by
Nick Bilton
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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?"