Hatching Twitter

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.