FT.com
November 6, 2013 5:22 pm
Review by Hannah Kuchler
Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, by Nick Bilton (Penguin Portfolio, $28; Sceptre, £14.99)
Any book that starts with a description of a chief executive on his knees, throwing up into a bin after being betrayed by friends and investors is unlikely to be a traditional founder’s tale.
Forget your classic bedroom-to-billionaire narrative, often so dull that it must be perked up with allusions to a girl who got away: the story of Twitter’s foundation is a full-on saga of back-stabbing. And it is published the same week as the social media company’s initial public offering.
In Hatching Twitter , New York Times journalist Nick Bilton traces the company’s history from an idea so simple no one really knew what to do with it to a service equally famous for celebrities and revolutionaries.
Suddenly, the start-up has got to a stage where Snoop Dogg is dropping in to start an impromptu party while the executives are out of the office; or a founder is struggling to distract a visiting Dmitry Medvedev, then president of Russia, when the site goes down just as he is due to send his first tweet.
Corporate suitors start turning up, from big technology companies such as Google, Microsoft – and several times – Facebook, to the more unlikely including Al Gore, former US vice-president, who drinks shots with the founders as he tries to persuade them into a deal.
However, the story focuses on two of the three official co-founders – Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey – as they turn against each other, and first Dorsey, then Williams, get pushed off the perch of CEO. It is Williams who ends up vomiting.
Unusually for Silicon Valley, neither Williams, Dorsey, nor the under-the-radar co-founder Biz Stone, still work day-to-day at Twitter and only Williams retains a stake that is more than 5 per cent.
The book ends just as Dick Costolo, current CEO, takes over. Since then, the co-founders seem to have made peace, appearing in public together for the sake of the forthcoming IPO.
Bilton is at his best when he uses tweets, photos and videos as primary source material, cutting through the founders’ competing myths to show at first hand how the company developed.
The first tweets show the start-up’s staff saying goodnight to each other on Twitter like “a bunch of children at a sleepover”, and trace how its power as a medium to discuss live events and news became clear during a small Bay Area earthquake.
But the story suffers when he sinks into cliché to make clear that his sympathies lie with Williams and not Dorsey. Williams is the boss everyone “yearns” to work with, starting life in a lonely town where “his only friends were the crickets”. When Williams sacks someone he is making “shrewd” choices in the interests of Twitter.
Dorsey, however, is cast as personifying the stereotypical “what I had for breakfast” tweet. While few dispute he had the original idea, Bilton gives him little credit because Twitter has evolved into more of a tool to talk about “what’s happening?” than the status updater Dorsey devised.
As CEO, Dorsey is described by Bilton as doing the sums wrong on spreadsheets he keeps to himself. Once kicked out, he is mocked by Bilton for trying to style himself as the latest Steve Jobs, expelled from Apple before a triumphant return.
The clichés climax at the end, where Bilton imagines Chris Hadfield, the tweeting spaceman, looking down on the world in a scene that suggests the author already has one eye on making the movie. Hadfield sees Williams at home, engaged in frequent family time as he tries to bring up decent kids incapable of back-stabbing, while Dorsey is seen friendless “in an empty glass castle in the sky”.
Cringeworthy Hollywood finish aside, this well-timed book successfully mines a story so rich it is destined to be told and retold. Vomit and all.
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