The Twitter Revolution by Michael S. Malone, WSJ.com
"Twitter is the side project that took," says company co-founder Biz Stone, 35. "Now it's our chance to do something transformative."
When I arrive at Twitter's headquarters on a recent morning, Jerry Brown is waiting in the lobby, just another day at the world's hottest high-tech company. "It's pretty bizarre," says co-founder Evan Williams, 37. "At least once per day we look at each and say, 'What the hell?' It's like we're living out the script of the ultimate start-up company story."
But other than the familiar face of California's attorney general standing near the steel front door, you would hardly know that this little company of about 30 employees is the epicenter of the Web, used by an estimated 20 million Americans on a daily, even minute-by-minute, basis. Just how fast Twitter is growing is a company secret, but its traffic appears to be more than doubling every month.
The company itself seems calm and casual. The employees drift in, grab some free food and eventually make their way to their desks. It's located in an anonymous warehouse just a couple blocks from South Park, the once-frenzied environs of the dot-com companies of the first Internet boom.
In his sports shirt and slacks, sipping a bottle of apple juice, Mr. Williams exhibits indifference to the trappings of success. So does Mr. Stone, who last year won an Oxford Union debate wearing a borrowed bow tie and a pair of black sneakers.
The company is hiring like crazy, it expects to double its size in the next month or two, and is also adding a senior management, notably new vice-president of global operations Santosh Jayaram, hired away from Google. "We've never had a company that grew past 15 to 20 people," says Mr. Stone, "We're kind of excited about that."
Even faster than Google, Amazon and eBay in their days, the three-year-old Twitter has become deeply embedded in the culture. President Barack Obama twittered the words, "We just made history," on the night of his election. It was a twittered image that first captured the forced landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River.
Scores of people trapped in the Mumbai terrorist attack twittered desperately for help. And in a much discussed event, a San Francisco technology writer twittered his surprise to discover his home was being broken into.
Strictly speaking, Twitter is a social networking application that enables users to post short text messages, called tweets, of no more than 140 characters on their personal feed. These real-time diary entries can then be read by other users, called "followers," who have subscribed to that page.
Twitter is much more than a novel way to share updates of one's daily life with friends. It's now evolved into a powerful new marketing and communications tool. Regional emergency preparedness organizations are looking at Twitter as a way to reach millions of people during a disaster.
NASA is using it to regularly update interested parties about the status of space shuttle flights. And one journalist solicited help from fellow Twitterers to get himself out of an Egyptian jail. It worked.
The real Twitter revolution may prove to be much more everyday. When I stop for a latte at Peet's Coffee on the way to the interview, the manager tells me that he plans to start sending out tweets to let regular customers know when a table is open. He isn't alone.
A Manhattan bakery twitters when warm cookies come out of the oven. "It's those small stories that really inspire us," says Mr. Stone. "Those are the things that transform people's lives."
Mr. Stone vividly remembers the first time he appreciated the power of Twitter. He and his now-wife had just bought a house in Berkeley and, having spent the day scraping up carpet and painting walls, he was tired and sweaty. "That's when I got a twitter from Evan saying, 'Up in Sonoma drinking pinot noir after a massage.' I just started laughing. That's when I realized that this technology could be entertaining too," as opposed to a basic communications tool, he says.
"It took us a while to figure out that it really was a big deal," says Mr. Williams. It was at the annual South by Southwest tech conference/music festival in Austin, Texas, in March 2008, that the social power of Twitter came home to the co-founders. "I found myself watching groups of people twittering each other to coordinate their actions, which bar to go to, which speech to attend, and it was like seeing a flock of birds in motion," says Mr. Stone.
As with many Web entrepreneurs, Messrs. Williams and Stone took unconventional paths to success.
Mr. Williams was born on a soybean, corn and cattle farm near Clarks, Neb., pop. 361, where he attended the single public school there. In a class of just 14, he took part in everything from sports to band. "In a school that small, everyone does it all," he says.
But he was an indifferent student and felt like a black sheep at home, too. His father and brother loved to farm and hunt, while Evan, a vegetarian, preferred to read and ponder schemes for building enterprises.
Eventually he made it to the University of Nebraska, but he never declared a major, took as few classes as possible, and eventually dropped out. In the years that followed, Mr. Williams drifted around the country, Key West, Dallas, Austin, working various technology jobs and trying to pursue start-ups.
But every time he got started on one idea, some new idea would pop into his head, luring him away and preventing him from ever following through on a project. "It was turning into a constant pattern," Mr. Williams recalls.
By 1996, Mr. Williams found himself back on the family farm, with little money and few prospects. "I was in the dumps," he recalls. He had long worshipped California's Silicon Valley from afar, and now, with nothing to lose, he decided to move there. "Unfortunately, my aim was a little off," he says, since he landed in the farming town of Sebastopol in Marin County, working for the old-guard media/conference firm O'Reilly Inc.
In the end, that proved fortuitous. What began as a marketing job ended up as an independent contractor job writing computer code, and in short order, Mr. Williams parlayed that into freelance work with legendary Valley companies like Intel and Hewlett-Packard. "For the first time, I learned what it was like to work in an office and have a normal career. To be in real meetings. I also learned that I didn't want to do that."
Did Mr. Williams ever feel that there was something wrong with his inability to hold a traditional job? "No," he says. "I always figured there was something wrong with everybody else."
In 1999, Mr. Williams teamed up with another contractor, Meg Hourihan, and founded Pyra Labs to make management software. A much admired product which allowed managers to handle complex projects online, Pyra earned him a reputation as a brilliant entrepreneur who didn't know how to make money.
"The truth is," Mr. Williams protests, "we had revenues from the first day . . . there just wasn't enough of them." It should have ended in yet another business failure -- but in computer parlance, Mr. Williams decided to 'turn a bug into a feature.' This meant taking one of his distracting brainstorms and turning it into a company.
The new company, called Blogger.com -- Mr. Williams invented the term -- which was developed from a note-taking application on Pyra, was the original blog prototype. It proved to be one of the few successes of the era. Better yet, Mr. Williams even managed to nail down some real venture investment just as the bubble burst.
Mr. Williams finally had a real company and real money. Now he needed a team.
Enter Christopher Isaac "Biz" Stone. Raised in Wellesley, Mass., Mr. Stone had an early love for graphic arts and theater. But at the University of Massachusetts, he too had proven to be a distracted student, and when a job at publisher Little, Brown evolved from moving boxes to designing book covers, Mr. Stone dropped out of college.
In the years that followed, he, like Mr. Williams, discovered a natural gift for Web design and programming. In fact, the two young men had admired each other's work from opposite coasts.
So when Evan invited Biz to join Blogger, Biz moved West. He arrived just in time to get the news that Google decided to acquire Blogger. Messrs. Williams and Mr. Stone, neither of whom technically qualified for the CV-obsessed company, were suddenly Google employees.
The gig lasted 20 months and both men say they thoroughly enjoyed it. Mr. Williams even met his future wife at the firm. But the entrepreneurship gene couldn't be denied forever. And in 2005, both men decided to strike out on their own. "It was about the toughest decision I ever made," recalls Mr. Stone, "and if I'd known how high Google stock would go, I'm not sure I would have made it."
Once out of Google, Mr. Williams teamed with another entrepreneur, Noah Glass, to found Odeo, a podcasting company. It was a brilliant plan, until Apple decided to offer its own podcasting application in iTunes. Says Biz, who had also joined the firm, "I remember asking Evan, 'Do you really want to be the King of Podcasting?' And he said, 'No.' And that was it." Looking back, Mr. Williams says, "I didn't follow my gut. I intellectualized myself into Odeo."
Mr. Williams had taken venture capital money to build Odeo and to change its business model, and he had to buy out those investors with a big chunk of his Blogger cash. Once again abandoning the main idea for a sidelight, he transformed Odeo into Twitter by stripping down and selling off the podcasting component and keeping the social-networking tool, the last a concept proposed by Jack Dorsey, now Twitter chairman.
Under the guise of a fun communications tool, Twitter is building one of the world's most valuable real-time information caches. And as Twitter's profile continues to explode, Oprah just sent her first tweet on yesterday's show, many wonder whether the company will ever find a revenue model.
Others speculate about who will buy the young company. Google seems to be the leading candidate. "We know there are a lot of people looking at Twitter right now," says Mr. Stone.
For now, Messrs. Williams and Stone are keeping their plans secret. With patient investors who just put in $35 million in third-round funding, the company is in no hurry. Mr. Stone will only say that "we are enamored with the idea of going all the way." Adds Mr. Williams: "We want to have as large an impact as possible."
Mr. Williams says that the amount of money it would take to buy Twitter right now is more than any company could justify to its shareholders, but suggests three other possible scenarios.
First, that Twitter could go public, probably without him, as he has little interest in running a public company. Second, Twitter could remain private and somehow buy out its investors. Or third, they discover some other option no one has thought of yet.
Of course, there's still one more possibility: Yet another one of Mr. Williams's obsessive distractions, as he calls them. Lately, he's been pondering a way to revolutionize email.
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