Twitter

About

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams as a side project at Odeo, a podcasting company co-founded by Williams ¹². Dorsey conceived the idea of an SMS-based service that would allow individuals to communicate short status updates to a small group ¹. The first Twitter message was posted by Dorsey on March 21, 2006: “just setting up my twttr” ¹.

The prototype was developed by Dorsey and contractor Florian Weber, initially as an internal tool for Odeo employees ¹. After Odeo failed to gain traction, Williams bought out Odeo’s investors and spun Twitter into its own company in April 2007 ²³. Twitter gained mainstream attention at the 2007 South by Southwest conference, where usage tripled from 20,000 to 60,000 tweets per day ¹.

Twitter went public on November 7, 2013, on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker TWTR, with shares priced at $26 and opening at $45.10, giving the company a valuation of approximately $31 billion ¹⁴. On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion ($54.20 per share), taking the company private and later rebranding it as X ⁵.

Funding History

What Investors Say

Ron Conway invested $75,000 in Twitter after Evan Williams returned investors’ money when Odeo failed. Conway was so impressed by Williams’ integrity that he promised to invest in whatever Williams built next ⁶. Conway’s investment philosophy aligned with Twitter: “We invest in people first, idea second, market size third. It’s our belief that the idea that we’re seeing is going to morph so much that we should not get wedded to the idea, we should get wed to the individuals” ⁶.

Mike Maples Jr. was one of Twitter’s earliest investors, having first backed Odeo and then refusing Williams’ offer to return his money ⁷. When Williams described Twitter to Maples, the pitch was minimal: “‘You write what you’re doing. And you do it in 140 characters or less.’ And I asked, ‘Then what happens?’ And he said ‘Nothing.’ I asked, ‘What’s the roadmap?’ ‘There is no roadmap.’ So I asked, ‘What is the revenue model?’ He said, ‘There is no revenue model’” ⁷. Maples invested anyway because Williams argued: “What if you took the total 180-degree opposite approach and made blogging super easy by enabling micro-blogs? What if 10 million people did micro-blogs instead of 1 million?” ⁷.

Maples reflected honestly on the investment: “When people tell you they saw the future of these companies at the time they invested … they are usually blowing smoke. Serendipity and the ability to make the most of it play a much bigger role than most will admit” ⁷.

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, who led the Series A, acknowledged early uncertainty about the business model: “The question everyone asks is ‘What is the business model?’ To be completely honest, we don’t yet know” ³.

What Founders Say

Jack Dorsey described Twitter’s core purpose: “Twitter was around communication and visualizing what was happening in the world in real-time” ¹¹.

Evan Williams reflected on the experience of building Twitter: “We built this thing that took on a life of its own that has these bad elements and these good elements and the battle is trying to have the good outweigh the bad” ¹². He also noted: “There was a lot going on. There’s not really time in the day to contemplate the much larger implications of what we’re building” ¹².

Sources