Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is returning to the company
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Biz bounced around but when he was there things were better. Kind of like the basketball player that Nate Silver likes to love, who doesn't have any stat which makes them star, but everybody else around them plays better when they're there. Biz isn't a business guy, nor product, nor code, nor support, nor really marketing. But when he's in the room, working with people, everybody's better at all of those things.
He can play a kind of court jester role, which is disarming, but he's super damned sharp. He uses stories and humor to bring people forward.
Having him there, working on twitter means there are now two people in senior roles who aren't afraid of breaking twitter, because they created it in the first place.
In recent years, talking to twitter employees you get this amnesia over the company's culture and history. People don't know where things came from, they don't know the story of how the came to be. The myth's are complicated and messy. And eventually go so messy the company stopped telling the story of how twitter came to be where it is now all together.
With Biz back, he can take on that internal story telling, creating a hero's journey that the company can believe in. Because he's there, as an equal to Jack in understanding the origin, he can tear things down without fear of destroying somebody else's house of cards.
> he can tear things down without fear of destroying somebody else's house of cards.
Isn't the challenge with this that the house of cards literally belongs to somebody else - the shareholders - now?
Since you were too humble to mention it yourself, I thought I point that out to those folks that don't know who you are so that people know your opinion definitely has some weight in the matter. :)
Anyway, interesting that your basic point of Biz was that he was an everyman but I posit that while it may be a good role to have in a startup (with all the internal dramas and such), it may not work in a "corporate" environment given that Twitter has thousands of employees[2]? I have been working for more than a decade and have met my fair share of "everymans" but it is my personal anecdotal experience that these guys usually get shredded in the politics of the corporate world. More so considering that apparently Biz use to get on the nerves of Jack[3]?
A jester can be loved by the king in his court but the minute the King finds him annoying, not long will it degenerate into an off-with-his-head scenario.
Given your intimate knowledge of their relationship, I am curious what are your thoughts from this perspective.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RM8TBPRZ1490F/
[2] https://about.twitter.com/company
[3] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/11/twitters-founde...
That always happens, the raison d'être gets lost after the initial cohort moves on.
Twitter is just another big corporation now, like any big corp employees will pay lip service to vague corporate values (with a few true believers).
Rolling out a heavily decorated old timer in 1870 will not inspire the troops to fight anew for the glory of the French empire.
Companies name co-founders based on what's useful going forward and of the dozen or so folks who were at Odeo when twitter was created it made most sense to name Ev, Jack, and Biz as cofounders. Goldman probably turned down the offer to be named as a cofounder, and the rest of us weren't given an option. Later Hatching Twitter came out and Noah was added to the list of founders.
Starting companies is hard, running them is hard, the drama of who said and did what is interesting but it doesn't teach us much about why the platform ended up like it did or provide insights in to creating new companies.
Of the things twitter needs - strategy? product direction? revenue? - is "guiding the company culture" really that high on the list?
This is very typical in dying large companies, you bring back the old guard to try and save the day. Rarely works, but at least it's an attempt.
That said, I fail to see what unique vision either Twitter founder brings to the party.
Maybe it was because of this. Maybe it was because some analyst put out a piece on a private feed that said "Twitter might make more money someday".
Or he's just "putting the band" back together and next month they will launch their own version of Snapchat's filtered selfies. Who knows.
I don't understand how anyone thinks Dorsey can run both Twitter and Square at the same time.