What's up everyone welcome back to another episode of founders journal the best show on planet earth for entrepreneurs and builders

I'm your host Alex Lieberman co-founder and executive chairman of morning brew today

I am breaking down a viral tweet from a former Twitter employee about pre Elon Twitter post Elon Twitter and how Elon Musk is as a leader

I share parts of the post as well as lessons that any leader can take away. Let's hop into it

Esther Crawford was the director of product management at Twitter she was the CEO of a company called scout which was a group video chat app scout was acquired in

December of 2020 by Twitter and Esther went on to run several of Twitter's top product initiatives and she went on to report

directly to Elon Musk for a period of time after he bought the company and became CEO Esther recently put out a 2400 word

tweet accompanied by a 14 minute long video of her reading the tweet and in it she shared her thoughts about Twitter before

Elon Twitter after Elon acquired the business and what it was like to work for the man directly the post

deservedly blew up getting 14 and a half thousand likes 4.3 million views as Esther provided one of the more in depth looks at Elon Musk's leadership style

as well as a nuanced perspective on Twitter as a company what I want to do is share a few clips from Esther's recording

and then share my takeaways from what she said I'm also going to link to the tweet in the show notes if you want to read

or watch the full thing which I highly recommend because this is basically a live case study for any founder

the first lesson is about the painful trap that so many companies fall into as they grow here's what Esther says

as someone with a maniacal sense of urgency built into me Twitter often felt siloed and bureaucratic

dumb power plays reorgs and team name changes for the sake of someone's ego or distractions that occurred too

regularly you couldn't just be a builder you also needed to be a politician my reaction to this is

for many years now people have talked about the sluggishness of Twitter's product evolution and growth as a business

so it's really interesting to hear that validated by Esther what's also scary about the type of organization that she describes

is that this shift from meritocracy to bureaucracy and the feeling of running in place versus running towards something

is a real challenge that so many companies face at a certain scale and it can happen at companies way smaller than Twitter

I want to explore further what it is exactly that leads to this unfortunate cultural shift but I have a few theories

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