Biz Stone
Co-Founder and Partner, Future Positive. On 1 show, 1 appearance, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderinvestorexecutiveauthor@biz ↗bizstone.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
Biz Stone is best known for co-founding Twitter, Medium, and Jelly Industries. He is an early-stage investor and venture capitalist who authored several books, including Things a Little Bird Told Me.
1shows
1appearances
12statements
5resolved
4supported
0contradicted
80%fully supported
14said about them ↓ Everything Biz Stone said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Twitter's board failed to find a better CEO than Jack Dorsey
“There was a committee of the board that was trying to find somebody else, and they weren't able to find anyone better than Jack.”
Twitter suffered shrinking users, brain drain, and zero profit before 2017
“The company was not doing well. I mean, sort of ethically, it was the company itself was shrinking. It was a, there was a brain drain and there was also the user base was shrinking. There wasn't revenue or profit. And nobody felt like Twitter was a special pla…”
UK VCs are excessively risk-averse compared to US investors
“I do feel in general, there's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy happening there where VCs don't really want to take that much of a risk. And so contrary to what it's like in the States, I feel like they often will offer something like a hundred or 200,000 in …”
Founders shouldn't start a company without a 10-year commitment
“Unless you want to work on something for 10 years, at least, I don't think you should make a start about it, because it just means you don't have what it's going to take when everything's going really badly, and you're not going to want to see it through.”
Suppressing personal identity at work creates a soulless company culture
“I think it would be kind of soulless if everyone just said, I'm going to bring half myself to work and it's going to be the political side and I'm not going to share any of this or that.”
Stone spent six months unwittingly hurting morale upon returning to Twitter
“I kind of barged in like a bull in a china shop. I was advised that, you know, you're under a magnifying glass. You should really you know, be careful. And I thought to myself, oh yeah, I know what that's like. Don't worry about me. Yeah. We've been in under a…”
Stone's angel investment in Square yielded a 1,000x return
“Oh, that would probably be square because it's something like a thousand X return or something.”
Prioritizing great collaborators over venture safety consistently pays off
“When I found somebody that I enjoyed working with and liked as a person, I stayed with them, no matter how risky it was, and that was paying off.”
Stone put 'Seinfeld of the internet' on early Twitter homepage
“When we were doing Twitter, somebody early on said, Twitter is the Seinfeld of the internet. It's a website about nothing, and the first thing I thought was, wow, Seinfeld's a hit show, and I put it as a testimonial on the rotating testimonials I put on the we…”
Trusting your future self creates a safety net for taking risks
“Future biz will get current biz out of whatever jam he's getting himself into. And I guess it was kind of an excuse to do crazy things because I did sort of say out loud that, well, no matter what I do here, if it doesn't work, my future self will figure out h…”
Dorsey and Stone established Twitter's purpose as serving the public conversation
“What I did when I came in is, is Jack and I hammered out a purpose statement for Twitter. The answer to the question, why do we exist? Because before that, if we asked around at the company, you know, what's the purpose of Twitter's existence? People would say…”
Stone resumed self-managing investments after advisors sold an early holding
“I made one error of judgment because when I started to get some wealth, I hired advisors, and I thought, well, the advisors know what they're doing, so I'll let them be in charge of my investments too. And then their thinking was, okay, well, this is X would s…”
The other half of the tape: Biz Stone's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 13 times in 7 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Sumeet Shah 5Eoghan McCabe 3Harry Stebbings 2David Sze 1Chris Sacca 1
Statements about Biz Stone, by other people (1)
McCabe: Biz Stone was Intercom's most helpful angel investor
“I think it's Biz Stone, who's one of the Twitter founders invested in. And the reason he was so helpful was that for a young lad, I was 26 when I started Intercom and moved to San Francisco. For a young lad in this big industry who really thought very little o…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 13
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 4 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Chris Sacca on Coming Out of Retirement To Unf**k The Planet with Lowercarbon, How Chris Evaluates His Relationship To Money Today, Why We Have Bred a Generation of Ass**** Kids, Do VCs Provide Any Real Value and The True Unfiltered Opinion on Faceb
- 20VC: Squarespace Founder, Anthony Casalena on Scaling Squarespace from Dorm Room To Public Company with over $700M in ARR, The Decision to Direct List over Traditional IPO or SPAC & What Changes When You Go Public?
- 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function
- 20VC: Evernote & mmhmm Founder Phil Libin on Why We are Beginning a Multi-Trillion Dollar Restructuring of the World, Why Shortcuts are the Biggest Mistakes Startups Make & The Future of Video and The Unbundling of Zoom
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 3 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Biz's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder and Partner, Future Positive | 1 +1 | 12 | 80% 4/5 | full record on 20VC → |