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

Listen to the Intro

00:00

Hatching Twitter summary

Name: Hatching Twitter
Rating: 4.5 (10 reviews)
Author: Nick Bilton

Nick Bilton

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

4.5 (10 ratings)

28 mins

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.

Table of Contents

Hatching Twitter
summarized in 13 key ideas

Audio & text in the Blinkist app

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.

Want to see all full key ideas from Hatching Twitter?

Key ideas in Hatching Twitter

More knowledge in less time

Read or listen

Get the key ideas from nonfiction bestsellers in minutes, not hours.

Find your next read

Get book lists curated by experts and personalized recommendations.

Shortcasts ^New

We’ve teamed up with podcast creators to bring you key insights from podcasts.

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.

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

Categories with Hatching Twitter

Entrepreneurship

Books like Hatching Twitter

Amazon

Natalie Berg & Miya Knights

How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce

Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove Built the World’s Most Important Company

13 min

4.1

What Would Google Do?

Jeff Jarvis

Reverse engineering the world's fastest growing company

The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google

A Dystopian Novel on the Perils of State Control & New Technology

29 min

4.6

Platform Scale

Sangeet Paul Choudary

How an emerging business model helps startups build large empires with minimum investment

The Science of Synchronicity and How Your Choices Shape Your World

16 min

4.2

Chaos Monkeys

Antonio Garcia Martinez

Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

17 min

4.0

Startup Growth Engines

Sean Ellis

Case Studies of How Today's Most Successful Startups Unlock Extraordinary Growth

15 min

4.0

Blitzscaling

Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh

The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

31 min

4.5

Radical Product Thinking

R. Dutt

The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter

A Philosophical Masterpiece on the Boundaries Between Good and Evil

30 min

4.6

The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Teenagers

Sean Covey

The International Bestseller Updated for the Digital Age

18 min

4.3

High Performance Habits

Brendon Burchard

How Extraordinary People Become That Way

18 min

4.6

Epic Content Marketing

Joe Pulizzi

How to Tell a Different Story, Break Through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less

16 min

4.2

The Science of Storytelling

Will Storr

The scientific underpinnings of a good story

21 min

4.2

The Book of Five Rings

Miyamoto Musashi

A Classic Text on the Japanese Way of the Sword

18 min

4.6

Streaming, Sharing, Stealing

Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang

Big Data and the Future of Entertainment

17 min

3.6

The Smartest Guys in the Room

Bethany Mclean

The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron

Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

Short Life Advice from the Best in the World

18 min

4.2

The Distraction Addiction

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues and Destroying Your Soul.

Change Your Brain to Break Bad Habits, Overcome Addictions, Conquer Self-Destructive Behavior

14 min

4.1

The Overthinking In Relationships Fix

Rodney Noble

Toxic Thoughts That Can Destroy Your Relationship And How To Fix Them

A New Science of Consciousness

Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time

28 min

4.6

Impromptu

Reid Hoffman with GPT-4

Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI

Winning the Heart of the Woman of Your Dreams

16 min

3.9

The Fine Art Of Small Talk

Debra Fine

How To Start a Conversation, Keep It Going, Build Networking Skills – and Leave a Positive Impression!

How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

8 min

4.2

The World Beyond Your Head

Matthew B. Crawford

On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

The House That Jack Ma Built

20 min

4.4

Guns, Germs and Steel

Jared Diamond

The Fates Of Human Societies

How to Think and Act Like the Most Successful and Highest-Paid People in Every Field

26 min

4.2

The Future is Faster Than You Think

Peter H. Diamandis

How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

Survival of the Fittest in the Age of Digital Disruption

A Brief History of Tomorrow

Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life

31 min

4.6

Secrets of Sand Hill Road

Scott Kupor

Venture Capital and How to Get It

Methods for Manifesting a Life Beyond Your Wildest Dreams

Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

17 min

4.1

The Automatic Customer

John Warrillow

Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

18 min

4.2

Co-opetition

Barry J. Nalebuff and Adam M. Brandenburger

A revolutionary mindset that combines competition and cooperation; The Game Theory strategy that’s changing the game of business

Employability Skills and Strategies for Career Success

24 min

4.0

Antifragile

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Things That Gain from Disorder

Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

29 min

4.2

Start With Why (New Version)

Simon Sinek

How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

21 min

4.7

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The 2015 National Book Award Winner is a deep look at being black in America today

13 min

4.3

People ❤️ Blinkist

Sven O.

It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. Added to that the apps ability to suggest kindred interests opens up a foundation of knowledge.

Thi Viet Quynh N.

Great app. Good selection of book summaries you can read or listen to while commuting. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion.

Jonathan A.

Life changing. The concept of being able to grasp a book's main point in such a short time truly opens multiple opportunities to grow every area of your life at a faster rate.

Renee D.

Great app. Addicting. Perfect for wait times, morning coffee, evening before bed. Extremely well written, thorough, easy to use.