#182: Twitter – Not “X”

Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner Dave Young.

Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is… Well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients, so here’s one of those.

[Out Of This World Plumbing Ad]

Dave Young:

Welcome back to the Empire Builders podcast. Dave Young here along with Stephen Semple. And as we record this, it is the morning.

Stephen Semple:

You’re not excited on this one!

Dave Young:

Dude, come on. Come on. It’s the morning of November 4th.

Stephen Semple:

And what happens tomorrow?

Dave Young:

Tomorrow we have a little election in the United States. The topic that Stephen whispered into my ear just as we started was Twitter. Let’s talk about Twitter.

Stephen Semple:

Twitter.

Dave Young:

And I go to Elon Musk. I’m like, oh God. So please, let’s do talk about Twitter and let’s talk about their origins and not their demise.

Stephen Semple:

See, I thought you would be more excited. Because the real driver behind Twitter is a guy by the name of Evan Williams, and he grew up in Nebraska.

Dave Young:

Did he really?

Stephen Semple:

Yes! You didn’t know about that.

Dave Young:

I thought he was a New York City guy. Because he started it with… It was like an emergency alert thing.

Stephen Semple:

Well, that’s one of the things that kicked it in the high gear. But no, he grew up in a farm in Nebraska.

Dave Young:

Where? What town?

Stephen Semple:

Oh God, of course you’re going to ask me that. I don’t know what town.

Dave Young:

Because I know people everywhere.

Stephen Semple:

I automatically assume that you would know this part.

Dave Young:

I didn’t know that. Every Nebraskan knows someone who knows every other Nebraskan. That’s just like, it’s a third degree of separation.

Stephen Semple:

But I figured in a place like Nebraska, everyone would know where this dude was from because of how big Twitter is.

Dave Young:

No, I don’t. Please do tell.

Stephen Semple:

Okay. So the primary driver was Evan Williams, but also Jack Dorsey and Noah Glass and Stone played very, very big roles in the starting of Twitter. But Evan grew up, as I said on a farm in Nebraska, and he wasn’t into sports, but he always knew he kind of wanted to do a business. And because of that, he read a lot of business books. And in particular, he read some marketing books, and he decided he wanted to learn more as he read a book by pretty famous marketing guy named Gary Halbert. And he said, “You know what? I want to learn more.” So he literally drove to Key West Florida and basically walked into Gary’s office and said, “I want a job working for you.”

Dave Young:

I’m telling you, that’s a bit of a drive from Nebraska.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, it is. It is. So here’s this farm boy from Nebraska showing up at Gary Halbert’s office. And Gary basically gave him a writing assignment, said, “Fine, here, do this writing assignment. See how you do.” And it was so good, Gary actually thought he had someone write it for him. He’s like, no, no, no.

Dave Young:

This is before AI.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, exactly. Actually, if it was written by AI, he wouldn’t have accepted it. But anyway, that’s a whole different issue.

So Gary hires him, and he works there for about seven months. Learns a whole bunch of stuff and returns to Nebraska. And he returns Nebraska, it’s the early nineties, and he decides he wants to start a website business. So he’s trying to sell websites to local businesses. Now, at this point, he’s in Lincoln, Nebraska. I don’t know whether that’s where he’s from, but that’s where he moved back to.

Dave Young:

That’s the big smoke. Lincoln and Omaha, you’re headed off to the big city.

Stephen Semple:

Okay, so here he is in the early nineties. Remember what websites were like in the early nineties in terms of how many businesses even had that.

Dave Young:

Oh, yeah.

Stephen Semple:

It’s early nineties. He’s trying to sell websites to local businesses, Nebraska and into the farm towns around Lincoln. And guess what? It was not working so well.

Dave Young:

Really? I’m aghast.

Stephen Semple:

I know. I know you are. I know you are.

So he’s not paying the bills. It’s not really working out, and he keeps hearing about all this stuff going on in the Bay Area in the mid to late nineties. He’s scared to kind of make the plunge, and his girlfriend at the time is moving to California, and he decides, what the heck? He would move out to California with her.

Dave Young:

Here’s the side note about Nebraska.

Stephen Semple:

Okay.

Dave Young:

This is the never-ending story. Anybody bright and talented from Nebraska moves somewhere.

Stephen Semple:

Right. Yeah. Since you are in Austin.

Dave Young:

I live in Austin. The state has more law schools and medical schools and dental schools than would ever be needed. It turns out more of those people than you’d ever need in the state of Nebraska.

Stephen Semple:

So you would just basically export them.

Dave Young:

They go somewhere.

Stephen Semple:

So it’s ’97, finds himself in California. And no degree, some experience with basically failed businesses. And he gets a job at a company called O’Reilly Media, and it’s a marketing company writing copy. Of course, you had the experience with Gary Halbert, right? But he discovers that he’s not so good in the working environment. He does good work, but he’s not a good employee. Just sort of one of those scenarios that we often see with entrepreneurs.

Dave Young:

May be a little neuro spicy.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, probably. Probably. And while he was at O’Reilly Media, he had started his own website, and he started to post his thoughts and essays onto the website. Now, it wasn’t called blogging at the time. It was just something that he was doing.

Dave Young:

Blogging hadn’t been shortened from the word web logging, which was just basically keeping a journal on a website.

Stephen Semple:

And really even at the time, what it was called was personal homepage. So he had this personal homepage, and he even wrote one of his favorite posts, because he was saying not all of them were good. One of them was he did a post on why Amazon should not expand beyond books.

Dave Young:

Oh, okay. Yeah, good advice. Nailed it.

Stephen Semple:

But at the time, it took a lot of coding to publish something, right? You had to do it in HTML and all this other stuff. So he decided to create some software where it would make it easy to publish to a website. Where you could write something, push a button, and suddenly it’s on the top of the website. And for him, that felt this really new and different, felt like this new thing. This whole idea where you could go from thought, to publishing, to it being out in the world was really exciting to him.

So he left O’Reilly Media, and he had met this woman, Meg Horan, and they started to start a business together. Now, he also got hired as a contractor for doing some things on the side, and they started this company called Piranha Lab. But he also continued to work on web logging while he was doing this, because he thought this whole web logging thing could become a product, but in some ways it was almost too simple. And he created a product called “Blogger”, it was at blogger.com. And in April, 2000, he raised half a million bucks. And if we keep mind April, 2000 in the tech world, that was right before the big tech crowd.

So in six months, they’re out of money, because they’ve been giving away the product for free. So in the fall of 2000, things are really tight. Software companies at the time, what they started to do were all pivoting to commerce solutions, because this is how they figured they could make money, is suddenly pivot these things to business products. And they thought about this, Williams thought about this, but he didn’t really want to build that. He was still excited about this idea that anyone in world, this whole blogging stuff, could share their idea for people.

And so they came really close to going out of business, was not able to make payroll. It’s 2001, and he sits everybody down and he says, “I don’t have any money. If we come up with some money, I can pay you.” And so basically everyone left. But he couldn’t imagine himself stopping working on this idea. So he finds himself by himself working on this.

And in some ways it’s like… I heard some interviews with him, and it was kind of interesting because in some ways, it was a very lonely time. But in other ways he found it very liberating, because he could do just what he wanted to do. Didn’t have to explain to anybody, didn’t have to justify it to anyone. And so he’s working on this blogging product, and it’s growing and things are happening. Then September 11th happens. And September 11th explodes blogging, right?

Dave Young:

Sure.

Stephen Semple:

Even with the .com bust that goes on, because all of a sudden people are like, what’s going on? And they’re discovering this whole idea of sharing their own experiences a