Jack Dorsey's Reputation Takes a Beating in New Book

What's This?

By Seth Fiegerman2013-10-09 10:31:25 -0400

You don't know Jack. That's the big takeaway from an excerpt of an upcoming tell-all book on Twitter written by New York Times reporter Nick Bilton.

Jack Dorsey is widely viewed as the man behind Twitter, thanks in no small part to a number of statements he has made to the press over the years.

"Twitter has been my life's work in many senses," he said in one interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2009. "It started with a fascination with cities and how they work, and what’s going on in them right now."

See also: Twitter IPO: Who Gets Rich?

But in Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship and Betrayal , Bilton raises questions about how much credit Dorsey deserves for creating and naming the social network we know today, why he was really pushed out as CEO and how Dorsey pushed out one of his co-founders early on.

Bilton reports that Dorsey initially pitched the idea of a network for sharing status updates to Noah Glass after a night of drinking in 2006 while the two were working as employees at Odeo, a podcasting company founded by Evan Williams. Glass, who had been tasked with seeking out novel ideas from Odeo employees for how to pivot the struggling company, thought the idea was too similar to away messages at first, but then it dawned on him that the idea could be about more than sharing updates; it could be a way for people to connect and have "conversations."

Based on Bilton's reporting, which comes from interviews with Twitter employees and investors, Dorsey's main contribution was suggesting the idea of status updates and later introducing a character limit. Glass was the one in charge of brainstorming new features for the social network and was responsible for coming up with the name Twitter — contrary to Dorsey's suggestions that he was involved. Later, it was Williams who pushed to define Twitter as a service to share "what's happening" in the world around them, rather than just status updates.

The single most damning detail in the book excerpt may be Dorsey's secret effort to push Glass out from running the company in the early days.

"Perhaps it was because he sensed vulnerability or perhaps it was because Glass was the only person who could rightly insist that the status updater was not Dorsey’s idea alone," Bilton writes. "Whatever his reasons, Dorsey had recently met with Williams and threatened to quit if Glass wasn’t let go."

Williams, who was friends with Glass, was the one to let him know he was being kicked out. When Glass approached Dorsey afterward, Dorsey "acted dumbfounded and blamed Williams."

Following Glass's departure, Dorsey took over as CEO of Twitter, but reportedly proved to be inexperienced and inefficient in that role.

"He also habitually left around 6 p.m. for drawing classes, hot yoga sessions and a course at a local fashion school. (He wanted to learn to make an A-line skirt and, eventually, jeans.)," Bilton reports. Dorsey also reportedly continued to push for Twitter to function as a text message service, which carried greater expenses for the young company and troubled investors. He was eventually forced out of the CEO role in late 2008.

None of the Twitter founders really come off great in this excerpt. Ev Williams is described as being a "terrible" CEO by one of the company's investors; Noah Glass, the oft forgotten co-founder, is portrayed as unstable in the midst of a divorce; and Biz Stone is all but omitted from the excerpt, intentionally or not raising the question of how involved he really was in Twitter's creation. But there's no doubt it's Dorsey who suffers the biggest blow to his reputation in this excerpt.

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