Twitter Co founder, Biz Stone, says enjoying your own product is a good sign | Biz Stone

Thanks, everybody. Thanks especially for the call-out for the most influential person in the world, because Osama bin Laden was also on that list. It's not best people in the world. It's just most influential.

Anyway. Welcome, everybody. Is it better to use the mic, or do we just—

Yeah.

OK.

I don't know. I don't know anything about it.

Good.

Oh, yeah. It's on. A little better.

So, so Biz, you got that nice introduction. You know, you made it sound like you went straight to Google and Twitter and immediately had amazing success, but people don't know that you tried many things and many of them didn't work, and you're still trying many things. How much of—

And there's still a lot working.

How much of entrepreneur Life is just being around the right people with the right ideas at the right time?

Oh yeah, pretty much all of it. I mean, I tried to do something like Twitter 3 times and it didn't, it never took. So clearly it was timing. I mean, it played a big factor in Twitter because we started Twitter in 2006. 2006, and the iPhone came out in 2007. And that was sort of a—

You couldn't have predicted. Yeah.

I was just like, oh, this is perfect. And also just the people. I mean, one of the things I realized was every move I've ever made in my life has always been following a person, never an institution or the money. I probably should have been following the money because it was I grew up on welfare, and I was in debt until I was like 37. But instead, I chose to follow people. So I followed Evan when he quit Twitter because his— I mean, Google— because his payout was over for Blogger.

For Blogger.

I just quit too, even though that was my first shot at being a millionaire. But I just left. I remember my manager there was like, so you don't care about money? And I was like, yes, I do.

Okay.

And then I quit and I realized I couldn't pay for anything. Oh, I guess I now know what he was talking about. So I went back into film. But anyways, yeah, so timing is key. And then the people— Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey— those 2 guys in the same room. Jack and I became fast friends at another failed startup right after Google called Odeo, which was— it was podcasting, but it was way too early. iPods had pretty much just come out, and we were like, these things are going to be huge. People are going to definitely listen to shows on these things. And they do now, but they didn't then. I'm going to make this thing quiet. So yeah, so timing, the right people.

How do you know when you have a good idea?

I'm not really sure if you— well, you think it's a good idea. You don't know that it's definitely a good idea. In fact, I've found that most of the times when I've succeeded have been the times when people have said that it's a terrible idea. So I get worried when people are saying, like, this is a great idea, you should definitely do this. And I'm like, uh...

Maybe not.

Every other time it's been like, oh, this is so stupid, the world doesn't need this, you shouldn't bother with it, it's a dumb idea. And that's just because they don't, you know, they don't see it, how it could fit in the world, which means to me maybe it's a whole new thing that they'll realize they need. Once they have it. So you don't— I don't think you— you don't— I mean, you know it's a— you think it's a good idea, and you want to see it in the world, and you'd like to use it. I always tell people, like, try to make a single-player game first. Like, if you love it, you're laughing using it, you're enjoying using it, you think it's fun just with, like, a couple of your friends prototyping, you're like, this is great, I would totally use this every day. Then that's a good feeling. That feeling happened to me early on with Twitter when we were prototyping. My wife and I had just moved into this little tiny 400-square-foot house in Berkeley, and I'd watched a lot of Bob Vila when I was a kid. I don't know if you guys know who that is, but he—

Yeah.

It was called This Old House, the show, and All the time on the show, what they would do is they would cut the— cut, like, they would rip off the carpet and expose these beautiful hardwood floors underneath. And so there was a heat wave in Berkeley, and I decided I would do, like, I would be Bob Dylan and rip up the carpeting. And so I just started cutting it with a big knife and ripping it up, and there was no floor underneath. It was just like a subfloor. Oh my God. It looked terrible, except then I ruined the rug, so I had to keep doing it. And, um, I was cursing myself, sweating, and then my phone buzzed in my pocket, and it was, it was Evan. And he had sent an early prototype tweet that said, sipping Pinot Noir after a massage in Napa Valley.

You're like, oh!

And I was just like laughing out loud. And then when I realized I was laughing out loud, I was like, I'm laughing out loud.

It's a good sign.

But now here I am laughing out loud, so that's a good sign. So yeah, that is a good sign. That's a good sign when you know you have a good idea if you're laughing and enjoying your own product and using it because you want to, not because you feel like you have to dogfood it or something because you think it's like, oh, this would be good. This would be a good business. I'm gonna make it and then get rid of it. and go somewhere else. That's usually a bad idea because you won't be able to— you won't have the emotional investment that it takes to get through all the times when everyone says how terrible it is. You'll probably just agree with them and fail. If you have that emotional investment and that tie to it emotionally, then you don't hear all the bad stuff.