Hatching Twitter Part 9

When Jack arrived at work, he stepped off the elevator into the Twitter office and was greeted by the familiar smell of percolated coffee that filled the hallway. He headed straight for Ev's desk, hoping by some miracle, by some obscure chance, he would be sitting there ready to answer questions.

But Ev's desk was empty. Just his roller chair, alone. His Mac computer, sleeping.

As the afternoon drew on, Jack's anxiety still hadn't abated, so he decided to write Ev an e-mail asking for some answers. He hit "send," then waited. Waited for a reply. A phone call. A text message. For Ev to appear in front of his desk and explain what was going on.

Ev never responded.

Fred's hand scrunched around his face as he rubbed his eyes, trying to abate the tiredness that was consuming him. It was Tuesday morning and he was exhausted after the six-hour flight from New York. He was also starting to grow impatient, as the conversation seemed stalled.

Bijan started speaking again as Ev paced in his living room, his feet brushing against the white s.h.a.g rug and the dark hardwood floor. In the background his bookcase, filled with marketing, management, and business t.i.tles, watched over them. Surely one of these books covered this topic: firing a CEO.

The three had been talking for some time, having a variation on previous conversations that had taken place over the past few months.

"What if he goes to Facebook?" Bijan had asked on more than one occasion. "We have to do something to make sure that doesn't happen. It'll look terrible for Twitter if the founder goes to Facebook."

"He's not gonna go to f.u.c.king Facebook." Fred laughed, rolling his eyes in Bijan's direction, his hand in its usual resting spot, his chin. "Look, I get that he's all starry-eyed by Zuck, but he's not gonna go work there."

"He could!" Bijan said and argued that the board should make Jack director of product or chairman or give him another senior role at Twitter after he was let go as CEO, to ensure that he didn't go off to a compet.i.tor.

But that wasn't an option either. Jack had been quite vehement when he had been given his three-month reprieve that if things didn't work out, he would not work for Ev.

As the morning wore on Ev cupped his phone in his hand and paced, looking at it every few minutes to see if one of his confidants, like Chris Sacca, an investor in Twitter and one of Ev's trusted friends, had called with some advice on the matter.

"I'm not giving him a f.u.c.king board seat," Ev snapped. "He doesn't know what the f.u.c.k he's doing."

Then there was a group discussion to just fire him and call it a day.

But as Ev noted, Biz and Crystal and the people who enjoyed working with Jack would be distraught. If Biz even knew about this discussion, he reminded them both, he'd be fuming and might threaten to quit. At all costs, Biz must stay at the company, Ev said. Losing two of the three cofounders would be a disaster.

The discussion went on for over an hour. Round and round the proverbial merry-go-round they went. And then, finally, a decision. A plan. An execution.

Wednesday arrived quickly. Jack awoke weary and anxious. He felt sapped as he stepped off the train in the Tenderloin. Plodding up the steps to exit the station, he kept his head down as he walked in the direction of the Clift Hotel. Although it was still early, homeless people were everywhere, spilling out of halfway houses. Hookers-a familiar scene of leftovers from the night before in the Tenderloin-stood about without a care in the world. As Jack approached the hotel, the doorman pulled back the large gla.s.s door and repeated his morning announcement to guests, "Good morning, sir."

Not for Jack, it wasn't.

Jack was reminded of the sounds and the smell of the hotel from the last time he had stayed there. A year earlier, when Twitter was just a hatchling, he had spent two nights at the Clift. A staycation in his own city. Wining and dining in the hotel. He had worked too, spending an evening writing the code that would connect people's names together using the now famous @ symbol.

As the door to the Clift swung open, he walked inside, looking around for Fred and Bijan.

At the moment Jack exited the Muni train, across the city, Goldman's phone vibrated in his pocket as he took a sip from his morning coffee. He looked at the screen and a bit of confusion set in. A text message from Ev said to meet at Ev and Sara's apartment on Fourth Street in an hour. Greg got the same message. Biz too. As did Abdur Chowdhury, who had joined Twitter during the Summize acquisition. Each thought the same thing: A meeting. This early in the morning. At Ev's. Can't be good.

They all arrived, separately, buzzing as the door clicked open, into the elevator, into Ev's house. Before long the group of Twitter executives were sitting at Ev's kitchen table, sipping coffee and waiting to find out why they were there so early in the morning.

"So Ev, you wanna tell us what's going on here?" Biz asked after everyone was settled. Goldman looked up, nudging his gla.s.ses with his finger to push them back up his nose. They all noticed that Ev was fidgety. Not a good sign. As some of them knew, fidgety meant someone was getting fired.

Ev looked down at the table as everyone looked back. His arms crossed, he took a deep breath and then began to talk.

Jack walked by the huge, blazing fireplace in the lobby of the Clift Hotel. He spotted Fred and Bijan sitting in the rear of the hotel's Velvet Room restaurant. They were in a round booth, their backs pressed against the dark brown leather. Seven ornate lightbulbs hung from the ceiling, encircling them both.

"Hey, Jack," Fred said, motioning to an open black chair at the end of the booth, "take a seat." Fred was already tearing apart the eggs on his plate. Coffee cups had been refilled more than once. It was clear there had been a meeting before this meeting. Bijan seemed more solemn, pursing his lips as he nodded in Jack's direction and almost whispering, "Hey, buddy."

Jack sat, his hands clenched under the table. In an almost-sad whisper he asked, "How's it going?"

Fred was about to start speaking-there would be no small talk here-when the waitress interrupted. "Coffee?" she asked with a smile. Jack's stomach, already churning like a washing machine, couldn't even handle chamomile tea, never mind coffee. "No, thanks. I'll have a yogurt, please."

Then, as she turned to walk away, Fred dropped the guillotine.

"So we're making Ev CEO," he said, his fork clenched in his hand. "You're going to get a pa.s.sive chairman role and a silent board seat. We have some paperwork for you and a recommendation for a lawyer."

Jack felt like he had just been hit in the face with a baseball bat. "Say that again," he stuttered to Fred, thinking he had heard incorrectly.

Fred repeated himself almost verbatim: We're making Ev CEO. You're getting a pa.s.sive chairman role. You will have a silent board seat. Here's the paperwork. Call a lawyer.

Jack was told that the chairman t.i.tle was more honorary than actually functional. His board seat wouldn't actually be a board seat at all. Instead it was "silent," which meant it would belong to Ev, who would maintain Jack's voting rights. Jack would now be the company mascot, unable to make any decisions about Twitter. Pa.s.sive. Silent. Ev, in comparison, was the majority stakeholder in Twitter, with four times as much stock as Jack, and would now have two board seats.

At almost the exact same moment, Ev spoke from the same mental script to the Twitter executives gathered around his kitchen table. "Jack's out," he said.

"The board met. This is the final decision. They want me to be CEO, and Jack will become chairman," he continued. "The board is telling him right now. Today will be his last day."

They all looked back in shock as Ev continued talking, explaining why the board had made the decision.

Jack stared at Fred, not sure what to say, as Bijan started talking.

"You know, you're really good," Bijan said, his eyes calm as he looked at Jack. It was clear that his role was to be good cop to Fred's bad cop. "You're a founder of the company, and we really believe in your vision, so we want you to stick around."

Fred interrupted him. "It's effective immediately, Jack; it has to be." Jack realized this wasn't a hostage negotiation; this was it.

"What? When did that happen?" Biz said, annoyed. "Come on. What the f.u.c.k? What happened?"

Ev tried to calm him, saying it wasn't entirely his decision, that the board had been pressing for a new leader and it was either Ev or an outside CEO. Ev had even gone on a search for a replacement, interviewing a few external candidates to run the company, but in the end Ev made the most sense. He reiterated that he had experience running a company, adding that it was going to be the job of the people sitting at that table to tell the employees and ensure that morale stayed solid through the swift transition.

Jack rocked back and forth slightly in his chair, looking down at his untouched yogurt.

"You've done amazing things for the company," Bijan said. "But the site still keeps going down, and the SMS bills, and we just ... we just can't wait anymore."

"But what about the three months?" Jack interrupted, anger now taking over his voice. Most of their words were starting to sound m.u.f.fled as he looked up at them. "We're going on all cylinders and the election is coming up and ..."

Bijan and Fred continued to talk from their script, irrelevant of what Jack had to say. They explained that he wouldn't get all of his stock options, that he had not fully vested, so they would be taking some of them back. But because they liked him, he was getting more than he deserved.

"But what about my three months?" Jack repeated. "You said ..."

"It's done, Jack," Fred said apologetically.

"You can't tell anyone yet," Ev told the group as a barrage of questions came in. Goldman immediately protested. He was going to tell Crystal, who was now his live-in girlfriend. "No, you can't!" Ev's voice was now becoming stern. "I get that she's your girlfriend, and that she's really close with Jack, but we can't have all the employees finding out about this before we tell them. It'll be f.u.c.king chaos."

"So I'm supposed to just lie to my girlfriend?" Goldman said with anger and sarcasm in his voice.

"Yes. You need to learn to separate business and relationships," Ev responded. It was one of the few moments that Goldman felt a dislike for Ev. As he was about to respond, Biz interrupted them both.

"Have you spoken to Jack?"

"No," Ev said, then repeated what he had said earlier. "The board is with him now."

Jack was panicked as he stood on the sidewalk in front of the Clift Hotel. He peered down, scanning the legal doc.u.ments. Certain words leaped out at him. Numbers. Percentages. Dollar symbols. But they were all lower than they should be. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, scrolling frantically for Greg Kidd's number.

Kidd was one of the few people Jack trusted in San Francisco. As of a few minutes ago, he might have become the only person he trusted in San Francisco. The two had worked together in the past, and although a business they had once started in partnership had ended with near bloodshed, Kidd had always been there for Jack.

In 2005, after Jack had spent a week at Burning Man, traipsing through Black Rock City and dancing inebriated until sunrise to techno music, he had shown up on Kidd's doorstep in Berkeley, jobless and essentially homeless. He had been a different Jack back then, sporting blue dreadlocks and grimy clothes. Still, Kidd had taken him in and let him stay in the guesthouse in the backyard. He also gave him a job as a nanny for his newborn baby. A blue-haired, dreadlocked nanny with a nose ring in Berkeley. He fit right in.

"Greg, they fired me," Jack said, his voice frantic. "They took away my stock and they fired me. They made Ev CEO and I ..."

"Just relax for a second. Hold on," Kidd said, interrupting him. "What's going on?"

Jack explained the conversation, what Fred and Bijan had said, that he would technically no longer work for Twitter. After a few minutes listening, Kidd explained that there wasn't much Jack could do. "Ev owns the majority of the company; you don't," he said. "You should call that lawyer."

Ev closed the door behind him as they left the apartment. Goldman was clearly upset. Biz too. Greg and Abdur, who were more employees of the company than friends to Jack, seemed almost relieved.

They all walked to the office together.

Jack hung up the phone with Kidd and started walking quickly. He didn't know where to go. He couldn't go back to the office. He walked briskly down Geary Street, then took lefts and rights and had soon trudged more than a mile. He was frantic when he paused in front of One Embarcadero, a giant concrete building near the water's edge-the same place where Noah had ridden his bike when he had been cast out of the company two years earlier. Cast out by Jack, who had given Ev an ultimatum: "It's Noah or it's me."

Now it was Jack's turn. He stopped and sat on the cement steps as people with jobs brushed by in suits and heels, off to work for the day. Then, the emotions too much, his throat started to itch. He started to cry. His head in is arms, he sat on the steps, sobbing. Alone.

The door to the office opened and Ev walked in, Goldman, Biz, Abdur, and Greg in tow. Rebecca, Jack's a.s.sistant, immediately rushed over and asked where Jack was. After a brief pause, Biz spoke: "We had an off-site executive meeting today, and Jack will be out of the office for some other meetings," he said.

He then looked over at Ev and said, "Hey, you got a second?" They walked into a conference room near the kitchen, the door closing behind them.

"Look. I get this is the best thing for the company. I just wish I would have known first," Biz said. Ev listened, agreeing while trying to explain the situation he was in with the board and the legal aspects of the transition. They sat for a brief moment in silence. A deep sigh came from Biz, then he spoke: "I should probably go talk to Jack, huh?"

"Yeah. That's probably a good idea," Ev said. "He has to come into the office tomorrow to tell everyone, so we'll have to make sure he knows what to say."

Biz pulled his phone out of his pocket and sent Jack a text message.

Jack's phone had been going all morning. His a.s.sistant was trying to reach him. Text messages, e-mails, missed calls. He didn't respond. What could he say? "I'm not coming in today; I've been fired"?

Suddenly a message from Biz popped up, saying they should talk. They arranged to meet at Samovar Tea Lounge in the Yerba Buena Gardens, near the Twitter offices. The two had spent countless hours and lunches there, often talking about Twitter or other projects they wanted to work on together one day. Jack would sip his favorite tea, masala chai, and mostly just laugh as Biz would crack jokes.

There would be no jokes on this particular morning. No masala chai either.

The two sat outside on a wooden bench looking out at the city. The sky had opened up, and Biz squinted as he looked at Jack in the glaring brightness. He could see his eyes were puffy and red.

"So obviously you heard," Jack said.

"Yeah, Ev told us this morning," Biz said quietly. "We're not telling the rest of the company yet, though."

"What do you think I should do?"

"I think you should come in and talk to Ev and figure out what to say to everyone."

They talked about the discussion at the Clift Hotel, and Jack told Biz he knew Ev was behind it all. That this was a coup by Ev, not the board.

"You don't know that," Biz said.

Like a wind changing direction, Biz could feel Jack's tone and demeanor go from pain and sadness to anger and vindictiveness as he heard Jack say: "I'm going to go in and tell the whole company what happened! I'm going to tell them Ev f.u.c.ked me and he threw me out of Twitter because he wanted to be in control. I'm going to tell them everything."

"No! You can't do that. This is about Twitter and all the people that work there," Biz said, sensing the panic in Jack's voice. "This isn't about you and Ev. It's bigger than that."

Biz suggested they go for a walk to cool off, hoping to calm Jack down. They strolled around the block a few times. After a while Biz needed to get back to the office, but they agreed that Jack would come in later that afternoon to talk to Ev.

It was dark outside as Jack sat in the Twitter conference room waiting. He was drained from the day. Ted, the company's lawyer, had explained that everything had been done by the book. Ev was the majority shareholder. Jack was not.

Twenty minutes had already gone by as Jack sat there. He was growing angrier by the minute. Biz was at his desk nearby, writing the blog post that would go online the following day announcing Jack's departure from the company. "Meet Our CEO and Chairman, Again," the t.i.tle of the post would read. It would praise Jack for his "artful minimalism and simplicity, combined with great vision and ambition." And it would say that Jack and Ev had decided to make the switch. That it was the best thing for the company. "We took a good look at our path forward and saw the need for a focused approach from a single leader," the blog post would say.

But it wasn't the focused single leader Jack wanted.

As Biz wrote an e-mail to the employees telling them to meet for an all-hands meeting the following morning, the door to the conference room where Jack had been waiting opened and Ev finally walked in. "What the f.u.c.k!" Jack said, p.r.o.nouncing the k as if this were the last word he would ever utter. Jack's adrenaline was pounding.

"I'm sorry. These things aren't always easy," Ev said calmly. He had fired a dozen people before, but never a CEO.

"No. They're not f.u.c.king easy when you go behind someone's back to have them thrown out of their own company," Jack said. "You had the opportunity to tell me exactly what you wanted, to tell me exactly what I was supposed to be doing, but instead you went behind my back!"

Ev was silent.

"And I don't think it's right, or fair, that you took my stock away," Jack said. "This is my company; you can't take my stock away."

"We're not taking your stock away; you haven't fully vested yet," Ev said. "You've only been a full-time employee for two years, and your stock hasn't fully vested, so no, we're not taking anything away. We're actually giving you more than you deserve."

Jack laughed maniacally. "You're giving me more than I deserve?! Please. You guys are f.u.c.king me and you know it."

Ev tried again to explain the vesting time frame, but Jack interrupted. "This is my company!" Jack slammed. "I've put so much more into it than you have."

After Jack railed for a while, Ev calmly responded that it wasn't Jack's company.

The following morning, Friday, Twitter employees shuffled in and grabbed their spots in the lounge, unsure what the announcement might be. Some people sat on the gray sofas in the meeting area, which was designed to look like a living room. A huge flat-screen TV hung on the wall. Others pulled over white office chairs. The company was still small, with just under thirty employees and freelancers.

Ev was clearly fretful as he stood to the side with a worried-looking Biz. Ev was peering down, his feet shuffling back and forth on the concrete floor, fidgety, as if he were trying to kick away a piece of gum that wasn't actually there. People could immediately sense something was off.

A few minutes later Jack arrived, walking out in front of the employees to deliver his brief address. His hands were shaky, his heart pounding. It was clear to everyone he was nervous.

"The board has decided," he said, then paused. "And I agree." Another pause. "That I'm going to step down as CEO." The last pause. "Ev will take over."

The employees were stunned by what they had just heard. Jack went on to talk about how much he would miss everyone. And for the first time he told a story he would repeat for years, that he would still be around, as the "executive chairman," involved in a larger role at Twitter. He didn't explain that the chairman t.i.tle gave him no real power. That he was no longer part of the power base of the company he had cofounded. That he had been fired from his role.

When he was done, he walked away, past Ev, whose turn it was to walk to the center of the living-room area and greet employees. The two didn't make eye contact.

"I know that some of you have felt like the company has sometimes been run like a two-headed monster," Ev said, now fidgety and anxious too. "Like you didn't know who to go to with questions, or who was in charge." He went on to say that the decision was the best thing for the company, that he and Jack agreed. Biz spoke too, trying to quell any concerns employees had.

Secretly, some of the employees were elated. Although they wouldn't say anything to Jack, they knew he was in over his head and had been for a long time. And they believed Ev, who had managed and sold Blogger, would be able to provide better leadership for the shaky start-up.