Hatching Twitter
Twitter seems like a perfect start-up success story. In barely six years, a small group of young, ambitious programmers in Silicon Valley built an $11.5 billion business out of the ashes of a failed podcasting company. Today Twitter boasts more than 200 million active users and has affected business, politics, media, and other fields in innumerable ways. Now Nick Bilton of the New York Times takes readers behind the scenes with a narrative that shows what happened inside Twitter as it grew at exponential speeds. This is a tale of betrayed friendships and high-stakes power struggles as the four founders--Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Noah Glass--went from everyday engineers to wealthy celebrities, featured on magazine covers, Oprah, The Daily Show, and Time's list of the world's most influential people. Bilton's exclusive access and exhaustive investigative reporting--drawing on hundreds of sources, documents, and internal e-mails--have enabled him to write an intimate portrait of fame, influence, and power. He also captures the zeitgeist and global influence of Twitter, which has been used to help overthrow governments in the Middle East and disrupt the very fabric of the way people communicate.
Stats for nerds
17recommend
58mentions
45people
2013–2026years
31% recommend64% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The book "Hatching Twitter" is a pretty eye-opening history of Twitter from the very beginning. If true, Twitter pre-Elon was run by people with strange product opinions, in a fairly dysfunctional, ineffective way. Jack Dorsey, who comes across as a grade-A weirdo in the book, was first pushed out and later reinstalled in a palace coup.
- One of my favorite genres!
Any book by Steven Levy is great, he is the master! He wrote multiple books about Apple, and also about Google, Facebook,…
Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Nick Bilton
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris
The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni
That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea by Marc Randolph (Netflix Cofounder)
I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards
- I really like those "case study" books about our industry, too. Off the top of my head, two more:
Neither of them go into great detail or nuance — they're made for popular consumption, so they simplify things and gloss over details. You won't find any extensive discussion of microservice architecture and organizational design. But they were still interesting reads.- "Hatching Twitter" by Nick Bilton (published in 2014, about the early days of Twitter) - "Super Pumped" by Mike Isaac (published in 2019, about the early days of Uber) - As someone who is more interested in building the product than marketing it, I found the following recent reads helpful in achieving a balance:
1. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore - making your product work for the masses
2. The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen - achieving escape velocity, getting viral referral traffic
3. Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss - it might seem a bit gimmicky but negotiation always comes off gimmicky
Motivational stories:
4. The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson
5. The Founders by Jimmy Soni
6. The Upstarts by Brad Stone
7. Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton
8. That Will Never Work by Marc Randolph
9. Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's by Ray Kroc
Can't skip:
10. Zero To One by Peter Thiel
- Hatching Twitter - Nick Bilton
Bad Blood - John Carreyrou
How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story - Billy Gallagher
Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork - Reeves Wiedeman
Whistleblower: My Unlikely Journey to Silicon Valley and Speaking Out Against Injustice - Susan Fowler
Uncanny Valley - Anna Wiener
What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry Into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley - Adrian Daub
The Scapegoat - René Girard
- > German Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to the decisions, saying on Monday that lawmakers should set the rules governing free speech and not private tech companies.
Fair point, I would rather have Merkel decide what can be said than Jack Dorsey. At least Merkel was democratically elected, while Jack is... I would rather not say it, but I do recommend to people to read the book "Hatching Twitter"..
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