Biz Stone
Biz Stone
Christopher Isaac "Biz" Stone is a co-founder of Twitter, Inc and also helped to create and launch Xanga, Odeo, The Obvious Corporation and Medium. In 2012, Stone co-founded a start-up called Jelly Industries where he serves as CEO. The release of the Jelly app, a Q&A platform that relies on images, was officially announced in January 2014...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth10 March 1974
CityBoston, MA
CountryUnited States of America
I started as an artist and I had a side job moving some heavy boxes for a publishing company. They had just gotten a Mac for their art department, the department that creates the book covers. I was kind of showing the art director a thing or two about how to use a Mac. And one day everyone went out to lunch and I jumped on the computer and designed a book jacket and slipped it in the pile to go to the review board in New York. They picked my jacket and when the art director got back to Boston, he wanted to know who designed it and I said, "Me." He was like, "The box guy?"
I think when people twitter 20 or 30 times per day, that's too much. They are boxing everyone else out, and people stop following them because they need a break.
For me, I've learned about what it means to focus on a culture, to build social responsibility, and the idea of a company as a super-organism.
You can provide a short-format content, and it can grow, and it can spread virally across the entire Twitter system, and it can contain within it a link to something that's much longer, that's a long essay or that's a video.
I think it's a really big deal to be able to meet people outside the context of something like a conference room or someplace where everything feels like it's formal talk.
A feeling I got from working at Google was that technology could solve any problem. Yes, it's fantastic, but what I realized later was there's technology, and there's people. Google had its list ordered: Technology. People. And I think the right order is: People. Technology.
I thought about tennis. But the more I thought about the whole thing - lessons, equipment, going to the courts - I said screw it, I'm just going to go buy a pair of sneakers and go running.
The international limit on mobile texting, or SMS, is 160 characters. We wanted Twitter to be entirely readable and writable on every single one of the over five billion mobile phones on this planet, because they all have SMS built in. So we said it has to be within 160 characters, all the tweets.
In a job where you're on a computer all day, and we cater lunch and we put snacks in the kitchen, well, we all started gaining weight, even though we try to pick healthy stuff, but inevitably you find the cashews.
Obviously, working at Google wasn't a mistake. I used to just walk around. I don't know if I was supposed to, but I'd just open doors and see what people were doing.
I'm still kinda old-school. We're twittering, and we're all twitterers. And we write tweets. The only thing I don't love is twits.
I love Sherlock Holmes, but I love any of these old stories where the writer was paid by the word, so the adventures just continue forever. They are almost like they were meant to be read out loud.