Ev Williams and Biz Stone Are Not Real Twitter Co-Founders

by Leplan on July 16th, 2011 3

Yesterday, 15th July, was Twitter’s 5th birthday and Buzzom wishes them a wonderful year ahead. On this occasion, let me share a really interesting story about Twitter with you all. It is not about good or bad, but it is essential for the ecosystem to learn about the history of the Product and the company they love and use everyday.

An early employee at Odeo, Rabble – Evan Henshaw-Plath, tells the history of Twitter on Quora and reveals some very interesting details of the history of the Micro-blogging Giant. Twitter is today one of the largest Social Network (second only to Facebook), and according to the world the company has been founded by 3 folks — Biz Stone, Even Williams and Jack Dorsey.

Evan Williams, Noah Glass, Biz Stone (Credit:businessinsider.com)

These three folks received good recognition in the world and they are among the most talked about Tech celebrities along with Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Apple’s Steve Jobs and Microsoft’s Bill Gates. But, it seems Twitter was originally founded by Jack, Noah, and Florian. When Odeo lost the business to Apple’s iTunes, Even Williams bought all the investor stake in the company and survived Twitter. Great and risky step by Ev, which proved to be the best step taken by him. It not only survived Twitter, it helped him in a way unimaginable at that time.

Here is the full story explained by Rabble – Evan Henshaw-Plath.

I don’t know the details. But I can give a general overview of how I THINK it happened.

The first thing to remember is that Twitter’s official founders is more about the title given to the outside world.

Odeo was a startup founded by Noah Glass. After working on it for several months, with Ev as an advisor, Ev put up some initial angel investment money. After about 4 months of work on Odeo, Ev decided to join Odeo as an active member of the team instead of being an advisor / investor. Because of his position having co-created Blogger, and being the sole angel investor, he got the title of founder, it made sense. At the time we were working out of his old apartment in the mission, above Jay’s Cheesestake shop.

Odeo went on to raise a series A round, and worked for more than a year on Odeo as a podcasting startup. All employees got stock options with 4 year vesting schedule at about the same time as Series A closed.

When it became clear that Odeo was not going to become a huge success in the podcasting space, there was a period of soul searching and hack days. One of those hack days, Jack, Noah, and Florian (another Rails dev at Odeo), created Twitter. The initial version seemed interesting, Noah, Jack, and Florian kept working on it for several months, while the rest of the team stayed focused on Odeo.

At this time, there were various efforts to sell Odeo, which didn’t pan out. It became clear that the development team was bigger than was needed to experiment with Twitter and maintain Odeo. So the VP of Product, Tim Roberts, VP of Engineering, Tony Stubblebine, myself, Adam (biz dev), who went on to do Trazzler, and Dom who was running QA, left.

Eventually, Ev bought out the VC’s and everybody else who were shareholders of Odeo. He created a new company, and issued founders shares to everybody who was remaining. I think, 7 or 8 people. Jack was named CEO in charge of Twitter, because Ev wanted to do other products as well, under the umbrella of Obvious Corp.

I’m pretty sure Ev got the vast majority of the founder’s shares. He was the person who bought out the Odeo investors. Without that, Twitter would never have survived.

I DO NOT KNOW the exact details of who got what percentage. But this is my best guess, knowing the people involved.

The initial employees got somewhere between 0.5% and 1.5%, Jack got something like 5% to 15%, and Biz probably got something similar. All of these were FOUNDERS SHARES, common stock, not preferred, but also not options. It might seem small, but it was extremely generous of Ev. It was his company and his money.

My understanding is that Noah and Ev decided to go their separate ways. Noah was paid for being the founder of Odeo, just like the other Odeo investors. I don’t know if he got Twitter stock or cash. To me it’s sad, that Noah and Florian have been written out of the history.

Ev and Biz were around, both do good product work, and Ev’s being able to buy (back?) Odeo was critical to Twitter’s existence. So was his faith to bank roll Twitter for more than a year afterwards until it started getting traction at SXSW. But they weren’t really founders. They were around and involved, and ended up getting the fame. Once Twitter started growing, clearly they’ve played a huge role in making Twitter a success. Biz had energy and faith in promoting Twitter which ended up being very important. Having the title of founder, helped them help Twitter grow.

That’s a long story to explain. Hope it’s interesting.

So what do you think about this? Is this unfair for Noah and Florian? Or is this a fair deal as the fruit has gone to the folks who made it happen.

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