Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

by Nick Bilton

The dramatic, unlikely story behind the founding of Twitter, by New York Times bestselling author and Vanity Fair special correspondent

The San Francisco-based technology company Twitter has become a powerful force in less than ten years. Today it’s everything from a tool for fighting political oppression in the Middle East to a marketing must-have to the world’s living room during live TV events to President Trump’s preferred method of communication. It has hundreds of millions of active users all over the world.
But few people know that it nearly fell to pieces early on.

In this rousing history that reads like a novel, Hatching Twitter takes readers behind the scenes of Twitter’s early exponential growth, following the four hackers—Ev Williams, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass, who created the cultural juggernaut practically by accident.  It’s a drama of betrayed friendships and high-stakes power struggles over money, influence, and control over a company that was growing faster than they could ever imagine.

Drawing on hundreds of sources, documents, and internal e-mails, Bilton offers a rarely-seen glimpse of the inner workings of technology startups, venture capital, and Silicon Valley culture.

• ISBN10: 1591847087
• ISBN13: 9781591847083
• Publish Date: 30 September 2014 (first published 5 November 2013)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Portfolio
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 320
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781591847083

Reviews

[adamfortuna]

Hatching Twitter follows the rise of Twitter through the lives of its founders and initial employees. As someone how has followed twitter since the beginning, I thought I knew the story but wow was I wrong. It turns out that there was far more power jockeying and boardroom backstabbing than I ever thought.

The way this story is told is also rather impressive. Rather than just being a telling of facts, you feel like you’re there with the characters in the rooms as ideas are brainstormed or things go right (or more often wrong).

Twitter has played an outsized role in my life. The first startup I worked at where I felt true ownership of my work was a platform to connect Twitter users with advertisers to make money (before promoted Tweets were a thing). I remember going to Twitters first (and only) conference, Chirp, right around when Twitter hit 140 employees. I remember sending out a sponsored tweet manually from a Rails console that someone paid $20k to send. I remember having lunch with coworkers and friends on the floor at a Twitter event while Will.i.am had discussions over us.

Twitter holds a number of great memories for me. While this book shed light on some of the darker sides of the company, it also left me feeling how important a part it was (is) for the founders - a feeling I could easily identify with.