Twitter (with Dick Costolo)

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2020

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A week before the 2020 US Presidential election, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo joins us to tell the story of a company that has impacted all of our lives (political and otherwise) like none other. While it's easy to forget now, a very viable alternate history exists where it's Twitter, not Facebook, who owns Instagram, and Vine, not TikTok, that's the global platform for mobile video. We dive into it all on this episode — and of course while we had Dick, we also had to discuss his controversial recent deleted tweet.

If you want more Acquired and the tools + resources to become the best founder, operator or investor you can be, join our LP Program for access to our LP Show, the LP community on Slack and Zoom, and our live Book Club discussions with top authors. Join here at: https://acquired.fm/lp/

Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta

Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury

New! We're codifying our own Playbook notes and takeaways from each episode, and posting them on our website. You can read them at: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/twitter-with-dick-costolo

Links:

Ashish Goel at Stanford: https://web.stanford.edu/~ashishg/twitter.html
Dick and Adam's new firm, 01 Advisors: https://01a.com/

Carve Outs:

Vote! https://www.vote.org

Transcript

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0:00.0	Yeah, I'd prefer the one single take, so, you know, but we'll see what happens.
0:03.5	Doesn't matter. Welcome to Season 7 episode 5 of Acquired.
0:18.4	The podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind
0:22.2	them.
0:23.0	I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and venture
0:27.5	capital firm in Seattle.
0:29.4	And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an independent advisor to startups and angel investor based in San Francisco.
0:36.4	And we are your hosts.
0:38.4	Today we tell the story of a company that has changed every single one of our lives, Twitter.
0:43.6	Whether you use the product all day every day, like I know many of you out there do,
0:48.4	ostensibly as part of your jobs, or you have just seen the occasional
0:53.2	discomforting tweet from a world leader.
0:55.4	There is no doubt that Twitter impacts us all,
0:58.1	especially heading into this historic US presidential election.
1:02.4	But how did these 140 character messages that grew out of the SMS protocol
1:06.5	eventually play such an outsized role in our society?
1:09.0	And conversely, why is it that despite being the heartbeat of the world Twitter still pales in
1:15.0	comparison both in user numbers and in revenue to its juggernaut social media
1:19.4	cousin Facebook? So a lot of ink has been spilled on Twitter's founding and its early days of musical
1:25.3	chairs between various founders and board members. Most of our listeners know all about that.
1:30.4	So as Ben and I were reflecting on what the acquired way to do a Twitter episode would be,
1:36.0	we realized that there actually was this pretty significant fork in history,
	...

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