Biz Stone - Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind

For Livia

Introduction

O n October 7, 2003, a Boston-based blogging entity called Genius Labs announced it had been acquired by Google. The press release was picked up by various news outlets, and soon Genius Labs was added to Wikipedias List of Mergers and Acquisitions by Google. Once something makes it into Wikipedia, it is often repeated as fact. And in a way, it was fact. Genius Labs was an entity. It was me. The tale of how I got acquiredthat is, hiredby Google says a lot about how Ive made my way in the world.

A year earlier, the future wasnt looking bright for the entity of me. My first startup, a site called Xanga that began with me and a group of my friends having the not-quite-refined idea that we wanted to make a web company, wasnt what Id hoped it would be. Tired of being broke in New York Cityof all the cities to be broke in, its really one of the worstI quit. My girlfriend, Livia, and I retreated to my hometown of Wellesley, Massachusetts, with tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt in tow. We moved into the basement of my moms house. I had no job. I tried to sell an old copy of Photoshop on eBay (which is probably illegal), but no one bought it. At one point, I even asked for my job back at the startupand my former colleagues said no.

The only bright spot in my so-called professional life was blogging. At the startup, we had used a piece of software from a company called Pyra, and I took an interest in the work of Pyras co-founder, a guy named Evan Williams. I started writing my own blog and following Evans, and in 1999, I was among the first to test-drive a new product Pyra had released: a web-logging tool called Blogger. To me, like lots of people, blogging was a revelation, even a revolutiona democratization of information on a whole new scale.

Xanga was a blogging community, but having left it, I was peripheral to that revolution, broke and directionless in my moms basement. But my blog was another story. My blog was my alter ego. Full of total, almost hallucinogenic confidence, my blog was a fictional creation. It all began with the title, inspired by an old Bugs Bunny cartoon guest-starring Wile E. Coyote. In one scene, the ultrarefined coyote says, Permit me to introduce myself, then presents a business card to Bugs with a flourish. It reads W ILE E. C OYOTE , G ENIUS . By announcing himself as a genius on his business card, Wile E. Coyote epitomizes the spirit of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. When youre starting a company, you sometimes have nothing more than an idea. And sometimes you dont even have the ideajust the supreme confidence that one day you will have an idea. You have to begin somewhere, so you declare yourself an entrepreneur just like Wile E. declares himself a genius. Then you make a business card and give yourself the title F OUNDER AND CEO.

I didnt have a company... yet. But in the spirit of Wile E., I christened my blog Biz Stone, Genius. I made up business cards that said the same. And in my posts, I made sure to play the part. Genius Biz claimed to be building inventions with infinite resources and a world-class team of scientists at his headquartersnaturally titled Genius Labs.

One of my posts in July 2002 read, The scale-model of a Japanese superjet that is supposed to be able to fly twice as fast as the Concorde crashed during the test flight... I may have to sign various paperworks that will flow millions into further development of hybrid air transit.

Real-Life Biz was not investing in hybrid air transit. I did, however, manage to land a job as a web specialist at Wellesley College; Livia found a job, too. We rented a place near campus so I could walk to work. It wasnt so much an apartment as the attic of a house, but at least it wasnt my mothers basement.

My alter ego, Genius Biz, meanwhile, continued to exude confidence, gaining more and more of a following. He was Buddy Love to my Professor Kelp. But as I sustained this charade, something started to happen. My posts werent just wacky anymore. Some of the thoughts werent in the character of a mad scientist; they were my own. As I continued to write about the web and think about how it might evolve, I started hitting on ideas that I would one day incorporate into my work. In September of 2003 I posted:

My RSS reader [a syndicated news feed] is set to 255 characters. Maybe 255 is a new blog standard?... Seems limiting but if people are going to read many blogs a day on iPods and cell phones, maybe its a good standard.

Little did I know how ideas like this, which seemed incidental at the time, would one day change the world. And I say this with all the humble understatement of a self-described genius.

Google acquired Evan Williamss company, Blogger, in early 2003. In the four years it had taken for blogging to evolve from a pastime of a few geeks into a household word, Ev and I had never met or even talked on the phone. But in the interim, I had interviewed him for an online magazine called Web Review, and I still had his email address. Now I worked up the confidence to contact him. I sent him an email congratulating him on the acquisition and saying, Ive always thought of myself as the missing seventh member of your team. If you ever think of hiring more people, let me know.

It turned out that, unbeknownst to me, Ev had been following my blog, too. In the tech world, that made us practically blood brothers. Though he was surrounded by some of the best engineers in the world, he needed someone who really understood social mediasomeone who saw that it was about people, not just technologyand he thought I was the guy.

He wrote back right away, saying, Do you want to work here?

I said, Sure, and I thought it was a done deal. I had a new job on the West Coast. Easy peasy.

I didnt know it at the time, but behind the scenes Evan had to pull strings in order to hire me. Actually, they were more like ropes. Or cablesthe kind that hold up suspension bridges. Google had a reputation for hiring only people with computer science degrees, preferably PhDs; they certainly didnt court college dropouts like me. Finally, the powers that be at Google begrudgingly agreed that Wayne Rosing, then Googles senior VP of engineering, would talk to me on the phone.

The day of the call, I sat in my attic apartment staring at the angular white Radio Shack phone Id had since I was a kid. It had a cord. It was practically a collectors item. Id never interviewed for a job before, and nobody had prepped me for this. Although I naively assumed that I already had the job, I at least understood that talking to Wayne Rosing was a big deal for someone in my position. I was nervous that Id mess it up, and with good cause. A few days earlier, a woman from the human resources department had called me, and Id joked around with her. When she asked me if I had a college degree, I told her I didnt but that Id seen an ad on TV for where to get one. She didnt laugh. Clearly my instincts in this department werent reliable. Real-Life Biz was consumed by self-doubt.

The phone rang, and as I reached for it, something came over me. In that instant I decided to abandon all the failure and hopelessness Id been carrying around. Instead, I would fully embody my alter ego: the guy who ran Genius Labs. Genius Biz was on the job.

Wayne began by asking me about my experience. I guess hed talked to the HR woman, because his first question was why I hadnt finished college. With utter confidence, I explained that Id been offered a job as a book jacket designer, with the opportunity to work directly with an art director. I considered it an apprenticeship. As the interview went on, I acknowledged that my startup had been a failurefor me, at leastbut explained that Id left because the culture didnt fit my personality. In Silicon Valley, the experience of having crashed and burned at a startup had value. I told him about a book Id written on blogging.