If an org does WBI's then it's a good indication that they are not choosing the best applicants. Instead of either getting good at them or trying to get the industry to change, we should embrace this.
If they do WBI's then they probably do lots of other things which run counter to best practices. Isn't it so much better to expose to the outside world a culture of cargo culting inability to evaluate techniques for the efficacy.
There are so many orgs who do run themselves well. The real tricky party is how to determine that quickly. With WBI's we can get a short cut.
Twitter started out as Odeo, we started with Ev's investment in Noah Glass's idea for a podcasting platform in 2004. After a few months in early 2005 Ev joined full time. Biz and Jack joined in the fall of 2005 almost a year in to the company. Twitter itself was created as a prototype in Feb 2006, and the current version was launched as a side project in March 2006.
Companies name co-founders based on what's useful going forward and of the dozen or so folks who were at Odeo when twitter was created it made most sense to name Ev, Jack, and Biz as cofounders. Goldman probably turned down the offer to be named as a cofounder, and the rest of us weren't given an option. Later Hatching Twitter came out and Noah was added to the list of founders.
Starting companies is hard, running them is hard, the drama of who said and did what is interesting but it doesn't teach us much about why the platform ended up like it did or provide insights in to creating new companies.
Yeah, huge amounts of work from prototype to world changing platform happened after i left. Nobody created twitter, rather it was the collective work of many.
I know a lot of the early history, I worked there when we hired both Jack and Biz. I can tell you that it's a really good thing that Biz is back on board. Biz was able to articulate what twitter was as the human voice of the company in both directions. From day one the question was always, what does Biz do.
Biz bounced around but when he was there things were better. Kind of like the basketball player that Nate Silver likes to love, who doesn't have any stat which makes them star, but everybody else around them plays better when they're there. Biz isn't a business guy, nor product, nor code, nor support, nor really marketing. But when he's in the room, working with people, everybody's better at all of those things.
He can play a kind of court jester role, which is disarming, but he's super damned sharp. He uses stories and humor to bring people forward.
Having him there, working on twitter means there are now two people in senior roles who aren't afraid of breaking twitter, because they created it in the first place.
In recent years, talking to twitter employees you get this amnesia over the company's culture and history. People don't know where things came from, they don't know the story of how the came to be. The myth's are complicated and messy. And eventually go so messy the company stopped telling the story of how twitter came to be where it is now all together.
With Biz back, he can take on that internal story telling, creating a hero's journey that the company can believe in. Because he's there, as an equal to Jack in understanding the origin, he can tear things down without fear of destroying somebody else's house of cards.
So i think it's partially values and markets. Enough US companies know the transformational effect tech can have on a business where that's not really understood elsewhere. Just having part of the market get it means it drives up all prices. In the US you are quoted a price before taxes, many countries quote offers post taxes (including after income tax is taken out). That can make US salaries look MUCH higher. Because the employer doesn't think about taxes, if you're outside the US as a contractor or freelancing, you can get a much better deal.
I've got a place in rural northern california and we don't get cell phone coverage, no where within a 20 miles, and of course there is no broadband. The forest service doesn't help put in towers, the rural telephony program only supports landlines, which don't reach out here. Easy process of putting up both cell phone towers and microwave repeaters would be huge. What's now is that the government makes it very hard to do, but it should subsidize it instead.
I love Project FI, but nobody who tries to call me ever gets through. Not nobody, but really like %75 of the calls don't go through. The data and international roaming are wonderful.
Does gigster have anything real at all? There are no gigs at all listed on their site... just a few full time jobs in SF, plus things for working on gigster itself. Seems like it might be a lean startup trick of painting the sky blue to try and build both sides of a marketplace.
Not only is it cool to honor David Kelly, it's also probably more useful to have a speed limit like 17 vs 15. The thinking is that 15 feels generic where as 17 is specific.
It's really disappointing that they didn't even look at 500 startups, one of the few VC's who've done a genuinely good job at getting diversity of partners. http://500.co/team/
Seems cool, but it's missing a lot of listings. Compare the city's listing of permits at protlandmaps.com and buildzoom and you see lots of missing ones from BZ. It does have a nice UI and seems cool. Oh also you have to implement the zillow style grouping otherwise folks won't even zoom in enough to see the data you do have.
Because Ev's a great product guy but not such a great manager. Speaking of which, Jack's also better at coding / product than managing himself. (i worked at the company before both 'founders' jack and ev joined as employees.)