

Tony Stubblebine on how Odeo gave birth to Twitter and took over the world - aditya
http://www.stubbleblog.com/index.php/2009/06/the-real-lessons-from-twitter/

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tonystubblebine
I'd love to see a discussion here about one topic from that post in
particular: what are best practices for changing direction as a company.

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tonystubblebine
Some of our specific problems:

We were too big, so we were paralyzed a bit by the idea that we were going to
have to lay people off. Maybe I'm not giving us enough credit because we went
from thinking podcasting was everything, to thinking we needed to find
something else, ran five different experiments, ran at least two hackathons,
and built and launched Twitter in seven months. But it _felt_ paralyzing to
think about a radical change of staff.

We had middle management (me and a VP/Product) who arrived thinking our job
was to make people productive. If you just wanted to experiment all day, why
the hell were we hired? Somebody really needed to say: guys, we're changing
modes. I think I probably needed to hear that multiple times.

We had investors who got bought out. As one said, "Ev is going to either be
remembered as a genius or as an idiot." He was very gracious about it, paid
more than he needed to for Odeo and then I believe let many of the investors
back in when Twitter got funded. But at the end of the day CRV was the primary
backer of the company that built twitter and Union Square is the primary
backer of Twitter.

Once you change direction, when do you say "this is it" and actually sit down
and figure out how you're going to make it happen? Because for a lot of people
at the company, so many changes in direction made it hard to know for sure
that Twitter really was the new direction.

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Tichy
I think it is very interesting that they did internal Hackathons to find a new
direction for the company.

Wish I could just get together with a group of people and do hackathons until
we hit on the right thing.

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aditya
I think Odeo was unique in this regard. I think it comes from having an
engineering driven culture, rather than a management driven culture.

Also, it is very surprising but a lot of startups still think that ideas
should come from the top, rather than anywhere in the organization. I could
write a whole book on this.

~~~
tonystubblebine
I think it came from the Odeo founders, Ev and Noah. When they have an idea,
they can be very forceful personalities. But when they're unsure, they both
were good listeners and open to all possibilities.

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dugmartin
Best blog post I've read here in a while.

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anigbrowl
This is much, much better than the cliche title suggests.

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tonystubblebine
Wait, what? Do I need to retitle it?

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aditya
How's the new title? ;-)

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tonystubblebine
I think it would narcissistic to say that I like it better. But I'm glad you
like the post. Thanks for posting it here.

~~~
drusenko
FYI -- your blog seems to be down:
<http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.stubbleblog.com>

Would like to read the post but can't, currently :)

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tonystubblebine
Looking into it. It's back up now, but if it goes back down here's the google
cache:
[http://74.125.47.132/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2...](http://74.125.47.132/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.stubbleblog.com%2Findex.php%2F2009%2F06%2Fthe-
real-lessons-from-twitter%2F&aq=f&oq=&aqi=)

