2 ms·

Re: Odeo. It got sold to some guys who tried to roll it up with other small acquisitions. It's dead now. Re: regret. People misunderstand the regret of not con

Re: Odeo. It got sold to some guys who tried to roll it up with other small acquisitions. It's dead now. Re: regret. People misunderstand the regret of not continuing to have stock. Twitter was nothing when we left. I didn't even bother to exercise my options. Then Odeo's CEO bought out all the investors and that return on their money was way more than whatever Twitter was worth at the time. Those investors were all using Twitter, so they knew what they were getting bought out of. But it was still basically nothing at that point, a few hundred users. The things that made Twitter valuable were what happened after Odeo. Evan Williams bought the whole thing back and then relaunched it as a new company with funding from him and a new equity structure. Imagine if Jack & Biz had "co-founded" Twitter but had to stay on their existing Odeo option grants which were probably less than 0.5%. So just that alone was big. Twitter had a solid year of grinding where it looked and felt just like every other nascent startup, i.e. worth continuing but not at all a sure thing. To me, the game changer was the way Biz managed to start making Twitter part of the media landscape and something everyone heard about on every half hour segment of cable news. Twitter basically became a core part of the internet at that point. So Odeo people probably all have some amount of regret (I quit and then refused an offer to come back). But I don't think anyone really feels like they were entitled to the money or credit.

NoodleIncident 7y ago
> To me, the game changer was the way Biz managed to start making Twitter part of the media landscape and something everyone heard about on every half hour segment of cable news. I've always hated those segments. It makes me strangely happy to hear that the cause and effect here was indeed backwards; cable news didn't start reading those tweets because twitter was important, twitter became important because cable news started reading those tweets!
- nl 7y ago
  It's pretty difficult separating cause and effect here. The hugely successful SWSX campaign moved Twitter out of the tech-only sphere into other areas. That got non-tech people using it, but by the time of the time of the Aston Kutcher vs CNN race to a million followers (less than 2 years later) it already had its own momentum.

NoodleIncident 7y ago

> To me, the game changer was the way Biz managed to start making Twitter part of the media landscape and something everyone heard about on every half hour segment of cable news. I've always hated those segments. It makes me strangely happy to hear that the cause and effect here was indeed backwards; cable news didn't start reading those tweets because twitter was important, twitter became important because cable news started reading those tweets!

nl 7y ago
It's pretty difficult separating cause and effect here. The hugely successful SWSX campaign moved Twitter out of the tech-only sphere into other areas. That got non-tech people using it, but by the time of the time of the Aston Kutcher vs CNN race to a million followers (less than 2 years later) it already had its own momentum.