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

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

Ev told Jack he had to “chill out” with the deluge of media he was doing. “It’s bad for the company,” Ev said. “It’s sending the wrong message.” Biz sat between them, watching like a spectator at a tennis match.

“But I invented Twitter,” Jack said.

“No, you didn’t invent Twitter,” Ev replied. “I didn’t invent Twitter either. Neither did Biz. People don’t invent things on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.”

In 2005, Odeo was a struggling podcasting start-up founded by free-range hacker Noah Glass and staffed by a motley crew of anarchists. Less than two years later, its days were numbered and half the staff had been let go. But out of Odeo’s ashes, the remaining employees worked on a little side venture . . . that by 2013 had become an $11.5 billion business.

That much is widely known. But the full story of Twitter’s hatching has never been told before. It’s a drama of betrayed friendships and high-stakes power struggles, as the founders went from everyday engineers to wealthy celebrities featured on magazine covers, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Daily Show, and Time’s list of the world’s most influential people.

New York Times columnist and reporter Nick Bilton takes readers behind the scenes as Twitter grew at exponential speeds. He gets inside the heads of the four hackers out of whom the company tumbled:

• Evan “Ev” Williams, the ambitious farm boy from Clarks, Nebraska, who had already created Blogger and sold it to Google for millions. Quiet and protective, Ev is a shrewd businessman who made tough choices in the interest of his companies, firing cofounders and employees who were once friends.

• Jack Dorsey, the tattooed “nobody” who helped mastermind the original concept of Twitter, became a billionaire tech titan, and convinced the media that he was the next Steve Jobs.

• Christopher “Biz” Stone, the joker and diplomat who played nice with everyone. As drama ensued, he was the only founder who remained on good terms with his friends and to this day has no enduring resentments.

• Noah Glass, the shy but energetic geek who invested his whole life in Twitter, only to be kicked out and expunged from the company’s official history.

As Twitter grew, the four founders fought bitterly for money, influence, publicity, and control over a company that grows larger and more powerful by the day. Ultimately they all lost their grip on it. Today, none of them is the CEO. Dick Costolo, a fifty-year-old former comedian, runs the company.

By 2013 Twitter boasted close to 300 million active users around the world. In barely six years, the service has become a tool for fighting political oppression in the Middle East, a marketing musthave for business, and the world’s living room during live TV events. Today, notables such as the pope, Oprah Winfrey, and the president of the United States are regular Twitter users. A seventeen-year-old with a mobile phone can now reach a larger audience than an entire crew at CNN.

Bilton’s unprecedented access and exhaustive investigating reporting—drawing on hundreds of sources, documents, and internal e-mails—have enabled him to write an intimate portrait of four friends who accidentally changed the world, and what they all learned along the way.

网友对Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal的评论

這本書我還沒來得及看。看與不看，經典都在那裡。
發票沒開有點遺憾。希望能把我在貴處購買圖書的發票都補開。謝謝。

Having lived and worked in and around Silicon Valley for most of my adult life, I have always felt that one of the most frustrating things about this still-amazing place is that it never seems content to just tell the world the truth about how technology is made.

Building products--successful and unsuccessful ones alike--requires a lot of things: A solid idea, the right team to execute on it, and good timing, certainly, but on a more complicated note, personal connections, social capital, back-room deals, and, most of all, a whole hell of a lot of luck. Yet the stories that get told about Silicon Valley all too often gloss over all of this (and the power-grabbing and horse-trading that always accompany it) in favor of the much simpler and totally inaccurate narrative about the brilliance of "that one guy." The "founder." The "inventor." The one who made all the money and took all the fame. Never mind the other people who helped come up with it, the people who supported it, the people who contributed to it, the people who toiled away to make it a real thing. Nope: Just that guy. You know, the next Steve Jobs!

Not so "Hatching Twitter." A lot of the reviews here have focused on how compelling Bilton tells this story, weaving the narrative of the tool's creation around some impressively researched details about a seemingly never-ending litany of back-stabbing. That's completely true, and the book's a worthwhile read for that alone. But to me, the most impressive thing about the book is how intently it works to dispel this standard myth of the lone creator, and how tirelessly his prose works to promote the truth, which is simply that making things is hard, and that it takes more than any one person to bring something as big and as important and as fundamental as Twitter seems to be into the world.

I can only hope that the next wave of brilliant, motivated early-twenty-somethings who make their out to California to find their fortunes in the world of startups read this book and take away that message. That it sticks with them, and that they remember, no matter how successful they get, that it doesn't have to be all about them. That there's plenty of glory to go around. This stuff we do here is already impressive--there's no need to mythologize it, to hoard credit, to take away the accomplishments of others for no other reason than to promote a small, self-serving lie.

And if they do, then maybe then they'll be able to treat each other better than the awful, inhumane way the Twitter team did.

Maybe. I'm not holding my breath.

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

OVERVIEW:

The broad lesson of the story is about individual and collective contribution. The founders each brought their own strengths, resources, ideas, and skills to the table. It is easy to imagine Twitter not being what it is today without all their contributions. This book helps give credit to both the known and some of the important less well known contributors, for example Noah Glass in the early days and Ev's contribution beyond just financier.

With a startup story including the word betrayal in it and in reading the reviews here you might think the book is all Hollywood pitch drama with no business details, however many of the business details can be found in the book, the setting of the chess pieces, inception, creation story of famous twitterisms, decisions, the turning points, etc.

While there is certainly a lot of drama, the author does a good job of explaining the business reasoning behind the drama and how the decisions were executed so you can make up your own mind. Betrayal or the right business decision at the time? Personnel decisions made with reasonable consideration or done in a Machiavellian or manipulative manner?

There is almost no mention of the technology behind the scenes. For example, the site was going down regularly and this helped contribute to the ouster of a CEO, but when the issues are resolved there is no mention of how and what the problem was. Ramble's post here suggests there may be an interesting technical challenge story or two here.

In the end, the author uncovers a great startup story partly from often reluctant interviewees, and in so doing gives us a real world business story to entertain us and learn from.

SOME OF THE BUSINESS
HISTORY COVERED:

Inception

- Ev's background creating and selling Blogger, and thus funding Odeo and thus later Twitter.
- The serendipity of Noah meeting Ev.
- Odeo, the company inside which Twitter was started, saw its certain doom when Apple added podcasting to iTunes, forcing founders to focus on new ideas.
- Jack telling Noah about the idea for Twitter he had years ago, Noah likes it.
- Jack and Noah telling Ev about the idea for Twitter.
- Noah coming up with the name Twitter (p61), the silly names others came up with including friendstalker and smssy. Thank goodness for Noah.
- Ev declaring a hack-a-thon for competing ideas that cemented his committment to the Twitter idea.
- Original Twitter written.
- The Odeo board not seeing potential in Twitter, thus not agreeing to fund Twitter as another startup and agreeing to be bought out by Ev.
- Noah's importance in the early days, why he was asked to resign.
- March 21, 2006 saw the first twitter.

Onwards

- Jack and Goldman cutting back on command verbs to make Twitter friendlier.
- South by Southwest March 2007 a huge success for Twitter, ultimately due to an idea of Ev's months before (p97).
- Jack setting message character limit to 140.
- Twitter outages actually generating more interest in it.
- The creation story behind @ and # at Twitter (p117).
- Ev convincing board not to sell to Facebook (p164).
- Ev on Oprah and the Oprah server.
- Various threats to Twitter emerge, though little follow-up is given. Just a brief reminder that there are competitors and potential competitors in the real world.

SOME STRENGTHS:

- Great job stitching the story together from so many sources, hopefully the story is accurately portrayed.

- Lots of character development, though in some cases it detracts from the story in an attempt to double as a morality play. Also some folks seem to be reduced to caricatures of real people, though that is often unavoidable in an effort to stick to a limited set of themes.

- Some important lessons about treating your people well, being a team player, etc.

SOME WEAKNESSES:

- There is mention of past attempts at Twitter-like services that failed, but why they failed and who they were isn't mentioned, nor is what was different about Twitter that allowed it to succeed when others couldn't, etc. Was it the ability of Ev to keep it funded without any income stream? Was it product differentiation? Timing luck?

- Technology is not covered at all, the challenges, the solution to all the outages isn't covered in any detail. There is a brief mention that Twitter was first written in Ruby on Rails in 2 weeks and that's pretty much it.

- The character assassination of Jack seems a little much and past a certain point I think it detracts from the Twitter story and lays on the morality play a little thick. To his credit the author gives the reasons behind decisions Jack was part of, and I think the author would have been better off leaving us with both sides of the story and acting as a neutral business story teller.

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