“We are just getting started. Social media is still brand-new, very much in its nascency and we are feeling our way forward. But social media will transform itself into a global system for people to better coordinate with each other,” says Christopher Isaac “Biz” Stone, whose new book Things a Little Bird Told Me, blends the beginnings and growth of Twitter with aphoristic business wisdom that makes it a part self-help guide for start-up geeks.
The book is strewn with them: Inventing your dream is the first big step to making it come true; creativity is a renewable resource; have faith in your future self. For those who wonder about the challenges that Twitter is facing—slow growth rate of users and the astronomical number of users who have never tweeted—Stone says give it time, it has just started. “Think in terms of decades.”
Stone credits the idea of Twitter to Jack Dorsey who dragged him to have a look at the status updates on Google chats. Together they saw how that tiny window is being used in multiple ways: to tell others what one was doing, watching, eating. Stone has moved on from Twitter to cofound Jelly with Ben Finkell. Jelly is where you put a question: for instance, where can I find cheap accommodation for the football World Cup in Brazil, and people who are enmeshed in your social networks answer.
Stone says, “I realised that how people answer our queries hasn’t changed in the past 15 years. And this is our way to transform it.” Because, for Stone, “Software should capture and mirror human behaviour.” That is how he sees social media: people coming together to form one big, interconnected organism for a few moments, before moving in their separate individual ways. He says the fears that there is a tech bubble is misplaced.
For someone who is an angel investor and who has been part of the social media landscape from the very beginning, Stone says there is no tech bubble. “There might have been a couple of crazy valuations, but you have to zoom out and look.
There is definitely value in most of these companies. Or they are headed towards those valuations. It is not like earlier when you spent millions for just a domain name.” And revenue? First build scale, the money will come. On the day Facebook has launched FB Newswire, like a Twitter clone, Stone just laughs and says, “I haven’t looked it up, but Twitter and Facebook overlap in so many ways.” Ultimately for this idealist entrepreneur, “tech is all about people helping each other.”
