Yes Jobs had Apple and Pixar, and Musk has Tesla and SpaceX. But both Pixar and SpaceX don't really require day-to-day CEO attention, they follow long term plans (movies, rockets). That's really different from Square and Twitter, which are both, in their own ways, in a kind of trouble.
I'd love to be proven wrong though -- so good luck, Jack!
Creativity, Inc. by Catmull covers all this. It paints a better portrait of Jobs than Isaacson's Jobs biography. Plus, you get to read about the history of computer graphics and Toy Story.
I love this particular chapter where he discusses about how you feel like you don't "belong" in that role of a leader within your own company, imagining that the leader is supposed to have some perceived aggressive characteristics of your ideal leader.
But all along, you may have been the right person to make sense of everything happening in that group and it is very important to let go of those inhibitions and just focus on the job to be done. As long as we have a group that is passionate and motivated to do the job and focused on customers, you are doing alright.
It was beautifully narrated by him and I loved it. It is something you experience as a startup founder, bringing along smarter folks into the group and be humbled by everyday experiences.
Really? What's special about SpaceX that it doesn't require a full-time CEO? I'd imagine, considering the scope of their task and the scale of their ambition, it'd require more hands-on time than most.
I'm sure he's still working more than 40 hours a week across all of his companies, but I don't think he needs to be in the room for every major meeting.
If anything, Musk has two full time jobs (priorities: 1. SpaceX; 2. Tesla; 3. everything else) and actually does 80-100 hours per week of work. He's not out creating vanity designer clothing lines in his spare time.
You can't create world class products or companies while maintaing a silly "because i'm so special i'll only work 6 hours a day, 4 days a week, 1 week a month" mindset.
Also, that part of LA (hawthorne, el segundo), has a history of aviation and rocketry companies, so it has better facilities and a larger built-in talent pool too.
They do co-locate some operations (tesla designer lives in the SpaceX office, not the tesla office), but it makes sense for Tesla, as a consumer brand, to be located in the most densely concentrated location of multimillionaires and billionaires in the world.
generally curious, where did you read about Dorsey having this mindset?
Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 - October 5, 2011) was one of the three founding fathers of Pixar Animation Studios. A business magnate and inventor, he was the former CEO of Apple Inc. and Pixar Animation Studios.
"Mr. Jobs is a co-founder of Pixar and has served as its Chairman since March 1991, as its Chief Executive Officer since February 1986 and in the Office of the President since February 1995. He has been a director of Pixar since February 1986 and served as Chairman from February 1986 to November 1988."
Where's the money in that, though?
And obviously the messaging service attached to an already massive social network would be compelling, that's not really an "experimental app" by any definition.
Snapchat and Instagram are very quickly taking over the celebrity/new/sports one-to-many angle from Twitter. Once celebrities depart, Twitter will have only news, and that's not enough most likely.
The problem is that most Internet users don't fit into this bucket. They have things to discuss and share with a small group of family/friends but beyond that don't have much to say, to the broader world. These are the users that flock to Facebook, Snapchat, et al.
Until Twitter finds a way to engage the everyday average Internet user then they'll struggle to grow or create a meaningful value proposition (the $$$ is in advertising to the masses, not the engaged thought leaders).
The data on users indicates Twitter has likely peaked in terms of attracting these engaged users (data also indicates a lot of these "active accounts" are fake / bots / spam). Until that changes Twitter will be in trouble as it has no viable long term business model.
Nothing of really value is that short. Sorry.
Unless you figure out the Theory of Everything... That'll be of value ;)
I've frequently heard this theory, that Twitter's problem is that it's too complicated. I don't buy it. It has a simpler UI than Facebook or Snapchat, and it's not significantly more complicated than Instagram or Vine or Periscope or any other media sharing platform.
If you personally enjoy Twitter and derive value from it, it's easy to believe that people who don't get into Twitter just don't understand it it. My experience is that many people sign up, send their first tweet, and then say, "OK, I get it, and I have no use for this." I've helped my friends follow news sources and celebrities they like, but then they look at the wall of Tweets and say, "OK, I get it, but I don't want to read things in this format." It's not about ease-of-use for them, it's about the basic value proposition of tweeting and the Twitter feed.
when people say "ease of use" that's what i think about
Lots of people at Twitter are all about (C), and have ideas how to improve it. However, management has never really been hot on it, and prefers (A) because it is easier to "measure" and optimize for. If (C) was done well, and allowed users a good way to find content they though was interesting, it would be super helpful.
Another problem is that Twitter still sucks for media. Michael Sippey, then head of product, was against anything but text. He was out within a year. Text is hard to create (well), but photos are very easy- snap, apply a filter and bam, billions of food photos on Instagram. One of the appeals of Snapchat and Instagram are that they allow you to broadcast photos/video very easily. In essence, they are a better Twitter for 99% of the population.
> .@jack #awesome
They didn't know what that meant. Now that hashtags and @ style messaging are just about everywhere, I don't think it is a valid theory.
On Media Watch (Australia) last week they discussed how savvy politicians now use social to speak directly to the public, cutting the middle man out of the equation. The middle man being traditional news media.
I think facebook is less appropriate for this kind of celebrity broadcast.
I find it frustrating to watch twitter flail around because I can see this epic opportunity hanging right in front of them. I really hope they can take that small step and make twitter something truly epic.
https://recode.net/2015/06/22/twitter-feels-compelled-to-poi...
http://scripting.com/2015/10/02/whatWouldAFatTweetLookLike.h...
Obviously, they've thought of this internally too. I wonder what the point of the 140 character limit is today (I think it made sense originally).
i know Dave deserves respect but if i was even a janitor at Twitter this post would piss me off.
2 things:
1) Nearly a decade's worth of technical infrastructure built around the assumption that tweets will only ever be 140 characters.
2) A vocal, but shrinking, group of users who are still using Twitter via SMS.
my favorite part of tweetstorms is the compartmentalization of ideas and arguments. if a point in the story is 50 chars, its 50 chars with a break point. if its 100, let it be 100. making the story one string feel like reading long text, whereas breaking it down feels more comfortable to me.
but this is all subjective, and that website's design is pretty sleek :)
Twitter's "Follow" function being the core method of interaction, and defaulting to public feeds that you can easily interact with is actually fairly different even from a blog or say tumblr, whose core method of interacting is content-first. The balance of power (you can tweet, I can tweet back, I can retweet you, you can retweet me—and they all look the same and have the same weight in the UI) is the main advantage, and if they can play that well then they have a chance.
My examples are:
The gossip and snark of say Startup L Jackson vs the gossip and snark of a valleywag post.
IRC backchannels during conferences versus a Tweet Wall.
Valleywag is dead because of reasons unrelated to the death of media (and I genuinely miss it). IRC backchannels are dead because IRC is dead.
Whether by coincidence or design, Dorsey’s comeback closely resembles the Steve Jobs Narrative — a modern myth Silicon Valley entrepreneurs hold up as a map to absolution.
(1)I'm going with "by design." His ego risks the futures of both companies, unfortunately. Surprised the Twitter board caved on allowing a part-time CEO.
1. http://recode.net/2015/10/02/why-jack-dorsey-is-ready-to-sav...
They need to focus on how easy it is to approach a movie star, your favorite player and musician you like. How easy it is to show that you like a brand or you love a new TV show. And talk about some major events that are happening around you.
For people who have no idea what it is, they just see it as a tool to talk to someone. And most of the time, you do not have any feedback on what you wrote. In fact, you may not have any idea how many people have read what you have written.
So I think if they focused on showing how Twitter is great for expanding the boundaries of what you want to talk and make easy to see feedback from people about what you have spoken, they can attract more people.
Jokes aside, I think Jack is the man for the job. He has proven capable in square. I hope he does the same with Twitter. The company needs to take advantages of the huge market share it has.
I am curious if anyone has recent anecdotes in regards to the engineering talent at Twitter (aside from the talent that came in with Periscope).
"Twitter needs a CEO who is an @elonmusk with the Street and a @pmarca in the tweets. - @zerobeta"
However, Square is a different story altogether. Square Wallet was a damp squib, and Square's facing competition both from established players like Intuit and more recent entrants to the market, like iZettle. Leading Square and bringing it to market seems like a full-time job to me, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's IPO valuation takes a hit because it lacks a full-time CEO.
That reads like they think it's good that he's not spending as much time focusing on Square! :-)
Would love to see twtr become a platform for a myriad of third-party apps. Wouldn't it be great to place a market order by messaging @bats "buy $TWTR 10,000 30.00". Or order a limo with @uber "2 people in one hour to jfk airport"?
Why would typing out a generic request to a several square mile area without any identifying information be better than a GPS enabled app with real time communications, mapping, and integrated payment?
I see this kind of comment all the time (eg that ridiculous "magic" SMS startup) and always wonder how otherwise rational, linear thinkers develop this delusion.
I'd love to see Twitter become a "command line of the web". Add voice integration on top of it via siri/google/etc, and it come become the plaintext glue between a lot of services.
What we have here is a pub/sub message transmission layer that just happens to be used by a lot of people for personal communication. Having machines use that for other things is something that's already been experimented with - using it as a de-facto API layer is a logical step.
Why do I want to insert Twitter in the middle of this transaction? What problem is it that you're trying to solve?
Only in your little corner of the world. I honestly don't know a single person who uses twitter on a day to day basis.
Twitter is so common in tech industry circles - so many announcements , debates, and moments happen there weekly that I would think it's essential if you care about that stuff.
Truth is there is no canonical place to get the pulse of what's going on in the tech world: each of Reddit, HN, Twitter, or various aggregation sites have their filter and regulars. But Twitter seems to have the widest net.
Twitter is the best broadcasting platform. The true challenges are to control spam level and be able to display enough ads to monetise it.
I'm a late adopter of twitter but if you know how to use it is a great tool: follow less than 20 accounts, info is still possible to digest and the number of ads is not enough to annoy you.
Twitter: 500M tweets per day https://about.twitter.com/company
WhatsApp: 13B messages per day http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/06/whatsapp-now-has-700m-user...
Facebook + FB Messenger - WhatsApp: ~30B messages per day http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/22/facebook-voip-not-facebook-...
In what world?
Now that Google realized they can't be good at everything (really, are they good at much besides a few focused things?), they're open to integration and collaboration on their not-so-competitive-advantages again.
Now it's official
Seriously though, are you an employee at Twitter or Square, or are you basing this statement on the fact that you (presumably someone who doesn't see what's going on within Twitter and Square) only see Jack in interviews, and he tells the same story?
I mean, I'm by no means a big time CEO, but the only contact people outside my company have with what's going on internally are interviews. And when I give interviews I tell the same story probably almost identically, word for word. Why? Because that's the story. It doesn't change interview to interview. You have one story, one vision, one mission, and you talk about it to anyone who asks. That's not surprising.
Internally, if you're not an employee or talking to employees (ideally executives), you pretty much have zero idea what the CEO does day to day.
If all those things are true, then they can be in the office as much or little as they want. If one or more of those are missing, then the CEO has work to do.
As one former Twitter employee has said, “The greatest product Jack Dorsey ever made was Jack Dorsey.”
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/all-is-fair-in-lo...
http://recode.net/2015/10/02/why-jack-dorsey-is-ready-to-sav...
Good or bad, remember it's all PR.
The employees I know at Twitter are thrilled.
He really does like that story.
Well then, consistency. And do we not all tell the same stories, live the same lives daily, do the same work daily, solve the same problems. It's all rewind and repeat, and I would not be upset at anyone who does this.
Nobody at Twitter talks to Jack anymore
Gosh, there are 4000 people at Twitter. One could hardly maintain a true working relationship with 1% of the workforce.
Chaikovsky is a great musician/composer/genius, but people prefer M. Cyrus obviously!
Twitter should have treated itself like a utility, and focused less on the online advertising race-to-the-bottom that it is sure to lose due to the aforementioned poor user experience and negative sentiment about the platform's future; this announcement is only going to continue to contribute to poor impressions.
The other monetization directions they have played around with---namely selling access to researchers and advertisers, and certifying identities of accounts for celebrities and brands---are a much better fit for the platform, and would have sustained a fast-moving company of 50 hotshot engineers. But the constant pressure to get bigger and bigger has served Twitter poorly. I'm sad to say that I think it will be a ghost town in a few years.
As a backend engineer, I feel offended by this statement of yours.
I wish people would stop claiming how they could clone a social media app in an afternoon / weekend.
Now, social media apps are worthless without the aforementioned features that would have to be omitted to get it done in a weekend, so obviously there's some hyperbole going on with statements like that. However, on a fundamental level its correct. The technical requirements of building a social media app are small/easy and within the scope of what a startup on a shoestring budget could manage if they felt like it was a good business opportunity.
The issues start to pile up only much later down the road. Maintaining scalability after you cross some critical threshold of traffic gets hard, but you don't have to think about that until you're at or near the threshold anyway. Not a lot of barrier in getting started.
Now, to create a Twitter clone in a weekend when there's no Twitter to go by? Nope.
Well, how about recommended posts / people to follow (ML)? Sponsored posts with a buy button (3rd part integration)? Growth and metrics (data analytics)? A software product is never just about pixels on the screen; and trivializing the engineering effort behind it is insulting to Twitter employees, some of whom are brilliant engineers I know.
There would be no desire or need for advertisement or money making or tracking people when there are no owners, no benefactors but the people using it.
The end is nigh for traditional SV unicorns that offer no barrier to entry in a distributed and anonymous internet.
Edit: To be clear, I thought Twitter was just expressing a good sense of humor, and I was disappointed in that I was expecting something humorous but didn't find that.
