Things a Little Bird Told Me

Biz Stone was one of Twitter’s co-founders, and this is his own account, written as a memoir with lessons attached. The subtitle varies by edition. The paperback calls it Creative Secrets from the Co-Founder of Twitter.

What it’s about

Stone describes a path through early internet companies, including the blogging era, to the point where he and his colleagues, among them Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams, created Twitter in 2006. It began as a side project inside Odeo, a podcasting startup that was struggling at the time. He tells the story of how a very small idea, short messages that fit in a text message, grew into a service millions of people used.

The book is organized as short chapters. Each pairs a piece of his story with a point about creativity, opportunity, or how to work with other people. His recurring themes are that creativity can be practiced and renewed, that luck is something you can put yourself in the way of, and that kindness and empathy are practical qualities in business and not just nice ones.

Why it belongs on coldboot

The articles here stop at the 1990s for now, but Twitter belongs to the stretch that comes next, when the web turned from pages into services people lived on. This is a first-person look at how one of those services started, written by someone who was there.

Keep in mind

It is a founder’s memoir and not a neutral history. Who counts as a co-founder, and how much credit each person deserves, is itself disputed. For a more critical and detailed reconstruction, Nick Bilton’s Hatching Twitter (2013) tells the story as a journalist, with the conflicts left in. Read Stone for his perspective and his optimism.

Edition linked: paperback (Grand Central Publishing, 2015).