Twitter

“Just because a piece doesn't do well on Twitter doesn't mean it isn't good, and I think a lot of times people are writing in that vein, and I want young writers especially to just understand that that validation only goes so far, and what you really need is to…”

“I had a friend named Ori Alone who had sold a company to Google and another company to Twitter”

“I put 34,000 dollars into Twitter. Okay. Okay. The reason I had that, and then I also put money into Facebook, and then put money into Tumblr. Those were my first three investments.”

“The next thing I know, I am negotiating to buy a portion of Blaine Cook, the original CTO's founder shares of Twitter, and now I'm in the game.”

“Facebook, of course, was private at the time, but based on their valuation, they could do a stock deal that may value us around Half billion dollars, and that was a lot of money, and we were maybe, no, we were we were 30 people at the time.”

“The company grew 10 X in users and employees and valuation in the two years I was CEO”

“I do remember a conversation where at first there was a version of what became Twitter presented that had audio, and I remember asking, what if it didn't have the audio piece?”

“Somewhat ironically, the board of Twitter had a lot of conflict aversion. Because they never, never gave me that feedback to my face. I didn't know I was going to be fired at all, because no one ever told me I was doing a bad job. So there was a whole culture …”

“Jack went from individual contributor, he had never been a manager, I believe, before he became CEO of this very fast-growing company,”

“I thought about it very deeply, and I came up with this, like, okay, why would you sell a company? I think there are three reasons, and none of these meet that criteria. Three reasons being, you don't want to do it anymore, and so you need someone to do it for…”

“It felt like a thing, which has, I've come to realize, is the most important thing, and like, it's, feeling is much more important than metrics early on.”

“What we had learned from social networks was that The value was in the connectivity. Like, if Twitter just did what Blogger did and posted your tweet to a webpage and didn't fan it out, if there wasn't this follow mechanism, it wouldn't be very interesting. I…”

“He was pushed out, and then I became CEO, which It's hard to believe, but it wasn't actually my plan. I still didn't necessarily want to be CEO. And we talked to a few other candidates, but then I was like, okay, maybe I'm the best person to be CEO.”

“I still owned a hundred percent of it at that time through obvious, but it was clear that we needed to grow.”

“You know, the team over the years gotten a lot of flack on the trust and safety side, but those people are some of the most earnest, hardworking, Integrity-driven folks I've ever seen in, in the world of business”

“I was not a great CEO by any stretch, and I think I was getting better at What I was very good at was product, and knowing, in my opinion, product and strategy, and knowing where to take the company, what we should build. But the company got to a size where lo…”

“Basically, everybody, everybody there got on Twitter. And, you know, it was a few thousand people, and again, lots of journalists, lots of bloggers, and so then they talked about it and wrote about it. It was a moment, just capturing lightning in a bottle amon…”

“We looked for people that we thought weren't being well served by the dominant media structure, but actually had interesting things to say and had a devoted audience. And so it wasn't necessarily the people with the largest audiences. Maybe they'd have a small…”

“By the time it went down, the share of Substack traffic that was coming from Twitter had been on a steady decline for years.”

“And he responded by getting Chris on a call and saying to him, well, how about Twitter acquire Substack, and you, I'm looking for a CEO to run the company.”

“And so we put a survey out on Twitter and the survey results came back and it was 70% milk chocolate chip, 30% semi-sweet. And that's how we decided that we were going to go with milk chocolate chips instead of semi-sweet.”

“They not only kicked him out of Twitter, they tried to write him out of the history, and I know this very well because I was reading at the time The reports, and they would mention Biz, and they would mention Ev as the founders of Twitter, and they would omit …”