Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Hatching Twitter

I enjoyed Nick Bilton's book, American Kingpin, so much that I decided to check out another of his books, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, especially because it's about one of my favourite apps.

It's a remarkable story, far more interesting than I would have thought. Some of the things I found incredible were the complete lack of focus on revenue (there were several years of $0 of revenue, and management didn't really care), the lack of professionalism in certain executives (leading Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg to call the company "a clown car that fell into a gold mine"), and the fact that one of its founders (@EV) was not a one-hit wonder, as he had started Blogger, another platform I use regularly (as do you, if you read this site!).

I'm not sure there is a whole lot to learn from this story, however, other than that people will be people as they scratch and claw their way towards increasing their power. I would tend to agree with Zuckerberg's take, with the caveat that maybe the book was biased. I have no basis for expecting it to be biased; I'm just leaving room for the possibility, because it does make current Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey seem like a less than ideal leader. But considering Twitter's income statements over the last few years, maybe that assessment is all too correct.

Enjoy!

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