Hatching Twitter Part 18

Within seconds the press started scrambling to cover the announcement. An announcement that didn't mention the vicious mutiny that had taken place in the boardrooms of Twitter over the past months. An announcement that didn't mention that Ev had almost been completely out of a job. And one that didn't mention that Jack Dorsey would be returning to the company. That was all still to come.

V.

#d.i.c.k.

No Adult Supervision.

Do you smell that?" a round-faced Twitter engineer said as he peered up from his cubicle. It was late in the afternoon on a Thursday. Moments earlier the office had been as serene and calm as a summer lake, the only sound a faint white noise coming from employees' computers.

"It smells like weed," the engineer said to his cubicle mates as he took a deep whiff to be sure his nose was being honest. "Right? That's weed?"

Another engineer sat up, now sniffing too. "Wait, is that rap music?" he asked.

They looked at each other, trying to figure out what was going on.

They didn't know it, but two hours earlier the metal elevator doors on the sixth floor of Twitter's office had quietly slid open and, like a scene from the beginning of a rap video, an entourage of a dozen large men, most of them black, had poured into the lobby.

"I'm Nick Adler," a man with a shaved head said confidently as he approached the doe-eyed, pet.i.te receptionist, who, sitting behind the low counter, looked back at the posse with utter confusion. "We're here to meet with Biz Stone. Omid sent us."

The receptionist looked back and saw, towering above everyone, in the center of the group, like a queen bee surrounded by its lieutenants, the rapper Snoop Dogg. His head swayed slightly from side to side as he looked around the lobby, his sungla.s.ses concealing his bloodshot eyes. A large, droopy hat covered his cornrowed hair.

"Yes, um, let me call him," the receptionist said, smiling awkwardly as she tried to reach Biz. But there was no one to call. There were no vice presidents or senior executives or any adult supervision at all in the building.

One of d.i.c.k's first tasks when he had taken over as CEO had been to remove Goldman as head of product at Twitter. d.i.c.k wanted to clean up the board, get out the old and bring in the new, make Twitter his company. Removing Goldman was the first step. Yet at the last moment there had been a compromise: Rather than being fired, Goldman was "allowed" to quit.

In early December Goldman set out for the LeWeb show in Paris, and while onstage with M. G. Siegler, a TechCrunch blogger, he broke the news publicly.

"You've been with Twitter for a while. So what's next for you personally?" Siegler asked.

"I've just announced to the entire company last Friday that I'll be leaving Twitter at the end of the month," Goldman said. "I'm not going to say I need to spend more time with my family-as it only consists of my girlfriend and two cats-but I just need a bit of a break." (He was still dating Crystal.) Ev, too, was nowhere to be found. After handing the CEO role to d.i.c.k and processing the initial shock of being pushed out of the company, he was actually excited by his new job, realizing that it freed him from the stresses of the business side of the company. Now he could focus on the product. So in November he got to work designing new features for Twitter. But things quickly soured.

When he presented these new product ideas to d.i.c.k, they were brushed off and mostly ignored. Before long Ev was being ignored too. There were executive-level discussions that he wasn't invited to, senior off-site meetings he was not privy to. Like Jack in his "silent" chairman role, Ev was now a "silent" product director.

Over the Christmas holidays, Ev set off to Hawaii with his family-a vacation he had taken with d.i.c.k many times before, but not this year. While away, sitting by the pool, thinking about the psychological trauma of the past several months, he realized he didn't really have a role at Twitter after all. He had been fired without being escorted out of the building.

On January 2, 2011, he sent an e-mail to everyone in the company, announcing that it was time to take a break. "I've decided to extend my vacation even longer-through March," he wrote. "Why? I've been needing a break for a while, and the timing seems ideal. I'll still be available and monitoring email, attending board meetings, talking to d.i.c.k and other folks regularly, doing some press if needed, and keeping a close eye on things. But I'll also be spending a lot more time with Miles and Sara." He signed the e-mail, "Mahalo, Ev."

With Goldman gone and Ev on leave, Biz wasn't coming into the office either. He felt like an intruder in d.i.c.k's company and had been spending his days trying to figure out if he would leave Twitter too.

"Hi. Um. Biz isn't around right now," a short, white, geeky Twitter engineer said to Snoop Dogg's entourage as he appeared in the foyer with a laptop in his hands. "He's on his way back to the office, but ... I can show you around until he gets here," the engineer said.

The employee nervously led the group through a door to the right that emerged into the center of Twitter's offices. As the men flowed into the silent cubicles, a ruckus immediately ensued.

"Whad up, honey, you look fly-a-liscious," Snoop said to a young, attractive female employee as he wandered by. "d.a.m.n, girl, you be dope on a rope. What's your name, honey bunny?" he said to another, hovering over her cubicle in his oversized blue Adidas jacket with "L.A." emblazoned across the front. "Oooh, oooh, ooh," he added, pursing his lips and shaking his head from side to side as if he were about to eat from a buffet.

The sound of the entourage was so distracting to employees, it was as if someone had just set off a bottle rocket in a public library.

"Um, excuse me, Mr. Snoop Dogg," the engineer skittishly said as he looked up at the six-foot-four-inch rapper. "We're going to go, um, go into this conference room."

Snoop, along with his entourage, which included Warren G and several other rappers, were in San Francisco for a show they were performing that evening. Nick Adler, who managed Snoop's digital presence, had organized the meeting and been told that Biz would be there to meet with the Snoop entourage. There was a slight problem, though: Biz had not been told. Nor had any of the other Twitter executives, who were all at an off-site meeting.

Snoop's visit had been set up by a new employee of Twitter's emerging media team, a group that had been developed to build relations.h.i.+ps with more high-level stars, including actors, athletes, and musicians. These people were called VITs, or Very Important Tweeters, inside the company.

It also signaled a change in music culture. Although top-of-the-charts musicians had visited Twitter in the past-including Kanye West and P. Diddy-these stars were no longer visiting a certain other media: radio, ironically the thing Ev and Noah had originally set out to reinvent in 2005.

Instead, musicians wanted to see Twitter. Enter Snoop Dogg.

But this particular "tour" wasn't going as planned.

After Ev's ousting, d.i.c.k had organized a number of off-site meetings to reorganize the company. As a result, most execs were missing from the office as the slight, white engineer tried to entertain Snoop Dogg and his posse. It wasn't going well; he was like a subst.i.tute teacher trying to manage a group of unruly kids.

"So this is our new a.n.a.lytics tool," he said to the group. "It can show you which tweets are performing better than others."

"Oh, really, dude? That's really neat, dude," Snoop said, imitating a white-person voice. "That's your new a.n.a.lytics tool. Dude, that's really cool." Laughter erupted from the rest of the cla.s.s as they all sat playing with their phones, barely paying attention.

But the engineer continued to speak. "So you can see, whenever you tweet about weed, you get a huge spike from your followers," he said. At this Snoop sat up, staring inquisitively at a graph on the screen.

After some time in the conference room the entourage quickly sat for a short video interview to help publicize a new feature on Twitter, and they were then led out through the Twitter cafeteria and back to the lobby. As they wandered past a DJ table and microphone set up in the cafeteria, Snoop stopped in his tracks. "Yo, yo, yo," he said, his arms outstretched on either side. "I can get on that?" he asked, pointing to the turntable. But before the engineer had a chance to answer, Snoop had a microphone in his hand and music was blasting out of the speakers. The sound flowed through the hallways, and employees quickly started to venture into the cafeteria. Before long people's phones were out, taking pictures, shooting videos, and, of course, tweeting.

Then, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of thin air, Snoop Dogg had something else in his hand: a large blunt the size of a Sharpie pen. Then a lighter. And a few seconds later he was smoking weed, ferociously. Seeing this, his entourage a.s.sumed it was okay to light up in the Twitter offices, so naturally they pulled out joints that had been in their pockets or tucked behind their ears.

In a matter of minutes, the cafeteria had become the stage for an impromptu Snoop Dogg concert, with a dozen large blunts being pa.s.sed around among famous rappers and Twitter employees, most of whom were dancing, some grinding on each other. A few girls stood on cafeteria tables, their arms waving in the air as if they were atop a large speaker in a nightclub, not at work. They were all partying while their parents were away.

Eventually a Twitter lawyer appeared. Asking Snoop Dogg and his entourage of rappers to stop smoking weed in the office wasn't an easy affair, but all parties must come to an end, and eventually they left, bequeathing a haze of smoke, dozens of stoned employees, and hundreds of tweets in their wake.

A note was sent around to employees by the lawyer reminding people that they were not allowed to use drugs at work. People were asked to delete tweets. Photos were removed from the Web. The only incriminating videos left online belonged to Snoop Dogg.

d.i.c.k was furious when he found out about the weed, the dancing, the partying employees. He vowed that this was the last time anything like that would happen. It was time for Twitter to grow up, he said.

Jack's Back!.

It was light outside and dark inside. Jack was pacing back and forth in front of the bright projector screen as cracks of daytime hidden behind the blinds crept in. His brown dress shoes slid against the carpet like a ballet dancer's slippers. A white employee badge with the name Jack Dorsey and the word "Twitter" dangled from his waist, swaying from a thread clipped to his jeans.

"We're calling this Twitter 1.0," he said to the several hundred Twitter employees who sat watching him. "We're going to abbreviate it 'T1.'" Then he explained to them all that before that moment, until Jack had arrived back at the company, Twitter had been incomplete. "Pay attention to the direction, not the details," he said confidently. This was the new Twitter. He didn't praise the previous iteration of the product-Ev's version-but rather took a couple of slight swipes at it. It was a beta and incomplete, he said.

He had started his preamble by playing the song "Blackbird," by the Beatles, where a bird with broken wings learns to fly. Fitting. Some of the employees were excited, but many looked around, upset, as Jack disparaged the work they had spent the past two years on.

It was the moment Jack had been waiting and planning for-the moment that should have happened months earlier when Ev was forced down. Now Ev was being forced out.

After discussions with d.i.c.k and the board, Jack had arrived back at his castle in late March, a banished king returning from exile.

When d.i.c.k introduced him at a Tea Time, he was greeted with a standing ovation from most of the now 450 employees at the company, many of whom believed he was the rightful heir returning home. But there were a few who didn't stand up: a small handful of people who knew what had happened behind the scenes with Jack's return.

As Jack stood there basking in the glow of applause, Ev sent an e-mail to all of the employees at Twitter.

"I've been doing some serious soul searching," Ev wrote about his past two months away. "Obviously, Twitter is the biggest thing I've ever played a significant part in or likely ever will. And, though I couldn't be more proud of what we've accomplished together, it is clearly not finished. If it reaches its potential, Twitter will be around for many, many more years, and we'll look back at 2011 as one of the quaint early years.

"I've decided, though, that my role in Twitter from here on out will not be day-to-day," he wrote. "I'll be doing what I can to help, as a co-founder, board member, shareholder and friend of the company (and so many people in it)."

He concluded, "I'm by no means disappearing," and signed the letter, "Continue changing the world. Your friend, Ev."

Three days later, on Monday morning, the company officially announced that Jack was back. This was followed by his tweet confirming his return. "Today I'm thrilled to get back to work at @Twitter leading product as Executive Chairman. And yes: leading @Square forevermore as CEO," Jack wrote.

Then came the press. Piles of it. Fenton stepped in to make sure Jack was painted as the hero. "It was a tragedy for the period of two years when he wasn't involved with the company that we were missing the founder," Fenton told the New York Times in an article about Jack's return.

In public talks and news interviews Jack continued to channel Jobs, using terms like "magical" and "delightful" and "surprising" and "best" to describe products, along with almost exact vernacular used by Jobs at conferences and on television, including "we're just humans running this company" and hawking the concept that Jobs shared, when he told people he was "most proud" of the things the company hadn't done.

Then, as he started to move into a greater orbit, he was featured in a huge profile in Vanity Fair on April 1, 2011, t.i.tled, "Twitter Was Act One." Next to the several-thousand-word article was a picture of Jack in a black suit and tie, his chest pushed forward, a little blue bird resting on his shoulder.

The article touted Jack as the "inventor" of Twitter and noted that this was one of the first times he had spoken publicly about his ousting as CEO. "It was like being punched in the stomach," Jack told David Kirkpatrick, the reporter who wrote the piece for Vanity Fair. The quote was picked up thousands of times on social and news networks.

Yet to a few the quote sounded eerily familiar. Like many of the things Jack had been saying for the past year, it was an unattributed quote by Steve Jobs. When Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1987, he told Playboy magazine: "I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach."

Two weeks later, for the first time in several years, someone else appeared in the press: Noah. Nicholas Carlson, a blogger for Business Insider, had tracked Noah down and interviewed him for a piece on the real story of Twitter's founding. Carlson wrote that "all of the early employees and Odeo investors we talked to also agree that no one at Odeo was more pa.s.sionate about Twitter in the early days than Odeo's cofounder, Noah Gla.s.s."

Ray, Blaine, Rabble, and others spoke on the record and said Noah was the "spiritual leader" of Twitter. Noah, though reluctant to talk about the old days, did too.

"Some people have gotten credit, some people haven't. The reality is it was a group effort. I didn't create Twitter on my own. It came out of conversations," Noah told Carlson in the interview. "I do know that without me, Twitter wouldn't exist. In a huge way." But Noah's real gripe was with Ev, whom he still believed had pushed him out of the company.

The same day the article came up, Ev tweeted: "It's true that @Noah never got enough credit for his early role at Twitter. Also, he came up with the name, which was brilliant."

But none of this stopped Jack. As the media's Next Steve Jobs, he was too big and too powerful for anyone to dent his version of history that had appeared in thousands of press outlets. And as the months rolled by, Jack's image and fame only grew. He started spending more time with celebrities. He partied at ritzy affairs in Los Angeles and New York City. He flew on private jets. He appeared in gossip outlets, partying on boats with celebrities and models. He metamorphosed with the help of coaches and stylists and drastically grew the public-relations team that would get him featured on more television shows and in more magazines.

Biz was the last cofounder to leave. On June 28, 2011, he announced that he was leaving a day-to-day role at Twitter. But really he was leaving because he didn't have a day-to-day role. His collaborators were already gone.

The day after Biz said he was leaving the company, an e-mail went out to all the Twitter employees announcing that the following day the White House would make public its plans for the first-ever "Twitter Town Hall" with President Obama. The event would be held in the East Room of the White House and streamed live to millions of Americans on the Web, and on Twitter, the e-mail said. It also noted, "Jack Dorsey will be the moderator."

Biz was sitting up in his bed when he read the e-mail, his back resting on his pillow. Seeing Jack's name, he started to fume. Over the years, he had never really grown too upset about Jack's media blitz, unless it crossed the boundary he and Ev had worked so hard to instill at Twitter. That had happened when Jack's name had been included in the Iran revolution story in the New York Times and when Jack had spoken about Twitter and China. And now it was about to happen again.

Biz quickly wrote an e-mail, his thumbs tapping the screen of his iPhone as the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.

"When Amac first explained this to me he said that n.o.body from Twitter would be the moderator specifically to highlight the fact that we are a neutral technology," Biz wrote in an e-mail that he sent to the entire company. "I very strongly disagree with anyone from Twitter being involved as the moderator especially a founder." He went on: "This goes against three years of work to stay out of the narrative and remain neutral. Amac, what happened? This is the complete opposite of what you pitched me and it was the one thing I said to avoid to which you wholeheartedly agreed. The only thing I said to avoid. Please, please, please don't do it this way. We should not get involved in this manner."

And then, like a light switch turning off the last dimming bulb in a once brightly lit room, Biz's e-mail was disabled from e-mailing the entire company. His voice was muted.

Jack Dorsey was going to interview the president of the United States, cast across the media spotlight for all to see. Ev, Biz, and Goldman wouldn't be able to stop him now.

Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow.

The nearly six hundred Twitter employees spent most of the week of June 4, 2012, placing their belongings in cardboard boxes. Books, keyboards, computer wires, little trinkets were all sent to sleep in the confines of cardboard. Then, as the week drew to a close, they walked out of the office that Ev had built, 795 Folsom Street, for the last time.

Over the weekend a swarm of men arrived, lifting the boxes and computers and transporting them to trucks that lined the street below. A light wind rustled the trees on Folsom Street as the engines coughed to life. Then they drove along the quiet streets, turning left onto Third, then down Mission, right, left, and finally arriving at a beige building the width of a city block on San Francisco's Market Street: Twitter's new home.

Along with the boxes and computers, the movers also carefully transported the artwork that Ev and Sara had carefully picked out, a beautiful neon sign that read TELL YOUR STORIES HERE, and the @ symbol that hung in the cafeteria.

The following Friday, d.i.c.k stood up in front of the employees in the company's new cafeteria. Compared with the old office, this new s.p.a.ce was gargantuan. To the right of the entrance there was a huge outdoor roof deck where employees could lie on faux gra.s.s and work encircled by the San Francisco skyline. Snack stations were set up on each floor. There was a game room with table tennis, couches, and old and new video games. Wood-slab tables. A yoga room. Parking. And the dining area, where d.i.c.k was about to speak to employees, was a cavernous s.p.a.ce, with a ceiling that rose up into the sky like a wave about to crest.

Although Jack's image on the outside was mushrooming, internally his aura had quickly started to fade. In late July 2011, he had fired four product managers who were part of Team Ev and had been (somewhat) privy to Jack's role in the ousting of Ev. Gone. Then he pushed Sean Garrett out, partially as revenge for Sean trying to m.u.f.fle Jack's media frenzy a year earlier. Twitter employees also started to complain to Twitter managers that Jack was difficult to work with and repeatedly changed his mind about product ideas.

Jack's twenty-four-hour-a-day press tour had started to affect his relations.h.i.+p with d.i.c.k, who was often a.s.sumed to be an employee of Twitter in interviews, not its CEO.

When Jack went on TV to do interviews, he was sometimes introduced as the CEO of Twitter and Square, and he made no point to correct the mistake. The misinformation that Jack was CEO spread to leaders of other companies, to the media, and even to taxi drivers in the city.

One afternoon d.i.c.k was taking a cab back to the Twitter office from a meeting.

"Where to?" the driver asked.

"The corner of Market and Tenth," d.i.c.k replied. "The Twitter offices."

The cabbie explained that he would have to drop his pa.s.senger around the corner, because there was nowhere to pull over on Market Street. "It happens every time I have to drop someone off here," the cabbie proclaimed. "There really should be a place to pull over near the Twitter office."

"I might be able to do something about that," d.i.c.k said, understanding the man's plight. "I'm the CEO of Twitter."

The cabbie turned around with an excited look on his face and said, "Whoa! You're Jack Dorsey?"

d.i.c.k just sighed.

Though the public didn't know it, the employees of Twitter did: d.i.c.k was in charge.

He had worked extremely hard over the past year to boost company morale from the tumultuous years of different CEOs. Twitter employees clearly loved d.i.c.k, and in turn he genuinely cared about the company and the people who worked there. He had also gone to great lengths to ensure that the company kept the ethical values inst.i.tuted by Ev, Biz, and Goldman and continued to stand up to government requests for information about users. And he also knew he had a responsibility to make Twitter into a profitable and successful company. d.i.c.k and Ali Rowghani also started shutting down third-party feeds to ensure that compet.i.tors, including Bill Gross, couldn't siphon people away from Twitter to a competing network.

Early one morning, after the employees had unpacked their boxes, placing books, keyboards, computer wires, and little trinkets on their desks in their new home, d.i.c.k called his first Tea Time meeting in the Market Street office. He stood in front of the employees in the cafeteria to welcome everyone to their new home-a home that felt like a large corporate company. A company that under d.i.c.k's leaders.h.i.+p had grown to a ten-billion-dollar valuation in 2012. A company that had begun making one million dollars a day in advertising revenue from sponsored tweets and other ads and by the end of the year would become consistently profitable, pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from advertising. A company that, under d.i.c.k, would also soon fix its outage problem, staying up and stable nearly 100 percent of the time. A company that planned to go public in less than two years. A company that investors hoped would eventually be worth one hundred billion dollars.

As the employees sat, hushed, d.i.c.k paced in front of them with the microphone in his hand and told a story about their recent move.

He said that when he had directed the movers to transport the artwork from the old office, he had instructed them to leave one piece of art behind. It had hung in the Folsom Street office since late December 2009. The piece of art was in a black frame with a white border. In a bit of irony, it had been hung upside down. And in bold white letters on a dark background, it made a statement in thirty-six characters: "Let's make better mistakes tomorrow."