THINGS A LITTLE BIRD TOLD ME: CONFESSIONS OF THE CREATIVE MIND
Biz Stone
Macmillan, 2014
222 pages, Rs 499
Biz Stone's Things A Little Bird Told Me is an irreverent look at one of Silicon Valley's big success stories. One of the co-founders of Twitter in 2006, the author has penned a succinct, irreverent account of his rise to success and money. Part-autobiographical and part-self help manual in tone, Things… begins with Stone's humble beginnings (at one time, he writes, was so heavily in debt that it would take 200 years to pay off his loans) and goes on to entertainingly describe life from inside the Twitter offices. The account of the highs (starting Blogger) and lows (his podcasting platform Odeo, which tanked) of Stone's eventful career takes readers on a wild ride through the ever-changing world of social media.
In the book, Stone is brash, as befits a (very) young social media baron. Yet, he writes that in real life, he used to be the uncertain, almost retiring type. So he wrote a blog from his mother's basement, Biz Stone, Genius. "My blog was my alter ego," he writes. "Full of total, almost hallucinogenic confidence."
This often egotistical, puff-chested preening characterises the way in which Stone looks back on many of his social media projects and experiences. A self-confessed ideas junkie and non-stop talker, the author writes of Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, "He values my brainstorming abilities and intuition and understands that for all that extraneous blather, there may be a legit idea there." Interestingly, in spite of being the quintessential geek who struck gold on internet, Stone is emphatic about the importance of the 'social' aspect of social media and explains why he is critical of Google's reliance on, and veneration of, technology: "…my priorities are flipped. People come before technology."
Technology becomes meaningful, Stone writes, only when people use it in ways that change their world and quality of life. Describing the rise of Twitter, Stone compares the way in which tweets can move crowds quickly and efficiently, much in the same way as a flock of birds flies in formation. The analogy is spot on, both visually and structurally, offering a unique insight into how the social network had a life of its own that went beyond the mere sum of its parts. Twitter came to be the tool of choice in the anti-government protests in Egypt. During the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, people used Twitter to report what was happening in real time, even using it as a lifeline during the search and rescue operations.
Most importantly, Stone realised, Twitter and Tweets and their in-house Chirp conferences made people smile. One hot day in Berkeley, when Twitter was a start-up and Stone was engaged in a doomed home improvement project wherein he ripped off the wall-to-wall-carpeting only to find that there was no "attractive hardwood floor" beneath that he'd anticipated finding, he received a Tweet from Williams - "Sipping Pinot Noir after a massage in Napa Valley". It made him laugh out loud, and he realised why Twitter would succeed where Odeo had failed - it brought him joy. Soon came the time when Stone sold his first Twitter shares and realised that his wife and he were "officially rich white people who live in Marin."
While his highs are dizzying, his account of his failures is what makes this book a good read. Stone describes how in the early years, Twitter would crash too often for comfort. These frequent crashes became so talked about, that many people who hadn't heard of Twitter, heard about its crashes and eventually became users. Also, it made Stone realise that the loudest complainers were also, often, their most ardent users.
Early in the book, Stone writes about the failure of his podcasting website, Odeo, saying that it was condemned to crash even before iTunes introduced the exact same thing on a more successful platform: "neither Ev, nor I, nor (I suspect) several other members of our team, were actually interested in podcasts. We didn't listen to them. We didn't record our own… We lacked something that is the key to a successful startup… it was emotional investment."
Befittingly for a co-founder of Twitter, the book is an easy, quick read. And sure enough, page 140 is blank but for these words - "If this book were limited to 140 pages, it would end here." Things…, is, at the end of the day, an interesting read written by an interesting guy. His life lessons are solid, if unoriginal ("Once true passion hits you, you can recognize all the times in your life when you were chasing the wrong dream"; "If you really want to succeed big, you have to be willing to risk crazy failure" and "The more connected we are, the more empathy we feel"). The fact remains, however, that these are lessons from someone who became incredibly successful by serendipitously being at the right place at the right time.
