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The value of hard work and persistence
How to stay focused on long-term goals
How to learn from failures and setbacks
Noahâs vibrating phone led him to think of the brain impulses that cause a muscle to twitch. So he continued flipping through the twâs in the dictionary. Twister. Twist tie. Twit. Twitch. Twitcher. Twitchy. Twite. And then, there it was.
A verb. Twitter. Twitter. Twittered. Twittering. Twitters. - âThe light chirping sound made by certain birds.â
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MORE IDEAS ON THIS
The producer explained that Ev would be interviewed by Oprahâ in front of seven million viewers. This would all follow Oprah sending her first tweet on live television.Â
âHi, itâs Friday Live and Iâm on Twitter for the first time,â Oprah said cheerfully.Â
âHowâd it come to light?â Opr...
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At that point Ev had received more offers to buy Twitter than he could count. Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, a former vice president, celebrities, and rappers had all made overtures toward Twitter, and each time Ev had said no.Â
But it wasnât about the money for Ev, it was about prote...
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Mike Abbott, who was vice president of engineering at Twitter,Â
âI need your help,â Abbott told Jack. âWe have no direction at Twitter, and I donât know where the company is going.â
The problem was Ev. He was still unable to make a decision. He communicated infrequently with the board...
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 In December 2009, Dick had been instrumental in striking a deal with Google and Bing to make the nearly forty million tweets being sent across the site each day viewable on their respective search engines. In exchange Google had agreed to pay $ 15 million to Twitter. Microsoft would hand over $ ...
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Jack was hired as a freelancer almost immediately and fit into the culture of Odeo seamlessly. He had a hacker mentality, no degree, and a love for programming.Â
The site they had just unintentionally launched hoped to be the Webâs central destination for podcasts. All of this would be comp...
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Noah was writing an application called Odeo or audio blogger, that allowed anyone to post voice-based posts to blogs from a phone.Â
As soon as Ev started cashing out his Google stock, Noah asked if he would invest a few thousand dollars to help kick-start the idea.Â
Ev agreed to finan...
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A simple status updater( jacks view) in 140-character posts was too ephemeral and egotistical to be sustainable.
A news updater(Evâs view) in 140-character spurts was just a glorified newswire.
Though they didnât realize it, the two together were what made Twitter different.Â
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Noah was also becoming paranoid about Ev.
Ev explained Noah . â I donât think we can work together well on it.âÂ
Ev ordered Noah to resign from Twitter.
Noah faced with no other choice and no one in his corner, Noah resigned.
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Noah was trying desperately to sift ideas out of the employees to save the company. Jack mentioned his âstatusâ concept.Â
In a small snippet of text, people could note if they were available, in a meeting, or just busy, so their online friends knew their whereabouts.Â
It was about co...
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âWhat are other use cases?â Dom asked. âMy mom could use it too,â Jack said, so she could see what he was up to.Â
On March 21, 2006, at 11: 50 A.M., Jack tweeted, âjust setting up my twttr,âÂ
  âOh this is going to be addictive,â Dom wrote. âWishing I had another sammich,â Biz wrote. ...
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But Biz was genuinely confused. âI donât understand how they can just throw away this guyâs entire career,â âDonât these people (investors) have feelings?â Although Biz was a cofounder of Twitter, he had never really had much power at the company. He had never understood what drove the âmoney guy...
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By 2013, with a net worth of a billion dollars, it might seem like Jack had âwon.â But to some of the people who knew him when he arrived at Odeo eight years earlier, it seemed quite the opposite. Back then he had joined the company as a quiet young programmer in search of friendships and a mento...
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Biz was starting to grow frustrated , as Jack would often tell people in these interviews that he was the âinventorâ of Twitter; the sole creator of an idea that actually had many creators.Â
 âBut I invented Twitter,â Jack said. âNo, you didnât invent Twitter,â Ev replied. âI didnât invent ...
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Jack had been behind it all. Moving chess pieces, ten moves ahead. This was Jackâs revenge.Â
Like Jack two years earlier and Noah two years before that, Ev was officially out of a job at Twitter. And like his two cofounders, he was completely powerless to do anything about it.Â
Like J...
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April 2008 Jack fired Blaine in an attempt to show Ev his control of the company.Â
Blaine had been the core programmer of Twitter, and without him Jack had no idea how to fix certain issues. Â
Ev pulling on one end, Jack on the other, Biz trying his best not to get caught in the midd...
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Jack had the germ of the idea, of people sharing their status,
Noahâs vision of a service that could connect people who felt alone, and a name that people would remember, Twitter,
Evâs financial support and Silicon Valley fame,
Bizâs ethical stance on protecting and standing ...
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Ev released the diary Web site to the world. He called it Blogger, a word that had not existed until then. He believed it would allow people without any computer-programming knowledge to create a Web log, or blog.Â
He had a vision for Blogger, where anyone could have their own blog, the equ...
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There was one person who was not Jackâs biggest fan: Ev. He believed Jack didnât work hard enough. Wasnât in the office enough. Was distracted by his hobbies.Â
Jack had also started a new ritual called Tea Time: a weekly event for Twitter staff that was held on a Friday afternoon to discuss...
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âCampbell is the real deal,â âHeâs coached Eric Schmidt, Larry and Sergey, and Steve Jobs. Heâs a fucking legend.â Ev agreed to the meeting.Â
Whatâs the worst thing I can do as CEO to fuck the company up?â Without skipping a beat, Campbell responded: âHire your fucking friends!âÂ
Ev a...
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 Jack had also made one of the most important decisions for Twitter to date: limiting the length of tweets. âWeâre going to standardize this at 140 characters.Â
Ev dictated that Jack would be CEO. Biz, Jack, and Ev would be cofounders. Goldman would be the vice president of product.Â
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Campbell said âThe board doesnât wasnât you to be CEO. They want you to step down. They want you out.âÂ
He explained, the company needed a new type of CEO who could focus on revenue and take Twitter public.Â
Ev had no idea whom to trust. How long ago had the board decided to fire him?...
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A couple of years before that theyâd been just nobodies:
Jack with blue dreadlocks, wheeling a stroller around Berkeley, a hacker nanny sleeping on couches.
Biz, who was afraid to fly on airplanes, juggling credit cards to pay the rent with fifty thousand dollars in debt.
Ev liv...
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Ev took a deep breath and replied. âYes. I want to be CEO. I have experience running a company, and thatâs what Twitter needs right now.âÂ
âJackâs out,â he said. âThe board met. This is the final decision. They want me to be CEO, and Jack will become chairman,â
Ev was the majority sh...
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As the mediaâs Next Steve Jobs, jack was too big and too powerful for anyone to dent his version of history that had appeared in thousands of press outlets. He started spending more time with celebrities.Â
Biz was the last cofounder to leave. On June 28, 2011, he announced that he was leavi...
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Ev sat down with his wife and they asked each other the following questions: How can we raise our children to never act this way? How can we raise them to be honest and caring? They came up with two solutions.
First, When his kids grow up, they will be responsible for giving it away to char...
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Jack had another side project too: REVENGE. Unlike Noah, who was doing his best to forget and forgive the betrayal by his friends, Jack ran in the opposite direction, unable to flush the resentment he felt toward Ev, the board, and now Biz too, out of his mind.Â
Each time he read an article...
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Jack experimented with Jobsâs round glasses and cloned the mantra of a daily uniform.
He copied many of Jobsâs decisions.
Jack heard that Jobs didnât consider himself a CEO but rather an âeditor.â
Soon Jack started referring to himself as âthe editor, not just the CEOâ of Squar...
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All of the early employees and Odeo investors we talked to also agree that no one at Odeo was more passionate about Twitter in the early days than Odeoâs cofounder, Noah Glass.
âSome people have gotten credit, some people havenât. The reality is it was a group effort. I didnât create Twitte...
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Ev set off to Hawaii with his familyâ a vacation. While away, sitting by the pool, thinking about the psychological trauma of the past several months, he realized he didnât really have a role at Twitter after all. He had been fired without being escorted out of the building.Â
After discussi...
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Biz bank account, which once began with a negative symbol, now ends with seven zeros. When people ask Biz about his wealth, he tells them that money rarely changes people; it often just magnifies who they really are. The majority of the money Biz make goes to the Biz and Livia Stone Foundation (a...
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âTwitter was originally conceived as a mobile status update serviceâ an easy way to keep in touch with people in your life by sending and receiving short, frequent answers to one question, âWhatâs happening?â
The perfect equilibrium of two different ways of looking at the world:
"The ...
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