The dramatic, unlikely story behind the founding of Twitter, by New York Times bestselling author and Vanity Fair special correspondent The San Francisco-based technology company Twitter has become a powerful force in less than ten years. Today it’s everything from a tool for fighting political oppression in the Middle East to a marketing must-have to the world’s living room during live TV events to President Trump’s preferred method of communication. It has hundreds of millions of active users all over the world. But few people know that it nearly fell to pieces early on. In this rousing history that reads like a novel, Hatching Twitter takes readers behind the scenes of Twitter’s early exponential growth, following the four hackers—Ev Williams, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass, who created the cultural juggernaut practically by accident. It’s a drama of betrayed friendships and high-stakes power struggles over money, influence, and control over a company that was growing faster than they could ever imagine. Drawing on hundreds of sources, documents, and internal e-mails, Bilton offers a rarely-seen glimpse of the inner workings of technology startups, venture capital, and Silicon Valley culture.
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“Fast-paced and perceptive…Bilton sketches the founders’ backgrounds and personalities in quick, skillful strokes…He contextualizes the founders’ disagreements about the fundamental nature of Twitter with a light, easy touch and unpretentious insight.”
— New York Times Book Review
“Nick Bilton’s opus Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal goes where no book has gone before…Informative on many levels.”
— Huffington Post“This well-timed book successfully mines a story so rich it is destined to be told and retold.”
— Financial Times (London)“If you’re looking for a quick, well-written, thoroughly researched human drama, the story of an utterly dysfunctional foursome and the accelerated unraveling of their once brilliant partnership, this is your book.”
— Amazon.com, editorial reviewNick Bilton is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, where he writes about technology, business, and culture, and is a contributor at CNBC. He was a columnist for the New York Times for almost a decade.