Twitter’s BIGGEST Lessons | 3 Ways to Grow Fast

¡Hola! I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Modeling the Masters. I believe that the fastest and most effective way to grow your business is to model the strategies of people who've already done what you're trying to do. So today we're going to look at how 3 young men who were all coming from humble beginnings decided to come together, launch a business, which became one of the most successful and popular websites in the world. This is a story of the founders of Twitter and the top 3 lessons that you can learn from their success. Jack Dorsey, Christopher Isaac Biz Stone, and Evan Williams were all on different career paths when they met and created one of the world's most prolific social media sites, Twitter. In 2000, Dorsey started an online company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency workers. This work would soon evolve into an idea for real-time status communication. Stone's entrepreneurial spirit showed at a young age when he founded a lacrosse team in high school and coordinated a senior play after the school decided to cancel it. In 1999, a friend of Stone's pitched him an idea for a new company called Zanga.com, which they launched together, but in less than a year Stone had grown frustrated with the direction of Zanga and moved to Los Angeles, where he worked in television for a while and wrote a book on blogging. Williams grew up on a farm, far from the high-tech lifestyle he would later embrace, where summers were spent irrigating crops. He drifted from working on the family farm to jobs with several IT startups in Texas, but finally moved to Sonoma County, California to work with the technology publishing company O'Reilly Media. All three men were at a crossroad in their lives, and it was at this crossroad that the three budding entrepreneurs would come together to make history. Both Williams and Stone were working for a new internet company called Blogger, but eventually sold it to Google. And with those stock options, Williams and Stone sold out to start their own company. With that, Odeo, a podcast company, was born. In late 2006, Williams, Stone, and several Odeo employees formed Obvious Corporation, while Odeo was acquired by Sonic Mountain. One of Obvious's first projects was Twitter. Dorsey, who was also newly fascinated with instant messaging, approached the company to see if there was room for his cooperation. The team began a day-long brainstorming session where Dorsey proposed the idea of using an SMS service to communicate with a small group of people. Within just 2 weeks, Dorsey and Stone had created a prototype of Twitter. Twitter was launched as its own company in April 2007 with Dorsey as CEO. Dorsey saw the young company through 2 rounds of venture capital funding. In 2008, Williams would become CEO of Twitter with Dorsey taking the role of chairman of the board. Although criticized for lack of a business model, by February 2009, Twitter had become the third most used online social network, with over 55 million monthly visits. The trio had not designed Twitter to earn money, and for the moment, were happy spending their time and energy on improving the service rather than turning a profit, namely by focusing on simplicity, constraint, and craftsmanship. Twitter meanwhile has grown from being just a social networking site to an important news distribution tool that gets listened to around the world. People are no longer using it just to update friends on their meals of the day. Twitter's popularity spiked, for instance, during the Iranian elections, with news of events being reported on-site before mainstream media found out. The US government even asked the company to postpone a 90-minute scheduled maintenance outage during the elections in order to ensure people could continue to use it to share updates. Today, Twitter is one of the most widely used daily sites by people around the world, including the President of the United States. By starting small and by taking steps every day to grow their business, the Twitter founders were able to go from having a working demo made in 2 weeks to building one of the most successful websites in the world. To help you expand your business, here are 3 action items that you can learn from the Twitter guys. Action item #1: Choose collaboration over competition. When was the last time you partnered with your competition? It might sound like a strange concept, but there are sometimes opportunities to be had by collaborating with them. As an entrepreneur, you should be the best at what you do, even if it's only in a very limited area. It means that for some clients, you're the best option, and for others, you might not be. You might create referral opportunities with competitors you respect who have a slightly different skill set. It might also open up chances to bid on projects together to land a client which neither one of you could get on your own. Keep an open mind to collaborating with your competitors. The co-founders of Twitter have taken a unique approach to their operations. They're choosing collaboration over competition, the promotion of open information exchange where it might have once been blocked, and instilling that culture throughout the company. Twitter also worked with some of the industry's heavy hitters when it came under attack from hackers early on. Stone likes to call it "nourishing the ecosystem" and believes Twitter has a role to play in facilitating the open exchange of information in all its forms. The co-founders believe that collaborating with the competition will help everyone out. This concept is not unique to the business world, but has continued to work for Twitter. According to Dorsey, Stone, and Williams, "There's a lot we can learn from smart people out in the world. Previous companies I've left before I left, I left because I didn't really like where the culture was going and I wanted to leave. I was too young to realize that I could have an impact on changing it if I didn't like it. I could work harder. I think a lot of folks are just wired that way. It's product A or product B, like those blind taste tests. There's something healthy about friendly competition. It's like a scrimmage or pickup game. That's good. But the truth of it is that we're all working together. It's like Coke vs Pepsi. I noticed the other day that they're following each other on Twitter. Action item number 2: Make it fun. Starting and running a business is going to be one of the hardest, most challenging things you'll ever do in your life, so you might as well have some fun doing it. If you're going to work every day hating it, you need to change things up. Find a way to make it more fun, and you'll not only enjoy it more, you'll get better results from it as well. From the beginning, the co-founders approached their company a little differently than most. They didn't know how they were going to make a profit from it, and they weren't sure exactly who would use it. But what they did know was that they liked using it. Today, despite the popularity of the service and the near, you know, celebrity status of its founders, the three entrepreneurs have managed to keep themselves in check. Why? Because they're just having fun. Still, they continue to enjoy all that their business has brought them, including a new vocabulary. The co-founders found it funny that some of the words they created have made it into the official dictionary. According to the founders, early on someone said, "Twitter is fun, but it isn't useful." Ev said, "Neither is ice cream. So what if it's just fun?" We were working at Odeo, but we weren't as passionate about the podcasting service as we should have been. We weren't using it, and that was a problem. Twitter got started because Ev gave us some freedom to think along different lines. There are different ways to approach a startup. One thing I admired about Google is we said, "This thing is huge, and we're gonna kick ass at it." People asked, "How big is the market for blogging?" I said, "I don't know, but if we make it awesome, lots of people would do it." With Twitter, there is no market, other than we knew it was cool. Axiom #3: Key in on culture. Once you start building beyond yourself, you're gonna have to start thinking about the culture that you want to create at your company. What does your company stand for? What values do you want to embody? You have an opportunity to hire people who share those values, and you can create that culture from the beginning. If you don't create it yourself, a culture will naturally form on its own and might not reflect the direction you want it to take, so plan accordingly. Dorsey, Stone, and Williams are trying to build Twitter into more than just a microblogging service but into a superorganism, into a company that cultivates a healthy work environment and culture as much as it does technological innovation. The Twitter office itself was even designed to cultivate an open and fun work environment. There are brick walls, high ceilings, and no cubicles. Employees work side by side at their stations on modern furniture. Breakfast is catered with everything from soy yogurt to fresh strawberries. Then comes lunch, also catered for employees, including soup, salads, and sandwiches. Thursday at Twitter headquarters is a particularly special day where a guest speaker, anywhere from a businessman to a musician, joins them for lunch. Employees are then encouraged to tweet about the lunch as it happens. Based on their own personal experiences from working at other companies, the Twitter co-founders decided to place a heavy emphasis on making sure that theirs was a company people wanted to go to work for every day. According to one of the founders, he very genuinely wants to innovate. Not just from a product or technological standpoint. According to Stone, when thinking about Williams, he very genuinely wants to innovate, not just from a product or technology standpoint, but from a company standpoint. For me, I've learned about what it means to focus on a culture, to build social responsibility, and the idea of a company as a superorganism. We focus a lot on culture specifically. We don't want to end up like that child actor who found success early and grew up all weird and freaky. We want to remain okay. Just because we found success early and in many ways got lucky doesn't mean we're a bunch of geniuses. It means what it means. So remember, choose collaboration over competition, make it fun, and key in on culture. To finish up this video, I wanted to share one of my favorite true stories about the Twitter guys and some of their most inspirational quotes. Twitter has been used by everyday people to report incidents around the world. These remarkable events have been picked up by news agencies and reported through local broadcasting channels. While Dorsey, Stone, and Williams never thought their technological innovation would become a major way of reporting instant news stories, they do joke about sitting around thinking of new words to describe their creation. After brainstorming, they came up with the name Twitter, but also called the process of delivering real-time information sending a tweet. Or tweeting. The inside joke, according to Dorsey, is that these two made-up words are now in the newest official English dictionary. Stone said, "We never believed these made-up words that we thought were just funny ways to describe our invention would become actual English words found in a dictionary." Thank you for joining me for another edition of Marlene and the Masters. If you liked the video and you want to see more, please give it a thumbs up below. I'd also love to hear what you have to think. If you want to leave a comment under the video, I always read those and try to respond to everybody. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode. ¡Gracias!