Biz Stone explains how Twitter started as a playful hackathon experiment inside Odeo, with Ev as CEO and Jack as co-founder, rather than a deliberate attempt to solve a known problem. The platform later filled an unexpected need for instant information sharing that nobody knew they wanted until it existed.
Chapters
Who has a question? All right, you right here.
Oh yeah, there's a mic.
Oh yeah, I guess you guys can just line up by the mic.
Hello. Hello.
Nice to meet you. I'm Jim from China.
Hey, Jim.
Yeah, I've been we've been told a lot of times here. If you wanted to start a company, you should solve a problem, and you should find the real pain of people and solve it, and that's called your business. But some of us just feel like that our idea may not solve a specific problem, but if we can make it happen, it will be awesome. And one of us, I think one time we asked a question to a speaker, What Twitter was solving back then, and the speaker maybe think about like 30 seconds and answer the question. Actually, Twitter was came up from Hackathon, and it was solving the problem that Hackathon communicate with each other, the people of Hackathon. So I want to hear the real story. Is it like us just you think you thought that Twitter was If you kind of make it happen, it will be awesome, or is it really solve a specific problem?
Yeah, so we weren't doing that. We weren't doing the traditional find a problem and solve it. We were— what happened was Odeo, the podcasting company, wasn't working. So Ev was the CEO of Odeo. So Ev said, why doesn't everybody pair up except for a couple people who keep Odeo running? Pair up and just do whatever the heck you want for fun. And some other guys made some other stuff, like some productivity software and things like that. And Jack and I paired up and we built Twitter. And it wasn't solving anything. It was just— it was more like, wouldn't it be cool if— You could know what people were doing without asking them. That was— it was more like, wouldn't it be cool if? It wasn't, what's the problem? The problem sort of presented itself later, like, oh. And I jokingly later, I called Twitter the messaging system we didn't know we needed until we had it. The problem— it turns out we were solving a problem of, like, giving people information From any source instantly, which in the history of mankind is the way you win at everything. You get the information first, then you lead in any profession, you know, like Wall Street or whatever. But we weren't looking— we weren't in search of a problem. We sort of just accidentally made something that It turns out people liked, and then it caught on, just went like bonkers, and we just struggled to build it. So, I mean, that's the real story. We were just sort of having fun and hacking.
It didn't really come from the—
In fact, everyone thought it was a bad idea. Even our coworkers were like, this one's dumb, we should toss it. It was only Ev that was like, you guys can keep working on that.
Does it really come from the hackathon?
Yeah, it came from a hackathon. It wasn't even the winner of the hackathon. And, um, but Ev, I think Ev noticed that Jack and I were just really into it. We were really excited about it. We really liked working together. We had found every excuse possible at Odeo to pair up on things just for fun. Like, um, I would say, hey, Jack, you know when the system crashes and we have to throw up a little dialog box that says, the system crashed, and the person has to click OK? And he was like, yeah. I was like, let's put a little checkbox next to it that says, OK, but I'm not happy about it, 'cause it crashed, so... And he was like, what does it do? And I was like, it doesn't do anything, it just makes you feel a little bit better about clicking OK. And, you know, so we would just do these little stupid things, and then— and so we sort of paired up 'cause we just liked working with each other. So it really was just, I don't know, a hackathon. And it turned out to be something that the world needed. And to this day, I think the world needs Twitter. It's just something that had to be born. And so we need it.
