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Think about a device that's going down the aisles on Wheels by itself sleek-looking tall friendly fast and curious. These robots are
That's Robert. Boyanov. Ski a 5 G expert at AT&T business and the robot. He's describing is making its way to a supermarket near you think of a robotic vacuum, but on steroids, it's got the ability to scan inventories up and down the aisle in an autonomous way. Is it on the Shelf? Not on the Shelf? What's selling? What's not selling? These retail robots are ready to realm beyond the supermarket.
Else, but how later in the show Robert will explain how five G's Mass connectivity will help allow a fleet of retail robots to flourish in the meantime visit att.com 5G for Biz to learn more that's att.com 5 G fo R bi Z.
Silicon Valley tends to lie in eyes entrepreneurs who take hairpin turns and their careers the sharper the turn the greater your prestige Steve Jobs made his name not just at Apple but through his diversion of Pixar and Back Again Elon Musk is approaching demigod status with Tesla SpaceX hyperloop. And the boring company. His career is downright swashbuckling those daring shape-shifting figures can Inspire us to shoot for the stars and burrow through the Earth.
at the same
time
but watch them too closely and you may derail your own destiny. You may start telling yourself something like this. I should do something completely new and different and maybe I'm just stuck in a rut in some ways. That didn't excite me. I thought well, it felt a little bit derivative on the things. I had already done actually hesitated because I had been doing the same thing for so like that Hamlet of the entrepreneurial world is my friend Evan Williams the EV Williams. He's the co-founder.
Founder and former CEO of Twitter before Twitter. He was a co-founder of the service blogger those two service has transformed the way we communicate online. They popularized verbs like blogging tweeting and following and of course following predates Twitter, but it was redefined by it with bloggers and Twitter under his belt you'd think as Maestro of online communication would double down on his next eruptive venture in the world of self-publishing. But this is where silicon Valley's obsession with all things new and
Different can go a bit too far. It can lead established entrepreneurs into an Eddy of self-doubt until they're circling around questions like this. Do we want to actually do this? Is that my thing that's a big decision fortunately ever made that big decision. It's very valuable to do the thing that you're obsessed with that you just think about all the time. If I have all this time and intuition that has been built that's an investment that's actually an asset but like not doing this
I thought I would regret much more.
What excited me originally that feeling you get sometimes from technology of the seeming magic to it? You did something. It was just delightful to have this idea in your mind. And then it's on it's on a webpage when you create something yourself and you're like, oh wow, I did that and like that EV launched his third Venture medium a One-Stop shop for every thoughtful medium-length article online medium is
Third attempt to reinvent the world of self-publishing in his long but not so winding career make no mistake while a career that twists and turns and nearly flies over a cliff is certainly fun to watch. It's not necessarily the path. You should follow in fact, if you're a thoughtful reflective Mission driven entrepreneur, like ev-do. You may find yourself chasing the same big idea again, and again you return to it sometimes wittingly sometimes unwittingly and just when you think you're out,
It pulls you back in to quote Michael Corleone from The Godfather Part
3 Let's make him an offer. He can't
refuse but here's the thing. You shouldn't feel fatigued by the repetition instead. You should celebrate your single-mindedness your focus. I believe you can never know the full reach of your first idea. It could span your entire
career.
You got to have incredible Talent at every position.
There are fires burning when you going home
going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. So so do I have no idea what to do? Sorry. I made a mistake. Would
you have to time it right?
This is masters of scale.
I'm Reid Hoffman founder of LinkedIn investor acrylic and your host. I believe you can never know the full reach of your first idea. It could span your entire career.
There's a set of entrepreneurs who see a transformative change taking place in the world a change. That is so profound. They can spend a lifetime playing out the possibilities in their heads. They say to themselves. I know the world's moving in one particular direction and I'll just keep betting on the world going in that direction and suppose you're right the world does in fact start moving in that direction. You'll be surprised how many times you want to ride that way? It doesn't matter if you end up having the ride of your life or an epic Wipeout you'll just keep
Running after it Ed Williams and I are similar in this regard EV to me is the embodiment of this serial entrepreneur who's been riding the same massive wave of change throughout his career and to understand how F first caught this wave. You have to go all the way back to his childhood to a farm outside of Clark's Nebraska. It was a very small town. It was around 400 450 population where I grew up we were actually outside of town.
Down so we drove for miles to school and there were twelve to fourteen kids in my class from K through 11. And in this tiny community of didn't exactly fit the mold. It was a very isolated experience. It was literally in the middle of corn fields. You knew everybody football was the main interest of people that brought the community together lots of sports lots of hunting not much else and that was my life.
That was his life in the real world at least but ev2 like many lonely kids in the 80s was leading a double life. He had one foot planted in Clarks. The other planted in the virtual world. It turned out his family farm was just the right place for Ev to get an early introduction to the dawn of computing. My dad had did have a computer in the 80s. He was an early adopter for Farm purposes. He had an IBM PC with some spread.
Sheet software and different Farm software. I tried to figure that out didn't really succeed much but then in high school, we had some apple twos in our computer lab. We had mandatory basic programming when I was a sophomore and I loved it. That was when I was just stricken by. Oh my gosh. I can this works for my brain. I stayed up late I more than one occasion the school shut down the lights were shut off and the doors were locked while I was still sitting in that.
Her Labs at that feeling of flow that you really just doing something that is creative and exciting and Technical and hard and that's when I felt that programming was just the spark for Ev what really set. His imagination on fire was an article in Wired Magazine EV still remembers that piece to this day. I picked up the second-ever issue of wired on a newsstand. I remember talking about connecting all the brains on the planet and about the instantaneous.
Shushing of texts and ideas and all these utopian ideals utopian as it may have been ever took a deadly seriously that got me very excited and I got it because of playing with bulletin boards and had a PC at the time that dial into things with and that just immediately I found very exciting. Now. This is the wave that ever will start writing from the outside. It might seem like his passion is to empower self-expression.
But there's a deeper force that will carry them from blogger to Twitter to medium. I have been focused on essentially the same problem throughout most of my career. The internet was very exciting because of this idea that all these mines or connected that there's great stuff in these mines out there in the world somewhere in the internet is this big machine that takes certain bits from these mines and puts them in other minds and so to me
It's like this fascinating possibility and then these tools that we build are like different approaches to make the machine work. Now this idea of connecting Minds in one great big thinking machine may sound a bit abstract. But overarching Visions often are it's exactly what makes this kind of vision one that can stretch over an entire career. But the challenge of these big broad areas of Fascination is you don't always know how to
Art and your biggest opportunities will change from year to year technology changes business changes competitors change the landscape, but if it's a vision that's meant to guide you you'll start to feel of a pole and EV felt in early poll. I was trying to think of what's the business what's the product that I can do on this? So I was thinking very creatively of what what can I create that actually no had a great and though I had programmed I didn't really know much.
About how to do that. So I decide well the biggest problem with the Internet is most people don't know how to use it. So we need to teach people how to use it now bear in mind. We're talking with the late 80s internet which was a decidedly unwelcoming place for people who didn't know how to code the web had just been invented only a handful of people had email addresses the first step towards ev's Vision was simply to get people online. So he created a guide for the confused internet.
User is so I thought the way to teach people how uses to show them. So we made a video on how to use the internet. We actually made a VHS tape.
The following is a reenactment of whatevs video may have sounded
life internet a global computer Information Network that connects you with the world. It was just before the web actually was taking off and so the World Wide Web of course makes a brief.
Mention, but a lot of it was command line how to FTP if I land how to email with pine and it was incredibly tedious and Incredibly amateur how to use the internet video connected to the internet is not as difficult as you might think after you watch this training video, you will be able to send a message to anywhere in the world. That was my first internet product. This may sound like a quirky high school project. But this idea that the internet should be easier to use
is actually the Wellspring of ev's creativity throughout his career. He'll keep returning to the same question. What's preventing people from sharing their thoughts online the question never gets boring because the answer is constantly changing it evolved along with technology and culture. I actually think Eva and I are similar in this way as you may have noticed. I'm really interested in how people connect online my interest predates LinkedIn and PayPal it
Dates my investments in Facebook and Flickr it began back in the 90s when I began studying the original online communities, where could you meet other users online? You can go play in a virtual world. You could join a chat room you can post on a message board and so forth. All of these unregulated spaces were sort of like costume balls you arrived and any sort of Disguise you liked there was a New Yorker cartoon at the time. It summed up the pervasive feeling of mistrust Sheryl Sandberg Chief Operating.
Officer Facebook reminded me of it in our interview.
It's hard to remember but this is where they had that cartoon, you know with the dog the computer saying on the internet. No one knows you're a dog the whole idea behind all the stuff. We did online was
Anonymous you could be an angel one minute and a troll the next minute and no one would know you were the same person just unleashing your super-ego and your ID. That's what it meant to go online to alternatively present and disguise yourself to be part. You part fantasy and a lot of people figured this
Just the very nature of our online identities. They wouldn't match the real world and they never would but then there were The Optimist like me who couldn't stop thinking about the power of these communities once users could shed the role-playing habits and really be themselves people like me would say to Skeptics. No, no these patterns this participation in these networks these communities these communication tools. These are all part of our real world and what really matters to us is our real world identities and our
Our real world lives the change was coming and the bet you could make on that change were mind-boggling and that's a long game. I've been playing ever since I suspected at the time that this change was huge. I could never have known where it would take me and how much I would learn along the way but this intersection between the online world and the real one that remains the guiding force of my career and ever as we'll see also has a guiding force after creating that VHS Guide to the internet. He followed the natural.
Bold move to Silicon Valley where he worked for O'Reilly media writing technical manuals for the first generation of web Engineers while he was there. He started a website called Egghead.com where he captured his own thoughts. It was one of those scratch your own itch things. So I had had a personal website and started reading what people called Web blogs at the time. I was like, well, I'm going to make my of head.com in
into a web blog and because I knew how to write code and web applications. I wrote a very simple script that let me go and type in a box and I hit a button and that was at the top of my homepage and I remember doing that and that feeling that we're all very familiar with now where you have a thought and you consider putting it on the internet and closing the Gap to doing that literally seconds. That's that's where the ants.
Jason came from EV called that tool bloggers and it's the reason the term blogging stuck more importantly it was outside of the quirky little community of programmers blogger heralded a much bigger shift in online Behavior. The more people come online the more custom they become to sharing and consuming ideas in this way and then F builds a solution that Taps a geyser of self-expression when a blogger posted to the internet, they essentially live stream.
Their lives in as much detail as they please stranger still they invited friends to follow and reply in the comments section and that behavioral shift paved the way for Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Airbnb and any other social site or Marketplace is simply couldn't exist in a world of anonymity.
As blogging took off EV devoted more time and more people to his growing platform, but he wasn't quite sure how to turn blogger into a viable business. He had raised the seed round of $500,000, but it was dwindling that money ran out in late 2000 that was for us the beginning of the dark times. I said the team down said look in two weeks. We're not going to be able to pay you. So essentially this is the last paycheck we can pay we had already met.
I skipped one. I told him you're welcome to come back tomorrow. I'm going to come back but none of them came back. So yeah that was hard. There was a myth in Silicon Valley that successful entrepreneurs like oil Prospectors, ultimately just get lucky. They sink a well in the right field the right time and they've been cashing in on that guys are ever since and I won't deny that luck plays a huge role in any highly risky career, but I don't know of many.
Foreigners who strike oil on their first try or their second or even their 20th attempt. You need some reason to keep going and this is normally what we call grit or persistence that persistence that endurance that grit can actually lead you to scale to understand a little more about where it comes from and what inspires it. We reached out to Angela Duckworth a psychology Professor whose research cemented the connection between perseverance and success Google the word grit and the second result.
Alt is her Ted Talk. She says that grit actually begins with
goals. Human beings have goals. You know, you want to have lunch today. You want to call this person back. The reason why I'm trying to do these things is, you know, I'm trying to reach these other goals that are actually of more enduring importance to me like, oh, well, the reason I have to call that person back is, you know, actually that relationship matters to me. Well, why does that relationship matter to you? You know, you keep asking this question of why till you get to the top level goal that gives meaning and purpose to everything else.
That you do whatever's at the top of
that hierarchy makes everything else fall into perspective and that's what keeps someone like Eva or me in pursuit of that one idea. You keep going because every single thing you do is in service of your vision
when you're a truly gritty person you have tremendous clarity about what that top level goal is that life philosophy that drives everything else and you actually are very good at aligning your day-to-day actions your to-do list.
It's task list to that top level goal. You don't waste time doing things that are unrelated to the top-level goal and you're really stubborn when you're trying to reach that top level goal. And one of your low-level tactics isn't working out, you know, you get up again and you think of some other way that you can get the job done.
Ever found ways to get the job done for two years after his funding ran out and the rest of his team left. He kept developing this new service blogger. Most other entrepreneurs would have packed it in and I'd argue that this is why many entrepreneurs fail F stuck with it. He stuck with it because he had a vision that folks on a bigger problem. And this is the Hallmark of an entrepreneur or an artist or a scientist or an activist.
Anyone really who's first idea can span their entire career. You just tell yourself. I know this problem needs to be solved this solution needs to be built. It needs to happen and after two years of working out of his apartment without a paycheck. Someone came knocking Google you might have heard of them have sold blogger to Google in 2003 and went to work inside the mothership this validated his single-minded dedication, and he also got a few shares in Google which would turn out to be quite valuable.
Oil then blogger was eclipsed by the competition. Does it Google little over a year and a half working on Blogger the whole time we started to build things that were attempts to make it an aggregation. But our frustration was really we're building the software is the easiest way to start blogging and then people would move off blogger because there's no one network effect. There's no reason for them stay there. That's when we started focusing on more and we built profiles and we built links between the profiles. He was in a race to
Build features that were precursors to a social network, but it was just one
problem
EV never really aspired to build a social network. Remember his vision is to connect brains not to connect friends or Foster a sense of community. The lifeblood of social media is not just self-expression. It's communal interaction. The friend invites likes poked comments and other notifications the deliver a dopamine hit and keep you engaged the fact is those features
I've never really engaged EV we didn't build comments and a blogger for a long time and that actually hurt us because some people like it was all about the comments all about hearing from people as I can. Yeah, I don't really want to hear from people. I just want to put some thoughts out there and read other thoughts. So what features did he want to build any feature that enabled a deeper exchange of ideas. There is a feature that I was really enamored with called Next blog was meant to do was Drive traffic.
Blogs, obviously and there was in theory going to be some intelligence to it. So you could see something related or something that you followed before we even have the word follow but the very first version of it was literally a some script I wrote where that would go query a database and randomly select a Blog out of the Thousand most recently updated Vlogs and redirect you to it, but the next blog feature wasn't sufficient to fend off the competition blogger eventually slipped under our tidal wave of social media trends.
Why maintain a blog when you're already spilling out your life on Myspace friends stir and ultimately Facebook. You may think this was a huge missed opportunity for Ev he had a nation community of users. He had users identifying themselves sharing confessional post. It sounded like all of the ingredients for our primordial social network. I'd argue ABS Advantage is that he's never distracted by the business model in Vogue That season he stays focused on that first Vision, which will rapidly Define the
Of his career. He's interested in elevating the conversation in sharing the most insightful posts. He never could have related to users who aspired a more followers are watching the number of likes climb on a witty Facebook post. Most of our brains deliver a dopamine hit from this sort of digital Applause ABS brain, I won't claim to understand how it works. But here's a clue of just how little satisfaction he derives from casual socializing online. So that's not motivated me not to
say I'm completely antisocial but that's not how I looked at where the most value of online interaction was. So it might seem rather ironic that EV the champion of deep meaningful monologues shouldn't upscaling the shortest most reactive form of self-expression in Internet history Twitter.
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor AT&T
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Think of a robotic vacuum but on steroids, we're back with Robert Blaine top ski a 5 G expert at AT&T business. He was telling us about the retail robots that roam Supermarket aisles and are now expanding their territory moving into a cellular environment allows the robot to do more things. It can now go outside the building now, you can take it back to where those trucks are coming in unpacking and doing more inventory Logistics.
Roll in and out of the front office or back office. Now, imagine a fleet of these retail robots communicating with millions of store items the numbers get mind-boggling. They're supposed to be 35 billion connected things. Give or take a few billion depending on Whose estimate you're looking at we all know 5G networks are fast, but they're also built to handle the billions of devices will find in the future from retail robots to
Smartphones so one of the enabling Technologies and five. She is This Promise around massive device connectivity. The network has got to be able to manage all of these things and very small spaces. So it really gives customers this new Option or opportunity to think about if I'm going to connect all these things and get data from these things now I can use a 5 G system to do that. Where in the past you really couldn't the 5?
Future is coming fast along with its capacity for Mass connectivity to learn what that means for your business. Visit att.com 5G forbids to learn more. That's att.com 5 G fo R bi Z.
So how did Eva Vol people wind up is Twitter's co-founder and CEO unexpectedly it actually grew out of a dead end in ev's road to scale. Here's how it happened after blogger. EV was drawn to a new medium podcasting. This was 2005. And the first Generations a podcast had just emerged they were taking certain segments of the Tech Community by storm. If everyone was so eager to express themselves in writing ever figured it would only be a matter of time.
I'm before they'd start sharing ideas and audio. He figured speaking was even easier than writing. So the quickest path to share a thought from one brain to another might just be audio. So in 2005, he launched a new company Odio. He envisioned it as the premier platform for podcasting and not just podcasting switching from writing the speaking it would be even bigger than
blogger. It had to be
I thought audio given my experience with blogging I thought
Oh, well, this is even easier because talking is easier than writing turned out talking may be easier than writing. But creating listenable podcast or listenable audio content is actually much harder than creating readable text as a new podcaster. I can tell you Eva is absolutely right about that. I realize audio is actually a less casual form if you will and could be very powerful, but it's just much harder to do and not
Within the bounds of what most people can sit down and do even if they had great stuff in their head.
EV secured five million dollars in funding he built a platform for podcasters to publish their work and listeners to discover content. It was expensive. It was ambitious. You might even call it a Marketplace or not. I don't know if we called it a Marketplace, but we're going to Discovery and creation and this big comprehensive thing. And before we launch anything Apple came out with podcasts integrated into iTunes, which kind of blew our minds because it was so early when Apple
You to Market. It's never a good sign, especially when your company's potential audience is Apple's installed base of iPod owners of wasn't sure what his next move would be. So I went to the team we did this very deliver process where I said, I don't know if podcasting or rodeos are thing who's got ideas and we did essentially a hackathon. The hackathon has become a tried and true method of generating ideas. The process is simple you bring together all of your employees.
He's traditionally would focus on the technical employees. But Smart Companies engage everyone and you challenge them to come up with an idea. They can build in one Marathon hacking session. Usually everyone is trying to solve for a specific problem in Ebbs case. They were solving for the company's future. What should they do? Next this Odio hackathon proved unusually fruitful historically. So odious co-founder biz Stone and web designer Jack Dorsey came up with a
Any idea a lot of the ideas were in a similar space because we had been toying around with messaging and SMS as well. As audio. One of the ideas was a group texting type product. But then what became Twitter didn't have named Twitter was one of the others that Jack and Biz came up with it just seemed like something it was simple. It was elegant. It seemed fun. This simple elegant fun messaging service actually felt oddly familiar to have it turns out he had sent tweet like
messages in the past back in his blogger days. I build a Blog for status updates and was completely private. I shared it with my team and I went on this short trip for family purposes. And on the trip, I were sending what essentially were status updates which is how we thought of tweets it at the time before we call them tweets. And before we even build something or maybe while the team was built something. I just built this prototype using existing technology where I sent status updates to a private blog.
And that resonated with me that felt like something interesting and unique it was sharing this thing that you didn't normally share. Of course the buzz around Twitter for stev to answer a tough question. Do we need to actually pivot every board meeting? I would present them Twitter and what was going on with iodo. Odia was even though it was going sideways it had users. I remember realizing at the time that sometimes it's better to fail than it is to not fail.
If you're not going to you know succeed so and Odio had your usage like we couldn't ignore it. It wasn't a total failure. And so we kept iterating on that and thinking well, maybe there's something here in April of 2007 Twitter spun off from Odio odile was gradually wound down and once more EV was on the cusp of changing the way we communicate online Twitter may sound like a departure from Ebbs goal of connecting the world's brains on the contrary.
A of argues that Vision shaped Twitter from its Inception. He saw Twitter as one way of getting people to share their thoughts at unprecedented speeds to him. It sparked the world's first Collective brainstorm. I have a thought and now not only is it online but it could be another people's brains and seconds instead of somewhere. But then the next week if someone happens upon my blog or is the RSS feed it was very visceral and
And
one example, we always referred to early on and they're begin an earthquake in San Francisco and you turn to Twitter and at times we even experienced our phone buzzing with tweets about the earthquake while still feeling the earthquake so that idea of feeling being connected in real time as really the real time. They made all the difference as well as the idea that you are really broadcasting not publishing. So I think it was just more a pure expression of brains being
Being connected for the first few years after Twitter's founding Eva was adamant. The Twitter would never become a venue for kibitzing. Like Facebook Twitter was a forum for broadcasting for speaking out loud to The Wider world. Not just your social network. This came up a lot. Of course when we were doing Twitter, which many people classify as a social network. I kind of railed against that especially early on when we were still trying to figure out what all these things were and and Facebook was fairly well-established. Twitter's not a social
work they argue Twitter's and Information Network or real-time Information Network social information was a subset of what Twitter provided and actually wasn't the point some of the people you want to hear from our social connections, but there's a whole world of other people this vision of Twitter as a public forum deeply influenced every facet of its design the word follow for instance reminded users a Twitter wasn't just a place to tell your friends what you
You were thinking strangers could follow your thoughts as well. There's a talk. I gave a year or two into Twitter where I talked about at first. We thought the big thing about Twitter is compared to plugins was that was short which enabled Real Time - it wouldn't mobile-friendly it was built through SMS, but we invented this follow button and I think we invented the follow term fact. I remember that we had debates about followers it creepy to say you follow someone and didn't prefer I stalk someone but yeah, we thought
That we had lots of jokes about that. That's why although the very first version of Twitter had a concept of friend eventually. It was like no it's not friend. It's not to way they don't have to prove you. It's a follow subscribe model and even things like retweets the design of those got influenced by this idea that it's about the dissemination of information more than it is connecting with your friends or having social interactions. And what was interesting that framing at the time was also Facebook.
It was very much focused on the social. Of course all these things expand to do the adjacent thing as well notice. How else thinking has evolved since the Blogger days remember his original reaction to the idea of user comments on blog posts. I don't really want to hear from people. I just want to put some thoughts out there and read other thoughts. He has a newfound appreciation of the value of user comments and you can actually spend a whole career discovering how odd little behaviors that emerge online can redefine the
Network you thought you knew a network isn't simply a web of users it's a launching pad for more robust communication deeper trust and greater understanding new behaviors emerge as they grow accustomed to one another in this unfamiliar new venue, and that's when the true value of the network first comes into view for example in the early days when I said LinkedIn can help you search for a job. Most people would then say oh so you can browse the classified ads and I'd say no no, no.
You can look for a company. You can actually look for hiring manager. You can look at the profiles of other people who work at that company and a company can search for job candidates like you and then ask you who else do you know and why stop a job searches LinkedIn can also answer questions. Like how do I stay up-to-date on information in my industry? How do I learn the right skills? How do I find the right people to do business with how do I connect to them? All of that becomes applications on top of this network which then in turn?
Turn feed back into the network. It's exceedingly hard to imagine all of those emergent properties as a first-time founder. In fact, if there's one thing every wishes he could tell his younger self. It's about this emergent power of the network. It's about the network. The value is in the network. The value is not in the software that the internet enables. The value is in the network because there's so many implications of that. I'm obviously preaching to the choir and talking about like the the king of networks, but
But but I I didn't realize that certainly in the Blogger days as flattering as it is to be called the king of networks. I'm going to have to refuse that Crown to be clear. I understand the Dynamics of networks. I understand how quickly they can change and how rapidly New Opportunities can come into view, but I would argue that networks are such strange fast evolving organisms. No one could claim any and all networks as their personal Royal Dominion. In fact, I would argue that ever has developed an expertise over.
Pacific kind of network a network that enables the discovery and distribution and transmission of information and he's become a master of building the platforms for those kinds of conversations. And this is a skill uniquely suited to have after a lifetime of trying again and again to build this network. Of course, that's not the only lesson ever had to learn a CEO as the company grew exponentially ever found himself as so many Founders do in Uncharted Territory.
It was incredible two years as CEO of the company in general grew 10x across every measure that we are counting including ones that maybe shouldn't event but I was definitely in over my head is by far the biggest thing I'd done the company Grew From 30 people to 300 people during that time. I grew an exec team from nothing and I never considered myself a great manager and I think I didn't spend enough time.
Thinking about the people and the pressures that they were under F started the company to build a product the great connected brain, but he soon realized he also needed to grow a team and the skills that make someone a brilliant and Visionary product developer. Someone intensely focused on Vision Art always married with a skills to manage the team to get there. I underinvested in relationships. I under-invest in the time to really understand what was going on with people.
Around me and that's what caused the turmoil and is sort of the classic lesson of communicate talk. Listen to people I was obsessed with the product and the strategy and where we were going next and capturing the opportunity we had and less on the team. We raised a lot of money and the company is growing. So I assume the board was happy and they weren't telling me otherwise, so I didn't invest in that either and
Got me into trouble with some turmoil unfolding between his executive team in his board ever took a step back dick. Costolo became CEO of Twitter allowing ev2 focus on product and the leadership lesson of took from this period of time will serve any founder. Well the Top Line ask for feedback. If you're not getting feedback. There's probably some negative feedback that you could be getting that probably would help me a lot. I wasn't getting any so I assumed everything was great.
By 2010 Twitter was a huge success but ever sought only is a half step towards his vision of a robust virtual meeting of the minds if the internet is one big machine of connected Minds Twitter help get all the synapses firing willy-nilly which was an extraordinary accomplishment, but that's not a thinking machine. It's more of a Twitchy gut reaction machine. There was another part of this thinking machine that hadn't been built yet. You might call it the
A rebel cortex a place for deep thinking a place where users can spend a little bit more time polishing and expanding their thoughts before Wheeling them out for the public nice idea. But every was the founder of Twitter that ain't the platform for Polish never will be and this meant Twitter became ev's gilded cage a huge irresistible opportunity for scale and a stunning success, but it didn't feel like he'd reach his ultimate Vision this can happen to anyone in the business of
Of creating something new you put your blinders down and speed down One path and suddenly you realize you're miles away from where you were trying to go and at that point. It's hard to double back and find out where you went off course, especially when the company is highly successful and has its own natural path and doesn't reach the destination of the founders Vision ever was torn he took years to retrace his steps and not only retrace them but figure out where he was trying to get in the first place there is
A year after I left Twitter and before we started medium and my next thought was whether or not I wanted to pursue that opportunity and I thought if I believe in this this principle that you should actually focus on what you naturally focus on and really it coming down to impact so many people would have been delighted to found a company like Twitter and scale it for the rest of their working lives, but ever couldn't stop thinking about his larger Vision. This idea of the thinking machine is like his creative Center of
Gravity and no amount of success can pull them away from that vision for long. He keeps returning to it. It's as if he had said in the middle of Twitter's fabulous growth who cares about that Tara Babel metrics like monthly active users are not my measure of success. I care about what they're saying and who's listening ever wanted to elevate the conversation not just make it louder turns out this part of the thinking machine had been utterly neglected by every founder of
Social media and by Publications that historically generated that thought-provoking insightful content that ever was after every thought that those Publications were making a serious Mistake by trying to manage their websites themselves their efforts resulted in a critical failure of innovation their content didn't have the potential to go viral or be retweeted or get applauded. We're just talking non social media that was still published on individual isolated websites.
Often with outdated and cumbersome CMS software that certainly didn't find its audience efficiently didn't have built-in feedback loops and mechanisms. So if you're publishing on the internet in a few years, it's going to make less and less sense to do that on a stand alone isolated website that you build from scratch and then try to get people to come to and even if you get them to come there they're not logged in and any sort of Engagement is hard to Garner if
Can instead publish into a platform and build an audience and that's going to be more efficient and more likely to
succeed think about the our selves
learnings that f is acquired by now. He's launched blogger one of the first venues for freeform publishing. He took his lumps It audio and learned how hard it was to populate a platform with meaningful content. He helped Twitter grow from a company side project to a global Powerhouse of a network. It's like with each company.
Any he's seen a different part of the promised land but hasn't put them all together until now with medium that was the opportunity and because it hadn't happened yet. There's no place that really own that for a particular type of content creating a place where substantive thoughtful high-quality ideas and stories would reside in find a good audience that place medium an F might have finally found his place,
too.
Or five years into medium now, which is actually longer than I had worked on anything. I can relate to obscure directory at least a little bit. I've been trying to move closer and closer to One Vision from most of my entrepreneurial history. In fact, my very first startup was an online dating site called social net but no one ever introduces me as the founder of social in because no one remembers it as vividly as I do. It means something really different to me than it does to anyone else. It was my first
first ride on the larger wave of social networking. I may have wiped out but it was an invaluable Wipeout because after that when I was investing in Facebook and founding LinkedIn, I knew a lot more about how people connect online. I was better equipped to get a little bit closer to my vision. Someone like Eva isn't necessarily asking what's the next big thing the really asking how do I realize my vision? How do I take one more step towards that future in ev's case?
Medium is working towards being an answer to that question. When we started meeting five years ago at told friends during the tech business that's going to create a place to be published on the web and they're like kind of scratch their heads and like mmm isn't that already a solved problem? Well, actually, you know, we think we can create a better solution for that in the marketplace for stories and written content and ideas you can slave away and maybe you can Garner an audience after a few years, but then if you're lucky you'll get a job or
if you're lucky you'll get a book deal and there's really nothing in between and so I think what we really haven't democratized yet when it comes to the internet is the ability to compete at a professional level in this form and we don't yet know what comes that because it hasn't existed yet. But that's what I'm most excited about.
Even EV doesn't know what will come out of medium just like he didn't know where blogger would take him or what the future is a podcast would be or the new kinds of interactions that Twitter would create you never know. Just how far your first idea can take you it might take Eva way from medium on to another part of that giant thinking machine. He wants to build it may lead him to company number four or five or six. We don't know what it is yet and maybe
It doesn't yet either he just knows what he's working towards.
I'm Reid Hoffman. Thank you for listening. If you've heard anything on the show that you want to write an email to your team. You're in luck. We post the full transcript of every episode on our website masters of scale.com while you're there sign up for our weekly email. You'll know first when each episode launches and we'll pull out the most interesting threads from the show. Finally. If you love the show, we'd love you to leave us a review on iTunes. We read everyone and it helps us make each
Better than the last masters of scale is a wait what original our executive producers are June Cohen and daren't riff. Our producers are Dan CAD me Chris McLeod Natalie Chang, Jenny Cataldo and been Manila are supervising producer is Jay Punjabi original music and sound design is by the holiday Brothers mixing and mastering by Brian Pew special. Thanks to Chris Shea Eliza Schreiber David Sanford cited. Sepia Eva and Stephanie Kent visit masters of scale.com to find the
script for this episode
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