I’d like to preface this by saying this is the only book about Twitter I’ve ever read. I didn’t know anything about the company or it’s founders before I started and this is the only source that I have consulted in forming my opinions about it and them. As such, I don’t claim any kind of objective veracity for my opinions, which are simply the impressions I formed while reading this author’s account. In fairness to Nick Bilton, he seems to have researched this topic deeply and diligently but his is only one perspective, formed at some remove from the actual events, and I feel like these limitations should be acknowledged from the outset.
With that having been said, I found all four of the main figures are a bit nauseating personally! With social skills in short supply, they all seems to betray one another and never air their true feelings face to face; preferring to go behind each others backs and avoid confrontation.
To attempt a basic outline, Ev Williams is a quite likeable tech entrepreneur who is passionate about ‘push button publishing for the masses’, which seems worthy of respect. To this end, he founds Blogger, sells it to Google and then quits to start another business, Odeo, with his neighbour Noah Glass. This business focuses on podcasts and dies a death when Apple enter the market via its, then dominant, iTunes platform. A young programmer called Jack (Dorsey) working at Odeo with Ev and Noah comes up for the basic idea for Twitter while DUI with Noah. The three then work up the idea via ‘hackathons’ with various other employees at Odeo including the fourth co-founder Biz Stone. Noah is the project’s first leader, helping incubate it with Jack at Odeo. Jack, who seems to have brilliant ideas but be a little socially dyslexic, promptly goes behind Noah’s back and tells Ev to sack him and make him boss. Ev does this and Jack runs the project, and latterly company, until Ev decides he wants to be CEO and ousts Jack as CEO by going behind his back and getting the board to remove him. Ev also owned the majority of the company at this time and it seems money definitely spoke in this instance. However, despite his effective removal from the day to day operations of the company, Jack, who retained the title of (silent) Chairman, goes on a media fuelled propaganda tour to inflate his profile before repaying the favour and managing to convince the board to get rid of Ev and re-appoint him! Admittedly, Dick Costolo serves as interim CEO to soften the blow and Jack returns under the title of ‘Executive Chairman’ but it’s still an impressive feat for Jack to convince essentially the same board that got rid of him to then reinstate him despite Ev being the majority shareholder. I should point out that I am assuming that Ev was still the majority shareholder but the book doesn’t go into much detail on the capital structure and equity holdings as the company evolves. I would’ve liked to know more, especially as I feel it’s relevant to the power struggles. There would certainly have been further funding rounds since Ev became CEO so perhaps he had been diluted? The book doesn’t relate. Regardless of how impressive and tenacious this move was, I was still left feeling like all of the co-founders had a phobia of speaking openly with their so-called friends or treating them decently. Is this just the nature of working with your friends at a company that is growing almost unthinkably quickly? I sincerely hope that I’d have the decency to speak to someone face to face about a problem I had with them. There again, perhaps these ‘friendships’ within Twitter actually signified little more than shared passions for technology, the project, fame or fortune that had nothing to do with love and personal affection. The overall impression leaves you thinking, ‘it’s hard to believe how badly these so-called friends treat each other!’ Biz Stone comes off a little better but it is the best of a bad bunch, really. His role seems fairly ill-defined but, according to the book, the venture capital investors were genuinely worried by his threats to quit meaning he must have been important at the company. Perhaps mediating between the gigantic egos, power struggles and passive aggressive non-confrontations of the other founders; predominantly Ev and Jack as Noah had been ousted so completely, and so early in the piece, despite having an absolutely central role in the products creation, including the name. However, this assessment of Biz’s job may be uncharitable given he is also mentioned on numerous occasions in connection with forming and preserving the culture of the company. While this is hard to measure empirically it is of indubitable importance. Perhaps the best example is when Biz attempts to stop Jack becoming a ‘moderator’ of some Twitter event with the President on the basis that the company’s culture forbade any role of this kind as it could be construed as Twitter participating in the conversation rather than simply hosting a platform on which it could take place. Incidentally, when Biz sends an e-mail to point this out he finds that the recently returned Jack, now Executive Chairman, has suspended it! This is typical of the kind of interaction between the four.
Another group who come out of the leadership struggles and changes looking very bad are the venture capital investors and board members. Why are they condoning, and indeed facilitating, so much backstabbing and intrigue within the management, which must surely be detrimental to the company culture? A charitable interpretation would probably appeal to the vastly different types of CEO a rapidly growing tech company needs during the various different stages of its development. However, I don’t think this really holds true in this case. Seemingly, Ev fires Noah in 2006-ish and Jack is CEO until late 2008 when Ev uses the board to remove him. Seemingly this same board, plus one Peter Fenton from Benchmark was very enthusiastic about reinstating Jack and may also have bought a whooping great stake in the company, then ousted Ev in favour of Jack in only late 2010! Can so many changes really be justified by the needs of the company alone? To me, it sounds far more like bunch of disingenuous schemers playing politics for money and power; both at the board and management level. Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet, from Union Square Ventures in NY, come out looking the worst at the board level. Having helped Ev plot his removal of Jack in 2008 they then plot with Jack to remove Ev in 2010; talk about a toxic environment and a lack of trust!
The book itself painted some quite vivid pictures of the founders’ early lives and the early days of Twitter. On the whole though, I found it a bit long on description and ‘setting the scene’ and a bit short on detail. For example, the text has no dates in it so it is hard to get a firm grasp of the chronology. I’ve also mentioned before I would have appreciated more detail on the capital and ownership structures. Perhaps this sort of information is too niche for this type of book. However, I felt like it would have benefitted from a few more dates and a few less descriptions of how many drinks these crrrrazy young entrepreneurs were imbibing! Given the large-ish cast of founders, company members, investors and hangers on the book should have had an index. The prose can be a bit clunky in places too with one passage referring to how, “their sneakers tickled the concrete sidewalk”! Another passage I found irritating was, “In the past, history was always written by the victors. But in the age of Twitter, history is written by everyone. The victors became the ones with the loudest voices who get to tell their version of history”. To me, this is deeply ill-conceived and does little more than restate, at length, and misinterpret the original material. Namely, “the victors write history”. In the past, accounts of what happened were clearly written by both the victors and the defeated. However, the victors, who possess more money and power, have far more success in disseminating their version. Exactly the same seems to be true of Twitter; lots of people write about an event and, ordinarily, those users who are most famous or have most followers succeed in disseminating their versions most effectively. The passage does serve to raise the question of whether people tweeting are really ‘writing history’ or more accurately ‘writing source material’. It’s possible to view the two as the same thing. However, on the whole I felt like the both this passage, and the book in general, had a slightly awestruck tone in relation to Twitter’s technology itself. Obviously, Twitter was a hugely disruptive and innovative force within society and has changed the way many people consume media. However, I would probably have stopped short of describing it as changing the way history was written. Has anything we consider ‘history’ today even been written in the past ten years, for instance?
There was one aspect of the book that caused me more trouble than any other. It relates to the civil war between Jack and Ev. Around p148 we are informed that Jack has been fired as CEO and will occupy a new role as ‘(silent) Chairman’, crucially without a vote on the board, which we are informed has been transferred to Evan. To quote, “it would belong to Ev, who would maintain Jack’s voting rights...and would now have two board seats”. Confusingly though, by the time we reach p259 and Jack is now in the role of ouster and Ev in the role of about-to-be-fired-CEO we find Jack seconding a motion to remove Ev. How exactly has he managed to do this without a vote? I found this bit the most troublesome because, unless I’ve missed something, the book seems to contradict its own assertion about what had happened, which is a fairly major flaw for a book purporting to be historical. It’s quite a good example of how the author prioritised these sort of atmospheric, movie scenes above factual detail or lucid explanation of the chronology.
I learned something about Twitter’s history from this book, and it was enjoyable in places, but there were too many annoying mistakes and omissions for me to rate it very highly.
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