[rabble]

I know a lot of the early history, I worked there when we hired both Jack and Biz. I can tell you that it's a really good thing that Biz is back on board. Biz was able to articulate what twitter was as the human voice of the company in both directions. From day one the question was always, what does Biz do.

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.

[kinkora]

I just realised you are the same rabble in "Hatching Twitter"[1] and you were there even during the Odeo days!

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...

[101km]

> "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."

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.

[rco8786]

Thanks for your post. I'm curious about what you mean by "I was there when we hired Jack and Biz" though. Were they not founders?

[case]

Rabble was the first Eng hire at Odeo, the podcasting startup founded by Noah Glass and Evan Williams. When Odeo didn't gain enough traction and they were figuring out what to do next, a small Odeo team (which included Jack) prototyped Twttr. And the rest is history.

[evanweaver]

Well, we still had to scale it.

[rabble]

Yeah, huge amounts of work from prototype to world changing platform happened after i left. Nobody created twitter, rather it was the collective work of many.

[rco8786]

Ah, thanks for the clarification!

[rabble]

Twitter started out as Odeo, we started with Ev's investment in Noah Glass's idea for a podcasting platform in 2004. After a few months in early 2005 Ev joined full time. Biz and Jack joined in the fall of 2005 almost a year in to the company. Twitter itself was created as a prototype in Feb 2006, and the current version was launched as a side project in March 2006.

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.

[rco8786]

Thanks for the clarification! Wasn't thinking pre-Twitter.

[sanderjd]

This is super interesting, thanks for the perspective!

> 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?

[kondro]

Who cares. Shareholders will do whatever they want. The sharemarket isn't rational. Hopefully the board is though.

[fredwilson]

Yup

[LoungeFlyZ]

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