Twitter CEO: Why He Turned Down Facebook
John Battelle, Chairman Federated Media Publishing, interviews Twitter CEO, Even Williams, on why he turned down Facebook.
This is a 2:37 clip from ZDnet.com.
JB: Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night like with, ya know, cold sweats saying I should’ve take the check from FaceBook?
EW: I never have. No.
JB: Ok… you are a better man than me.
So what was it that went through your mind, that made you sort of decide, I’m going to be… I mean on this one… you sold blogger to Google… on this one I am going to go all the way, I’m just going to go for it, and see if we can get this one really big. I mean, when someone puts in money at a $1 billion valuation – that’s pretty big already. It’s got to get really big. Is it Twitter? Or is it where you are as an entrepreneur? Or is it both?
EW: I think it’s both. I’m not a visionary in terms of… I didn’t see with twitter that it’s going to be the biggest thing ever, when we started twitter. I took the CEO job, in fact, almost exactly a year ago. And that’s around the time I realized, you know this is really really big. That was also the time when we had a few conversations with our friends in Palo Alto, and ultimately I just didn’t see a reason to sell, if that opportunity would have presented itself… because it’s not the point.
The point is really to see what we can build. We believe very strongly in that twitter, and enabling the open exchange of information, is a good thing for the world. We see glimpses of this on a daily basis with twitter. IIt’s what I’ve been working on for a decade now. We just celebrated the 10th anniversary of blogger. And that really inspires me. And it inspires the team.
So the goals never been: can we exit? Can we get a good payout for the founders and investors? That is always a goal, but it’s enabling. In fact, I’ve always been inspired by something Tim said when I worked for him… business as a context for doing interesting things. And a number of interesting things we can do with twitter is just endless. It blows my mind. And that doesn’t get more interesting by making it part of a bigger company.
