Costolo: Twitter partnered with Google to bypass Egypt's Arab Spring shutdown
Dick Costolo · a16z Podcast | Improv'ing Leadership · Jan 2, 2019 · at 13:28
Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo recalls how Twitter responded to platform bans and government censorship during the Arab Spring uprisings.
0:00 / 0:25exact quote · 25.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 weren't able to come over to their house and arrest them, and then spread across North Africa, and then Egypt shut us down, and we worked with Google to be able to allow people to use Twitter over the, you know, phone networks and through sort of various proxy servers they set up, etc.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Dick Costolo
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”