"Twitter itself was a bit of a side project. You could say it was a mistake that worked out very well for us."
[partner id="wireduk"] So begins Biz Stone's master class to MBA students at the Said Business School in Oxford. It's a dark Monday afternoon in November, and, as part of the annual Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford program, and alongside other accomplished founders such as LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, mydeco's Brent Hoberman and Plink's Mark Cummins, the Twitter creative director is inspiring the audience by openly admitting to having failed.
"It turns out other people had been thinking of this. It's called podcasting, but we thought we were geniuses," Stone says in a self-mocking tone. "We worked on it for about a year but we realized something that was a bad sign. We didn't like podcasting. We didn't listen to podcasts and we didn't want to make podcasts."
Then fate, or rather Steve Jobs, dealt a blow. Apple made podcasts available directly from iTunes.
"We were like, 'Well, that's a good place for it. Probably a better place than some website with a pink logo.'"
Stone and co-founder Evan Williams used some Google logic: everybody take some time and develop something you want to see in the world. "I had become very close friends with one of the engineers at Odeo called Jack Dorsey," continues Stone. "Jack had a long history in writing software for dispatch. For bicycle couriers and ambulances and these sorts of things.... And he knew that I had all these years of experience at building social networking/blogging systems that allow people to express themselves and communicate. We started talking."
Then building. A prototype for what would become Twitter was born within two weeks. "We showed it off to the rest of our colleagues at Odeo. They weren't that impressed. They were saying, 'So that's all it does? You send a message and it goes out to other people and if they want it, they can get it?' And we were saying, 'Yeah!' They said, 'Can't you add video or something and make it more complicated?' One person called us 'the Seinfeld of the internet -- it's a website about nothing.' I thought, 'I love Seinfeld.' We put that on our front page as a testimonial."
Stone says he realized they were on to something while ripping up the carpeting in his new house during a heatwave.
"I'm sweating, my back is killing me, I'm hunched over and my phone buzzes in my pocket. It's Evan. It's a Tweet. It says: 'Sipping pinot noir after a massage in Napa Valley.' I thought, 'Great.' I actually laughed out loud.
"I thought, 'This is it. I'm emotionally invested in the product I'm building.' This is what was missing from Odeo. Odeo demoed so well. It was so easy to raise capital because everyone saw it as this great idea that other people would use, but Twitter, even in this prototype phase, was something that was making me giggle and making me realize I definitely want to keep working on this."
As Stone relates this story, another successful American technology entrepreneur is sharing his definition of the word "entrepreneur" in a classroom just a few steps down the corridor. "You throw yourself off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down," says LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. "If you're not the kind of person who has a very fast learning curve under pressure, then being a founder is hard. Because usually there are multiple ways to die and they get thrown at you a lot."
Fail fast. That mantra, in its many guises, is an accepted truism in Silicon Valley. Time is short. Money is dear. Manifest that destiny, or move aside. In San Francisco, failure evangelism has progressed to the point of having its own dedicated annual conference -- FailCon.
"The reason failure is important in a place like Silicon Valley is that most startup ideas that people have are dead wrong," says Eric Ries, a serial entrepreneur who has developed a methodology called The Lean Startup to guide young businesses. "And it's not that they're not sufficiently thought through or the people who have them aren't smart. It's simply that the world we live in is so complicated and innovation is challenging."
But is a fear of failure holding back European entrepreneurs? Is the persistent social stigma -- not to mention bankruptcy law -- discouraging European entrepreneurs from taking the big risks that result in building world-class disruptive businesses?
Some in Europe, including Index investor Saul Klein, have long been calling for Europe to follow the US example of embracing failure -- or at least forgiving it. "Failure or bankruptcy is not culturally accepted in Europe, but if we want to encourage the abundance of talent to start and join early-stage companies trying to change the world, we need to accept there will be many, many more flops than hits," Klein wrote in a 2007 blog post, which laid the groundwork for the formation of the tech incubator Seedcamp. "We need to support failure and encourage people to take the risks you need to think and succeed big." Fast-forward four years and plenty more European voices are calling for Europe to embrace the constructive value of failure.
This article first appeared in the May 2011 issue of Wired UK magazine. Continue reading on wired.co.uk ...
