My impression was that Jack Dorsey was the founder and inventor of Twitter. The reality seems to be a lot more complicated.

In Nick Bilton’s telling, the story is broadly as follows:

  • Ev Williams started Blogger.com in his bedroom.

  • When it got bigger he hired a few friends to work on it together. One of these is next door neighbour Noah Glass.

  • Williams then sold Blogger.com to Google for millions.

  • Williams and the crew became Google employees. But they disliked the culture and soon left.

  • Glass then started a podcast company called Odeo. Williams gave the initial funding.

  • Jack Dorsey joined Odeo as an employee.

  • Despite some outside funding, Odeo didn’t take off. The iPod was announced and Odeo couldn’t compete with Apple on podcasts.

  • As a last ditch effort to save Odeo, Williams, Glass and Dorsey started a side venture (within Odeo) which eventually became Twitter.

  • But shortly before Twitter got big, Williams kicked Glass out. Dorsey was appointed CEO.

  • But after a period of rapid growth, Williams kicked Dorsey out too. One reason was that Dorsey had no management system at all, could not fix Twitter’s constant down time, and didn’t implement any back up system whatsoever. But to prevent Dorsey from leaving and damaging the company’s publicity, Dorsey was given a “silent” board role.

  • Williams then took charge, continuing to refuse ever-bigger buy-out offers (of different kinds) from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Al Gore etc.

  • While all this was happening, Dorsey decided to accept all interview requests that came his way. He slowly built up a public image as the sole inventor and founder of Twitter: an image that even Twitter employees bought into.

  • Eventually, with the help of a new venture capitalist (Peter Fenton), Dorsey returned to the helm of Twitter.

A couple of points that struck me as I was reading along:

  • While Williams, Glass and Dorsey were tech-obsessed programmers, what got them going wasn’t the intellectual pleasure of programming as such but the excitement of building out an ambitious project. E.g. Blogger.com to allow easy blogging, Odeo for easy podcasts, Twitter for sharing status/sharing what is happening.

  • A giant system of funding is constantly hovering in the background. Williams and Dorsey may have started out as anarchists, but behind their wild imaginations there is always the backdrop that is the Deus Ex Machina million/billion dollar buy-out.

  • It is easy to think of the great start-up stories as just some computer geeks in their bedrooms, but that is decidedly the layman’s view. A well-visited website such as Twitter costs a lot to maintain, in terms of servers, text messaging costs, and a team of engineers to keep the site going in times of rapid growth.

  • The PR/business story is as important, if not even more important, than the purely technical story, at least for this kind of platform start-up. The people who reap the most economic benefits from this are generally not the employees or contributors, but the VCs who bet on the company.

  • As technology becomes more closely intertwined in our lives, we shouldn’t allow this model to continue to dominate the development of every kind of software. There are areas such as government and law where we should not “move fast and break things”, or let VCs take a leading role in deciding where to take the product. There needs to be proper processes and accountability that is characteristic of a liberal democracy under the rule of law.

  • What do successful government/public interest technology models look like? Tim O’Rilley’s *WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us *touches on the idea of government as a platform, but doesn’t seem to go into detail as to how this should work. (The only operational detail I remember is Obama meeting top software developers personally and urging them to join the Government: but that is only an ad hoc measure).

  • Some government technology work well (e.g. gov.uk). Some don’t (e.g. Post Office scandal). What is their story? And how do they differ (if at all) from the Silicon Valley/VC paradigm? That is what I want to read next.