Hatching Twitter

More about the incessant drama surrounding the founders than the actual creativity that went into building the social medium, this book is definitely well-researched and thorough — albeit slightly biased — when viewed through the lens of “money, power, friendship, and betrayal” as the title suggests. Bilton offers fascinating insight, and the talk of venture capitalists, successful entrepreneurs, A-list celebrities, and deft hackers are enough to keep the book's tension at an all-time high. But I could have done without the plethora of groan-worthy metaphors and egg puns.

This book satiated my curiosity about the origins of Twitter. It starts with a simple tool to allow friends to know what they are doing via SMS updates and morphs into a revolutionary idea of giving voice to people, no matter their social status. It's clear that the founders (and friends) Jack, Evan, Biz, and Noah all contributed to “create” Twitter but the book shows how greed and money-talks disrupted friendships and ended up creating power struggles between the members. It is clear that once Twitter became huge, and millions of dollars were at stake, the company lost its founding values getting lost into the attention economy model. I loved the way the author chose to tell this story. He mixes journalism and narrative in a very clever style. I want to read more books written by Nick Bilton.

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.