Twitter is the hottest Internet startup on the planet. Over the last few months, the messaging service it provides has morphed from a social networking tool into an instrument of revolution. So what’s life like for the 52 employees at its San Francisco headquarters?
It’s a sunny, breezy afternoon in San Francisco, and I’ve just stepped inside the offices of one of the city’s many, many web companies. Indeed, the first thing you notice is how much the large, open space looks just like any other dotcom. To one side there’s a huge flatscreen TV that staff can use to play videogames during their breaks; in one corner stands a lonely red British telephone box; a pair of life-sized, green plastic deer stand in another, for no discernible reason. It definitely has all the hallmarks of a web startup.
It’s so quiet that it feels like it could be the weekend—the only real noise is the murmur coming from a trio of workers, laptops out, sitting on a sofa in the corner. But behind the calm lies the astonishing truth: the staff here are holding up the systems behind the world’s hottest internet startup. They are responsible for a sprawling website on which 35 million people from all over the world fire out vast numbers of messages every second. This isn’t just any normal office. This is Twitter.
Right now, the company’s 52 employees are part of the biggest media story on the planet. Their online messaging service—which encourages people to share their thoughts with the world in short, bite-sized morsels—has rocketed into the public consciousness over the past year.
It began as the kind of thing a hip young iPhoner would do, then won endorsements from people such as Stephen Fry and Oprah—who knew celebrities would want to let their fans know every time they left the house?—and then, most extraordinarily, it began to play a role in times of extreme crisis, getting information out of countries such as Iran and China where the authorities were tightly controlling the news. And to top it all, this amazing journey—from plaything to instrument of social change—seems to have happened in a matter of months.
How does it feel to be at the heart of all that? “It’s a little bit like being in the eye of the storm,” says Biz Stone, one of the company’s co-founders. “It’s not hectic per se.”
I am meeting Stone—an amiable 36-year-old designer who is now the company’s creative director—to try to understand what life at Twitter has become since the team first started working on it early in 2006.
New messaging system
Back then, everything seemed like a happy accident: the team was working on a different project called Odeo—a set of tools for podcasters. It was making slow progress, but during a brainstorming session, programmer Jack Dorsey came up with an unrelated idea: a quickfire messaging system that helped people share information with groups of friends using their mobile phone.
Chief executive Evan Williams and Stone —10-year dotcom veterans—knew they were on to a winner: within a year, the podcasting company was being sold off and the team was concentrating full-time on Twitter. The idea was simple: to build a website that let someone tell their friends what they were doing.
What’s most strange about the calm in this office today is that it is such a polar opposite to the frenzied activity on the website they have created. At any given moment, millions of people are sending messages from their computers or mobile phones, or reading the messages left by others. Twitter lets you choose who you want to keep up with; they, in turn, can choose whether to listen back. The conversations are largely held in the open, allowing anyone to point to somebody’s messages or rebroadcast ones that are interesting, funny or (in the case of Iran) important.
Easy to use
Twitter is many things to many people, but most of all it is lightweight, easy to use and transparent. Its swirl of activity is like a huge party full of hundreds of conversations you can tap into—not, like Facebook, an exclusive club where you need to know the right people to join in. All of this makes it catnip to users—and to the media, which dutifully reports every twist and turn on the site. “We have to stay focused on what we’re working on and not to get too caught up in the spotlight,” says Stone. “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 ...we like to have fun and stay humble.”
It’s an admirable sentiment, but the company can’t quite ignore its current status. It has courted the celebrity world to an extent (in one meeting room, there’s a photograph of rap mogul Sean “P Diddy” Combs, taken in the building’s lift one day after he turned up to express his gratitude and excitement). And Twittermania has led to a sequence of high-profile moments in which they have mixed with some of the world’s most famous and powerful people. Notably, there was an appearance on Oprah for Williams, who also spent the last week with Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates at the Sun Valley conference—a notorious deal-making hangout for the media industry’s biggest players.
Stone, meanwhile, has seen his face splashed across numerous magazines and was recently the star guest on The Colbert Report—the spoof chat show that is adored by millions of savvy young Americans. Does the attention get too much? Or worse, does it become intoxicating?
“They are definitely memorable moments,” says Stone. “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.” Part of his job, he says, is to try to help everyone at the company keep these things in perspective—making sure that Twitter does not become a gang of egotists who gloat over their status as part of the Next Big Thing, but instead maintains a “general level-headed, unassuming, humble, humourous, funny atmosphere”.
He says: “We focus a lot on culture specifically at Twitter because of this spotlight. 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.”
This all means that staying simple and understated is not an accident, but a philosophy. As a result, no one in the team could be described as flashy: Stone, like most of the company’s employees dresses in the uniform of new media—T-shirt, carefully messed-up hair and black-rimmed glasses.
Of course Twitter doesn’t actually make proper money right now. It does have $55m in the bank, though, from a variety of investors, which is being spent on propping up the service and its growing staff.
Focus on audience
Twitter is concentrating on building up a large audience with the idea that the cash and profits will eventually follow. With so much money in the bank, Twitter does have breathing room, though—and major ambitions. “There are 4 billion mobile phone users in the world that are all carrying around with them Twitter-ready devices,” he says.
“It can be very transformative when you realise that people can have access to this real-time network when all they have is a cellphone,” he adds. The team tries to concentrate on keeping things running smoothly, not interfering. If enough people talk about something it bubbles to the top of Twitter’s hot topics—a list that lets users see what everyone else is talking about.
Stone points to the success of companies who use the service to communicate with customers—whether it is big names offering discounts or smaller businesses who send messages to customers telling them about the latest products. “Think about that with a street vendor in India, asking, ‘If I get a watermelon, will you buy it?’ There’s a transformative power in SMS that’s extremely inspiring for us, and we’re going to bring that online worldwide.” Suddenly it’s not just about searching for information; it’s about letting the news find you—offering people anywhere the chance to get their messages out to anyone who is interested.
Humble beginnings
That world-spanning vision is certainly a long way from where the company’s founders started out. Williams, who grew up on a farm in Nebraska, dropped out of college and packed his bags for Silicon Valley. Stone, a Massachusetts native, also quit university to take up a design apprenticeship. Dorsey grew up in Missouri and moved to California, ending up working for a taxi dispatching company in Oakland.
None of them were obvious candidates for success—but Stone says part of their inspiration comes courtesy of people with similar global drive: Google chief executive Eric Schmidt is “super-smart”, he says, and he also lauds Barack Obama.
“One of the things I like so much about President Obama is his vision that it’s not a zero-sum game, where one country is going to win the game of earth. That fits with Twitter.” And Twitter doesn’t just admire Obama; it played a part in the election campaign as his team used the service to send out messages to hundreds of thousands of supporters.
Speed
“Something unbelievable happens every week,” he says. “Things do get increasingly weird as we become part of a global stage. It’s intimidating, but it’s a great opportunity.” In the grand scheme of things, he says, Twitter is just one part of a larger movement in which Google, Facebook, the mobile phone industry and the internet all play a part. How does Twitter compare to any of the previous startups that he’s worked at, I ask.
“Everything about Twitter goes faster,” Stone says. “It’s grown faster, we move faster... any decision you think we’re going to need to make two years from now, we’ll probably have to make it tomorrow.” That, he suggests, reflects modern life—a world where we expect things to happen with increasing speed. Perhaps, after all, Twitter is not just a symptom of a jump to light speed—but also a participant in taking us there. Biz Stone smiles.
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