Amazon and Twitter
#hatchingwinners
Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal. By Nick Bilton. Penguin Portfolio; 304 pages; $28.95. Sceptre; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. By Brad Stone. Little Brown; 384 pages; $28. Bantam Press; £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
THESE are heady times in the world of high technology. Twitter’s recent stockmarket debut has been a success, earning it a market capitalisation of about $25 billion after its first day of trading.
Ambitious students are shunning Wall Street and joining obscure tech startups. URL strategies—Silicon Valley shorthand for “Ubiquity first, worry about Revenue Later”—are all the rage again. And venture capitalists are bestowing multi-billion-dollar valuations on fledgling firms bleeding red ink. The hope is that these nascent companies will one day become as wildly successful as firms such as Twitter and Amazon.
These two internet icons are very different from each other, but the stories of their rise from obscurity to global prominence show how the power of a great idea coupled with the power of the internet can produce extraordinary businesses. Their tales are also a reminder that behind the bits and the bytes are human beings, whose vision of the future and outsized egos can make or break the silicon empires they are striving to build.
In Twitter’s case, infighting nearly tore the microblogging company apart on more than one occasion before it finally made it to the stockmarket. “Hatching Twitter” by Nick Bilton, a writer for the New York Times, is a made-for-the-movies account of the personal rivalries that fuelled several epic boardroom battles at the fast-growing startup.
The company began in 2006 as a side project at Odeo, an ailing podcasting business bankrolled by Evan Williams. Once Twitter started to fly, tensions quickly emerged between some of the outfit’s co-founders, who include Mr Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone. Noah Glass, who gave Twitter its name, is the first prominent figure to be defenestrated. Mr Dorsey, who became Twitter’s first chief executive, is subsequently deposed in a coup engineered by the venture capitalists funding Twitter and by Mr Williams, who took the helm. Later, after more secret plotting, Mr Williams gets the boot and Mr Dorsey returns in triumph as Twitter’s executive chairman alongside a new chief executive, Dick Costolo.
Mr Bilton is at his best when describing this turmoil at the top of Twitter. He also captures the thrill of being at a startup whose 140-character messages captivate high-profile people. Al Gore, a former American vice-president, plies Messrs Williams and Stone with alcohol as he tries (unsuccessfully) to get them to sell him a stake in Twitter. Snoop Dogg, a rapper and one of the firm’s “VITs” (Very Important Tweeters), drops by the company’s office and stages an impromptu concert.
The only thing that mars “Hatching Twitter” is the hatchet job it does on Mr Dorsey. Mr Bilton’s sympathies clearly lie with Mr Williams, who is portrayed as a much-loved boss whose vision of Twitter as a tool for talking about what is happening in the world spurs it to greatness. Mr Dorsey, on the other hand, comes across as an embittered soul who unjustly claims credit for the company’s success. Having supposedly alienated friends on his way to the top, he lives alone in San Francisco, his home “an empty glass castle in the sky”. Yet it is his notion of people swapping brief status updates that inspires the creation of Twitter in the first place, and it is his passion that helps drive it forward.
The book also mocks Mr Dorsey’s obsession with Steve Jobs, whose habits he copies. But what is wrong with trying to emulate an extraordinary businessman whose achievements at Apple before his untimely death in 2011 transformed the technological landscape?
If Jobs has a successor as disrupter-in-chief it is arguably Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon. In “The Everything Store” Brad Stone, a reporter at Bloomberg BusinessWeek, recounts Amazon’s transformation from a small online bookseller into an e-commerce behemoth, which has spread its tentacles into new areas such as book publishing, selling cloud-computing services to other firms and producing tablet computers and e-readers.
Mr Stone sees the similarities between Mr Bezos and Jobs. Like Jobs, Amazon’s boss is a demanding taskmaster and micromanager who does not suffer fools gladly. He also commands such faith from his shareholders that they are willing to tolerate wafer-thin profits (or losses) quarter after quarter as the $160 billion company continues its relentless expansion. Unlike Twitter, Amazon has had the same boss since its inception almost 20 years ago—one who has found time on the side to build his own spacecraft company (Blue Origin) and to acquire a prominent newspaper (the Washington Post).
So there is little boardroom drama to liven up Mr Stone’s pages. But his book has triggered a bust-up online. MacKenzie Bezos, Mr Bezos’s wife, posted a review on Amazon giving it the lowest possible rating, and alleging that it contains a number of factual errors. Mr Stone has published a defence, claiming he spoke to “more than 300 people” for his book, including “current and former Amazon employees, rivals, partners, and customers”. Such controversy will no doubt be good for sales of a tome that paints a fascinating picture of a remarkable tech entrepreneur just coming into his (Amazon) prime. Readers know just where they can get their copy.
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