“Mr. Williams says that all successful businesspeople make enemies along the way.” – The New York Times, October 30, 2010
How Twitter’s owners and top executives say Twitter was founded is different than how Twitter was actually founded.
Mainly, the official version leaves out the role of a major cofounder. Some early Twitter investors also wonder if it also leaves out a scandal.
Twitter is now worth more than $5 billion – and climbing toward $10 billion on secondary markets – so it’s worth setting the story straight.
The official telling of Twitter’s founding goes like this:
Ex-Googler Evan Williams had a startup called Odeo. It was going to be a podcasting platform. Evan asked his friend, another ex-Googler named Biz Stone, to join him. When Apple launched iTunes podcasting, and made Odeo’s podcasting platform irrelevant, Evan and Biz and an Odeo employee named Jack Dorsey decided to create something called Twitter instead. Odeo’s investors didn’t like Twitter, and Evan did them a huge favor by buying back all their stock and making them whole.
According to interviews with about a dozen early investors and employees, the story of how Twitter was actually founded begins with an entrepreneur named Noah Glass, who started Odeo in his apartment.
The story begins about six years ago…
THE REAL HISTORY OF TWITTER
“Noah had a product where you call a phone number and it would turn your message into an MP3 hosted on the Internet. That was the technology that Noah brought that turned into Odeo,” says early employee Ray McClure.
Along with Charles River Ventures and about a dozen other individuals, one of Glass’s earliest investors in Odeo was a former Google employee named Evan Williams. Williams was more involved with Odeo than most investors are with startups in their portfolios, and eventually, Odeo moved from Noah’s apartment to Williams’s. Williams, who had recently sold a company called Blogger to Google, had just bought a nice house and wanted to put his old apartment to good use.
“I think it was something Ev was interested in, but it was mostly Noah’s thing,” says McClure.
“At that time, it would have been me, Evan [Henshwaw-Plath, better know by friends as “Rabble,”] and Rabble’s wife Gabba. Mostly it was the four of us working out of the apartment.”
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-twitter-was-founded-2011-4#ixzz1fJ9QjpmC
