/ 15 July 2009

Twitter’s Biz Stone: ‘We got lucky’

Last week I met up with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone to discuss life at the company, and to find out what things are like inside the most talked-about start-up in the world.

This is an edited transcript of the interview: it’s quite long, so I am splitting over three posts. Today, in the first part, we hear about the maelstrom of activity around the company; its brushes with fame and how it is trying to cope with the spotlight.

On Thursday, we’ll be looking at Twitter’s role in the world, and whether the company listens to criticisms of it.

Twitter has been the subject of an awful lot of attention over the last few months. Do you ever get overwhelmed?

Biz Stone: One way to explain is it that it’s a little bit being in the eye of the storm, kind of. It’s not hectic per se.

There’s a very healthy acknowledgement that we have to stay focused on what we’re working on and not to get too caught up in the spotlight. There’s a knowledge that these things go up and they come down again. No matter what, we’ll just keep working on trying to make Twitter better.

Some of the cultural things we’ve got here that we’re fortunate to have are just a general level-headed, unassuming, humble, humorous, funny atmosphere. We like to have fun and stay humble.

Every Friday at Twitter we have something called “tea time” — it’s something we kind of stole from Google; they have something called TGIF, that’s when the co-founders and the CEO stand up on stage, greet new hires, talk about what happened that week and take Q&A.

We took that and flipped it around, so that anyone in the company can talk about what they did that week. It takes about an hour and half to go through it all, but it’s a very good culture-building exercise because everyone gets to learn what everyone else is doing … and we make fun of each other.

How important is that? Those things are clearly part of the culture at companies like Google, but what do they mean to Twitter?

BS: We focus a lot on culture specifically at Twitter because of this spotlight, and of the fact that we don’t want to end up like the child actor who found success early and grew up all weird and freaky. We want to remain OK; just because we found success early and in many ways got lucky doesn’t mean we’re all a bunch of geniuses. It means what it means.

Lots of you have been involved with start-ups before — chief executive Ev Williams sold Pyra to Blogger, for example. How have those experiences influenced you this time around?

BS: It has influenced us. We’ve both grown up a lot. Watching Ev really sink his teeth into the role of CEO, take it very seriously. He very genuinely wants to innovate — not just from a product or technology standpoint, but from a company standpoint. For me, I’ve learned about what it means to focus on a culture, to build social responsibility and the idea of a company as a super-organism.

Can you explain some more?

BS: Previous companies I’d done before that I left, I left because I didn’t really like where the culture was going and I wanted to leave. I was too young to realise that I could have an impact on changing it; if I didn’t like it I could work harder.

There’s a lot we can learn from smart people out in the world. One of the things I like so much about President Obama is his global vision that it’s not a zero-sum game, where one country is going to win the game of earth. We have to work together. I love that philosophy, and it fits with Twitter because we work with so many companies. The variety, the openness, and believing very basically that the open exchange of information is something that can impact the world in a positive way — from that belief, so many decisions are made easier.

Should we open this up further? Yes.Should we continue to support all these APIs and nourish the ecosystem? Of course.

A lot of decisions are made easier when you know some basic stuff.

Do you get bored hearing stories about how “Twitter will kill Facebook” or people wondering whether it will push somebody else out of the way?

BS: I think a lot of folks are just wired that way. It’s product A or product B, like those blind taste tests. There is something healthy about friendly competition — it’s like a scrimmage or a pick-up game … that’s good. But the truth of it is that we’re all working together.

Look at all the companies in Silicon Valley: they all have, to varying degrees, open systems that interoperate with one another. People are using these systems for different reasons. There’s room for everybody, although I think people are often wired to think that way.

It’s like Coke versus Pepsi — I noticed the other day that they are following each other on Twitter.

You’ve had a lot of brushes with celebrity. Those are bizarre experiences for people behind a start-up … even a high profile technology company. I can’t imagine someone like Eric Schmidt, for example, going on the Colbert Report.

BS: That would be awesome. I would love to see that. Eric Schmidt is super-smart … he could go toe-to-toe with Colbert, I think.

But does being part of those things strike you as strange?

BS: They are definitely memorable moments. I happen to be a huge fan of Colbert, so when I was sitting there at the table watching him before he came over to interview me, I was thinking ‘I’m watching Colbert, he’s funny’.

And then suddenly I realised I’m not watching: I’m on the show.

But those things are great opportunities for us, and when we do them we’re thinking about the whole Twitter team. Hopefully what we can do in those situations is display integrity and character and try to embody what we think Twitter is all about — to the extent that we’re able to do that in five minutes on a chat show where they’re insulting you the whole time.

It’s a lot of fun, it’s an honour — but it’s also, more importantly, a really good opportunity for us as a young company to try and take advantage of — not necessarily to pitch the product, but try to represent the character of the company. – guardian.co.uk