To promote his new book ‘Things a Little Bird Told Me,’ Twitter cofounder Biz Stone was at the Free Library of Philadelphia for a ticketed, breakfast event for which I interviewed him on stage for a half-hour before audience questions finished the morning.
My line of questions can be seen here. I tried to to steer the conversation away from what has already been said by Stone, a well-covered tech entrepreneur who is in the midst of a popular book tour, but we still hit upon some of what has already been covered: the designer by trade has focused on bringing the human touch to software.
That helps explain how decidedly simple Twitter is and how Stone’s new startup Jelly, a network-driven answer app, has stayed focused on getting social responses.
Watch below an interview Stone did that covered some of the same ground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqfUUBUBcy4
In the green room, he also talked to me about his pathway was about following people, not jobs — including following Evan Williams to Google and then to start Twitter.
In the 300+-seat auditorium, the 8am, $40 event probably filled about 200 seats, a fine crowd though it might have looked otherwise. Photo above by Christine Cavalier, photo below by Ashley Feucht.
My notes from reading his book:
- His podcasting company failed because he didn’t care. Twitter succeeded because he had passion for it: page 50
- Creativity needs constraint, so the 140 characters was bound to succeed: 57 hermann hauser
- Paying for 2007 SXSW: $10k to put up TV screens and helped get a sense of what worked for the platform. Stone said they didn’t have a clear strategy but the success was the right timing (he had launched similar efforts in the past) and paying to access the right audience early.
- Human flocking: 68; first time he saw Twitter in the wild, then he watched people use it.
- You can’t control how your product is used if it’s a platform fast launch, slow development update 87
- Fans sent Twitter offices delivery pizza pre iPhone launch because Twitter was so open about preparing for heavy usage. Stone says his focus on being transparent helped create fans. 95
- Struggle of losing CEO 112
- What twitter was for 115
- Hudson River tweet and Moldova were seismic international experiences that taught Twitter global power 118
- $500m and reasons to sell for Zuckerberg 132
- Build the buildings and follow the paths in the grass to build sidewalks 136
- No homework policy 148
- 6 assumptions Stone made new Twitter employees agree to before joining 160
- Make a stance in product design, don’t create options to fill all uses: that’s wishy washy development 163