Why You've Never Heard of Twitter's Real Creator

the story of twitter is a tangled web of lies and betrayals but it all begins in 2005 with a little startup called audio audio aimed to become the home of podcasting on the internet a place where users could record and share their audio files the business was started by noah glass and he'd hired a few engineer friends to help him build the platform however they didn't have much money and so were working out of noah's small apartment which was putting a huge strain on the relationship with his wife noah knew they needed investment to make

this into a real business and so he spoke to his friend and neighbor evan williams evan had just sold his own company called blogger to google and thus he had a lot of money however heaven was reluctant to invest in noah's business because he worried it would affect their friendship it took a lot of persuading but eventually noah did convince evan to invest by assuring him that the business wouldn't interfere with their friendship but almost immediately the business interfered with their friendship noah and evan began disagreeing over almost every little detail about the business ranging

from the logo to when they should actually launch it plus one of the conditions of evan investing in audio was that he became the ceo which noah was never really happy with he'd only accepted because he knew it made financial sense evan had much more experience as a leader and after selling his first company to google evan had a great reputation in the tech industry which would help audio get more attention and sure enough right after evan was announced as the ceo audio attracted more investors which meant they had more money to grow their team

further so despite noah and evan's disagreements it seemed like audio really could become the central hub for podcasts on the internet and then in the space of 10 minutes steve jobs essentially killed their entire business apple announced they were building their own podcasting platform directly into itunes basically crashing odio's entire business plan ever knew odio was doomed and wasn't going to be able to compete with apple and so he considered cutting his losses and shutting odeo down completely but then noah suggested that they ask the employees they'd hired to come up with new ideas to

pivot the business into something else after all they'd built a good team so maybe they could take the company in a different direction instead of podcasts as it turns out one of their new employees did have an idea to save the business an idea that would transfer modio from being a failing podcast company to a billion dollar platform called twitter that would change the world and that employee's name was jack dorsey [Music] when noah hired jack dorsey as an employee at his company the two of them immediately hit it off and became friends one evening

in 2006 the two of them went out drinking together and jack told noah about an idea he'd had where people could share their current status online essentially a way to broadcast to the world what they were doing in that moment noah didn't fully get the idea at first but as jack explained it more noah realized it could help people feel more connected this was something very important to noah who had been feeling increasingly lonely after his friendship with evan had fallen apart as well as his relationship with his wife in fact noah had always had

a deep feeling of loneliness perhaps caused by the fact his dad had gone for milk when he was young and never returned so noah encouraged jack to pursue this status idea odeo needed to pivot to something new instead of podcasts maybe this status idea could be it so noah opened a dictionary to try and find a name for this new project and it stumbled across the word twitter defined as a short burst of inconsequential information and chipped from birds perfect audio then began devoting most of their time and resources to twitter instead of their core

podcast products and within a couple of weeks the first version of twitter was built unlike twitter we know today the very first version was built around text messaging you would send your tweet to a phone number and it would broadcast your status to your friends the first official tweet was sent on march 21st 2006 when jackdaws he tweeted just setting up my twitter that's not a typo that's how they start the name originally meanwhile odio's main product its podcasting platform was going nowhere evan wrote a letter to shareholders explaining this and offered to buy the

shares back from odio's other investors some people think evan did this because he knew twitter had huge potential and so he tricked investors into thinking the company was going nowhere so he could buy their shares back cheaply because very soon after evan bought the shares off these other investors twitter began to rapidly gain momentum noah was excited perhaps a little too excited he publicly announced twitter at a party before he was supposed to which meant they got a lot more traffic than they were ready for which many of the team were frustrated by noah had

also become more vocal about the fact he didn't think evan should be ceo anymore the two had fallen out completely and had very different visions for what the company should be noah confessed to jack he thought they should try to kick evan out of the company noah felt that since he'd started odeo and since jacket had the status idea which they were now focusing on why was evan the guy in charge however what noah didn't realize is that jack did not feel the same way at all jack felt evan was the better choice for ceo

plus even though jack had become good friends with noah when they first met his opinions about noah had been changing jack felt noah had become a distraction for the company and that he was creating unnecessary division by always disagreeing with evan and basically he was doing more harm than good it's also reported that jack had become infatuated with a woman in the office that they'd hired who had a boyfriend and noah had warned him he was coming on way too strong to her and he needed to chill out noah had meant this in a friendly

way but jack did not take it well so was noah still thought of jack as a good friend jack's feelings towards noah had completely soured secretly jack met with evan and told him that they needed to get rid of noah or else jack was going to leave the company forever this was an easy decision shortly after he met with noah and told him he was fired noah glass was being told to leave the company he had started later that night noah met with jack at a bar and told him evan had fired him jack acted

shocked like he knew nothing about it and blamed evan entirely noah broke down in tears and hugged jack completely unaware it was him who was responsible by 2007 the team had given up on audio entirely and the sole focus was twitter which was growing increasingly rapidly more and more people were joining and tweeting every day of course there had been other social networks before but twitter's short informal stream of consciousness style proved to be incredibly popular however as twitter grew managing it became increasingly overwhelming and evan decided he wanted to take a more backseat role

in the company and became chairman instead which meant the ceo position was up for grabs and with noah now out of the company it was jack dorsey who got promoted to the ceo position now because twitter had been quickly hacked together in just a couple of weeks the infrastructure couldn't support all the users they now had and thus twitter kept crashing on a daily basis which ironically generated more news headlines which led to even more users checking the site out which led to the service crashing even more often twitter was growing faster than anyone could

have imagined and the way the site had been designed just wasn't built to scale that fast twitter users became very familiar with seeing this error about being over capacity which became known as the fail whale however when twitter did work users had come up with their own ways of using the sites for example when talking to someone directly people started using the at symbol and when referencing specific topics they'd use hashtags what's interesting is that everyone had their own ideas about what twitter actually was was it a social network was it meant to replace texting

replace emails or was it for microblogging and news different people used it in different ways but even internally at twitter the employees disagreed for example jack dorsey who is now the ceo believed twitter should be for broadcasting what was happening to you in that moment that's what he'd first envisioned when he suggested the status idea but evan williams now chairman of twitter felt it was more useful as a way of communicating what's happening in the world more of an information network than a social network for example when a us airways flight crashed on the hudson

river a photo was posted on twitter before any traditional media had reported the story the truth is twitter would end up being different things to different people but jack and evan regularly argued over this jack felt evan should stay out of the way now he'd left the ceo position but evan worried that jack was missing a lot of twitter's potential evan was also frustrated that jack was becoming distracted by his newly exciting social life a ceo of a rapidly growing company like twitter jack was getting invited to events he'd never had access to in his

life and he was fully embracing this new lifestyle as a mini celebrity the problem is evan had stepped down a ceo because he didn't think he'd be able to commit all of his attention to twitter but it seemed that jack wasn't committing all his attention to it either jack was even doing random evening classes like dressmaking at one point evan told jack you can either be a dressmaker or the ceo of twitter but you can't be both not just that but jack was doing very little to address the constant sight outages jack was so focused

on building new features and working on product development that he seemed to neglect a lot of other areas in fact some employees had mentioned to evan that jack's leadership skills were questionable to say the least there was no doubt jack had some great ideas for developing twitter but jack had no management experience which meant things at twitter were becoming increasingly unorganized and chaotic evan's frustrations with jack reached a tipping point in 2008 when evan realized twitter didn't even have a backup that meant that if the database had crashed at that moment they would have lost

every single user and tweets would all be gone for good in an instance evan had made his mind up he convinced the other twitter investors that jag wasn't up for the task of running the company and they agreed the next day the news broke jack dorsey was out and returning to the role of twitter ceo was evan williams before we get to the next chapter i want to tell you about today's video sponsor trends the ultimate membership for entrepreneurs when you join trends you'll get access to a community of like-minded ambitious people you can connect

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that's trends.co slash magnate to start your seven day trial today [Music] officially twitter announced that jack and evan had mutually agreed to switch positions jack was becoming chairman and evan was becoming the ceo again but the truth was that jack dorsey had no idea this was about to happen and he was absolutely distraught he was furious at having the ceo position taken away to him it was absurd twitter was doing well it had been growing really quickly sure they had some issues but he couldn't believe he was being betrayed like this now when noah had

been kicked out of twitter by his friends his response was to isolate himself from the world it was incredibly painful for noah seeing twitter become so big especially since twitter was hard to escape now that everyone was talking about it noah played such a pivotal role in the start of the company and so when he got kicked out he became increasingly reclusive however when jack dorsey was kicked out of twitter his approach was the total opposites he decided to start doing as many interviews and public speeches as possible and basically act like he was still

running twitter even though he was no longer involved at all jack had been given the chairman title so it didn't look to the public like he'd been sacked but the reality was he'd been kicked out completely just like noah and he had zero say in anything they did meanwhile evan was back as the ceo of twitter and he definitely brought a more professional management style to the company he immediately ordered they make fixing the outages their priority the crazy part is that despite all of the chaos and backstabbing going on behind the scenes twitter had

been on an unstoppable upward trajectory it had taken them eight months to reach their first 20 000 users and yet they were now getting 20 000 new users every single hour celebrities even started showing up at the twitter offices trying to get involved including kanye west and lady gaga but it wasn't just celebrities taking notice of twitter many world leaders were using twitter to spread their messages in fact there was one incident where the russian president came to the twitter offices to send his first tweet accompanied by snipers and secret service members but at that

very moment the site crashed again the twitter team had to try and stall him by giving an incredibly slow office tour so they could fix the site before he tried to tweet during twitter's crazy growth they also had several acquisition offers from companies like yahoo and facebook but twitter always turned them down they didn't need to sell everything was seemingly going amazingly with one exception twitter was making almost no money this hadn't mattered at first because twitter had got funding from investment firms but now the investors were starting to get frustrated that evan didn't seem

to be prioritizing money at all he was always just focused on making the service better so to try and keep investors happy evan hired his friend dick as chief operating officer whose job it would be to focus on monetizing twitter this was a common pattern with evan he would always try to hire his friends and family because his logic was that he could trust them so dick joined the twitter team and made a lighthearted joke in his first tweets first full day as cro tomorrow task number one undermine ceo consolidate power ever laughed when he

saw it but he wouldn't be laughing long dick did indeed begin helping twitter to monetize by selling ads but what evan hadn't realized is that twitter's investors had some other concerns twitter's investors were worried how slowly evan was making decisions he would often spend weeks deliberating over something minor which the board felt was holding twitter back not just that but he seemed to struggle to hire anyone for senior positions who wasn't already a friend of his possibly due to some kind of trust issues and most importantly the board was starting to doubt whether evan was

the right person to help twitter become a very profitable company considering evan seemed to spend barely any time thinking about how twitter could make money now some people claim that behind the scenes one man was feeding the investors all this information about evan's incompetence as ceo one man was deliberately trying to highlight evan's failings so that the board would turn on him and that man was jack dorsey jack was still furious at being kicked out of twitter and it's reported that he was pulling the strings behind the scenes to get evan kicked out as well

like a chess master moving pawns around jack was collecting information about everything evan was doing wrong and subtly dropping hints to twitter's investors and their connections to plant the seed of doubt in their mind about whether evan should run twitter and it worked the board called a meeting to vote on whether evan should be replaced as ceo evan of course didn't know about this until the very last second now some of twitter's investors still backed evan but many didn't so the vote about whether to replace him was actually tied and here's where it gets really

crazy the deciding vote of whether to kick out evan as ceo went to twitter's chairman jack dorsey ironically it was evan who had given jack the chairman title and board vote because he'd felt guilty for firing him a couple of years ago but now that decision was about to be evan's demise as you've probably guessed jack voted that evan should be removed as ceo and thus evan was kicked out so just to recap this insanity noah was pushed out in 2006 jack was pushed out in 2008 and evan williams was pushed out in 2010 and

all three founders had been kicked out by each other these guys were co-founders of twitter and at one point they were very good friends but through a series of boardroom coups and backstabbing betrayals everything had changed and as if being removed as ceo wasn't painful enough for evan it got worse the board announced that dick evans close friend who he'd hired because he trusted him would be taking his position as ceo of twitter because the board loved that dick was so focused on monetization dick denied that he'd deliberately tried to steal evan's position and said

he didn't even know the board was going to do this but evan didn't believe him evan didn't trust anyone anymore and dick's first tweet suddenly looked a lot less funny [Music] now that the board had removed evan as ceo jack was allowed to return to twitter at first he took a more backseat role in the company but in 2015 when dick resigned jack dorsey was promoted to ceo of twitter for a second time now all of these secret coups may sound more like game of thrones than a story about a social media site and hearing

these different betrayals may sound like karma all three founders tried to portray each other and all of them ended up getting betrayed themselves but you have to remember all of them were trying to do what they thought was best they all had their own visions of what the company should be and of course this is just one side of the story we may never know the exact details of what went on behind the scenes but one thing is clear there is no singular creator of twitter without noah there would have been no company to begin

with but evan the company would have never got funding and without jack they'd never have had the status idea which formed the basis of what twitter became each founder contributed many different ideas along the way that helped build twitter and many other employees played a big role too like one of their first employees biz stone who is also sometimes credited as a co-founder however if you were gonna feel sorry for anyone i think it's clear that noah deserves the most sympathy noah glass's name has largely been erased from history just look at his wikipedia page

it's tiny considering he had such an instrumental role in such a hugely influential platform noah glass has just 45 000 followers on twitter and his bio simply reads i started this and it was both jack and evan went on to become billionaires thanks to twitter's ipo noah isn't believed to have had any shares so he likely made almost nothing noah had started twitter with the goal of making people feel less alone yep it ended up destroying his relationship with his wife his best friends and leaving him with nothing these days he has seemingly no presence

on the internet and it's likely believed he prefers to stay away from it as much as possible as for twitter itself since jack started running the company again in 2015 twitter has still struggled to monetize as effectively as many of its competitors but twitter has continued to be incredibly popular and has given hundreds of millions of people a platform to express themselves and feel more connected then again opinion about twitter is certainly divided to many it's a very toxic place and it faces many of the same problems other social media like facebook have such as

whether it's a platform or a publisher meaning how much control should twitter have over what people say some people think twitter don't do enough to control abuse on their sites others feel twitter stifles free speech and imposes their own political biases after all the people designing the algorithms have the power they influence what information and news you actually see so twitter still has a lot of issues to address but whatever your views on twitter it's undeniably an incredible business success story when the company began as audio it genuinely looked like they might have closed down

back in 2005 and yet instead they pivoted to twitter and ended up changing the world interestingly twitter has recently been pushing its new feature spaces where users can livestream their own audio conversations which is not too dissimilar from what odio was trying to do all those years ago when it first began but there is one area where twitter undeniably screwed up and that was their service called vine a short video app that closed down in 2016 which is the exact same year a short video app called tick tock began if you want to understand why

vine failed but tick tock is dominating and making way more money than twitter ever has just click this video right here i'll see you there cheers