how to control the power of money with members of congress who need the money to campaign and are not paid that much money to begin with. and that corruptive power, we still haven't found a way to control. - as a kid, all i knew about abscam was that our local congressman, ozzie myers, was a crook. i wanted to interview him for the show, but i couldn't because myers had gone back to prison, this time for stuffing ballot boxes on behalf of his political consulting clients. how many of today's elected officials might be successfully stung if the fbi attempted abscam again? they might be too sophisticated to tell a fake operative or a fictitious sheik that, quote, "money talks and bullshit walks," but that doesn't mean they don't think it. i guarantee, we have not seen the last member of congress go to prison for taking bribes.

[cnn theme] -so anybody here on twitter? -[audience cheers] -why are you on twitter? -twitter! [narrator] among hipsters and high school kids, -twittering is all the rage. -do you twitter? [narrator] it asks users one simple question-- "what are you doing?" the twitter guys made up a thing out of thin air. t-w-t-t-r. twitter. jack, biz, ev, like, they made it up. [woman] why do so many people want so many other people to know everything about them? [kara] "tell your stories here." that's the whole point of twitter, isn't it? [drumming music] every company is the dna of its founders, and its founders are neurotic. it was the most emotional company. i was like their therapist at points. it's gonna get hot. working at twitter isn't just a sweet job, it's a way of life. [dubstep music] [biz] if you want to develop a platform that is capable of helping people topple despotic regimes,

it also has to support fart jokes. [bell ringing] [cheers and applause] yay! 30 billion, 40 billion, something like that. at first. maybe more. i don't remember. a platform, in order to be a platform, has to be free. i think we need to hear every extreme. no one at the beginning could possibly have understood where it was going. the president the united states uses twitter -to threaten other countries. -yeah. i mean, who the [bleep] saw that coming? not us. [rabble] everybody at twitter was incredibly well-intentioned, but we didn't always know how to handle it. [crowd laughter] so, are we the bad guys? please introduce yourself.

i'm biz stone. -i'm jack dorsey. -evan williams. and who are you? what do you do at odeo? -i'm biz stone. -[laughing] [woman] he's so funny. [ominous strings music] in 2005... uh, well, let's see. [futuristic electronic music] [biz] first part of 2005, i think, we're just a ragtag group of people in a crummy office in san francisco, in a tech startup called odeo. we were working on what people started calling podcasting. we were trying to build the whole thing, all open and on the web. [kara] it was an exciting time. there was just a lot of small companies trying to make it. -very nice. -wow.

[evan] there was just a sense that something was happening, this sense of excitement, invention. and there was a lot of money rushing in. [kara] and so you saw a lot of little companies like flickr, myspace. facebook started then. it was called the facebook, and it was in colleges. and then youtube. they were young and fresh, trying to create something new out of nothing. my favorite thing is getting together with people and inventing stuff, building stuff, coming up with new ideas, collaborating, like, "oh, we do this." it's a blast. [ethereal music] [ev] i grew up in rural nebraska, on a farm in the middle of the cornfields. i learned about the internet through reading computer magazines, got online,

started experimenting, started playing. eventually got the nerve to move out here to california. [gentle music] [biz] people knew evan williams. he was like a mini folk hero. there's mr. evan in there. he was like our ceo. he had to come up with one of the early social blogging networks, and then got acquired by google for millions of dollars. and everyone knew that story. they're like, "oh, my god, evan williams." [evan] i knew biz from google. so i reached out to him to come join our startup, odeo, the podcasting thing. it's good. we didn't lose anyone on the way over here, but maybe on the way back. i started out as an artist, but there was something about the idea of me making the software that allowed so many millions of other people to be able to express themselves that was like, "oh, this is a meta way of being an artist," you know? [evan] i wanted to build the team with curious, creative people. i always think that's the most important thing.

i remember my boss at google just saying the same thing over and over to me. "so you don't like money." and i was like, "i like money. money's great." he's like, "so you don't like money." but i just wanted to keep working with ev because we could develop all kinds of crazy things together. he also, i think, was a magnet for jack. [biz] jack had turned up in san francisco. and in south park, there was a place called el centro. and i think he was trying to get a job as a barista. and he saw evan, and he was like, "oh, i want to work with him." and he changed his resume on the fly from a barista resume to a programmer resume and submitted it to us. [evan] his resume just said, "jack." and it had the "jack" vertically. i don't know if it even had his last name. it was very stylistic, arty. [chillwave music] very nice guy. he knew what he was doing. he could code. so we hired him. and, yeah, he was just a quiet, cool programmer dude.

[man] meetings, meetings, meetings. biz. dustin. white board. to this point, jack hasn't really had a real steady job of any kind. he wanted to be a massage therapist. he was working on tickets at alcatraz. he did some random freelance coding. he nannied. he was into botanical illustration. and he would consider himself an artist. [jack] what was amazing to me about odeo was the team. i really like the people. i love what they're doing. i love their style, their taste, how they express themselves in everything they're doing. [jason] we were a real mix of actual anarchists and people who were dreamers, like people who believe in a world that could be created through the internet. more than half of the team knew how to juggle. yeah, we have a lot of jugglers. [ray] i think that this speaks to their counterculture kind of backgrounds.

[biz] when you do a startup, the play is the work and the work is the play. these are the people i'm laughing with all day long. i'm working through problems, and it's really fun and challenging to solve the problems. [rabble] this chaotic, disruptive culture of people who stayed till 3:00 in the morning at the office and wrote fantastic code. we were the most social people in the startup world. is there someone who is skilled in the ways of the piñata? -i think it was... -[evan] it was lively. -there were a lot of characters. -i'm going to run, actually. i think i was maybe the boring one. we were writing ideas on whiteboards. kind of typical small startup where you show up every day and you try to invent the future. [rabble] one day, jack came into the office and he wore a t-shirt that he had printed himself. and it was a white t-shirt with big black letters and it had his phone number on it. and it was a social experiment to see, as he walked around san francisco,

whether or not anyone would call him. and if they did call the number, he would answer it, and then he would have a conversation with the person. [jack] when you have amazing people and really creative people, there's just this unbounded creativity and potential that's in front of you. [man] the topic is the future of entertainment. it's at the web 2.0 conference. with this idea of podcasting, we were going down the path and racing towards a destination. and then the destination disappeared. -[applause, cheers] -[steve] good morning. now, we recently announced something new for itunes and ipod, and it's called podcasting. [dreamy music] getting beat by someone you admire? of course apple is going to support podcasting. it's the ipod. we were the hot startup of the moment,

and then we were surpassed. it's like, we have money, but no future. what is the point of all this? i guess we should stop hiring more people. okay, now what? we had this "oh, shit" moment. [distressing sting]

[music] [evan] after the apple took the lead, the board's reaction was, "well, we invested in you

and the team. do you have any other ideas?" i was like, "sure." we're gonna pause odeo, the podcasting thing, and do what we call the hackathon. [rabble] everybody in the company was invited to take their favorite interesting ideas and interesting software, or things they had always wanted to build, and we all put them on the virtual table. [ray] we made a thing so that you could send videos from your phone to other people. at that moment, the internet wasn't quite yet on our phones. we sensed it. it was like, "this is going to happen on the phones. "let's, like, poke around and figure out what the right version of that is." [biz] something like pictures with your phone. like share a photo. i don't know. what? something easy. like one photo a day or something. it was hellodeo... ...that let you record, with your webcam, short videos and post them to myspace. something to do with album covers or something to do with music.

what are you listening to? or something like this. [biz] jack and i had been finding every reason to work on projects together. it's like when you're a little kid and you're in gym class, and the teacher says, like, "find a partner." it was like, "i want jack." [rabble] jack was very minimalist and very nerdy and intellectual. and i remember him sharing a picture of his living room, and the only thing in his living room was one orchid flower. and there was nothing else. and i was like, "that's your living room?" and he's like, "yeah." [obscure warping music] [biz] jack was like, "what about, like, status updates, where you can look at your group of friends "and you don't even have to ask them how are they feeling "or what are they thinking or whatever? you could just see it." and he said, "do you think that's enough of a thing to make a whole thing out of it?" and i was like, "i love it. it's so simple." it's so simple that you could type something on the web

and it would make someone's pocket buzz. and then they would look, you know, fumble and take out their phone and see a message. and it would just, we got excited about it. and nobody thought it was a good idea. it was like, "and? what else does it do?" and i was like, "what do you mean? "that's the beauty. it doesn't do anything else. it only does that." [foreboding music] it's not clear what it was for, but it felt very social. no ideas come out, you know, wholly formed. it was a collaboration. jack's first idea was very social. so just a list of your friends and what they were doing. and that's it. that was the original idea. but i thought what felt novel and new ground was right now. it was like, "oh, what's happening right now?

what's my friend doing right now?" and that felt intriguing. so i was saying to the team, "just keep working on it." 2006 is a really interesting year for tech because it's one year before the iphone has launched. you maybe have a palmpilot or a pda. maybe you're using them to text a little bit. you're using t9 texting. there's still just very much a phone and laptop. and those feel like two very distinct environments for all of your tech experiences. so the idea that you could take your phone, this flip phone or pda that you had, and actually text, sms text, and update, and then blast it to the world, and take it on the go with you, that was a novel idea. [evan] as that idea was emerging, evolving, iterating, we were trying to come up with a name. someone suggested "ketchup" because you could "catch up" with your friends. [chuckles] and someone suggested "friendstalker."

friendstalker! yeah. yeah, exactly. [biz] one of the co-founders of odeo, named noah glass, liked the word "jitter." and then he had a rhyming dictionary. noah sits in the back of the office and he starts with a and he looks at every page for weeks until... and writing down the names he thinks might be good names until he gets to t-w. and he discovers that "twitter" is a word, which is the short bits of communication between birds. so, you guys, this word is part, it means, it, like, describes what we're talking about, and it has a reference to nature and birds like that. -it's perfect. -twitter. that's a great name. [birds tweeting] [biz] so after two weeks of working on coding and stuff, jack was hooking things up in the background. he was doing the programming and he was saying, "hey, i'm about to hook up so that when you write something

"into the field on the website, it should go to the phone. it should go to my phone." he's like, "are you ready?" [obscure music] [rabble] twitter.com, ev was already registered. so jack went and registered t-w-t-t-r.com. and that's what we launched with, without the vowels. [biz] later on, for almost $10,000, we bought the vowels.

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[keyboard clacking] [jack] we built twitter in two weeks. and after that, we invited friends and then invite, invite, invite, invite. you could hear everyone's phones buzzing, basically. [jason] there was something that was easy about it, that was seductive about it. [jack] that interaction, it's just, it feels electric. [biz] look at me with my dumb tweets. "eating a baked potato and green beans with..." i was literally answering the question. they're all bangers. i don't delete any. okay. [chuckles] "continuing work on things that will apparently destroy modern society." that's pretty good.

[evan] during that time, sms was limited to 160 characters. so we started limiting to 150, minus the length of your username and then a little extra space. i think jack just decided every message will only be 140 characters. that's going to be the limit. and then we embraced the constraint. we make the canvas very small. and then anything you put on it is a masterpiece. yeah. "digesting a burrito." there you go. yeah. i don't know if that's my first tweet, but it probably is. and you know what most people said when we signed them up for, we got them using twitter and we showed it to them? "this is the stupidest thing ever." and then some people would say, "this is the stupidest thing ever" and become utterly addicted to it. [obscure music] [steve] every once in a while,

a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. [applause] and we are calling it iphone. [cheers] [music] the iphone launch was just an incredibly pivotal moment, not only for these social networks like twitter, but really in the history of technology. it was truly the first user-friendly pocket computer that you could just literally carry around with you everywhere that you went. [kara] when steve jobs announced the iphone in 2007, everybody rushed into the breach to create products that would be used in a mobile first environment. and that's what it was all about, was mobile first. and so people rushed into the fray to provide services, all kinds of services. [lauren] twitter had been launched, and it was growing a little bit. but if you're building a social network at this time, it's becoming a pretty crowded space.

and so you're looking for a way to attract the cool kids. -what's that? -south by southwest, 2007. exactly what i'm talking about. whoo! i would encourage you to now use the internet. use the internet! hi, this is irina slutsky reporting for geek entertainment television at south by southwest in austin. south by southwest, this was a music and film festival. and then we'll let some nerds show up to talk about the internet for a while. -panels, hallways, or parties? -parties. i'm thinking the parties. panels. [mario bros. sound effect] what is adaptive path? oh, it's a strategy by which you navigate the, the, the waters of the user, eh, waters. [ethereal music] [evan] i had this idea. "we should do a marketing thing. "everyone hangs out in the hallway around the conference room where they have the panels."

so we put up a screen in the hallway. so this is one of the really cool things at south by southwest. this is a great social networking website called twitter, which i use constantly, by the way. hi, twitter. panels, hallways, or parties? [jason] there was a lot of people there. you could send something on your phone. it would show up on the screen. and you were able to see which session was interesting, which parties were people planning to go to. it was this way in which people felt like, "oh, i need to be a part of this." [ariel] south by southwest was honestly the start of my social life as i know it. my closest friends are in tech and it really started at south by southwest. twitter felt like this massive, huge group text where just everyone was letting everyone know about everything that was cool, that was happening. [woman] in this session today, we're going to be talking about... [biz] i was in the back of one of the theaters and someone was giving a talk. and when i looked out, i saw all the laptops had twitter.com up. it was just a sea of everyone using twitter.com. and i was like, "whoa, this is weird."

i got, like, kind of tingly. [ariel] we would be glued to our phones, like walking down the sidewalk in austin, looking at, like, "oh, wait, oh, there's a cool party happening here. and there's a bunch of people over here." it just became this instant way of meeting up with people. [band playing rock music] [biz] what was just totally amazing was the story of this guy who had gone to this party. and it was really loud and crowded. and it was too loud and crowded. he wanted to talk shop with fellow nerds. so he sent out a tweet saying, "does anyone want to meet over at this other place?" and it was because he had sent the tweet to all the people that followed him, and then they had sent the tweet saying, "we're going here, we're going here, we're going." it just multiplied like crazy. and it was within a couple of minutes or something, the place was completely filled and it was a line around the block to get in. as soon as i heard that, i remember thinking, "oh, my god, there isn't anything "like this among humans. there's no technology that can make this behavior happen." from what i understand, like birds flying together

in a flock, and then coming to a tree, and then moving around it as if they're one organism. and i thought there's a lot of those types of things in nature, but this is the first time i've ever heard of one person able to mobilize hundreds of people within two minutes. and i was like, "oh, my god, i think we invented a whole new thing." [birds cawing]

[dreamy electronic music] [man] where are we anyways? [biz] we're at twitter headquarters. -[man] twitter headquarters? -[biz] yes. in beautiful south park, san francisco. [man] yeah, it's beautiful. and who are you?

i'm biz stone. [man] now, what happened yesterday? oh, we got funding for twitter. [dreamy electronic music] [man] you've got a lot of good press. in fact, there's a san francisco chronicle article right behind you. [biz] i remember telling jack early on, "hey, ev and i had lunch and we think you should be the ceo." and jack was like, "me? doesn't ev want it?" [evan] i didn't want to do it. i had done that for a long time. i had just done that and i was like, "ugh, i don't know if i want to do it. " twitter is cool. it's intriguing. i want to see it succeed, but i don't want to run it. looking around the room, jack was the driver of the idea from day one. i thought it made sense. like, he was technical. so i was like, "jack, run with it." he was definitely inexperienced for the job, but it was still tiny.

jack dorsey, twitter's daddy, ceo, right? -right. -[laughter] [jason] when he was just the engineer, he had a nose ring. and then when he became ceo, he took the nose ring out as a sign of dedication to this new serious job, like a real... like a grownup or whatever. who's your favorite ceo? who's your role model? -i always look up to steve jobs. -steve jobs? i know it's a common one, but i... [jason] jack had a lot of wacky ideas. we were trying to accommodate, how do we set a start time for the day? and people were really against this. just like, "i just want to show up whenever i show up." and it's like, "no, we could say it's 11 o'clock. "it doesn't have to be 7:00 a.m. "we don't have to get up with the cows or whatever. "but we have to have a start of the day that where we say, like, 'okay, this is what we're trying to do.'" and one of jack's solutions for this tension was, what if we have a siesta? everyone can have from 2:00 to 4:00 as either a nap time or just time off. and i was like, "no, we're not going to have a siesta.

"we just need people to show up at 10:30. you're not, we're not inventing a new society here." [unsettling music] [kara] jack dorsey wasn't a particularly good manager. he's very remote and hard to talk to, i would say. he was very head-in-the-clouds kind of personality. he was like, let a thousand flowers bloom kind of thing. [evan] i don't know how to describe jack as ceo. he's incredibly thoughtful and a little opaque. [kurt] jack dorsey had always had this very open way of thinking about the internet. he believed that twitter as a service was very open and a way of democratizing control, letting people say whatever they want. with any new technology you learn, you come to this understanding of how it fits in your life. -mm. -it's all up to the user. so that's the approach we're taking. but, ideally, every community, i think,

wants to more or less veer towards the side of self-policing. he had no concept of malevolent players that would flood the zone with all kinds of misinformation or anything else because they said, once the community got to it, truth would surface. they had this perfect idea, perfect ideal of humanity that just didn't exist. [ethereal music] [ariel] i was in a situation where i had had a stalker for many years. and when i started going online through blogging, through different social networks, that stalker followed me online. [ominous music] [ariel] different social networks would often take the harassing or abusive post down. and that was what was standard. but then, when i would go to twitter, they weren't willing to do that. after south by southwest, i would regularly go to lunches with people from twitter or with people from other startups.

i had known jack as a acquaintance. so i had this phone call with jack, and there was a concern from him about, "well, if we remove this account, "if we remove these posts, that's not going to stop your stalker." it's like, this isn't about your responsibility to take care of my stalker. this is about your service being used to threaten and harass someone. you should absolutely ban this user. but at the extreme least, at least, you should send a warning, letting them know that they're violating your terms of service. at minimum, that's what i requested. my impression of jack on this phone call was someone who is kind and listening, but didn't have much of a reaction. you know, not necessarily understanding. someone who seemed a little bit confused about why this was their problem.

about a month later, after eight more instances of abuse and harassment, this is the reply that i got from jack. "ariel, apologies for the delay here. "we've reviewed the matter and decided "it is not in our best interest to get involved. "we've tasked our lawyers with a full review and update "of our terms of service. "thank you for your patience and understanding, "and good luck with resolving the problem. best, jack."

[obscure music] [biz] i think it was ev who originally coined the term "hallucinogenically optimistic." and that's what we were. that's what we were like. it was an excitement that we were creating something that was going to allow other people to create even more things. everyone's great. everyone's very well behaved. we just were very idealistic, very optimistic. i thought the biggest problem we would have would be maybe some spam. so del harvey came on board and she was the one who was like, "no, no, "you're going to... bad things are going to happen

and we need to get out ahead of it." the internet is swarming with sexual predators who constantly stalk chat rooms, searching for children. but del harvey is fighting back by hunting down online pedophiles and bringing them to justice. please welcome, from pervertedjustice.com, del harvey. [applause] del, what is it that you do exactly? well, essentially the organization goes into online chat rooms with underage profiles. and if adults then contact those underage profiles and solicit them for sex, we then contact the police and work with them to prosecute and convict them. -to trap them, essentially. -precisely. [kurt] del harvey had a long history of dealing with internet bad guys. before she got to twitter, she was literally trying to catch sexual predators online. [stealthy music] [del] when people are building products, when people are building features, there's this analogy that i use, which is an engineer comes to you and they're like, "i've made the perfect kitten.

"it doesn't need food. it doesn't need water. "it will never grow old. it will never die. it is the perfect kitten." and you look at the kitten and you're like, "why can this kitten shoot bullets?" and they're like, "well, that's not, "that's not what you're supposed to use the kitten for. "i told you all the things the kitten was intended to be used for." and i'm like, "yes. "and someone, whether accidentally or on purpose, is going to shoot a bullet with this kitten." [biz] del was in charge of spam and abuse or something like that. who wants to be on that team? that sounds terrible. let's make it "trust and safety." because obviously, since i am trying to fight spam and abuse, the neverending battle, i am, i am-- [woman] the sisyphus of twitter. when i started at twitter, they just asked me to come up with a plan for spam. i came up with a three strikes policy of warning, second warning, then you're out. and i was like, "okay, guys, when do you want to meet and go through it?"

and they're like, "no, no, we're sure it's fine." i was like, "oh." there was a lot going on. [chuckles] there's not really time in the day to contemplate the much larger implications of what we're building. i wouldn't say we spent no time on it, but there's a lot going on. [chuckles] and by the way, other people are thinking about this stuff a lot. it's not, they're not all group conversations. i'm trusting people who i think are very good. and they were. i mean, at that point, they were really more focused on keeping the site up. i'd be like, "guys, my, my, this isn't working." and they're like, "yes, nothing is working. the whole site is down." [biz] when we started building twitter, we got so many things wrong. like, "can we do this?" "no, we can't do that 'cause that's broken." "can we do this?" "we can't do that 'cause that's broken."

"what about this?" "no, 'cause the other thing is broken, remember?" oh! we'd be lucky if we could keep the site up. that was the answer to everything. if you've never played jenga, it was like that. when something broke, the whole pile fell down in a big mess. [kara] they constantly were down and people were worried about the ability of the company to stay afloat because it couldn't do, it couldn't do basics, which is like keeping the service working properly. they couldn't run their service. it would break so often that i was like, "well, we need something right away to at least say like, 'hey, we feel bad about it.'" [chuckles] i came across this really cute image of a whale being lifted up by a bunch of little birds. i thought, "oh, this is a good metaphor." we're all working hard on a big job to fix the thing. people nicknamed it the fail whale. and then this weird thing happened. it got popular.

i got invited to speak at the fail whale conference. people got tattoos of it. [woman] when you go to the twitter site, it's got the cute little whale and it's all the light blue picture. it showed up so much that it became a cultural fetish object of its own. the image of the whale itself became identified with this era. you've summoned the fail whale! [jason] it is one of those things where twitter ends up succeeding in spite of itself, and people end up identifying with the underdog shaggy story of it all. [lauren] oh, the fail whale. it's incredible marketing for what is a if-this-website-isn't-working sign. and that was the vibe of twitter. it was fun. you were there for the hang. people appreciated the way it felt. it was kind of patched together. for some reason, that was its selling point. it definitely attracted people to twitter. this is lady gaga, queen of twitter.

may you always have soft cuticles while tweeting. may you never have carpal tunnel. [biz] the celebrities loved using twitter because it was like a direct line to their fans. i'm doing an interview. you notice that my questions are 140 characters or less? -your answers are much longer. -yes. i send a tweet to all my followers. but my followers really, really say what that message means. [interviewer] what has really caught you by surprise? [man] at this point in time, phoenix would have normally deployed its parachute, standing by. you get an update on your phone, and the phone buzzes like, "parachute deployed. -we're landing." -[cheers and applause] it was one of the most dramatic usages of twitter i've ever seen. [man] we have found the proof that shows that this hard, bright material really is water ice. you realize we're changing the way we communicate, right? [laughs] [speaking japanese]

tweets. we were seeing markets around the world embrace twitter. japan, india, brazil. all these places that were really running with it. this is now a huge thing. and we saw a real path for this company to be one of the iconic internet brands, right? to get there, we require a certain level of management and discipline that we do not have. [indistinct chatter and laughing] by 2008, even though beginning of the year is when it started to take off, by late year, it wasn't growing again. we'd raised funding, and the pressure's on to make it grow. and i know by september, i'm emailing jack like, "what are we going to do to make it grow?" facebook was a monster and becoming more of a monster. and we're just still in survival mode. it's like, "is this thing going to work?" is still the question. that started to get very, very stressful.

it was jack's job to make it work. he's running the company. [jason] is jack going to be the person that's going to be the chief executive that's dealing with a lot of corporate governance, hiring and firing, structure of the company? is jack going to be the one that, like, goes through a hyper growth phase? is jack going to be the one to stop fail whale? is jack going to be the ceo that's there to take you public, who investment banks are going to look at and say, "yeah, that's someone we can do business with"? it just didn't seem credible. at least to me. [unsettling music]

i guess what i'm looking for from you is, i mean, i know how the fire affected me, and there's always a constant fear that who's to say something like that won't happen again? that's fair. we committed to underground, 10,000 miles of electric line. you look back at where we were 10 years ago and we are in a completely different place today,

and it's because of how we need to care for our communities and our customers. i hope that's true. [joe] that's my commitment. [ambient noise] [kara] and here we are, twitter people. the hq of twitter. [mysterious music] [jack] a company is just a great vehicle to spread an idea around the world. it allows an idea to thrive. i knew the concept of twitter was big. but the velocity that it's taken was very surprising. [biz] jack is very thoughtful, very patient. he likes to take a long time to make sure they make the right decision. [jack] one of my jobs as a ceo is to really set the tone. really, it's about getting the right people together

and then stepping out of the way. [biz] people saying like, "well, also he was leaving at 5:00 and taking these classes after work." [jack] i really wanted to see the world. i wanted to be a sailor. and i really wanted to be an artist. i wanted to create something. i wanted to show the world a new way to see itself. [evan] we had a company, we had money. we weren't just college kids in a garage. we were a venture-funded company. we weren't communicating well and i was frustrated. i think he was probably frustrated by me. and it was just, it was a mess. jack was managing finances on his personal laptop, and it turns out that he was doing it wrong. and so mismanaging the money for the company is obviously a big issue. and so when the ceo is indecisive, mismanaging money, and going to sewing class,

it started to rub people the wrong way. [biz] if you look at those things from the point of view of an investor, it's like in the animal kingdom, it's fear. every single startup founder who has a company that goes through massive growth is in above their head. and the question is only, are they able to navigate the politics to prevent the investors and the board from removing them? we should've been having more conversations about what was working and what wasn't working, and jack didn't have the experience. and it felt very high stakes. [cyberpunk music] [reporter] this election year, it's looking more and more as if the torch is being passed to a new generation. [rabble] jack was running the company as ceo and twitter started having a role in politics. and it became clear that it was part of the public sphere.

it was the first hint that twitter could have influence. [reporter 2] they're the wired generation, 18 to 34-year-olds who are using social networking to move their political activism from cyberspace to the real world. politicians started using twitter and they liked it for the reason that everybody else liked it, which is it gives you unmediated connection to have virtual intimacy. it was an example of how this platform could work and could change things. [reporter 3] barack obama is getting the biggest share. one click of the mouse can reach more than 370,000 of his supporters. what the obama campaign figured out is that twitter feels like the zeitgeist. it feels like magically being able to tap in and know what is going on in the global brain. it just gave twitter this jolt. it gives the service and the company so much more legitimacy that it didn't have before.

it was a way for politicians to reach directly to people, as opposed to going around them through news anchors or newspapers, or buying ads, or anything else. and that was powerful. [suspenseful music] [man] ...can celebrate because barack obama will become the 44th president. [cheering] [rabble] ev totally understood what twitter could do, and was frustrated with how it was being led, and decided that he wanted to take a turn. and it was his company to choose. the people who decided to fire jack, in my head, it was just "the board," quote unquote, but it was really the people.

it was the people i worked with. so i think it was evan, jason goldman, and some of our investors. that sucks. like, it sucks. like, you don't go into it hoping that the ceo fails. [chuckles] yeah, we fired him as the ceo of the company he co-founded. which, and he didn't really see it coming, and that's bad. and, um, you know, he was very upset. he was very upset. [biz] "so you all just fired him?" ev was like, "yeah." so he's just wandering around somewhere, feeling really upset and alone. and i was like, "oh, yeah, i guess so." [jack] i could have taken that idea, not told it to ev, not told it to biz, not told it to all my other coworkers,

and tried to start my own company with that idea, but we had a great team. [biz] so i found him, and we met up at the whole foods where we used to have lunch a lot. jack was, he just felt terrible. he said, "well, i'm going to go back to the office. "i'm going to tell everybody what i really feel. "this was horrible. "i feel like i've been punched in the gut. this was a bad decision." and i said, "no, i don't, no, i don't think you should do that." [drum & bass music] i remember him saying this, "i'll come back like steve jobs." and i remember thinking like, "whatever makes you feel better." [laughing] [deep warping music]