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
Biz Stone quotes about
Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.
If I had one piece of advice to tell an entrepreneur, I always say, 'You have to have emotional investment in what you're working on.' That's what we lacked at Odeo.
I believe that the open exchange of information can have a positive global impact.
Everything I've done, I've made up. Some of that might have been right; most of it was probably wrong.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Essentially, you become a top tweet because so many people are engaging with that tweet. They're either retweeting it, or they're favoriting it; they're doing one of many things to indicate to us that that tweet is interesting and engaging to users.
We focus a lot on culture specifically at Twitter because of this spotlight, and of the fact that we don't want to end up like the child actor who found success early and grew up all weird and freaky.
If you're thinking of acquiring a company and want to keep it a secret, tell everyone in the company; let them all in on the truth. Say, 'Listen, if this gets out, we'll probably lose the deal, so we're all in this together.'
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.
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.