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'd dropped out of college to start design thing.
I started designing book jackets, which was great because I was good at it. And then from there I decided to become a freelance graphic designer and I needed to expand beyond book jackets, so I taught myself web design, and then in 1999 some friends of mine decided to start a company called Xanga.com, which was a very early kind of social network slash blogging community.
When I studied graphic design, I learned a valuable lesson: There's no perfect answer to the puzzle, and creativity is a renewable resource.
Design is a career where you learn creative decision making.
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.
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.
My personal view about how people should use Twitter is less relevant than our goal to provide the infrastructure for a new kind of communication and then support the creativity that emerges.
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.
I still blog, but I do think blogging will become obsolete, as there are more ways of interacting on the Web with low barriers to entry for people to engage and participate.
People are watching TV, they're watching some clips on their iPhone. I mean, some folks are sitting there on the iPhone, watching the Colbert Report, and meanwhile there's a huge plasma TV right in front of them that they could be watching it on.
I mean just look at haiku, the idea of it. We want to focus on that singularity, on that simplicity, but we still want to add features and add value, but we want to do it in a way that fits in with that mentality of simplicity. You have to spend a lot of time thinking about it.