Hatching Twitter Part 2

But for now, Jack had found what he had spent his life looking for. A job with someone he looked up to: Ev. A group of coworkers who had a hacker spirit: Rabble and company. And a new friend: Noah.

@Biz.

It was early October 2005 when Biz Stone sat down in a small conference room with his boss at Google. The company's logo was spelled out in bright blue, yellow, green, and red letters on the wall behind him, as if it belonged in a kid's play den. Red beanbag chairs sat close by. Biz's smile seemed appropriate in the room's festive atmosphere as his tousled blond hair fluttered atop his head.

"I'm quitting!" Biz said with a giant grin.

His boss looked at him, unsure if Biz, the Google jester, was joking or serious.

"Nope," Biz continued. "I'm quitting."

"You don't care about money?" his boss asked.

"Yes. I do care about money."

"Biz, you do realize that if you quit now you have to give up all your stock options?" his boss said. He reminded him that he had only been at Google for two years, which meant his stock had not vested and wouldn't for another two years.

"How much am I leaving on the table?" Biz asked.

"More than two million dollars," his boss said, confident that such a number would sway the young employee's decision. For most people two million dollars or zero dollars was an easy financial equation. It was for Biz too. He just did the math a little differently.

Biz was far from rich. He had finally paid off fifty thousand dollars in credit-card debt he had been battling for years and was now living month to month in a small Palo Alto apartment with his wife, Livia, and their ark of rescued dogs and cats.

Yet having zero dollars in the bank, while he worked at Google-where even the chef was worth several million dollars-wasn't a new experience for Biz. That was, after all, exactly how he had been raised: poor among the rich.

He had grown up in Wellesley, an affluent suburb of Boston, where the town's median family income was well into the six figures. Though Biz's neighbors were often absurdly wealthy, the Stone family's life was rather different.

Biz was raised on food stamps.

His mother had been adopted by a kind Swiss couple as a child, and when they pa.s.sed away, their large house was left to Biz's mother and her children.

Feeding several hungry mouths was difficult as a single mother, so she developed a plan: Sell the house they owned every few years and downgrade to a smaller place in Wellesley. This way her children could take advantage of the county's fancy schools, and they could use the money from the house sale to pay the bills. Four years later, do it all again. Sell and downgrade.

So Biz was raised in houses that shrank as he grew. Everything was rationed. Haircuts, for example, happened at home, with his mother placing a round bowl atop his mopey head and snipping anything that hung below the edge.

As a boy, Biz was a little idea generator. On weekends he would often visit a family friend who was an electrician, and he spent hours in the man's bas.e.m.e.nt building strange gizmos. In one instance, Biz rigged a doormat with a buzzer that blared when someone came to the front door. Another endeavor, which failed, was an attempt to build his own scuba gear out of c.o.ke bottles and rubber tubes.

But most of Biz's time was spent with his best friend from third grade, Marc Ginsberg, whose father was wealthy enough to own a computer. Biz spent days on end at Marc's house, staring through his round c.o.ke-bottle gla.s.ses as he used the Ginsberg family's Apple II machine, playing video games and drawing on the built-in graphics program.

As Biz grew up, his father, a Boston car mechanic, turned absentee and on the rare occasions he did come home he would spiral into a drunken rage on Biz's mother-on more than one occasion she ended up in the hospital. She eventually kicked him out of the house, and he was only allowed to see his kids on Sundays; Biz decided to stop the weekly visits soon after his sixteenth birthday.

Such a traumatic upbringing would normally turn a young boy into a recluse, maybe someone who needed decades of therapy. But not young Christopher "Biz" Stone. No, it made Biz into a complete and utter goofball. From early on he was cracking jokes to make his mom and sisters feel better after one of his father's drunken tirades. He was the cla.s.s clown in high school. He dropped out of college twice, from Northeastern University and from the University of Ma.s.sachusetts, but while at each school he spent his time making his university friends laugh, rather than focusing on homework. The jokes continued into every meeting at Google.

While Biz's sense of humor helped him in his career and in social settings, the jokes were also used to avoided conflict at all costs, which allowed people to take advantage of him at times, especially in the workplace. Between 1999 and 2001 he worked at a blogging network called Xanga. His coworkers there walked all over him as they took the company in a direction Biz thought was unethical by deceiving people who used the service and harvesting private information about them for profit. Rather than stand up and fight, Biz chose to quit.

After racking up bills and hanging out in his mother's bas.e.m.e.nt, he eventually went in search of a job at Blogger. At that time, in the summer of 2003, Ev had been working at Google for a few months, trying to settle into the giant company. Biz had read about Ev and his "push-b.u.t.ton publishing for the people" philosophy and wanted to help spread the word about blogging too.

In mid-2003 Biz sent Ev an e-mail to say that he, Biz Stone, was the "missing member of the band." After a few phone interviews, some jokes, and ethical discussions of the importance of blogging and how it allowed anyone with a computer to publish content, Ev decided he wanted to hire Biz. But Google didn't feel the same way; Biz had no programming experience and was a college dropout. It took some convincing and politicking, but Ev was finally able to offer him the job.

After Biz received the offer letter from the search giant, the deal almost crumbled. At some point in his childhood, Biz had developed an inordinate fear of flying. He would go between Boston and New York City only on a multihour train or bus ride, rather than hop on a short fifty-minute flight. When he realized he would have to fly out to Mountain View, he declined without giving the real reason. Google, which at first had said no, did not like to be turned down, and the company kept adding money and stock options to woo him. When Biz explained the situation to a friend, the friend replied with one simple word: "Valium."

"What's that?" Biz asked.

"Let's just say you won't be afraid of flying."

He accepted the job and popped a giant, round antianxiety pill as he boarded the plane. On the flight, half-dazed and half-ecstatic that he had "overcome" his phobia of flying, he spent most of time slurry and chatting excitedly with any pa.s.senger who would listen to him.

Biz's jovial mentality became apparent to Google executives the moment he officially started at the company. He didn't just come to Google and slip into the company's culture of quiet and insular engineers. Instead, Biz held his own ticker-tape parade in the form of a fake press release on the Internet to announce his new job.

"Google Inc. has acquired the entire staff and some of the intellectual property of Genius Labs, a Boston-based blogging ent.i.ty comprised entirely of Biz Stone," he wrote on his personal Web site on October 7, 2003, in a post t.i.tled "Google Acquires Genius Labs." "Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed." He concluded his fake release with a joke at his new employer's expense. "Google's free snack and coffee program has drawn accolades from industry elite and their innovative search technologies are also very nice."

When he arrived at the search engine, his comic routines saw him shuffle between bosses. Like Ev, Goldman, and the rest of the Blogger team, Biz often felt out of place amid the company's cutthroat, businesslike mentality. Like a group of unpopular kids at school, the Blogger misfits would eat together in the company's cafeterias, drink in their own corner during the company's weekly Friday addresses, and crack jokes at the expense of the straitlaced programmers.

Ev wasn't like any traditional boss Biz had worked under before. When Ev hired someone new, rather than wait to trust them with confidential information or important tasks, he chose to trust them immediately. Biz felt a sense of confidence and pride that Ev treated him this way, and the bond between the two quickly tightened. Before long, fueled by their collective comic relief, Biz, Ev, and Goldman became best friends.

After Ev left Google in 2004, Biz was miserable, as his new bosses at Google didn't trust him or treat him with respect. So in 2005 he decided he had had enough and wanted to follow Ev to his next project. This came with a conundrum: He would have to leave millions of dollars on the shiny Google table in order to take a new job at the grimy podcasting start-up Odeo, working with Ev again and his new, wacky business partner, Noah.

"We didn't move out to California so I could work at Google," Biz told Livia as they discussed the millions of dollars they would be throwing away. "We moved out here so I could work with Ev."

Given how close their friendship had grown over the past two years, the decision was easy. He went into work the following day and turned over his white Google employee ID, and the money that came with it, in exchange for the freedom of start-up life.

When he started at Odeo on September 6, 2005, he quickly realized it was a much bigger change than he had antic.i.p.ated. His unlimited free meals, free snacks, free buses to work, and free inexhaustible everything at Google were now replaced with an office where homeless people slept in the stairwell, the only free transportation was his two feet, and the only free food or drink was a beer after work if Ev picked up the tab.

The cultural difference was incalculable. The sterile, robotic culture of Google, with its know-it-all engineers and bossy bosses, was now replaced with tattooed hackers with a do-what-you-want mentality. A group of people who had nothing but disdain for the Googlers of the world, who made a point to always tout their degrees from Stanford and MIT, the Odeo employees were all dropouts from midtier colleges.

And Biz, working alongside his best friend and former boss, among the homeless people and the chaos, the grime and grunge, felt right at home.

II.

#NOAH.

Troubled Waters.

It was late 2005 as the boat emerged from the thick fog and the Odeo employees looked out at the view. The Golden Gate Bridge glowed orange in the distance as the sails clanked against the mast as the wind thrust them forward.

"We're about to head to the Tiburon Marina," Ariel Poler, one of the Odeo investors, said as he steered his boat through the salty air and across the San Francis...o...b..y. "Sam's is open; that's excellent," he added, squinting into the distance.

Noah was hyperactively filming as he interrogated his coworkers for another short video he would later post to his blog. He b.u.t.ted the lens of the camera up against people's faces like a child showing off a lollipop. "Tell us about it?" Noah asked Biz, looking for a play-by-play of the relatively uneventful boat outing.

"It's good. We didn't lose anyone on the way over here, but maybe on the way back, one or two guys," Biz said to the camera, scrunched up to keep warm as the wind sc.r.a.ped across his orange jacket. Ev, who was sitting to his right, his eyes concealed behind his dark sungla.s.ses, said, "We can afford to lose one."

Ev was joking, mostly. Although he wouldn't throw him over the side of the boat, Ev would have happily thrust Noah over the rails of Odeo.

Ev and Noah were at odds on almost everything. The colors of logos. The type of products they should focus on. Who was in charge. They couldn't even agree on when to open Odeo to the public.

"No. It's not ready!" Ev had said one afternoon earlier in the year, shaking his head from side to side as Noah tried to negotiate with him. "I'm telling you, I'm CEO; I've done this before; I don't want to put the site up yet!"

Rabble and Ray, the young Flash designer who had been hired while Odeo was working out of coffee shops, leaned back in their chairs to get comfortable for the next Noah-versus-Ev debate. Ev wasn't ready to announce his new disruption to the world just yet. He had always had a difficult time making decisions and pressing the final launch b.u.t.ton. Noah, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with excitement and eagerness, had not.

Unbeknownst to them, the winner of this debate wouldn't count. Rabble decided. "It's live," Rabble told them, a mischievous grin on his face, his chaotic hair pulled back in a ponytail. Ev and Noah continued to bicker. Again Rabble told them, "It's live, guys," now speaking up to ensure that they stopped talking. "I just turned the site on."

They stopped arguing and looked over at him. Noah smiled from ear to ear. "No way!" he said. Ev just shook his head.

The site they had just unintentionally launched hoped to be the Web's central destination for podcasts. It would allow people to create and record audio files, then share them with other people on the Web using an Adobe Flashbased widget called Odeo Studio. All of this would be completely free.

With Ev's name attached to the company, Odeo had received press and awareness throughout 2005 that had brought the attention of investors, including Ariel Poler, who presumed that podcasting could become a compet.i.tor to radio, just as blogging had done to publishing. In August 2005, with no business model, Odeo had received five million dollars in funding from Charles River Ventures and a number of other smaller investors-a bet on podcasting and Ev, not necessarily on the company or the people working for it.

With a slew of money in the bank to hire new engineers and take the company in any number of podcasting-related directions, Noah and Ev hadn't been able to agree on anything. As the first month flush with cash had pa.s.sed, Noah had started complaining to the board, calling George Zachary, the lead investor in Odeo, to voice his displeasure with Ev's lack of leadership and inability to make decisions. On several occasions Noah had tried to stage a mutiny and suggested that the board remove Ev as CEO and install Noah as the new captain. Ev, who had an aversion to conflict, decided to deal with the contention by simply ignoring it. On most days he skipped going into the office altogether, rather than face the wrath of frenetic Noah.

"Who would you lose? Who could you afford to lose the most?" Noah asked Biz and Ev on the boat as they floated through the chilly water, smiling, as he already knew the answer.

"Oh, that's a tough choice," Biz said as he looked over at Ev, who didn't answer.

"Probably me," Noah said sarcastically, then flipped the camera around to doc.u.ment his own face, his broad smile filling the frame, buglike sungla.s.ses wrapped around his eyes. "Probably me, probably me," he said, laughing slightly.

Biz and Ev didn't disagree.

Noah set off like a rogue Ping-Pong ball, bouncing around the boat to film everyone else.

Jack was standing on the bow in a uniform of denim-dark jeans and a matching jean jacket. His messy, dark hair slapped around in the wind as he stood daydreaming. He loved to sail, and the day trip reminded him of an earlier goal he had set for himself, to soon buy a boat and skipper it, alone, to Hawaii: a 2,400-mile journey that, according to his research, would take about a month.

As Ariel's boat slowed at the dock, the group stepped onto the rustic planks, stretching their legs and collectively looking like a giant caterpillar waking from a nap.

Although this was the first boat outing for the Odeo crew, it was another field trip for a small group of mismatched employees who, for a brief moment, were becoming close friends-at least some of them were.

As on most of their excursions, alcohol would be used to help lubricate the afternoon's conversation. They soon found themselves rocking back and forth on the white plastic chairs outside Sam's Anchor Cafe, seagulls sniping at their food. They sipped gla.s.ses of wine, telling nerdy jokes and laughing at one another.

Jack sat quietly listening. He never really said much. When he did speak, it was in two- or three-syllable sentences, as if he were rationing how much he could say aloud during a single day. It wasn't clear anyone would have listened to him anyway. He was, after all, one of the most junior people at Odeo. The deckhand on a boat; a lowly private in the army; a contract programmer at a start-up. Although Ev rarely interacted with Jack, he referred to him in the office as "the idea guy" because of his wacky concepts. Some were totally bizarre, like his suggestion to create a start-up that would allow programmers to team up and work together, but not in a traditional way. The idea was that while one person wrote code, the other programmer would ma.s.sage his or her shoulders; then they would switch.

Jack often told his coworkers about a new movie, book, or alb.u.m they should watch, read, or listen to or about an upcoming art show or party they could all attend, helping sew together friendships between his office mates.

Often, though, Jack would simply sit quietly, absorbed in his own thoughts. But his daydreaming inevitably hit a dead end as the group of beer-sipping geeks' conversation quickly arrived at its final destination: work. This was often the case. Breakfasts, lunches, dinners, drinks, dancing in clubs were often punctured by work-related chatter.

It was these conversations-Noah, Ev, Biz, Rabble, Jack, and a handful of other Odeo engineers talking about the past and the future-where a potion started to stir together that would ultimately transform the podcasting company, which was going nowhere, into one that would change the world and all of the people gathered on the dock at Sam's that day.

At times Ev and Biz talked about their days at Blogger and how people used the service to share news. To tell stories. To disrupt media.

On one of the group's outings, Rabble and Blaine shared tales of their hacker days using mobile phones to help antiwar and antigovernment demonstrations evade the police. Noah talked about pirate radio stations. Jack mentioned his days as a bike messenger.

Others discussed compet.i.tors, including Dodgeball, a location-based messaging service that had started to gain a lot of traction in New York City.

Jack took it all in, processing the ideas he heard and he sat silently, as usual. But that was all about to change in the office. There was a new Odeo employee starting the following week.

A girl.

"Oh, that's Crystal," Jack was told when he asked about the woman in the office. "Not gonna happen; she has a boyfriend." Still, Jack was immediately smitten. And understandably so. Crystal Taylor had pin-straight black hair, deep welcoming eyes, and a smile that could stop traffic. Her slight frame made her seem like a pixie from a children's fairy tale.

During her first week at Odeo, Jack made endless excuses to talk to her. He would stand nervously fidgeting with something on her desk, staring at her at lunch, awkwardly playing with his nose ring. He eventually picked up the courage to ask Crystal what kind of music she was listening to on her headphones. The conversation quickly led to the type of bands they both enjoyed, and Crystal asked him if he wanted to join her and a group of friends to see a show.

"Yeah, I'd love to," Jack said, excited, nervously peering away from her. "I'll call you later to figure out where to meet."

"Call me?" Crystal said, confused. "I don't really use the phone. Can you just text me?"

"Umm, what's a text?" Jack asked, slightly embarra.s.sed.

"Um, text messages, h.e.l.loooooo? You've never used text before?"

In today's age, such a conversation might be like asking someone if they had ever heard of the Internet, or cars, or this giant ball of fire in the sky called the sun. But in 2005, although it had taken off in other countries and with teenage girls in the United States, text messaging was a relatively esoteric form of communication for most of America.

"No," Jack said solemnly. "I've never heard of texting. What is it?"

"Here, let me show you," Crystal told him as he stood nervously watching her explain how to send an SMS from a phone with a tiny two-inch black-and-white screen, a form of communication that until then had been lost on Jack but had spread in the rest of society like an epidemic that afflicted only girls with cell phones.

Jack was a quiet engineer at the time, and with his Raggedy Andy hair and fear of face-to-face communications he had not had the opportunity to interact with too many girls, most of whom texted. That was, until he met Crystal.

Although she told him she had a boyfriend, Jack was obsessed. He soon found out she liked juice, so at lunchtime he would show up with a bottle and place it on Crystal's desk to surprise her. But when that didn't garner much response, his head hanging, he tried one of his signature moves with the ladies: making the perfect origami crane.

He had first learned how to make the perfect paper version of the long-necked and long-tailed bird after he decided to craft one thousand of them as a gift for a friend's wedding. He had meticulously folded each one, on his own, until he was so perfect at crane making that he could do it from memory with his eyes closed. He decided such a gift was now worthy of Crystal.

One morning he rushed into the office early and placed a crane on her keyboard. He then slyly sat at his desk, silently pretending to work when she arrived with her cup of Tully's coffee to be met by a little paper bird staring up longingly from her computer. At first Crystal put the crane to the side, smiling at it and moving on with her day. Then she received another the next day. And another the day after that, until finally she grew upset at Jack's relentless pa.s.ses, especially given that she had a boyfriend.

"You don't need to get me juice," she said to Jack as she stormed over to his desk, reminding him that she was in a relationship. "And it's really sweet that you're putting the cranes on my keyboard, but you can stop now."

"Did you see which letter I put them on?" Jack said excitedly, almost ignoring her request to respect her boundaries. She had not seen that the cranes had each been placed on different letters, which were going to spell out her name. "No!" she said, annoyed, and turned around to leave. But he pressed on, determined that something would eventually happen with Crystal.

He was more successful with the friendships he forged with his coworkers.

With each social event, flocks were being shaped, people bonding like some sort of strange chemical concoction separating and coagulating back together again. At one end of the spectrum there was the Blaine and Rabble posse, sticking to their anarchistic, antieverything mentality. At the other end were Ev and Biz, dinner-party mavens who enjoyed a quiet evening of wine around a long wooden table. And in the middle were Noah, Jack, Crystal, and the rest of the mess, who soon became an inseparable group of friends. Sometimes they went to music shows together or foreign films. To wine bars and dive bars. For long walks and short bike rides. They were best-friend club kids who enjoyed drinking sake out of square boxes and dancing long into the night to music that sounded like a fax machine.

Although the groups sometimes overlapped, with Noah going to Ev's parties and Ev getting beers with Noah, they mostly kept to their own boats in the same waters. And although they didn't know it yet, the waters they were in were about to become even more fraught with mayhem and chaos. These waters would eventually see half of the crew of the HMS Odeo thrown overboard.