0:01

Support for Land of the Giants comes from Mint

0:03

Mobile. Do you like having a

0:05

deal with hidden fees baked into your traditional

0:07

wireless plan? Didn't think so. Thankfully,

0:10

Mint Mobile is doing things differently.

0:13

Right now, Mint Mobile's plans start at just $15

0:15

a month, and every plan comes

0:17

with unlimited talk and text plus high-speed

0:20

5G, which means you can browse, buy,

0:22

and set up your phone plan totally online.

0:24

I've done this myself with my own money. It's

0:27

easy. To get your new unlimited wireless plan

0:29

for just $15 a month and get

0:31

the plan shipped to your door for free, go

0:34

to mintmobile.com slash

0:36

giants. That's mintmobile.com

0:40

slash giants. Cut your wireless

0:42

bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com

0:45

slash giants.

0:54

Jason Goldman was supposed to be an astrophysicist.

0:56

Instead, he ended up dropping out of grad

0:58

school and working at internet companies. I'd

1:01

been extremely online before that was even a thing.

1:04

I was like a nerd from way back in

1:06

the early 90s. Goldman got a job

1:08

at Google and eventually ended up at a

1:10

dream gig for a young tech worker in

1:12

San Francisco. He was head of product

1:15

at Twitter.

1:17

One problem, though. Twitter barely

1:19

worked at all during this time. If

1:22

you used Twitter back then, you will remember the

1:24

fail whale. This is a cartoon

1:26

that showed a flock of birds carrying a whale. And

1:29

you got it when you opened the Twitter homepage if the

1:31

platform was down, which happened

1:34

a lot of the time. Most

1:36

of the time, Twitter went down unexpectedly.

1:38

Every so often, it went down on purpose,

1:41

like in June 2009. I

1:43

wrote a blog post saying, hey, we're

1:45

taking a downtime. We'll be down from 2

1:48

to 3 a.m. on Saturday morning,

1:51

West Coast time, in order to do this critical database

1:53

upgrade, which was critical. We're telling the

1:55

world we need to

1:56

take a break for a couple hours to

1:59

fix the thing. because we're failing all the

2:01

time. Yeah, because we're failing all the time.

2:03

Lots of people on Twitter would complain whenever

2:05

the service went down. But this time, the

2:08

Twitter team got an unusual request from

2:10

the State Department. We'd like you

2:12

not to do this if you can. We understand it's important,

2:15

but there's a thing going on,

2:17

and this is really bad timing for it. Could you

2:19

do it another time? The reason that

2:21

the US State Department wanted Twitter to stay

2:23

up was that Iran had just gone through a presidential

2:26

election,

2:27

and there were very believable accusations of fraud

2:29

and protesters had taken to the streets.

2:32

And people in Barack Obama's administration

2:34

thought protesters were using Twitter.

2:36

They felt like going down

2:39

would negatively affect the protesters'

2:41

ability to organize.

2:44

When Twitter got that request from the

2:46

State Department, it was not a tech

2:48

giant. It was a three-year-old

2:51

accidental company staffed almost

2:53

entirely by inexperienced young men.

2:56

But when the Obama administration looked at Twitter, it

2:58

didn't see a bumbling startup. The State

3:01

Department saw Twitter as a bastion of free

3:03

speech, a place where journalists and dissidents

3:05

and regular people shared information from all

3:08

over the world. This

3:10

may be hard to remember, but back in 2009, it

3:13

was totally normal for serious, important

3:16

people to talk about Twitter like this. All

3:18

kinds of people. Here's

3:20

a 2009 quote from Mark Fiefely,

3:23

a former official at the National Security

3:26

Council.

3:27

Quote,

3:27

Without Twitter, the people of Iran

3:30

would not have felt empowered and confident

3:32

to stand up for freedom and democracy.

3:34

End quote. Twitter, Fiefely

3:37

argued, should win the Nobel Peace Prize. The

3:40

Obama administration's request worried

3:42

Goldman and Biz Stone, one of Twitter's

3:45

co-founders. If they did something the State

3:47

Department asked them to do, did that mean they

3:49

were taking sides in an Iranian election?

3:52

We didn't want to pretend that we knew what

3:54

was going on, particularly with respect

3:56

to geopolitical affairs. Biz and I had

3:58

a real talk about this. at the time,

4:00

like a real like, can you believe this is

4:02

what we're doing right now? Like, can you believe

4:04

it? Like, we're not that smart.

4:07

Goldman and Stone did what Washington asked

4:09

and Twitter stayed up. And over in Iran,

4:12

well, that's the thing. This

4:14

role was minimal and it didn't, it was

4:17

in promise. It was a listening word of mouth that

4:19

organizers use in order to bring

4:21

people in the streets. Baba Krahimi

4:23

is a professor of communication, culture and

4:25

religion at the University of California,

4:28

San Diego.

4:29

In 2009, he went to Iran to study online

4:31

political life.

4:33

And when the protest kicked off, he ended up doing lots

4:35

of TV interviews from Tehran.

4:37

He found that TV networks thought what the State Department

4:39

thought.

4:40

That Twitter was driving events inside the

4:42

country. Protesters

4:45

aren't only sending video and photos,

4:47

but live updates from the demonstrations

4:50

using a website called Twitter.

4:52

I mean, I remember one Fox News reporter

4:55

asked me, what's your view of Twitter

4:57

in Iran? And

4:59

at that time, I actually didn't know

5:02

much about Twitter because I haven't really

5:04

used it at that time. I didn't see any Iranians use

5:06

it. I didn't encounter it much. I kept

5:08

talking about Facebook, but Twitter was somehow

5:10

pushed in our conversations. And

5:13

much of it had to do with, again, this

5:15

basic question, how Iranians

5:18

are using internet or Twitter.

5:21

That was the big question everyone wanted to know.

5:23

To be clear, people outside Iran were

5:25

certainly using Twitter. They were trying to focus

5:28

attention on what was happening inside Iran.

5:31

The State Department, the media, Iranian expats,

5:33

they all thought Twitter was central

5:35

to protests in Iran because they were

5:37

on Twitter and that's where they learned about the protests.

5:41

But to protesters on the ground, Twitter

5:43

was nowhere near as important as it looked from

5:45

the outside. I

5:47

remember this period really well.

5:49

I was spending a lot of time reporting on Twitter, the

5:51

company back then, and I was using

5:53

Twitter a ton.

5:55

And I was one of those people that felt like Twitter

5:57

was important. But also

5:59

I couldn't tell you.

5:59

exactly why that was.

6:02

Turns out the folks at the State Department were in the same

6:04

boat.

6:08

And to me, that is the story of Twitter, one

6:11

we've been playing and replaying for more than a decade.

6:14

We know it's a big deal, but we don't really

6:16

know how big a deal it is or

6:18

why. And we keep getting it wrong,

6:21

all of us, even now, it

6:23

can still command our attention in inexplicable

6:25

ways. Twitter has become kind of the de

6:27

facto talent square. It's

6:30

important to the function of democracy.

6:32

It's important to the function of the

6:34

United States as a free country and many

6:36

other countries and to help freedom

6:38

in the world. A year

6:41

ago, in 2022, Elon Musk

6:43

became the latest and most significant person

6:46

to fundamentally misunderstand Twitter. He

6:48

bought it for $44 billion, and

6:51

we all know what happened next. If I acquire

6:53

a Twitter, something goes wrong. That's

6:54

my fault 100%. I

6:57

think that will be quite a few hours.

7:03

I'm Peter Cosby. And you're listening to

7:05

Land of the Giants, the Twitter fantasy.

7:15

It's pretty reasonable to say we are at the end

7:17

of Twitter as we know it. For

7:19

one thing, it's now called X, which virtually

7:21

no one calls it, so I won't either. More

7:24

important, Twitter in some form will

7:26

probably still linger on for a while.

7:29

But despite what you've heard, Twitter's not dead

7:31

or dying because of Elon Musk.

7:34

I'd argue the platform had dug its own grave long

7:36

before he showed up to throw dirt on it. Long,

7:39

long before, you can go all the way back to

7:41

the very beginning. Twitter

7:43

began life as an accident. It

7:45

started as a side project of a side project,

7:48

and that afterthought quality has stuck around all

7:51

of its life. But choices people

7:53

in and around the company made in its earliest

7:55

days, and in some cases, choices they didn't make

7:58

helped permanently shape the company's trajectory.

8:01

It's a course that ends with the world's richest man

8:03

buying it and instantly regretting it.

8:05

Here's the quick backstory. Ev

8:08

Williams, a young, idealistic Nebraska

8:10

native, moved to San Francisco in

8:13

the 1990s to join the first web boom.

8:16

Williams co-founded a company to build workplace

8:18

productivity software, but the

8:20

only product they shipped was a side project called

8:23

Blogger. Blogger let anyone with

8:25

a keyboard and internet connection publish

8:27

their thoughts on a blog. And

8:30

Google bought Blogger in 2003.

8:33

Williams went on to co-found another startup

8:35

called Odeo and that was going to do for audio

8:37

what Blogger did for writing. But

8:40

in 2006, Apple made it easy to move

8:42

podcasts onto an iPod, which

8:45

is exactly what Odeo was trying to do. So

8:48

there was no reason for Odeo to exist.

8:51

So at that point it's like, well, you know,

8:53

what are we doing here? That's

8:56

Blaine Cook, one of the engineers who was working

8:58

at Odeo. Since Odeo now needed

9:01

to pivot, it organized a hack day.

9:03

That's a day for their developers to drop everything,

9:05

dream up a new idea, and build a rough

9:07

version of it. One of those developers

9:10

was Jack Dorsey.

9:12

He had an idea for something he called Status.

9:14

He borrowed the idea from instant messenger

9:16

apps like AIM.

9:18

Instant messaging clients had this

9:20

idea of status. So you could say like, I'm

9:22

available or I'm offline, but then you could put

9:24

in some other

9:26

information about what you were up to. Like you might

9:28

say, you know, making dinner or something like that. And

9:31

so Jack's idea was really just take that

9:33

course status update thing

9:36

and then make it something that persists

9:38

that you can actually share.

9:40

Shortly after that status got renamed

9:42

Twitter. Word for the sounds. Birds

9:44

make.

9:45

And that prototype of Twitter, the MVP

9:48

product that gets built in a day, more or

9:50

less. What is the reaction internally? Oh

9:52

my God, this is it? This is a gazillion dollar

9:54

company or is it? Oh, that's interesting.

9:57

I think more on the oh, that's interesting.

9:59

Part of the reason Twitter wasn't an obvious winner,

10:02

it worked using SMS text messages.

10:05

And at the time, in order to send a text for most

10:07

phones, you needed to tap out the letters

10:10

using the number pad. Tap a key once

10:12

for A, twice for B, three times for

10:14

C. This was deeply annoying,

10:17

and it was not something most people ever bothered

10:19

with. Sending and receiving text

10:21

messages also cost money, which

10:24

meant that early on, Twitter lost

10:26

money on every tweet. This is important.

10:29

We're gonna come back to it later.

10:33

Some people got Twitter right away.

10:36

Here's Jason Goldman. Ev

10:38

signs me up for Twitter over

10:40

SMS, and we are having dinner

10:43

on our way to go on a trip together,

10:45

to go to Vegas together. And so all my

10:47

first tweets are from this trip

10:50

that we take together to Vegas. And

10:52

it's like me, like saying, I'm gonna go play poker, and

10:54

Ev saying, like, you know, he's hanging out by the pool. And

10:57

like, I'm like, oh, like, this is like this ambient

10:59

awareness of like what my friends are doing. I

11:01

don't have to like text with them or make a plan. I just

11:03

know what their day is like. And I just

11:06

like, I don't know, just like immediately made sense to me what

11:08

this was gonna be. Remember, this is before

11:10

the iPhone and before the millions of ways

11:13

our phones let us track and communicate with each

11:15

other.

11:16

Facebook existed, but that was where

11:18

you posted pictures from the party you went to last weekend.

11:20

Twitter gave you present tense, actionable

11:23

intel about what your friends were doing now.

11:27

Williams hired Goldman to help decide what

11:29

Odeo's parent company should do next.

11:31

My first decision, or like the first email

11:34

I send, basically as director of product strategy

11:36

is, we shouldn't work on anything besides

11:38

Twitter. Odeo spun off Twitter as

11:40

its own company. Williams didn't

11:42

want to run it day to day, so the founders held

11:44

a meeting to decide who would be CEO. It's

11:48

principally Jack's idea. And so

11:50

Jack becomes the CEO, and

11:52

basically everyone else ends up going to work there.

11:55

Jack Dorsey had never run a company.

11:57

He had zero management experience.

11:59

And at the time he was considering quitting tech

12:02

and becoming a fashion designer.

12:04

Jack was always a bit of a cipher.

12:06

John Borthwick is an investor who funded several

12:09

apps that Twitter ended up buying.

12:11

So he got to observe the early Twitter team

12:13

and Dorsey at close range.

12:16

Just very hard to read,

12:18

just hard to know exactly where his head's at.

12:20

And hard to know how much he's

12:23

actually thinking.

12:25

Dorsey loved nightclubs and one of his primary

12:28

use cases for Twitter was to send his friends updates

12:30

about his plans from a noisy bar.

12:32

So it made sense that Twitter's big coming

12:35

out party happened in 2007 at South

12:37

by Southwest. That's the music and culture

12:39

festival that takes place in Austin, Texas every

12:42

spring. There's a tech part too

12:44

and back then it had a real spring break

12:46

vibe for a certain kind of tech person. Who's

12:49

going, what kind of nerds are going

12:52

to Austin in March? Some real

12:54

nerds, man, some real nerds. Like people

12:56

who like writing on the internet, sort of

12:58

in that like kind of early internet culture

13:01

space. And then at the end

13:03

of the tech part, you start seeing all of

13:05

the cool people in leather jackets with

13:07

guitars and like, you know, musical instruments

13:09

show up. You're like, all right, the actually cool people are here

13:11

now. It's time for us to go home. But

13:13

while the tech nerd swarmed Austin, the Twitter

13:16

founders had a captive audience. They

13:18

set up a big screen in the lobby with a live feed

13:20

of tweets about the conference and they gave

13:22

attendees instructions about how to sign up.

13:25

And the tech guys at South by used

13:27

Twitter pretty much as intended.

13:29

They told other tech guys about where to find

13:32

free drinks. The whole structure

13:34

of South by is the yes, there's

13:36

the panels, but it's really about

13:38

like the social scene. And

13:41

you would see this emergent behavior

13:44

where people would be in the bar,

13:46

the scene would be kind of dying down. All

13:48

of a sudden you'd see a bunch of tweets that like something else

13:50

was popping off down the street and you

13:52

would just everyone. I was like, Oh, we're all moving

13:54

over. I saw the tweets and things going on and everyone move

13:57

over. It was just like this idea that you

13:59

could see. people moving because

14:01

of the tweets that they read. And

14:03

it was just like this dominant back

14:05

channel for the

14:08

conference itself. Twitter

14:10

ended up being the big startup coming

14:12

out of South by that year.

14:14

They even won an award for Best New

14:16

Blog. Jack Dorsey gave

14:19

the acceptance speech and he was very

14:21

on brand. I would like to thank everyone

14:23

in 140 Coaches left and I

14:25

just did. Thank you. Thank you.

14:29

So the founders South by proved that Twitter

14:31

could make a crowd of people move like a

14:33

single all knowing organism.

14:35

And that was one early idea of what Twitter was

14:38

gonna be. But it wasn't the only

14:40

vision of what Twitter could be. Around

14:42

this time there were lots of competing ideas even

14:44

inside the company. For

14:46

Ev Williams who'd founded Blogger a decade

14:49

earlier and would go on to found

14:51

Medium,

14:52

Twitter was another place that would make it easy

14:54

for ordinary people to say what's on their

14:56

mind.

14:57

Here's Williams in an interview from 2010. The

15:00

way we described on the homepage was a way to keep

15:02

up with friends, family, coworkers by

15:05

answering the question, what are you doing?

15:07

Another version of what Twitter could be was not

15:09

a platform at all but a protocol

15:11

like email.

15:13

No one owns email but it's one of the basic

15:15

languages of the internet. Allows people

15:17

in different parts of the world using software and devices

15:20

made by different companies to talk to

15:22

each other. Here's Jason Goldman again.

15:24

Jack really believed I think in this protocol

15:27

notion of the product and this

15:30

public good notion of the product like describing

15:32

Twitter as like the public town square or

15:34

like this protocol layer of the internet. But

15:36

protocols don't usually make tons of

15:38

money. And at that moment right

15:41

after South by Southwest, Twitter

15:43

started looking like it might make some people

15:45

very rich.

15:46

Yahoo offered $12 million for the

15:49

company. The founders turned the offer down.

15:51

They thought Twitter was worth $100 million at least.

15:55

Venture capitalists agreed.

15:58

Twitter started raising round after round. of

16:00

VC money starting in 2007.

16:02

They needed that money to add servers, to

16:04

hire people, to pay for those SMS

16:07

fees.

16:08

But taking that money meant the dream

16:10

of an open protocol

16:11

was dead.

16:13

Once you've agreed to become a VC company,

16:15

the VCs have a very specific

16:18

contractual structural

16:20

idea about like how

16:22

this is gonna play out, which is they're

16:25

investing to get an outsized

16:28

return, 10 X or more in

16:30

the next seven plus years, or

16:32

it goes to zero. Like those are the outcomes they're

16:34

optimizing for. It's like, we're not really

16:37

interested in a double here. Like we're not really interested

16:39

in like, we put in $5 million and

16:41

it comes back $10 million. How

16:43

seriously were those discussions happening? That

16:46

maybe it could be something else. It wasn't

16:48

happening at a sufficient level of detail to obviously

16:51

avoid future pain. I

16:53

think this is a really critical kind of hallucination

16:58

on all of our parts. Like we all kind of

17:00

saw what we wanted from this thing. Twitter

17:02

was a little bit like

17:03

Jack in that you could look into

17:05

its eyes and see whatever you wanted to see.

17:08

That's investor John Borthwick again. Some

17:11

people would look at it and say, oh God, this

17:13

is like short form email. Others

17:15

would look at it and say, this is the future

17:18

of communications. Others would look at it

17:20

and say, this is the public square. Twitter

17:23

didn't actually state what they were.

17:25

And so they could be many things

17:28

to many different people.

17:31

For a while, the Twitter board looked

17:33

into Jack Dorsey's eyes and saw a

17:35

visionary co-founder that could run a visionary

17:37

company. According to hatching Twitter,

17:40

Nick Bilton's definitive history of the company's early

17:42

days, Dorsey hadn't run anything before.

17:45

And it turned out he wasn't good at running Twitter back then.

17:47

So Twitter's board replaced him with Ev Williams,

17:50

his co-founder in 2008.

17:52

This was the beginning of a carousel of CEOs

17:54

at the company. A

17:57

lot of Twitter's early adopters lived in San Francisco

17:59

or Silicon Valley. Valley and they worked in tech.

18:02

Right behind them were journalists like Jay Wortham,

18:04

who now writes for the New York Times Magazine and hosts

18:06

the podcast Still Processing. Back

18:09

then Wortham worked at Wired.

18:11

I was a research back-checking intern, berm,

18:13

berm, berm, and you

18:16

know, I mean I think the early Twitter offices

18:18

we could see from the Wired offices,

18:20

like I think it was all in downtown San

18:22

Francisco. For Wortham,

18:24

like a lot of early users,

18:26

Twitter served as a kind of surrogate social

18:28

life.

18:29

Now I'm a little bit more of an extrovert. When

18:31

I was younger I was such an introvert. It was a much

18:33

easier way for me to talk to people, to share

18:36

about myself, to sort of learn about the world.

18:38

The thing that Twitter replicated for me

18:40

that really hooked

18:42

me was the feeling of being in an AOL

18:45

chat room and just always seeing

18:47

what people were talking about. And it's the most

18:50

intoxicating thing and they know that.

18:52

Twitter offered a chance to join the

18:54

conversation and that distinguished Twitter

18:57

from other social platforms.

18:59

Most people were not able

19:01

to share their thoughts in

19:04

real time in any meaningful way, right? And

19:06

if you're posting on Facebook, it's probably

19:08

to a very small limited group of people

19:10

that you've agreed to be quote friends with. Twitter

19:13

on the other hand, I mean, it's just a free-for-all.

19:16

So if you're someone who has any

19:18

opinion or any thoughts about

19:20

anything, all of a sudden you

19:22

have this currency that you didn't

19:24

have anywhere else and nobody could keep you

19:26

from that. It was a way

19:29

that you could be heard and seen

19:32

that we've never really experienced before.

19:35

Before long, actual bona fide

19:37

celebrities started showing up on the site

19:39

and jumping into chats with normies.

19:41

And I think that was also part of the early

19:44

intoxication, right? Like it was removing

19:47

all these barriers between people that normally

19:49

existed and that was a buy-in. I remember

19:51

this

19:52

was a rock

19:54

guy named Sebastian Bach.

19:56

The lead singer from Skid Row just joined

19:58

a conversation that was heavy. having one. So he might

20:01

even dunk down and be like, this is amazing.

20:03

I don't even care about Skid Row or Sebastian Bach,

20:05

but he's famous. He's now participating in

20:07

a conversation that I'm having. That's

20:09

wild. It's wild.

20:10

Yeah, it's wild. And I

20:13

do think in the beginning people

20:14

talked a lot about Twitter as like this

20:16

cocktail party. You never really knew who you were going to

20:18

meet. Soon some of those real life

20:21

celebrities were making pilgrimages to the Twitter

20:23

offices in San Francisco. Arnold

20:25

Schwarzenegger came by, Sean Combs,

20:28

that's Puff Daddy to me and maybe to you,

20:30

showed up and asked to become their chief marketing

20:33

officer. If there was one moment

20:35

you could point to when Twitter as celebrity magnet

20:37

really got going, it was Ashton

20:40

versus CNN. In April 2009,

20:42

the actor Ashton Kutcher

20:44

challenged CNN to a race to

20:46

be the first to count on Twitter with 1 million

20:48

followers. And the winner got

20:51

to say they were the winner. CNN

20:53

reported on the race as if it were real news,

20:56

and it became a viral story. Ashton

20:59

won, by the way. He live streamed the moment

21:02

he hit 1 million followers. The

21:04

whole freaking world is watching.

21:06

Come on, people, we can do this.

21:14

I think the fact that it was CNN versus

21:16

Ashton, it was a perfect illustration

21:18

of the flattening of the graph that

21:20

Twitter allowed. Like it was a place where you

21:23

could become famous or talk to famous people.

21:25

What's it like in the company when that

21:27

is happening? And it's you're only a couple

21:30

years out from being this is for

21:31

nerds to tell the other nerds where

21:34

they're having a margarita.

21:35

Right.

21:36

It would have been a lot more enjoyable if I

21:38

was not one of the primary people on

21:41

the hook for the thing to work. And

21:43

it fundamentally did not work

21:45

most of the time. Like the product

21:48

just didn't work. Like

21:50

it was just technically broken for

21:52

the better part of two years.

21:55

Coming up, it's Twitter versus the fail

21:57

whale. But even when the service

21:59

was up and running.

21:59

it still had an existential

22:02

problem.

22:10

Support for the land of the Giants comes from Mint Mobile.

22:14

Traditional phone companies seem to have lost

22:16

the plot when it comes to contracts these days.

22:19

Phone plan appears simple, but then it turns out to be

22:21

a minefield of hidden fees. But

22:24

what can you do? Everybody needs a phone,

22:26

right? So we just have to navigate the financial

22:28

hazards the phone companies throw at us? We do not.

22:31

Mint Mobile is doing things differently. They're

22:33

the first phone company to ditch retail locations,

22:36

which lets them pass those savings on to you.

22:39

You can browse by instead of a phone plan

22:41

totally online. It's an easy

22:43

shopping experience that could save you time and

22:45

money. I've done it with myself with my own

22:48

money. It works. Right now, Mint Mobile's

22:50

plans start at $15 a month, and

22:52

every plan comes with unlimited talk and text,

22:55

plus high-speed 5G. To

22:57

get your new, unlimited wireless plan for

22:59

just $15 a month, and to get

23:01

that plan shipped to your door for free, go

23:04

to mintmobile.com slash

23:06

Giants. That's mintmobile.com

23:09

slash Giants. Cut

23:11

your wireless bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com

23:15

slash Giants.

23:25

Having celebrities like Ashton Kutcher

23:27

and Oprah Winfrey sign up for Twitter was

23:29

great publicity, but

23:31

it put a ton of stress on the company's tech

23:33

infrastructure. Infrastructure that was

23:35

never designed to handle tens of millions

23:37

of users.

23:39

Just because of the nature of the way it was built

23:41

and then how we tried to scale it, it was kind

23:43

of spaghetti.

23:45

Dick Costolo came on as Twitter's chief

23:47

operating officer in 2009.

23:50

He found a platform that was constantly being

23:52

rebuilt. Twitter's code would spring

23:54

a leak, and

23:55

the Twitter people would patch it quickly but temporarily.

23:58

I mean, there was a service. in

24:00

the architecture called the Ashton Kutcher

24:02

service, which had been built when Ashton

24:04

was getting so many followers and it rerouted

24:07

fanning out the tweets to anyone who followed

24:09

Ashton Kutcher through a separate service. It was all

24:11

this tourist stuff that was like not

24:13

the right way to write code at all. Twitter

24:17

needed a stronger tech backbone. More

24:20

servers, more engineers to rebuild the plane

24:22

in mid-flight, and that was going to take

24:24

even more VC money.

24:26

In 2009, Twitter completed a funding

24:29

round that valued the company at a billion

24:31

dollars.

24:33

And here it's important to place Twitter in the

24:35

history of social networking startups. After

24:38

the first web bubble collapsed in 2000, investors

24:40

stayed far away from consumer tech.

24:43

But a few years later, there was buzz around

24:45

web startups that connected people with

24:47

each other and that relied on those users

24:49

to post for free

24:52

things other users would find interesting, and

24:54

that meant zero content costs. These

24:57

things grew fast. They didn't require much money

24:59

to start. And every year, someone

25:01

made one that was more popular. First,

25:04

there was Friendster, which got overtaken by MySpace,

25:06

which Rupert Murdoch bought for $580 million. Then

25:10

MySpace got surpassed by Facebook, which

25:13

was supposed to be worth billions. Investors

25:16

saw a pattern.

25:17

Maybe Twitter would be the next big winner. Here's

25:21

investor John Borthwick again. This

25:23

cycle that

25:25

people get into, which is expectations

25:27

following that competitor, that Facebook competitor,

25:30

raising more capital, expectations

25:32

against that, and that people are basically

25:34

chasing that tail. We want to be Facebook.

25:37

Facebook's really big. In order to get really

25:39

big, we need to hire a bunch of people. We need to raise

25:41

money to do that. And then that then ratchets

25:43

up our expectations. We have to go down that path.

25:46

Right. It wasn't crazy to expect

25:48

in 2010 or 2011 that one

25:50

day Twitter would have a bigger valuation than Facebook.

25:53

Sean Garrett became Twitter's first PR

25:55

guy around this time. Did people feel

25:57

that way inside the company? At the time.

26:00

Like, there was no reason to believe that Twitter can

26:02

be more powerful, especially in a mobile world,

26:04

than Facebook.

26:06

Twitter was growing fast.

26:08

Faster than any other online service. When

26:11

Oprah Winfrey signed up in April 2009, Twitter had

26:13

about 20 million users. A

26:16

year later, there were 100 million. Twitter

26:20

is still small compared to Facebook, but it

26:22

was catching up fast.

26:24

And even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

26:27

feared Twitter might beat Facebook,

26:29

or at least be a real competitor.

26:31

Zuckerberg tried to buy the company in 2008. And

26:35

after Twitter turned him down, Facebook

26:37

spent years trying to compete with Twitter. But

26:40

even if Twitter was growing faster than anything

26:42

else on the internet, there was still one

26:44

big problem with this scenario. When

26:47

Dick Costolo joined as COO

26:50

in 2009, Twitter was barely generating any

26:52

money. You don't have to be profitable

26:55

if you're a tech startup. You're supposed to be growing

26:57

at all costs. And it's okay to make

26:59

zero dollars when you start. The

27:01

generous term for this is pre-revenue.

27:04

But you do eventually have to start showing the

27:06

world how you're going to make real money someday.

27:12

Investors saw a single pathway for revenue,

27:15

selling ads. But advertising

27:17

was never a great fit for Twitter, according

27:19

to John Borthwick.

27:21

The nature of the real-time web is

27:23

that it makes it incredibly hard

27:25

to, if not impossible, to

27:27

be able to target intentful behavior.

27:30

And so the most lucrative

27:32

forms of advertising that we've seen on the internet

27:35

are ones where people basically are placing

27:37

intent into a search engine.

27:39

You want to buy a foldable kayak? So

27:41

you type foldable kayak into

27:43

Google. Then Google serves you ads for

27:46

foldable kayaks. That is the best ad

27:48

business ever.

27:50

The second best business is Facebook's ad business.

27:53

You

27:53

have billions of users who tell you a lot

27:55

about what they like and care about, and you can maybe guess

27:57

that they're interested in foldable kayaks.

28:00

Google and Facebook are marvels

28:02

of modern advertising and they are money printing

28:04

machines. But Twitter didn't

28:06

have the, I would like to buy this thing now feature

28:09

that's built into Google,

28:10

and it didn't have Facebook scale.

28:12

Twitter's investors wanted this revenue

28:15

model. The founders, including CEO

28:17

of Williams, were not so sure. Remember,

28:19

Williams had founded Blogger and sold it to

28:21

Google, the world's biggest

28:24

advertising company. Here's Jason Goldman

28:26

again. We did have ambivalence about

28:28

it. I would say that as ambivalence about

28:30

it is one of the things that primarily got him fired

28:33

at the end of 2010. This

28:35

was Twitter's second leadership change in

28:37

two years. It replaced Williams

28:40

with Costolo, who had been Twitter's COO. Like

28:43

Williams, Costolo had built an early web

28:45

business and sold it to Google. Unlike

28:47

Williams, he was actually focused on making

28:50

money. We just raised money at a billion

28:52

dollar valuation. We got to start taking

28:54

it seriously as a business. But Twitter

28:56

didn't want to rely on banner ads, which were the

28:58

standard format at the time. The

29:01

ad networks, specifically

29:03

Google's and Facebook's ads, were

29:05

mostly what you would consider

29:07

in the right-hand rail and the sort of demilitarized

29:10

zone of content on the web.

29:12

In the middle of your screen, you had a feed

29:15

on the top and on the right rail, you had ads.

29:17

And that works okay on a laptop.

29:19

On mobile, of course, there is

29:22

no right rail, there's the feed.

29:24

If you use Twitter at all in the last 10 years,

29:26

or really any app that has a feed,

29:29

you know the solution.

29:30

Put the ads in the feed.

29:32

So the ad is a tweet. And it can

29:34

be replied to, it can be retweeted, it can be

29:37

favorited, et cetera. Then we can

29:39

have a set of tweets that are content

29:41

tweets and some tweets that are ad tweets, and the

29:43

ad tweets we can insert into the feed. And the ads

29:45

are content. The ads are content, and those

29:47

were the first in-feed ads. This

29:50

is hard to remember now that every ad

29:52

is part of the feed,

29:54

but at the time, promoted tweets really were

29:56

something different.

29:57

They were a new solution to the problem of how to get...

30:00

ads in front of eyeballs and they worked.

30:03

So much so that Facebook and later Instagram

30:05

and everyone else did exactly

30:07

the same thing. So

30:09

Twitter was finally making a little bit of

30:11

money but if it wanted to make real

30:14

Facebook sized money it was gonna have to

30:16

keep growing at a crazy pace and

30:19

that was no longer happening. At

30:21

the beginning of 2009 Twitter was growing faster than anything

30:24

else on the internet

30:26

but by the end of that year it had already begun

30:28

leveling off. The company was having

30:30

to work harder and harder to find new people to

30:32

sign up.

30:33

This it turns out may be the most existential

30:36

Twitter question of them all.

30:38

What if this thing just isn't that interesting

30:41

to most people? So

30:43

why wasn't Twitter for everyone? Let's

30:45

start with the obvious. To make a tweet you

30:48

have to write something and for a lot

30:50

of people

30:51

writing is no fun.

30:52

Twitter is really hard to use.

30:55

Jay Wirtham loved it but Wirtham is a writer

30:57

and most people aren't.

30:58

For all the supposed simplicity

31:01

of the service you just make an

31:03

account and you can write whatever you want it's really

31:06

hard to figure out what works. Like if you're

31:08

just tweeting any thought that comes

31:10

into your head it's not really gonna

31:13

probably land.

31:15

Wirtham is describing this from the perspective

31:17

of someone who wants to share stuff on the internet.

31:20

Just like Twitter's earliest employees and users

31:22

those people assume most people would

31:25

feel the same way.

31:26

Jason Goldman again.

31:28

When we did blogger we fully

31:30

thought that everyone was gonna have a blog. So then

31:32

when we do Twitter I'm like everyone's gonna do

31:34

this. Like this is clearly gonna be the one that everyone

31:36

does because it's short. It's even more seductive

31:38

than blogs. Like you know you could just say I'm

31:40

eating a taco everyone's gonna do this.

31:43

It turns out not everyone's gonna do this. Not

31:45

everyone wants to be a content creator.

31:47

There are some people who really do

31:50

want to be content creators.

31:52

Like journalists who famously like the sound

31:54

of their own voice. Who love getting likes

31:56

and retweets from their peers even more. Or

31:59

like certain celebrities.

31:59

or politicians who imagined they

32:02

could use Twitter to interact directly with fans

32:04

and followers

32:05

or, eventually, a rocket

32:07

company CEO with a bottomless supply

32:10

of takes and means. These folks

32:12

were the super users, the top 10%

32:14

of Twitterers

32:15

who wound up producing 80% of the content

32:17

on the site.

32:18

And gradually, Twitter accepted that reality

32:21

and landed on the idea that Twitter was a great

32:23

place to read other people's tweets,

32:25

even if you didn't want to write them yourself.

32:28

But the next problem was getting the right tweets in front

32:30

of you when you first tried Twitter so

32:32

you could see how great it could be.

32:35

Here's Michael Sippy, who is VP

32:37

of Product under Costolo.

32:39

If you're following the right people, it can be a magical

32:41

product. It can be a ton of fun. But

32:45

coming in, it

32:46

takes a lot of work

32:48

to actually get that follow

32:50

graph correct. And so we spent a lot

32:52

of time and a lot of technology to

32:55

essentially help you tune that initial

32:58

set of accounts that you would follow. And

33:01

that meant a bunch of different hypotheses

33:03

that we had. One is like, well, we

33:05

should do things like Facebook. It's a social

33:07

network. So let's go scrape your address

33:10

book and make sure that there are friends that are there.

33:12

And you can go find. The problem is that

33:15

we did not have the density of Facebook or the

33:17

growth of Facebook. So like your friends weren't

33:19

posting enough and then that's not good enough.

33:22

And if in your first

33:25

hour, day, three days

33:27

of usage, you're not finding value in the

33:30

product and you're not willing to put in the work to go

33:32

find those people to follow, you're

33:34

going to churn.

33:36

Churn is a term you hear a lot

33:38

when you talk to Twitter veterans about the company's

33:40

problems. Churn is when someone tries

33:42

your service and then leaves. And Twitter

33:45

had a lot of churn. And

33:47

for a long time, Twitter acted like it couldn't afford

33:49

to care about churn. It had to care about growing.

33:52

Here's Jason Golden. I think we were too

33:54

focused for too long on growth. And

33:57

this is during the era where growth hacking

33:59

became. a concept and

34:01

this idea that you just needed to get more people in the

34:03

top of the funnel and pay

34:06

less attention to the churn that

34:08

is happening when people bounce out because they simply

34:10

don't get it. There's a pretty good chance that

34:12

you've used Twitter because you're

34:14

listening to this podcast about Twitter. But

34:17

most people have never tried Twitter and

34:19

lots of those who have don't stick around. It's

34:21

so hard to get them to come back. That's

34:23

Michael Sippy again, the former head of product.

34:26

You can get kind of occasional use of a product,

34:29

right? So you'll hear people like, well, I'm

34:31

really only on Twitter during the NBA finals because

34:34

that's when it gets fun. I'll come on for

34:36

the Olympics. I'll come on for the World Cup. I'll come on

34:38

for the elections because that's my interest area

34:40

and that's what it is. Twitter

34:43

did try to make itself more appealing to new

34:45

users and to make it stickier for the ones

34:47

that showed up. And when you look back at Twitter's

34:49

history, there is a long list of kudawudda

34:52

shuddas. It cost a lot

34:54

of big idea was to make Twitter more like

34:57

Facebook. Everyone loves to go to Facebook and

34:59

look at their friend's photos. That's like a massive

35:01

use case. We don't have media at all. Twitter

35:03

needed photos. And in 2010,

35:06

2011, the best place to find photos

35:09

after Facebook was Instagram,

35:11

the super buzzy photo sharing app. We

35:14

had talked to them about buying them before

35:16

I was CEO. And then when I was CEO

35:19

in February 2012, we tried to buy

35:21

them aggressively. We

35:24

couldn't convince them to do it.

35:26

A few months later, Mark Zuckerberg convinced

35:28

the Instagram team to sell to Facebook instead

35:31

for a billion dollars. This

35:32

is a humongous amount of money at the time.

35:35

Twitter did end up buying Vine, an app that

35:37

showed looping six second clips. It

35:40

was intriguing, but no one at Twitter knew exactly

35:42

what to do with it. Michael Sippy.

35:45

How do we take Vine technology and put it

35:47

into the Twitter product and what's that mix and

35:49

how does that work and what does distribution look like and

35:51

how much Twitter branding is there on Vine?

35:53

All of those conversations, I think drove that

35:56

team nuts.

35:57

become

36:00

TikTok, the most powerful entertainment

36:03

app today. But by the end of 2016,

36:05

Snapchat and Instagram had eaten Vine's

36:08

lunch, and Twitter closed it down.

36:11

Twitter tried other ways to build out the platform,

36:13

to give people other stuff to do besides

36:15

writing and reading tweets.

36:17

It launched Periscope, a live video

36:19

service. It launched its own music service,

36:22

except it wasn't really what users wanted out

36:24

of a music service because it didn't really play music.

36:27

You're supposed to use it to follow musicians

36:29

or something,

36:29

there was lots of talk about turning Twitter into a place

36:32

where you could buy and sell stuff.

36:34

To Costolo though, the big one that got away

36:36

is always gonna be Instagram.

36:39

Do you replay like the coulda woulda,

36:41

like what happens if Twitter dies? I

36:43

think we would have won. The fact

36:45

that they had built this just gorgeous,

36:48

beautiful photo sharing application

36:50

that was becoming the dominant photo sharing

36:53

application, which is why we wanted to buy it

36:55

and why Mark did buy it. And we

36:57

owned, if you will, the text space

37:00

and would go on to acquire Vine, which

37:03

was number one in the app store for weeks

37:05

and weeks and weeks right before Instagram launched video

37:07

and sort of knocked it out, would

37:10

have been positioned to have these three apps that are

37:12

perfectly suited to their media types.

37:14

We just didn't get Instagram. And that

37:17

probably would have changed the course of the internet in

37:19

some important way. Maybe,

37:24

or maybe none of those features really mattered. People who were on Facebook wanted

37:26

to use Facebook, not

37:29

Twitter. In 2009, Zuckerberg

37:32

had been so freaked out by Twitter that he wanted

37:34

to own it or bury it. But

37:37

eventually Zuckerberg and crew learned

37:39

to stop worrying about Twitter. In

37:42

Nick Bilton's book, Hatching Twitter, Zuckerberg

37:44

describes Twitter's team as lucky incompetence.

37:48

It's as if they drove a clown car into a

37:50

car into a gold mine and fell

37:52

in.

37:53

This wasn't a unique assessment and

37:56

there's a lot of evidence that supports it. Take

37:58

Twitter's CEO musical chairs. For instance,

38:00

in the 15 years before Elon Musk

38:02

bought the company, Twitter had five

38:05

different CEOs, two of whom were

38:07

Jack Dorsey. Lots of startups

38:09

swap out leaders at different times, but

38:11

that's the kind of instability that indicates the company

38:14

fundamentally can't decide what it should

38:16

be.

38:18

To be fair,

38:20

Twitter did make it to an IPO

38:22

in 2013, where Twitter's private

38:24

shares turned into public stock and made tons

38:26

of money for its investors and its early employees.

38:29

But ever since then, Twitter's stock lurched

38:31

and stalled as various managers tried

38:34

unsuccessfully to convince Wall

38:36

Street that Twitter was going to be the next Facebook.

38:39

Twitter did build an ad

38:41

business worth nearly $5 billion a year.

38:44

That sounds like a lot

38:45

until you compare it to Facebook, which

38:47

does $113 billion a year, or Google, which does $224 billion.

38:56

Another reason Elon Musk could buy Twitter

38:58

in 2022 is that unlike tech companies

39:01

like Facebook and Google and Snap, the

39:03

founders didn't control the company's stock, so

39:06

they couldn't fend off an unwanted buyer.

39:09

But the main reason is that Twitter had been public

39:11

for nearly a decade and investors didn't care

39:14

about it anymore.

39:15

They'd heard Twitter's story over and over

39:17

and they weren't buying it. So when the

39:19

world's richest man showed up and wanted to pay

39:22

way more than Wall Street thought it was worth, they

39:25

had no choice but to take the deal. So

39:29

let's spell this out. Deciding

39:31

to take venture money,

39:33

deciding to be an ad business,

39:35

deciding to compare yourself to Facebook

39:37

and losing out on that comparison,

39:40

those are all decisions that led to the real-life

39:42

scenario where Elon Musk owns Twitter.

39:45

And why should we care about what happens

39:47

to Twitter? Objectively speaking,

39:50

it's a tiny company compared to real tech

39:52

giants.

39:53

But...

39:54

Twitter, for better or for worse, has completely

39:57

shaped and participated

39:59

in a conversation for the last 10 years,

40:02

you know, and probably will for the next 10 years. And

40:05

I think that alone is worth just looking

40:07

at. Like, what is this thing that had

40:10

so much power in shaping national

40:12

politics, from elections to social

40:14

movements to even our understanding of

40:16

gun violence? I mean, Twitter has played a massive

40:18

role in that, and there's no denying it.

40:21

This series is called Land of the Giants.

40:23

But Twitter was never a giant, not

40:26

by market cap, not by user numbers. But

40:28

it could exert an influence totally disproportionate

40:31

to its size or its value. Figuring

40:34

out how exactly Twitter commanded that

40:36

power, and what exactly that

40:38

influence was,

40:40

those are questions that have flummoxed a lot of smart

40:42

people. And that's why we're here, to

40:45

try our best to provide some answers. Because

40:47

there is one thing I'm certain about. Twitter,

40:50

for all its flaws and in all its glory,

40:53

could only exist in a certain time, and that

40:55

time is winding down.

40:58

So while it's still here, let's talk about why

41:00

Twitter mattered,

41:01

and what that tells us about what comes

41:04

next.

41:17

Audio clips from AlgaeZero, the TED

41:20

conference, South by Southwest, and Marketplace.

41:23

Land of the Giants, the Twitter fantasy, is

41:25

a production of Vox and the Vox Media

41:28

Podcast Network.

41:29

Matt Frasica is our lead producer. Alua

41:32

Kemi, Alade Sui is our producer. Megan

41:35

Koonane is our editor. Charlotte

41:37

Silver is our fact checker. Brandon

41:39

McFarland composed the show's theme and engineered

41:42

the episode. Art Chung is our showrunner.

41:44

Shach Kurwa is our executive producer. I'm

41:47

Peter Kofke. If you like this episode, as

41:49

always, please share it. Follow the show

41:52

by clicking the plus sign in your podcast

41:54

app.

41:58

Mint Mobile

42:00

for their support. Paying high prices

42:03

for traditional wireless plans does not feel

42:05

great. What's worse is

42:07

dealing with the hidden fees on top of that.

42:10

Thankfully Mint Mobile can provide

42:12

you an alternative. Right now,

42:14

Mint Mobile's plans start at just $15 a

42:17

month.

42:18

And every plan comes with unlimited talk

42:20

and text plus high-speed 5G, which

42:23

means you can browse, buy, and set up a phone plan

42:25

totally online. To get your

42:27

new unlimited wireless plan for just $15 a

42:29

month, and to get that plan shipped

42:32

to your door for free, go to MintMobile.com

42:35

slash Giants. That's MintMobile.com

42:38

slash Giants. Cut your wireless bill

42:42

to $15 a month at MintMobile.com

42:45

slash Giants.