Hatching Twitter Book Summary - Hatching Twitter Book explained in key points

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Hatching Twitter summary

Name: Hatching Twitter
Rating: 4.5 (12 reviews)
Author: Nick Bilton

Nick Bilton

A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

4.5 (12 ratings)

28 mins

Topics

Start-Ups Friendship Entrepreneurial Stories Memoirs Entrepreneurship Social Media Big Tech Success

Table of Contents

Hatching Twitter
Summary of 13 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 13

What’s in it for me? Discover the true drama behind the creation of Twitter.

Friends turned enemies, backstabbing secret meetings, and a leader ousts another, only to be ousted himself in return.

Shakespeare?

Nope, this is the story of Twitter.

Twitter is one of the technologies that has had the biggest impact on our everyday lives. It’s used to share groundbreaking news and allows people to create close connections with celebrities, politicians and world-leading thinkers. Not to mention sharing those all important selfies.

But few people know the story of how Twitter became a multi-billion-dollar company used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide. For a long time, Jack Dorsey, the techie with the ego of a superstar, had proclaimed to the world that he was the true founder of Twitter.

Sorry Jack – this book punctures that balloon.

In these blinks you’ll find out the real story of the relationship between the founders of Twitter – and not Jack’s media-fuelled fantasy.

You’ll know more about the technology behind Twitter, and how its founders imagined it could change the world.

And you’ll learn how a few strange but creative developers, some of whom never even finished college, built a multi-billion-dollar behemoth.

This is a Blinkist staff pick

“Who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy?! I love how these blinks tell the story of Twitter in a way that now I really feel like I understand the stories of Ev and Jack.”

– Ben S, Audio Lead at Blinkist

Before founding Twitter, Evan Williams helped start the blogging craze with the site Blogger.

So many of us use Twitter to share our lives, thoughts and opinions – but have you ever asked yourself how it all started? It might shock you, but the birth of Twitter began with a college dropout from Nebraska named Evan Williams.

Ev, as Williams was known, showed a strong entrepreneurial instinct from a very young age.

He was already trying out business ideas in his teens, and during high school he went door to door selling a VHS tape that explained what the internet was.

He later brought this entrepreneurial spirit to California and the flourishing start-up scene of the Bay Area. It was there, after learning how to code, that he and a few friends started a business called Pyra. As a side project, Ev built a journal-like website to help Pyra employees track their workflows. The employees used it so much that in 1999 he launched it as a public service called Blogger. The idea behind Blogger was to allow ordinary people who lacked computer programming knowledge to easily create their own internet journal or diary. By releasing Blogger to the public, Ev helped invent the idea of a blog.

But although Blogger quickly became popular among internet users, Ev’s struggles to keep up with the business’ bills and paperwork led the other Pyra employees to quit in frustration. He was left all alone to run the business, which he ran out of his own living room.

But Blogger continued to explode in popularity because people loved the opportunity to express their own perspectives, opinions and experiences. By 2002, Blogger’s continual growth had allowed Ev to hire a few programmers and improve his office space. And the site continued to grow, until in 2003 Google bought Blogger (and Pyra) for millions of dollars.

This money would later be crucial for Twitter’s genesis.

After selling Blogger to Google, Evan Williams joined up with a neighbor to work on an audio blog platform called Odeo.

One day, Ev’s neighbor came knocking on his door. He had recognized Ev’s photo in an issue of Forbes. His neighbor, Noah Glass, also a tech enthusiast, shared his ideas with Ev and soon became his best friend.

Noah had a similar idea to Blogger: Odeo, an audio blog that would allow people to make audio posts. Ev liked the idea, and agreed to fund it with money from the sale of Blogger.

While Odeo was struggling to survive, a few employees had an idea for a way to share their statuses with friends.

Desperate to prove his worth as an entrepreneur, Ev started to put his stamp on Odeo – yet it continued on its stuttering path.

Despite its substantial growth, Ev had trouble leading Odeo towards its launch. He managed to recruit $5 million of investments in 2005 – most of which were from investors betting on Ev as much as the audio blog idea – but the problems at Odeo were the same as at Pyra. Staff and investors complained about Ev’s inability to manage the paperwork and make big company decisions. And Ev and Noah were constantly fighting about Odeo’s direction, which left their friendship in pieces. Ev wanted to wait until the product was polished, but Noah wanted to launch it sooner rather than later. Things were at a deadlock.

Noah Glass was instrumental in turning the status idea into Twitter – but his disorderly behavior cost him his job.

Despite the attempts to cut him out of the loop, nothing would keep Noah out. Throughout this period, his marriage was struggling, and he became obsessed with the possibility of curing his and others’ loneliness with the new status idea.

Noah threw himself into developing the project. The fact that Ev was running both Odeo and the development of the status idea frustrated him: he wanted to contribute to the idea because it felt so personally meaningful to him.

Despite Twitter’s success, its founders constantly battled over who should lead – and in what direction.

In August 2006, the Twitter office reacted to an earthquake in San Francisco by tweeting to each other. This idea of using Twitter to share news soon became a promising one. But its potential wasn't yet universally recognized.

Twitter officially launched at a Love Parade rave party in San Francisco. Unfortunately, the idea didn’t capture the partygoers attention, and that night Twitter gained fewer than 100 users.

The money Twitter needed to raise as it grew created power struggles.

In 2007, Yahoo offered Twitter $12 million. The Twitter founders expected $100 million and turned Yahoo down. The offer was proof that the idea was going places – but there was still work to do.

As Twitter started to grow seriously it ran into scaling issues. Twitter had 250,000 users around the time of Yahoo’s offer. “Technorati” (tech enthusiasts), like those at the SXSW festival in 2007, loved the site and use quickly spread between them.

Despite its enormous success, Twitter was constantly blighted by boardroom disputes.

Jack felt that he was responsible for the invention of Twitter – and was furious at being ousted.

He started telling anyone who asked that he was the founder of Twitter and that he still played an important role. For example, Jack would answer journalists’ questions about internal Twitter decisions that he no longer knew anything about.

With the help of celebrities and politicians, Twitter’s popularity, influence and responsibility reached new heights.

Soon after its conception, Twitter became a beacon for celebrities, politicos and the media. They realized that Twitter allowed them to gain a level of influence like never before. And as they flocked to the site, users rushed to join them – and the site just kept on growing.

A key event in this development was when the actorAshton Kutcher beat CNN to one million followers, which proved that Twitter could enable one individual to reach as many people as a giant media operation. Twitter started to be discussed on TV shows, and in 2009, Ev was a guest on Oprah.

As Twitter grew in size and success, Evan Williams struggled to keep on top of running the business.

Like Noah and Jack before him, Ev was having trouble guiding Twitter towards building revenue while managing a giant organization. Although he preferred a hands-off approach to leadership, and liked to work with people he knew and trusted, he was criticized for hiring too many friends. So the board recommended that Ev take on famous CEO coach Bill Campbell in an attempt to help build Twitter’s revenue. And what was one of Bill’s first pieces of advice? Stop hiring friends.

But Ev ignored him and hired his friend Dick Costolo as chief operating officer (COO). Dick did help revenue by making multimillion-dollar deals with Google and Bing to promote Tweets on their search engines. But other employees felt Ev didn’t communicate enough with the board or senior staff, and they took it personally when he didn’t consult them about important decisions.

In a cruel mirror image of how he became CEO, Evan Williams was pushed out of Twitter by a board coup.

Twitter’s investors wanted Twitter to focus on building revenue. Ev thought he was doing a good job – even his coach was telling him so – and was totally taken by surprise when he was fired.

Thinking he was going to one of their regular coaching sessions, Ev was suddenly told by Bill Campbell that he would be replaced as CEO. Campbell told Ev that the board wanted to make Dick CEO because Dick could focus on revenue and take Twitter onto the stock market. With the Google and Bing deals, Dick had already proven that he could build revenue.

Finishing his years-long campaign to recover his influence at Twitter, Jack returned in 2011.

Triumphant, Jack returned to Twitter as a superstar. He was back, comfortably running product development as Twitter’s Executive Chairman. And Jack’s long media blitz had made him a celebrity, with his version of Twitter’s history now the best-established story.

Meanwhile, Ev and his allies were slowly pushed out. Although at first he enjoyed being able to focus on product instead of the kinds of headaches he had as CEO, he soon realized that Dick was ignoring his new product ideas, and decided to take a leave of absence. In March 2011, he officially left his day-to-day position in product. Biz also didn’t feel comfortable in Dick’s Twitter, so he started avoiding the office to figure out how to leave the company, and in June 2011, he was gone – two founders of the company had now left.

Dick Costolo steered Twitter towards maturity and huge revenues.

As the new CEO, Dick had a lot on his hands: he had to develop a more mature Twitter, increase revenues, and continue fixing bugs and outages – while transitioning the leadership from Ev to himself.

To start with, Dick wanted Twitter to have a more mature image. Not long after Dick was made CEO, Snoop Dogg showed up at the Twitter offices and kicked off an impromptu marijuana-smoking session and concert in the cafeteria. Dick was furious: this was exactly the type of immature behavior that shouldn't happen in the future.

Final Summary

The key message in this book:

Hatching Twitter is about how Twitter was conceived – told from the perspectives of its founders. Despite painful layoffs, stressful relationships and chaotic working environments, Twitter successfully solved its behind the scenes problems to become one of the most influential start-ups ever.

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What is Hatching Twitter about?

Hatching Twitter tells the story of the four men responsible for Twitter as we know it. It’s a tale of backstabbing, superstar glory and billions of dollars that chronicles the drama and defining decisions that made Twitter what it is today.

Who should read Hatching Twitter?

Anyone who uses Twitter
Anyone who is interested in Twitter’s impact and origins
Anyone who works in a start-up
Anyone interested in the dangers of mixing business and friendship

About the Author

Nick Bilton writes the Bits Blog for the New York Times. He’s an expert on technology, culture, business and the way the internet affects our lives. He is also the author of I Live in the Future and Here's How It Works.

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Management & Leadership Biography & Memoir Entrepreneurship

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