Hatching Twitter

Ev told Jack he had to “chill out” with the deluge of media he was doing. “It’s bad for the company,” Ev said. “It’s sending the wrong message.” Biz sat between them, watching like a spectator at a tennis match.

“But I invented Twitter,” Jack said.

“No, you didn’t invent Twitter,” Ev replied. “I didn’t invent Twitter either. Neither did Biz. People don’t invent things on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.”

Hatching Twitter is a wonderful, thrilling book. Not from a business perspective, not like the Social Network where it lays out Mark’s battle building his empire. This is the completely honest tale of the naveity and blindsightedness in the early days of Twitter, you start to realise like every other startup they had no idea what they were doing and early on nothing worked. Everyone was CEO at some point and everyone was fired or quit at another.

The most interesting thing about this book for me was since I’ve been following Twitter closely for so many years at each key point I remembered the public facing announcement and the book explains what was really going on. All of the founders and team members were interviewed in depth for the book, Bilton also went through tweets, went to the physical locations and read through blogposts to get more contextual information.

It’s ‘set’ in San Francisco so all of the places you’ve walked by, hung out at or had dinner at feature in stories. An Amazon review from early engineer Rabble, who heavily features in the book credits the depth and research that went into documenting the story, even if Bilton didn’t cover everything.

Each chapter contains a different overarching story. It often skips chronologically but this keeps the story arc interesting. It goes into depth about the early days of the company and the backstories of the founders. It’s great to read about the real Jack Dorsey. He’s obviously done amazing work but his public persona always seemed so opaque and the book shows the real Jack and how he created the persona we see today. I always wondered why his tweets were so short and mostly about his day-to-day but this seems to be because from the start Jack invisioned Twitter as a status updating service rather than a micro-blogging or discussion platform.

There are millions of these kinds of stories in the valley (board fights, employee crushes, founders hidden from the media, CEO firings, etc) but this is just a deep, well documented account that we can all relate to in some way. Whether it be because we used Twitter, visited/lived in parts of San Francisco or worked in small teams.