Hatching Twitter

A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

By: Nick Bilton

Narrated by: Daniel May

Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

Twitter seems like a perfect start-up success story. In barely six years, a small group of young, ambitious programmers in Silicon Valley built an $11.5 billion business out of the ashes of a failed podcasting company.

Today Twitter boasts more than 200 million active users and has affected business, politics, media, and other fields in innumerable ways.

Now Nick Bilton of the New York Times takes readers behind the scenes with a narrative that shows what happened inside Twitter as it grew at exponential speeds. This is a tale of betrayed friendships and high-stakes power struggles as the four founders - Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Noah Glass - went from everyday engineers to wealthy celebrities, featured on magazine covers, Oprah, The Daily Show, and Time's list of the world's most influential people.

Bilton's exclusive access and exhaustive investigative reporting - drawing on hundreds of sources, documents, and internal e-mails - have enabled him to write an intimate portrait of fame, influence, and power. He also captures the zeitgeist and global influence of Twitter, which has been used to help overthrow governments in the Middle East and disrupt the very fabric of the way people communicate.

©2013 Nick Bilton (P)2013 Penguin Audiobooks

Critic reviews

“Fast-paced and perceptive.” (The New York Times Book Review)

"Exhaustively researched...extensively detailed...unexpectedly addictive." (The Wall Street Journal)

"With a cinematic approach befitting its eclectic cast of characters, the perceptive read…is rife with Byzantine-like intrigue, character clashes and broken dreams.” (USA Today)

Love the author

This is the second book by Bilton that I’ve read, and I am definitely a fan. You’ll be captivated and talking at your speaker with incredulity at what transpired in this book. So good!

Fantastic book, loved it!

Im a huge fan of twitter and it was really cool hearing how it came about and all the craziness that went on through all the changes. business can be cutthroat. geez!

Great book, well researched!

Reads like a novel, but is as well researched as you would want. Great book and is read well. The author does expose some of his obvious biases for certain founders of Twitter and obvious disdain for others, so I take some of the characterizations with a grain of salt.

highly recommend

If you could sum up Hatching Twitter in three words, what would they be?

great tech book

Any additional comments?

If you're a fan of tech books, this one won't disappoint. Lots of drama I wasn't expecting. I live in SF, work at a tech company and drive by the new Twitter HQ on Market St everyday, so that made it even more interesting. A very fast read for me -- I wish it were longer.

Great Insights

As a technology buff I love to hear the story behind the tech and this book shares that story.

Brilliant history of my favorite site - Twitter

When I was founding my startup - I woke up in the middle of the night discouraged - but I heard a a podcast or interview of Ev Williams talking about searching his couch for change when he was flat broke and I took heart and continued until I got an investor and funding. Ev has always been a hero in my book. Being a founder is similar to giving birth to a child!

Shallow on Technology, Deep on Back-Stabbery

Any additional comments?

I really enjoy books about IT entrepreneurship and this was an enjoyable read.

I was hoping for more insight on the technical accomplishments of the early team, but it seems the author does not have a technical background. For example the term Operation System was used instead of Operating System (nerdy ouch!). But putting that aside there were almost no details on the technologies used, their innovations or how their outage problems were solved.

There was a lot more detail on the conniving and malevolent shenanigans of the co-founders as they attempted to wrest control of Twitter from each others' hands.

It seems to me that Twitter was successful despite the fairly inadequate leadership and the apparent lack of vision from any of the co-founders. The kernel of the idea by Jack Dorsey was as far as their "genius" extended. It seemed like the user-base of Twitter knew better than the folks who created it on how best it should be used.

Well worth a listen, especially if you have an interest in boardroom power games.

Couldn't stop listening to it.

Any additional comments?

I can't dislike any of the guys. I can see everyone's side. One thing they all had in common is their loyalty and passion to twitter.

Too much drama to like it more

Wish more technology and culture were covered. The narrator recording sounds like it was edited and spliced together an abnormal amount of times leaving it sounding robotic at times.

Interesting

This audio book met my expectations and was a very interesting read!
I didn't know a lot of this about Twitter!