Biz Stone

Cofounder of Twitter

• Born: March 10, 1974
• Place of Birth: Boston, Massachusetts

Primary Company/Organization: Twitter

Introduction

Biz Stone has been called a serial entrepreneur because of his involvement with several enterprises: blogging sites Xanga and Blogger, podcasting company Odeo, and start-up incubator Obvious Corporation. He was a cofounder of the latter two. He is best known as a cofounder of Twitter, the free microblogging service that enables subscribers to send and receive text-based messages of 140 or fewer characters. He served as the company's creative director until 2010. He is also the author of Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content(2002) and Who Let the Blogs Out? A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs(2004).

Early Life

Christopher Isaac Stone was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 10, 1974. He acquired the name “Biz” as a toddler when his struggle to pronounce his first name yielded something that sounded like “Biz-ah-bah,” which was soon shortened to Biz. His parents, Christopher Stone, a Boston mechanic, and Marjory Pugh, divorced when Biz was young, and he dropped the name “Christopher” at that time. Biz grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He has three sisters. He graduated from Wellesley High School, where he founded a lacrosse team and coordinated the senior play. He entered Northeastern University in Boston on a scholarship with plans to major in English, but he dropped out after one year when he realized his only reason for going to college was that it was what one did after high school. He gave college another try when he enrolled at the University of Massachusetts on a theater arts scholarship, but he again dropped out after a year.

A summer job moving boxes at the Little, Brown publishing company led to work as a designer Stone helped the art director, who was having problems with a new Mac computer. While the art director was at lunch one day, Stone designed a book cover and left it in a stack of jacket designs with no comment. The director approved the design and offered the box mover a job as a designer. When Little, Brown moved its design division to New York, Stone, who by this time had met Livia McRee, whom he would later marry, chose not to leave Boston. Instead, he became a freelance graphic designer and taught himself web design. When friends decided in 1999 to start Xanga, an early blogging community, they invited Stone to join them. Xanga launched in 2000, and Stone served as the company's creative director until 2001, when he moved to Los Angeles and wrote his first book on blogging. He left California to move back to Massachusetts, where he wrote software for the alumni association of Wellesley College.

In 2003, Stone received an invitation from Evan Williams, whose company Blogger had just been acquired by Google, to join him and help revamp Blogger. Stone helped create the newly designed Blogger with additional features and remained as creative director until 2005, when he went to work for Odeo, a new company founded by Williams and Noah Glass.

Life's Work

Odeo had been founded by Williams and Glass as a podcasting company. When Apple's iTunes added a podcasting directory, Odeo needed a new plan. Williams set the staff to brainstorming, and Jack Dorsey, a young programmer, tossed out an idea that he had been mulling for years, a service that combined instant messaging with qualities of dispatching. Dorsey, Stone, Glass, and engineer Florian Weber were charged with producing version 0.1.

Glass, with the help of a dictionary, came up with the name “Twitter,” meaning “a short burst of inconsequential information” and “chirps from birds.” Within two weeks, they had the prototype. On March 21, 2006, at 12:50 P.M. Pacific time, Dorsey sent the first message: “just setting up my twttr.” The prototype was tested internally for several months before the public launch on July 15, 2006. Williams bought out the Odeo shareholders, and in October 2006, Stone joined Williams, Dorsey, and a few others from Odeo in forming a new company, The Obvious Corporation, which now owned all Odeo's assets, including Twitter.

Hopes were high, but growth was slow at first. It was not until March 2007 at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, that the service really began to attract attention. The annual conference is part of a larger festival that runs for a week or more and includes music and film as well as technology. Twitter negotiated with the festival to place flat panel screens in the hallways and created a Twitter visualizer that showcased tweets on the screens to demonstrate how the service worked. The tech-savvy crowd was hooked by the opportunity to tweet conference news and locations of the best parties, Twitter usage went from twenty thousand tweets per day to sixty thousand. In April 2007, Twitter became a separate company, with Dorsey as chief executive officer (CEO) and Stone as creative director.

Two years later, on June 8, 2009, in New York City, Stone accepted the Webby Award for Breakout of the Year, an award presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. The award was presented to Twitter, which had grown by 900 percent in that year alone. Stone, more outgoing than the Dorsey or Williams, became the public face of Twitter. He appeared on television shows such as The Colbert Report and Conan O'Brien's show to explain how people use the service and to relate human interest stories of people using Twitter for purposes weightier than “short bursts of inconsequential information.” He has done interviews with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, and dozens of other publications, some provocative and thoughtful, some witty and tongue-in-cheek.

The affable Stone is annoyed that Twitter is still dismissed as lightweight by some. One of his favorite stories concerns James Buck, a photojournalism student at the University of California in Berkeley, who went to Egypt to take photos of the protests of 2006–08 and was arrested by police. Buck tweeted “Arrested” on his cell phone, and friends at home who saw the message contacted the dean, who contacted the consulate, and so on until Buck could tweet “Freed.” Stone also insists that Twitter is more information service than social medium. Despite the fact that Lady Gaga is the most followed person on Twitter, evidence suggests that Stone is right about its informative role. In addition to the famous tweets about the 2009 Iranian election protests, Janis Krum's message and photograph of the emergency landing of US Airways flight 1549 on the Hudson River, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronaut Timothy Creamer's first live tweet from space, and the tweet by Keith Urbahn, chief of staff for former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan are just samples of important news that has been tweeted. As a result, much breaking news is now being announced via Twitter. Some celebrities are prolific tweeters, but ill-conceived tweets can have consequences, as icon Oprah Winfrey, NASCAR driver Kasey Kahne, and actors Ashton Kutcher and Alec Baldwin have discovered. Artists, authors, and actors use Twitter to promote their work, regional emergency preparedness organizations use Twitter to reach people during a disaster, and political dissidents use Twitter to promote their causes. Stone has an abundance of ammunition to respond to the charges of shallowness.

Stone remained in his position as Twitter's creative director through the company's first five years and saw the total tweets per day reach 200 million in 2010. He also worked through tense times with three CEOs: his two partners, Jack Dorsey (2006–8) and Evan Williams (2008–10), and Dick Costolo, who joined Twitter as chief operating officer in 2009 and became CEO in October 2010. Stone remained friends with both Dorsey and Williams when the two were not speaking to each other. However, on June 28, 2011, a few weeks before Twitter entered its sixth year, Stone announced that he was leaving Twitter in his official role but would continue to be available in an unofficial advisory capacity. At the same time, he explained that he was joining Williams and Jason Goldman, who resigned in December 2010 as Twitter's vice president of product, in relaunching the Obvious Corporation. Less than a week later, he announced that he would also serve as strategic adviser to Spark Capital, a venture capital firm that is invested in Twitter. Furthermore, he served as cofounder and chief creative officer of Medium.com, which Stone described as "the best place to read and write on the Web," between 2011 and 2013.

In 2012, Stone partnered with Ben Finkel to develop Jelly, a search app that they described as a human-powered search engine, which allowed users to crowdsource, or post questions to be answered by members of their social network. Their start-up, Jelly Industries, launched in 2014 and was acquired in March 2017 by Pinterest. About two months later, Stone rejoined Twitter.

In October 2019, Stone announced at the One Young World conference that he was investing in the AI Foundation with the goal of developing a new type of media based on artificial intelligence. Stone and AI Foundation cofounder and CEO Lars Buttler described what they called "personal media," which would allow users to communicate through an artificial version of themselves.

Stone, along with investor Fred Blackford, founded the multi-stage investment firm Future Positive in 2019. Their intent was to hold onto their investments long after the traditional point of departure.

In 2023, Stone criticized Twitter CEO Elon Musk, for the changes he had made to "X" (formerly Twitter). Stone said that he was no longer enjoying the use of the platform and was spending time on Mastodon, a rival social media platform.

Personal Life

Stone married his longtime girlfriend, Livia McRee, an artist and author turned wildlife rehabilitator, in June 2007. She was on the staff of WildCare, an urban wildlife rehabilitation center in Marin County, California. Stone was an honorary member of the center's board of directors. The Stones live in Marin County with their son Jacob, born in November 2011. They are vegans.

In 2010, the Stones established the Biz and Livia Stone Foundation, a private nonprofit that supports education and conservation in the Bay Area, with priority given to programs that benefit underserved children. Livia runs the foundation with one employee. The foundation held its first fund-raiser, cosponsored by AOL and The Huffington Post, in September 2011. The event raised more than $50,000. Stone holds the title Strategic Advisor for Social Impact for AOL's Huffington Post Media Group, where he offers counsel on cause-based initiatives and best corporate practices for philanthropy and corporate responsibility. Stone also donated to the foundation his fee for a Stolichnaya vodka advertisement in which he appeared.

Stone is an adviser to several other companies and organizations and is a visiting scholar at several universities. In 2009, he was named one of 100 Most Influential People in the world by Time and Nerd of the Year by GQ. In 2012, Stone signed a contract with Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, for his third book, Things a Little Bird Told Me (2014). In 2019 he was once again named Nerd of the Year by GQ. and was named a Bright Spark by Vanity Fair.

Bibliography

Korn, Melissa, and Amir Efrati. “Business Education: Biz Stone Goes Back to College, This Time as Adviser to M.B.A.s.” Wall Street Journal 1 Sept. 2011, Eastern edition: B6. Print.

Lee, Dave. "Biz Stone, Twitter Co-Founder, on Being an Investor That Never Lets Go." Financial Times, 5 Nov. 2021, www.ft.com/content/80b621ce-73e5-4cc4-9779-a34db1e6d644. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Nolan, Beatrice. "Twitter Cofounder Biz Stone Isn't Enjoying the Platform as Much as He Used to and Is 'tinkering' with Its Rival, Mastodon, Report Says." Business Insider, 13 Jan. 2023, www.businessinsider.com/biz-stone-twitter-experience-mastodon-social-media-2023-1. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Parnaby, Laura. "Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone Envisages 'New Type of Media.'" TechCentral, 26 Oct. 2019, techcentral.co.za/twitter-co-founder-biz-stone-envisages-new-type-of-media/93590/. Accessed 5 Mar. 2023.

Smith, Chris, and Marcie McGrata. Twitter: Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. Greensboro: Morgan Reynolds, 2011. Print. Looks at the early lives of the three founders of Twitter.

Stone, Biz. “Biz Stone.” Interview by Sharon Gaudin. Computerworld 43.13 (2009):16–20. Print.

Switzer, Cody. “A Twitter Co-founder Starts Small with Family Charity.” Chronicle of Philanthropy 24:4 (2011): 2. Print.

Williams, Evan, and Biz Stone. “The Weekend Interview with Evan Williams and Biz Stone: The Twitter Revolution.” Wall Street Journal 18 Apr. 2009, Eastern edition: A11. Print.