All Is Fair in Love and Twitter

I'm Twitter user #6, was the head of engineering at Odeo when Twitter was built, and was one of four people in the management meetings (along with Ev, Noah, and Tim).

Some of this story rings true and some of it is total nonsense.

To my understanding of it, Twitter's staffing is much more a story of meritocracy. People were pushed out or replaced as the company outgrew their ability. Every replacement ended up being an upgrade. That includes Noah to Jack to Ev. And that also includes the turnover on the early tech team once the Summize team was acquired.

Twitter grew 1400% in 2007. That's a lot of growth and it's not necessarily a knock on someone to be a good fit early but to be over their head by the end of that year.

> Dorsey’s story evolved over the years. He would tell Vanity Fair that the idea for Twitter went back to 1984, when he was only 8 years old. A “60 Minutes” segment reported that Dorsey founded Twitter because he “was fascinated by trains and maps” and how cities function. Later, he would explain that he first presented the idea, fully realized, on a playground in South Park. All along, Dorsey began casting himself in the image of Steve Jobs, calling himself an “editor,” as Jobs referred to himself, and adopting a singular uniform: a white buttoned-up Dior shirt, bluejeans and a black blazer.

I'm intrigued by how pathologically obsessed Jack Dorsey seems to be with Steve Jobs. The more I learn about both men, the more I'm convinced that Dorsey is simply trying to copy Jobs in everything he does, from the design of Square's hardware and software to even the way he acts and talks in public.

I used to admire Dorsey greatly (and I still do to an extent), but the more I learn about him, the more I feel like I've been duped and manipulated, somehow. Turns out that a lot of what he said about founding Twitter was a lie at worst and a gross exaggeration at best.

I won't complain too much as long as he's making awesome products, but I can't help but feel a bit uncomfortable knowing that this guy I used to admire is actually a sociopath. A highly functional one to be fair, but a sociopath nonetheless.

> "Seven years after it was founded, the company with a catchy name had more than 2,000 employees"

This sticks out to me more than anything else in the article. I had no idea Twitter had such a massive headcount.

Does anyone have an idea as to the division of labor? 30% infrastructure, 10% design, etc.

My naivety must be showing, but I have a hard time imagining what all those engineers are up to.

EDIT: Sorry for the confusion. I realize that all 2000 employees aren't necessarily engineers, but I think it's safe to assume >1000 are probably in some sort of development role. To me, that still seems like a fairly large engineering base.

"For the ones that make it, success often comes down to a lot of luck." (For example, YouTube was worth way more than other video sharing sites; Twitter had more impressive people joining it than other status-posting apps.)

Saying "there were multiple companies in once space, so the one that was successful was the lucky one" seems awfully hand-wavy to me. There could be dozens of reasons why some succeeded and some failed.

I don't know why everyone glorifies silicon valley so much. I could never work in a place where people would stab their own grandmother in the back just to get up one rung.

My takeaway (if the stuff printed is true) is that Dorsey is the Don Draper of Silicon Valley. That's not a knock on him. He figured out early on that reputation and image matter more than playing by the rules of some no-longer-meritocracy, and he focused primarily on his personal image at the expense of all else.

So he prioritized his reputation over that of Twitter, if the OP is accurate. Good for him! It worked out, didn't it? From my read, he never-- not once-- tried to lash our or hurt Twitter. What he did do is use it to maximize its benefit to his reputation. People need to do that sort of thing if they want to be relevant in the Valley; it is, at this point, a reputation economy. Dorsey's "going rogue", if that is a correct story, was his having the sense to play it as one.

If it sounds like I'm being facetious, that's not my intent. Twitter's making a lot of people rich in a way that hurts no one. Even the "pushed out" people are going to have a nice windfall and stirling careers in the Valley. I can't say the same of the two startups (one failed, one still-unknown) where I worked, both of which ended up malignantly hurting people who worked at them.

Wow some companies are really shark eat shark worlds!

Dorsey comes off as particularly machiavellian. First betraying Glass and then managing to oust Evans.