Dick Costolo

Managing Partner & Co-Founder, 01 Advisors · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

executivefounderinvestorentertainer@dickc ↗LinkedIn ↗01a.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Dick Costolo served as CEO and COO of Twitter, guiding the company through its 2013 initial public offering and major revenue scaling. He previously co-founded FeedBurner and currently invests in startups through the venture firm 01 Advisors.

15statements → 1claims → 0claims resolved → 3.87/5average certainty → 2.07/5average debate potential → 4.2/5argument clarity · the sources → 10said about them ↓

1 not checkable as stated how the 1 claim stands · each chip opens the sources

1 assertion · 1 opinion · 12 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Dick argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.2 / 5 directness 4.1 · coherence 4.7 · precision 4.1 · compression 3.5

redirected or did not address 2 of 15 assessed questions (13%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

233 words/min while actually speaking · 10.4 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,365 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 1/10

pushed back at the host ▾ 1/10

setup questions received 75%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 7:11“What do you think is the kind of inflection point and the balance between a kind of vision for what you want to do, and then also realism when something's not working?” ▶ 8:32“How do you, and maybe thinking now with culture building with course, and then looking back to Twitter as well, how do you think about building a culture where kind of ambitious go…” ▶ 20:28“What's your superpower, and what's your super weakness, do you think?”

when Dick pushed back ▶ 15:20“No, I don't agree with that thesis.”

What they said15 What others said10 Episodes1

Everything Dick Costolo said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

Costolo: Silicon Valley hero mythology falsely elevates founders above normal people

“The thing that I believe that maybe many people in the industry disbelieve, I think that as opposed to the mythology of Silicon Valley of there are these sort of superheroes out there, and they have these amazing superpowers that the rest of us don't have, the…”

Dick Costolo Feb 12, 2018 ▶ 19:30 20VC: Dick Costolo on The Balance of Vision and Realism in Startups, The Biggest Challenge in Scaling Twitter & How To Optimise Decision Making Internally

Insight

Costolo: Improv comedy teaches founders to trust initial instincts

“Some of the things I learned about improvising helped me being an entrepreneur. 100%. There's no question about it. Things like you just have to run with whatever you've got to go on. Any, whatever your first idea is, whatever your instincts are, Run with thos…”

Dick Costolo Feb 12, 2018 ▶ 6:10 20VC: Dick Costolo on The Balance of Vision and Realism in Startups, The Biggest Challenge in Scaling Twitter & How To Optimise Decision Making Internally

Insight

Costolo: Large-company employees can adapt as flexible startup 'stem cells'

“No, I don't agree with that thesis. I think that people surprise you and people who were in very specific functional roles in company X when it was 10,000 people can jump into a startup and be a, you know, what I would call a stem cell and play multiple roles …”

Dick Costolo Feb 12, 2018 ▶ 15:20 20VC: Dick Costolo on The Balance of Vision and Realism in Startups, The Biggest Challenge in Scaling Twitter & How To Optimise Decision Making Internally

Insight

Costolo: Founders receive flawed advice driven by investor success bias

“A lot of CEOs and entrepreneurs are given bad advice by investors that are based on success biases of other things they've invested in, They're given bad advice by their CEOs who are giving their advice based on the success biases of their own companies.”

Dick Costolo Feb 12, 2018 ▶ 21:26 20VC: Dick Costolo on The Balance of Vision and Realism in Startups, The Biggest Challenge in Scaling Twitter & How To Optimise Decision Making Internally

Insight

Costolo: Earning a regular salary deters people from taking early-career risks

“Once you start making money and have a salary, you don't want to go back to scraping two pennies together.”

Dick Costolo Feb 12, 2018 ▶ 4:43 20VC: Dick Costolo on The Balance of Vision and Realism in Startups, The Biggest Challenge in Scaling Twitter & How To Optimise Decision Making Internally

Insight

Costolo: Startup vision becomes dogma when teams cannot question it

“Sometimes one of the reasons that startups and companies don't learn quickly is because they have some vision that becomes dogma because you're not allowed to question it.”

Dick Costolo Feb 12, 2018 ▶ 7:38 20VC: Dick Costolo on The Balance of Vision and Realism in Startups, The Biggest Challenge in Scaling Twitter & How To Optimise Decision Making Internally

Insight

Costolo: Startup optimism must be counterbalanced by radical truth-seeking

“You have to have this really aggressive dose of optimism that's offset by, we always have to be able to tell each other the truth, and we always have to be able to interrogate what we believe to be true.”

Dick Costolo Feb 12, 2018 ▶ 8:16 20VC: Dick Costolo on The Balance of Vision and Realism in Startups, The Biggest Challenge in Scaling Twitter & How To Optimise Decision Making Internally

Insight

Costolo: Giving teams ownership of solutions yields better creativity and accountability

“By doing that and not being prescriptive about the solution, but giving the team ownership and authority over the solution, they're going to be a lot more creative. They're probably going to be aggressive and creative and, you know, and then it's easy to hold …”

Dick Costolo Feb 12, 2018 ▶ 9:46 20VC: Dick Costolo on The Balance of Vision and Realism in Startups, The Biggest Challenge in Scaling Twitter & How To Optimise Decision Making Internally

Insight

Costolo: CEOs must compartmentalize and focus strictly on high-leverage priorities

“As an entrepreneur and a CEO, you have to be able to compartmentalize. Otherwise, you know, you go insane because there are always 50 fires you can be thinking about fighting and worrying about. You have to choose what you're going to focus on. Focus on those …”

Dick Costolo Feb 12, 2018 ▶ 10:40 20VC: Dick Costolo on The Balance of Vision and Realism in Startups, The Biggest Challenge in Scaling Twitter & How To Optimise Decision Making Internally

Insight

Costolo: Startup leadership is always hard, anyone claiming otherwise lies

“If you had one sentence of advice for a new first time CEO, what would it be? And I looked at him and I said, it's always hard. And people who tell you otherwise are just not being truthful. It's always hard.”

Dick Costolo Feb 12, 2018 ▶ 13:09 20VC: Dick Costolo on The Balance of Vision and Realism in Startups, The Biggest Challenge in Scaling Twitter & How To Optimise Decision Making Internally

Insight

Costolo: Scaling CEOs wrongly assume satellite offices automatically adopt HQ culture

“I think the biggest mistake a lot of CEOs of companies that are scaling outside their headquarters office for the first time make are They assume that all of the offices understand and operate based on, you know, the CEO and the headquarters folks understandin…”

Dick Costolo Feb 12, 2018 ▶ 13:43 20VC: Dick Costolo on The Balance of Vision and Realism in Startups, The Biggest Challenge in Scaling Twitter & How To Optimise Decision Making Internally

Disclosure

Twitter embedded SF executives overseas for years during global expansion

“So one of the things I did when we opened international offices was I would send a couple of my folks from my leadership team in San Francisco to open the office and stay there for a One to two years as we built that office out and brought in local leaders and…”

Dick Costolo Feb 12, 2018 ▶ 14:06 20VC: Dick Costolo on The Balance of Vision and Realism in Startups, The Biggest Challenge in Scaling Twitter & How To Optimise Decision Making Internally

Insight

Costolo: Great VCs assist with recruiting and avoid giving product advice

“I think that, you know, great investors are helpful when you ask them to be helpful and need them to be helpful, and they dig in and roll up their sleeves with things like recruiting, particularly on areas like recruiting or another area where a CEO may need h…”

Dick Costolo Feb 12, 2018 ▶ 16:40 20VC: Dick Costolo on The Balance of Vision and Realism in Startups, The Biggest Challenge in Scaling Twitter & How To Optimise Decision Making Internally

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Costolo auditioned for Saturday Night Live and was rejected

“When I didn't get some of the auditions, I tried to get, you know, audition for Saturday Night Live, didn't get that, a couple other auditions like that, and didn't get either of those.”

Dick Costolo Feb 12, 2018 ▶ 4:52 20VC: Dick Costolo on The Balance of Vision and Realism in Startups, The Biggest Challenge in Scaling Twitter & How To Optimise Decision Making Internally

Opinion

Costolo: Ed Catmull's 'Creativity, Inc.' is one of the best leadership books

“Creativity Inc. By Ed Catmull about the entire story of founding and running Pixar. I think it's one of the, has become probably one of the best books on leadership out there.”

Dick Costolo Feb 12, 2018 ▶ 16:14 20VC: Dick Costolo on The Balance of Vision and Realism in Startups, The Biggest Challenge in Scaling Twitter & How To Optimise Decision Making Internally

The other half of the tape: Dick Costolo's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 10 times in 6 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4 Matthew McCall 3 Ryan Denehy 2 Danny Rimer 1