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Dick Costolo

Managing Partner & Co-Founder, 01 Advisors · 2 appearances 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.

14statements → 7claims → 5claims resolved → 20%fully supported → 4.43/5average certainty → 1.93/5average debate potential → 3said about them ↓

1 supported 4 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 5 assertions · 1 opinion · 5 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, and 2 name 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.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Dick Costolo worked as unpaid technical consultant on HBO's Silicon Valley
“I contacted the HBO folks who were doing the TV show Silicon Valley and said, hey, I want to come work on Silicon Valley, and the CEO of HBO, Richard Pepler, said, well, we need a, like, technical consultant, but, like, we can't, like, pay you to do it. And I …”
Dick Costolo Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 0:52 a16z Podcast | Improv'ing Leadership

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
50% certainty 4
63% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

307 words/min while actually speaking · 14.2 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Dick Costolo: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,038 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 →

Everything Dick Costolo said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated
Costolo: AI will replace human-only medical diagnosis within ten years
“Healthcare, we're going to look back 10 years from now and go, oh my god, we let humans who had only seen four cases of this decide what to do next instead of running it through, you know, here are the symptoms and evaluating against terabytes of historical da…”
Dick Costolo Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:17 a16z Podcast | Improv'ing Leadership
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Costolo: AI recommendations will outperform human judgment when they disagree
“There are going to be lots of cases of, in specific domains of, it did this thing a human would never do, and there will be lots of machine learning examples of, well, the machine thinks we should do X, and the people think we should do Y, but the machines wil…”
Dick Costolo Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 10:10 a16z Podcast | Improv'ing Leadership
Opinion
Costolo: Veterans understand team alignment better than 95% of Valley managers
“If I had to summarize Ben's management course, it's make sure everybody understands what you understand, and people coming in from the military have that perspective much more deeply ingrained in them than 95% of people who are in management roles in Silicon V…”
Dick Costolo Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 22:52 a16z Podcast | Teams, Trust, and Object Lessons
Assertion Partly supported
Costolo: Twitter partnered with Google to bypass Egypt's Arab Spring shutdown
“Egypt, you know, during the Arab Spring, we sort of started in Tunisia with people organizing protests on Twitter, and they were able to organize protests on Twitter because they were writing under pseudonyms and not, you know, their actual names, so people we…”
Dick Costolo Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:28 a16z Podcast | Improv'ing Leadership
Disclosure
Costolo told Twitter's board he would leave peacefully without severance if asked
“I mean, I had the exact same conversation with my board many times, you know, long before the IPO. Like, hey, listen, when it comes time for, don't ever have any conversation behind my back about it. Just come tell me you're not the guy anymore, and I'll, like…”
Dick Costolo Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 18:28 a16z Podcast | Teams, Trust, and Object Lessons
Insight
Costolo: Leaders must correct mistakes quickly rather than try preventing them
“It's not your job as a leader to prevent mistakes from happening. It's your job as leader to correct mistakes as quickly as you can when they happen. If you try to lead by preventing mistakes from happening, nobody's going to friggin' take any chances, and the…”
Dick Costolo Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 11:28 a16z Podcast | Improv'ing Leadership
Insight
Costolo: CEOs can operate in wartime and peacetime simultaneously across departments
“Yeah, sometimes you're both at the same time inside the company, right? With, I remember there were times at Twitter where, with the sales team, I could focus on All right, this is really good. This engine's really working. It's going well. Let's focus on, you…”
Dick Costolo Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:25 a16z Podcast | Teams, Trust, and Object Lessons
Insight
Costolo: Military veterans ignore media noise like mean Business Insider posts
“I know they're gonna come in, they're gonna be mentally tough, they're gonna work their ass off, and they'll be, like, not distracted by, like, Nonsense, like, oh, there's a bad, mean blog post about us in Business Insider.”
Dick Costolo Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 10:58 a16z Podcast | Teams, Trust, and Object Lessons
Insight
Costolo: Great entrepreneurs succeed because they forget the pain of starting companies
“Entrepreneurs, people who are great entrepreneurs have, like, and have amazing short-term memory loss.”
Dick Costolo Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 15:58 a16z Podcast | Teams, Trust, and Object Lessons
Insight
Costolo: Leading to please your board creates misery and failure
“If you don't have that attitude about it, you're just going to be, you know, then you're just going to be miserable, and you're not going to be able to lead, because you're going to be constantly thinking, well, what would the board be happy if I do, right? An…”
Dick Costolo Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 18:53 a16z Podcast | Teams, Trust, and Object Lessons
Assertion Supported
Dick Costolo worked as unpaid technical consultant on HBO's Silicon Valley
“I contacted the HBO folks who were doing the TV show Silicon Valley and said, hey, I want to come work on Silicon Valley, and the CEO of HBO, Richard Pepler, said, well, we need a, like, technical consultant, but, like, we can't, like, pay you to do it. And I …”
Dick Costolo Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 0:52 a16z Podcast | Improv'ing Leadership
Assertion Partly supported
Costolo trained in same Second City improv group as Steve Carell
“I remember I got there my first day, and you're doing the Second City Training Center, and Steve Carell and I and Rachel Dratch were all in the same group, so he and I and Rachel know each other from, like, God, 30 years ago now.”
Dick Costolo Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:50 a16z Podcast | Improv'ing Leadership
Assertion Partly supported
Costolo: Twitter took seven years to hit $16, one day to $47
“So we're doing our IPO for Twitter in November, 2013, and it took us like seven years to get to 16 dollars a share. And then it took us Two weeks to get to 26 dollars a share, and then a day to get to 47 dollars a share.”
Dick Costolo Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 12:17 a16z Podcast | Improv'ing Leadership
Assertion Partly supported
Costolo: Twitter priced its IPO at $16 before hitting $47
“The night of the IPO, you know, the stock was at, like, 47, and we had priced it at 16 on the S-One, like, two weeks earlier”
Dick Costolo Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 1:54 a16z Podcast | Teams, Trust, and Object Lessons

The other half of the tape: Dick Costolo's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 3 episodes on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Reshma Saujani 1Erik Torenberg 1Elad Gil 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0011222019202020212022202320242025episodesmentions
0122019202020212022202320242025episodes it came up in
000.51122019202020212022202320242025episodesmentions per episode
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode

Appearances (2)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Improv'ing Leadership Jan 2, 2019 17m
a16z Podcast | Teams, Trust, and Object Lessons Jan 2, 2019 8m
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