including radio, telephone, and social media.

As the sessions on Twitter concluded, someone else asked how these astronauts tweet from s.p.a.ce. Hadfield explained that he has a laptop inside his sleep pod. As he floats around the s.p.a.ceship, checking on experiments that could cure diseases or enable people to grow scarce resources in s.p.a.ce or answer previously unanswerable questions, he often takes short breaks and slips into his bay to check Twitter. There he talks to millions of people who are floating 240 miles away. People who can talk to him but can't touch him. People who can make him feel just a little less alone.

Acknowledgments.

On Twitter people can only send 140-character updates at a time; printed books have their own character limits, too. So for those I do not thank individually, please understand that it is a matter of constraint, not appreciation.

A special thanks to the hundreds of people who provided me doc.u.ments and e-mails and took the time to sit for interviews for this book, especially Ev, Biz, Jack, Goldman, Noah, Bijan, Fred, Fenton, and d.i.c.k. Although some of these people agreed to speak to me reluctantly, I am eternally grateful for their time. There are some people I cannot thank by name-sources who put their job and friendships on the line to help me find the truth-they know who they are when I offer a heartfelt and respectful bow of grat.i.tude.

Thank you to my editor, Niki Papadopoulos, who seemed to telepathically know when I was stuck on a sentence or theme, reaching out, sometimes via Twitter, to push me along and in the right direction. (And immense appreciation for her listening to me ramble for hours on end about the book.) To my agents, Katinka Matson, John Brockman, and Max Brockman, who helped me find this project and a publisher that believed in it. And to Natalie Horbachevsky, Jennifer Mascia, Adrian Zackheim, and Drummond Moir for their involvement in, help for, and dedication to this book.

To my friends and coworkers: Nora Abousteit, Jill Abramson, Melissa Barnes, Ruzwana Bashir, Lane Becker, Veronica Belmont, Danielle B. Marin, Ryan Block, Tom Bodkin, Danah Boyd, Matt Buchanan, David Carr, Brian Chen, Mathias Crawford, Tony and Mary Conrad, Tom Conrad, Paddy Cosgrave, Dennis Crowley, Damon Darlin, Anil Dash, Mike Driscoll, Aaron Durand, Josh Felser, Tim Ferris, Brady Forrest, David Gallhager, Michael Galpert, John Geddes, Sh.e.l.ly Gerrish, Ashley Khaleesi Granata, Mark Hansen, Quentin Hardy, Leland Hayward, Erica Hintergardt, Mat Honan, Arianna Huffington, Kate Imbach, Larry Ingra.s.sia, Walter Isaccson, Mike Issac, Joel Johnson, Andrei Kallaur, Paul Kedrosky, Kevin Kelly, Jeff Koyen, Brian Lam, Jeremy LaTra.s.se, Steven Levy, Allen Loeb, Kati London, Om Malik, John Markoff, Hubert McCabe, Christopher Michel, Claire Cain Miller, Trudy Muller, Tim O'Reilly, Carolyn Penner, Nicole Perlroth, Megan Quinn, Narendra Rocherolle, Jennifer Rodriguez, Evelyn Rusli, Naveen Selvadurai, Ryan and Devon Sarver, Elliot Schrage, Mari Sheibley, MG Siegler, Courtney Skott, Robin Sloan, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Suzanne Spector, Brad Stone, David Streitfeld, Gabriel Stricker, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Kara Swisher, Clive Thompson, Deep Throat, Baratunde Thurston, Mark Trammell, Sara Morishige Williams, Nick Wingfield, Jenna Wortham, Aaron Zamost, Edith Zimmerman.

To my family: Terry and Margie, Betty and Len, Eboo, Weter and Roman, Sandra and David, Stephen, Amanda, Ben and Josh, Matt and Sam, and, of course, Michael, Luca, Willow, and Crazy Lotte, who housed and fed me (and Pixel) while I wrote at their dining room table.

To the readers who, in a world of never-ending media, took the time to read this book.

And last, but very far from least, Chrysta Olson, for her wisdom, support, and love. And, thanks in part to our discussions at Cecconi's and elsewhere around the storyline of Hatching Twitter, allowed us to hatch a relationship of our own. I love you.

October 2005. Noah captains the boat through the San Francis...o...b..y as Biz pretends to hold on for dear life. Ev, at right with sungla.s.ses, laughs. Rabble is in the rear right.

October 2005. Jack, middle, listens as Noah and Ev, not pictured, talk at Sam's Bar in the Tiburon Marina. Ariel Poler, an investor in Odeo, is at right.

January 2006. Noah, at right, records a podcast with Biz, seated in the chair, and Ev, seated on the floor.

May 2006. The Odeo employees gather at Amici's in San Francisco to say good-bye to some who have been let go in the layoffs. From left to right: Blaine Cook, Adam Rugel, Courtney Brown, Jack Dorsey, Rabble, Ray McClure, Noah Gla.s.s, Sara Morishige, and Evan Williams.

September 2006. Jack and Noah pose for a photo at the Love Parade in San Francisco during the grand public unveiling of Twitter. Hours later, Jack would end up in the hospital.

March 2007. Jack gives a speech at the 2007 South by Southwest Awards. Left to right: Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Jason Goldman, and Ze Frank.

June 2007. From left to right, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Jason Goldman. and Evan Williams gather to celebrate Biz and Livia's wedding.

January 2009. Twitter wins best start-up founders at the Crunchies Awards ceremony.

April 2009. Twitter employees watch Ev on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

April 2009. Jack peers out of an army helicopter on his way to the American-occupied Green Zone in Iraq.

May 2009. Ev, Jack, and the singer M.I.A. and her husband pose for a photo at the Time 100 dinner.

November 2009. d.i.c.k Costolo joins Twitter as the company's first chief operating officer.

August 2009. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, stops by the Twitter office for a town hallstyle discussion with Ev and Biz.

January 2011. Snoop Dogg rapping at the Twitter office.

June 2010. Russian president Dmitry Medvedev visits Twitter right as the site goes down.

July 2011. Jack hosts a Twitter town hall with President Barack Obama.

February 2012. d.i.c.k Costolo addresses employees during Tea Time, the company's weekly all-hands meeting.

May 2012. Jack, in one of his now-signature suits, talks to d.i.c.k, now CEO of Twitter.

About the Author.

Nick Bilton is a columnist and reporter for the New York Times and also leads its popular Bits Blog, where he explores the disruptive aspects of technology on business and culture, the future of technology, privacy, and the social impact of the Web. He is a regular guest on national TV and radio and the author of I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works. He lives in San Francisco.

Author's Note.

The author Julian Barnes once wrote, "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of doc.u.mentation."

What you are about to read is the result of several hundred hours of interviews with current and former employees of Twitter and Odeo, government officials, Twitter executives' friends and significant others, and people at competing companies, as well as discussions with almost everyone mentioned in the book. While Twitter, the company, declined to give me official access for the book, Twitter's current and former board members and all four cofounders of the company agreed to sit for, collectively, more than sixty-five hours of interviews. Although most interviews were recorded to ensure accuracy of dialogue, all of these conversations, while on the record to be used within this book, were conducted on "background," with the understanding that material would not be explicitly attributed to specific sources within this book. There are only a couple of people mentioned in this book who declined to be interviewed.

It became apparent in the interviews for the book that people's memories of past events have changed over time. During only a select few occasions two people agreed that a meeting took place, but their recollections of the location or timing were drastically different. In every instance possible I have tried to triangulate timing and location of events using doc.u.ments I obtained and, of course, social media. There may be some occurrences where this was not possible; in these instances I have done my best to estimate timing. I chose to leave out of this narrative moments of the story for which accounts were too different. In some areas of the book events are referred to a few months earlier than they occur to help the reader understand the overall significance of a moment.

The book is also based on more than a thousand doc.u.ments I obtained or reviewed during my reporting, including employee e-mails, boardroom presentations, investment filings, contracts, employee calendars, partnership doc.u.ments, government-level communications, instant-messenger correspondence, newspaper articles, blog posts, and highly confidential Twitter legal notices and internal e-mails. In moments of the book where scenes are described in exact detail, I have often personally visited the location. Any instance of a character's inner monologue or emotional state is based on interviews with that individual and not a.s.sumed.

Even with the hundreds of hours of interviews and the internal doc.u.ments, the most exact location of memory I found was strewn about the Internet on social-media Web sites. With a researcher, I pored through tens of thousands of tweets, photos, and videos.

It became clear in the reporting of this book that the imperfections of memory of those I spoke with have sometimes become more p.r.o.nounced over the past decade. But what has remained intact are the hundreds of thousands of photos, videos, and tweets they all shared over the years, helping to pinpoint exact moments in time, clothing, conversation, and mood. Unbeknownst to the people in the book at the time, their use of the tools they created, especially Twitter, ensured there were very few inadequacies of doc.u.mentation to deteriorate the true events that make up this history.