Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone shares how he Secretly Delivers the Truth
The Follow-Up Blog highlights industry trends, insights and keys to success from today’s top sales leaders and executives. Today we caught up with Biz Stone, currently back at Twitter to “re-ignite the fire in its belly” after several years away building other large-scale companies to help people communicate.
Biz Stone co-founded Twitter, Medium and then Jelly in his quest to develop large scale systems that facilitate the open exchange of information. Biz has been honoured with the International Center for Journalism Innovation Award, INC Magazine named him Entrepreneur of the Decade, TIME listed him as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, and GQ named him Nerd of the Year. I caught up with Biz via email this past week to learn more about his experience disrupting consumer communication platforms and his thoughts on where technology is taking the tools we use to converse.
MH: You’ve helped build Twitter, Medium and now Jelly. It seems your expertise is in digital communication. What sent you on to this journey to disrupt how people communicate and interact online? What part of it is interesting to you?
Biz: I started out wanting to be an artist. In fact, I got a full ride to UMass for “Excellence in the Arts.” It’s a long and funny story but the short version is that about one year into UMass, I was offered a job designing book covers at Little Brown, and Co. in Boston. The other designers all had MFA’s so I figured taking the job would be like fast-forwarding my life — plus I would be working directly with the Art Director which I considered to be learning through apprenticeship.
I did well as a graphic designer and won some awards. When Little, Brown and Co. decided to move to NYC, I opted to stay in Boston and start my own studio. When I was offered $5k to design and build a website in the late nineties, I said yes even though I had no clue how to code even simple HTML. So, I got a book and muddled my way through which lead to more web design gigs.
When my best friend graduated from Dartmouth College, went into consulting, and hated it, he suggested we start a web company since I was now designing and building sites. So we created and launched Xanga.com in 1999–2000. This made me into an accidental technologist. I was still very much interested in design, illustration, and writing. All of which came in handy developing the social blogging community that was Xanga.
I fell in love with giving others the power to express themselves online without having to learn HTML. I was extremely excited about this idea that I could play a part in the democratization of information.
The most interesting part of all of this journey has been the never ending amazement at how people use these tools in such creative and innovative ways. I’ve long been saying that people are inherently good and if you give them the right tools, they will prove it every day. I still believe, for the most part, that this is true.
What’s a hard lesson you learned early on in your career that helped you navigate tough decisions later on? Did a decision that had a good outcome at Twitter not have the same outcome at, say Medium? Why?
I learned early that the absence of transparency and communication breeds a kind of fear. Not fear in the traditional sense, but fear in the world of business. In other words, a company and board that doesn’t hear from it’s CEO fears the worst. So communication is everything. Even if the communication is, “We’re doing very badly right now but we’re working on it.”
Can you tell me about a time or event in your life where you had to deal with adversity? Where things didn’t go as planned? How did you overcome these obstacles? Did this learning help you out in your professional career?
I was born poor with a mother and three sisters. I started working at the age of eight to contribute to the family. However, my mother had been adopted by people who left her their home in the affluent town of Wellesley, MA when they passed. So, despite being poor, I had the advantage of going to a very good public school system. And I had to develop a good sense of humor about things like why I wore the same shirt every day, or why my lunch tickets were colored differently than those who paid. Humor has helped me immensely in my career. I’m fond of saying that humor is a secret delivery mechanism for truth.
You’ve re-written the rule book for how consumers interact with one another with software — have you ever considered attacking this problem in the B2B space? Do you see any opportunity to disrupt business communication as well?
Sure, I’ve thought about it. I invested in a company called Intercom which was initially built on the idea of providing businesses a simple way to communicate with their customers. I thought it was brilliant given my early learnings about the power of communication. At Jelly, we talked frequently about building “Jelly@Work” which would have been the same app but designed only for folks whose email ended in @apple.com, for example. We thought it would be great because no question would ever need to be answered twice. I’m convinced the future of work is all about decentralization and there is a lot of room for innovation to make a disperse team feel like one tight team.
You’ve mentioned in the past you believe artificial intelligence (AI) will revolutionize how we interact with computers. Will this change be bigger shift than mobile’s impact on society?
Absolutely. Machines learning from humans, machines building machines, our ability to speak to machines and have them understand us and for them to speak to us and have us understand them is incredible. In the best case scenario, this impact is far bigger than that of mobile and we enter a new age of enlightenment. However, there is a very real potential of a darker version of the future when it comes to AI.
When you break down AI into it’s buckets of Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Computer Vision (CV), which do you think will be the biggest driver of disruption? Do achievements in only one matter without complementary advancements in another?
When it comes to AI, I don’t think achievements in specific verticals like ML, NLP, or CV make a difference. There is overlap between all of them. At a high level we’re talking about maths and algorithms that can recognize patterns and learn from each other at an incredible speed — human length generations in minutes. And these AI, are beginning to learn at a level that our best and brightest minds don’t even understand.
Anything else you’d like to share with The Follow-Up Blog community? This could be what’s coming up for you personally or your next company idea, or it could be your thoughts on what you think is your secret to continued to success!
My secret to success has been to find good people that are also great people and then stick with those people. I never chased money, or power, or a particular institution. I found amazing people and stuck with them through thick and thin. It just happens that one side effect was financial success beyond my wildest dreams. But I’ve learned so much and continue to learn but sticking with good people.
Thanks so much for the opportunity to learn about your journey from Wellesley to Jelly! To our readers, if you found this interview on The Follow-Up Blog helpful, please applaud and share with your colleagues!