Hatching Twitter

Good read. I like Zuckerberg's take on the company and its dysfunctional start “Twitter is] such a mess, it's as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.”

The book is written in an engaging way and is a very quick read. I did enjoy it overall, but I was also quite frustrated with the one-dimensional portrayal of the main characters in it - e.g. Ev is timid, good and kind, Jack is a lonely vindictive egoist, who tries to emulated Steve Jobs, etc. Life has taught me that real people are rarely as shallow as this.

Nick Bilton spends a lot of time trying to pass judgement on the actions of the Twitter founders, which doesn't seem right to me. I would have appreciated a somewhat less biased narrative. I'm also wondering how much of the book is fact and how much is fiction, given that many episodes are narrated in such details, that I simply can't imagine came up in the interviews that Nick Bilton conducted for the book. As this is common in the genre I assume it was done mostly to make the storytelling more engaging.

And, of course, today we all know how the story continued and that Jack truly won. Seems that Nick predicted his return as CEO quite accurately. His massive success with Square/Block indicates that he wasn't as incompetent early on as Nick's portrayal of him implies. I guess with Jack's recent departure it's time to revisit the story of Twitter's founders and add the final chapters to it.

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.

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.

Poor Noah.

Quite a pageturner. Wish it wasn't as biased as it was.

Informative and inspiring, I haven't been sucked into a book like this for quite some time now.

It is simply fascinating to read a story the history of something that is so recently, and where the story is still being told. Never knew about the tumultuous history behind Twitter and it makes me see it in a new light.

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.

Nick Bilton's Hatching twitter is an amazing story of how a company that was a technology mess, patched together a product by bits of code, built on a framework to prototype an idea by a bunch of engineers who were about to were about to be laid off from a failed startup, got almost sold twice and saw three CEOs in less that two years went on to become one of the biggest social media networks that ultimately got a market valuation of $10 billion and in the process also played a major role in revolutions across the world.

I have ‘followed' twitter closely from 2007 and know a little bit the history of the company, I still found a fair bit of surprising information in this book. It is definitely, one of the best books that I have enjoyed reading in 2013. For most of us Jock Dorsey has been the public face ‘ inventor ‘ of twitter. This book will change your perception to an extent.

There is no doubt that the author has painstakingly conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with both current and past employees at Twitter, as well as their friends and perhaps even competitors at other companies. All four co-founders of the company agreed to be interviewed - and so did board members (past and present). Yes there were a few who were not interviewed or refused to be interviewed and the chronology of events might be slightly less than perfect, but that's OK. All the main characters, EV, Jack, Noah, Biz and Goldman are portrayed brilliantly.

This is a must read if you have ever worked on a startup, have had your own startup or even dreamt of anything related to a startup. From agile prototyping to how ideas are sparked, nurtured and molded, the book has an anecdotal description of all that. The book also captures the heart, soul and pulse of the silicon valley perfectly.

The author starts off with a narrative description on the co-founders and a few others who where key in shaping or rather hatching the the twitter idea and slowly builds up to capture the ideological tussles between them. 

Things do get mildly technical as you read through the book, but at most places the author ensures to provide a brief explanation. But at the end of it, it is after all a book about a technology startup. As long as your realize that before you pick it up, you won't be disappointed.  

Funding is key for any startup and the author subtly and sometimes cautiously shows the complex changes that an investor can bring in. Not something new, but an interesting section nonetheless.

While twitter is hatching, it finds itself in a unique position where it has to navigate its way and avoid various acquisition attempts ranging from bigwig competitors like Facebook, celebrities and former vice presidents. From boardroom discussion to private meetings, from internal employee brefings to last minute public blog post changes, the author has captured it all spot on. All this is largely invisible to people outside twitter.

One of the many things that I felt right about this book was that is the perfect size. Not too long and not too short, there is hardly a section, paragraph or page which you might be tempted to skim through or skip. This is a rare thing for me to find in a nonfiction book. 

This book could have easily been a boring narration of company and its journey, but hats off to Nick for writing and presenting this so well.

Of-course timing the book release just before twitter went for its IPO was a smart move.You can't really beat that. If twitter touches your life or work, you should give this book a read.