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Tony Stubblebine on how Odeo gave birth to Twitter and took over the world
- tonystubblebine 17y agoI'd love to see a discussion here about one topic from that post in particular: what are best practices for changing direction as a company.
- tonystubblebine 17y agoSome of our specific problems: We were too big, so we were paralyzed a bit by the idea that we were going to have to lay people off. Maybe I'm not giving us enough credit because we went from thinking podcasting was everything, to thinking we needed to find something else, ran five different experiments, ran at least two hackathons, and built and launched Twitter in seven months. But it _felt_ paralyzing to think about a radical change of staff. We had middle management (me and a VP/Product) who arrived thinking our job was to make people productive. If you just wanted to experiment all day, why the hell were we hired? Somebody really needed to say: guys, we're changing modes. I think I probably needed to hear that multiple times. We had investors who got bought out. As one said, "Ev is going to either be remembered as a genius or as an idiot." He was very gracious about it, paid more than he needed to for Odeo and then I believe let many of the investors back in when Twitter got funded. But at the end of the day CRV was the primary backer of the company that built twitter and Union Square is the primary backer of Twitter. Once you change direction, when do you say "this is it" and actually sit down and figure out how you're going to make it happen? Because for a lot of people at the company, so many changes in direction made it hard to know for sure that Twitter really was the new direction.
- anigbrowl 17y agoThis is much, much better than the cliche title suggests.
- tonystubblebine 17y agoWait, what? Do I need to retitle it?
- aditya 17y agoHow's the new title? ;-)
- tonystubblebine 17y agoI think it would narcissistic to say that I like it better. But I'm glad you like the post. Thanks for posting it here.
- drusenko 17y agoFYI -- your blog seems to be down: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.stubbleblog.com http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.stubbleblog.com Would like to read the post but can't, currently :)
- tonystubblebine 17y agoLooking into it. It's back up now, but if it goes back down here's the google cache: http://74.125.47.132/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.stubbleblog.com%2Findex.php%2F2009%2F06%2Fthe-real-lessons-from-twitter%2F&aq=f&oq=&aqi= http://74.125.47.132/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2...
- anigbrowl 17y agoDefinite improvement :) Didn't know Mr Stubblebine was here. Good job, sir.
- dugmartin 17y agoBest blog post I've read here in a while.
- Tichy 17y agoI think it is very interesting that they did internal Hackathons to find a new direction for the company. Wish I could just get together with a group of people and do hackathons until we hit on the right thing.
- tonystubblebine 17y agoI'm imagining the founder equivalent of speed dating where founders pair off to do hacks and then evaluate who they would hack with in the future.
- aditya 17y agobut then you need founders who write code... :-)
- aditya 17y agoI think Odeo was unique in this regard. I think it comes from having an engineering driven culture, rather than a management driven culture. Also, it is very surprising but a lot of startups still think that ideas should come from the top, rather than anywhere in the organization. I could write a whole book on this.
- tonystubblebine 17y agoI think it came from the Odeo founders, Ev and Noah. When they have an idea, they can be very forceful personalities. But when they're unsure, they both were good listeners and open to all possibilities.