by
Nick Bilton
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Although Jack really wanted to learn how to manage, how to run a company, and how to be a good CEO, he often found himself at a loss for what to do next. Although he would never admit it, pretending that he knew exactly what he was doing and that his actions were all part of a bigger, more resolute plan, he was so far out of his league that he was often speechless. When things grew frustrating, rather than confront the problem with his employees, Jack would walk out the front door of the office and then spend an hour or more walking in circles around South Park, a petulant look on his face.
Ev immediately dropped the gauntlet.
"You can either be a dressmaker or the CEO of Twitter," Ev said. "But you can't be both."
Although Jack worked hard, coming into the office well before anyone else arrived, he often left at around 6:00 P.M. to attend to one of his extracurricular activities. For a while he had taken drawing classes, sketching nudes in his notepad. He attended hot yoga classes, rushing off after work to contort his body into downward dog and sweat out the stresses of the day. He had also been taking classes at a local fashion school to learn how to sew, still contemplating a future career in fashion. He loved sewing and enthusiastically set out to learn how to make an A-line skirt for his first class assignment. The eventual goal was to make his own pair of dark jeans, maybe even end up working for his favorite jeans maker one day, Earnest Sewn in New York City.
this is hilarious but on another note, doesn't it kinda feel like Nick Bilton knows nothing about yoga except the buzzword "downward dog"? how could you call that a "contortion"
The sale had been relatively painless. The initial negotiation between Fred and John Borthwick, an investor who was on Summize's board, occurred while the two were standing next to each other at a bathroom urinal. "Why don't we just join these companies and call it a day?" John said as he peered over at Fred, a tinkling sound emanating from their respective urinals.
How Twitter acquired Summize (Fred = Fred Wilson)
First thing in the morning, his coffee cup still full next to his computer, and weary from a night without much sleep, Bijan accidentally pressed the "reply to all" button on his computer instead of replying just to Fred.
"I believe Jack would take a 'passive' chairman role," Bijan wrote. "It would then really be up to Ev to decide if he could live with Jack's new title." He hit "send" before he realized what he had done.
Seconds later, he looked up at the exchange and uttered a word he was about to write eighteen times in an e-mail that he then sent to Fred:
"Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck."
He then quickly rattled off the e-mail to Jack: "Please call me when you get this message. Out of context this could be really confusing."
But it was too late. Jack knew what was about to happen.
thank God gmail now has "undo send"
[...] He held his weekly meetings with Campbell, receiving his boisterous pep talk. "You're doing a fucking great job!" Campbell would bellow. At board meetings Campbell wuld appear to listen to Ev's presentations on the state of the company. After Ev's sermons were done, the coach would clap loudly and hug his protégé, proclaiming again to everyone in the room that Ev was "doing a fucking great job!" and asking them to clap (none of this was a usual occurrence in a corporate board meeting). Then, after Ev left the room, proud that his mentor thought he was doing such a great job, Campbell would shout at the group: "You gotta get rid of this fucking guy! He doesn't know what the fuck he's doing!"
(Bill Campbell is his executive coach; he would occasionally randomly show up to board meetings, which was not a normal thing for a CEO coach to do)
also man the level of cuckage here is brutal ... I get secondhand shivers just thinking about it
Kris, Ev's assistant, had been asked to go through Dick's tweets, highlighting any that could be perceived as controversial. As she scrolled through his thousands of 140-character updates, she stopped midscreen and rolled her eyes as she called people over to look at the message he had jokingly sent a year earlier: "First full day as Twitter COO tomorrow. Task #1: undermine CEO, consolidate power."
In a matter of minutes, the cafeteria had become the stage for an impromptu Snoop Dogg concert, with a dozen large blunts being passed around famous rappers and Twitter employees, most of whom were dancing, some grinding on each other. A few girls stood on cafeteria tables, their arms waving in the air as if they were atop a large speaker in a nightclub, not at work. They were all partying while their parents were away.
Eventually a Twitter lawyer appeared. Asking Snoop Dogg and his entourage of rappers to stop smoking weed in the office wasn't an easy affair, but all parties must come to an end, and eventually they left, bequeathing a haze of smoke, dozens of stoned employees, and hundreds of tweets in their wake.
"I might be able to do something about that," Dick said, understanding the man's plight. "I'm the CEO of Twitter."
The cabbie turned around with an excited look on his face and said, "Whoa! You're Jack Dorsey?"
He slipped his arms around her as if there was no question at all about what he was doing and he could take all the time he wanted to do it. He kissed her mouth. It seemed to her that this was the first time ever that she had participated in a kiss that was an event in itself. The whole story, all by itself. A tender prologue, an efficient pressure, a wholehearted probing and receiving, a lingering thanks, and a drawing away satisfied.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”
He turned her around, and they walked back the way they had come.
“So was that the first you ever been on a floating bridge?”
She said yes it was.
“And now that’s what you’re going to get to drive over.”
He took her hand and swung it as if he would like to toss it.
“And that’s the first time ever I kissed a married woman.”
“You’ll probably kiss a lot more of them,” she said. “Before you’re done.”
He sighed. “Yeah,” he said. Amazed and sobered by the thought of what lay ahead of him. “Yeah, I probably will.”
The reason that I had nothing to say was not that I was rude or bored (or any more rude than I was naturally at that time, or more bored than I had expected to be) but that I did not understand that I should ask questions—almost any questions at all, to draw a shy male into conversation, to shake him out of his abstraction and set him up as a man of a certain authority, therefore the man of the house. I did not understand why Alfrida looked at him with such a fiercely encouraging smile. All of my experience of a woman with men, of a woman listening to her man, hoping and hoping that he will establish himself as somebody she can reasonably be proud of, was in the future. The only observation I had made of couples was of my aunts and uncles and of my mother and father, and those husbands and wives seemed to have remote and formalized connections and no obvious dependence on each other.