Twitter founders leaving to relaunch venture

source: gmanews

Powerhouse micro-blogging site Twitter is losing three of its co-founders, who are relaunching a venture to build and run web products.

Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jason Goldman announced their plans to "restart" Obvious Corp., a company that can be considered a parent of Twitter.

"Our new startup, in case you haven't guessed, is obvious.com #excited," Stone said in a Twitter post at about 5 a.m. Manila time.

"I'm thrilled to announce that Evan Williams, Jason Goldman and myself will be relaunching The Obvious Corporation as co-founders. Our plan is to develop new projects and work on solving big problems aligned along a simple mission statement: The Obvious Corporation develops systems that help people work together to improve the world. This is a dream come true!" he added in his blog.

"Just (re)launched a new web site. It doesn't do much yet: obvious.com," Williams added.

The three described Obvious as a firm that "makes systems that help people work together to improve the world," and said that with the right approach, technology can benefit individuals, organizations, and society.

"We are relaunching the company that originally incubated Twitter with a high level of commitment to making a difference and developing products that matter," they said.

According to them, the possibility to reach and connect expansive numbers of people fundamentally changes the nature of what’s possible when it comes to building businesses on the Internet.

"Also, there’s room for innovation in how businesses measure success and more meaningful definitions of ambition," they said.

On the other hand, Stone said Twitter has grown so much that he decided he can be most effective by getting out of the way until he is needed again.

"My work on Twitter has spanned more than half a decade and I will continue to work with the company for many years to come. During this time—especially lately, it has come to my attention that the Twitter crew and its leadership team have grown incredibly productive. I've decided that the most effective use of my time is to get out of the way until I'm called upon to be of some specific use," he said.

"I'll still commit part of my time to hands on help with Twitter wherever and whenever I can be of assistance," he added.

Obvious, twitter roots

Stone, Williams and Goldman became close friends and lifelong collaborators at the Blogger team at Google.

When Williams left Google, Stone followed him shortly thereafter, and helped him with a startup that "didn't quite work out."

In his blog, Stone recalled that to save the failed startup, Williams created Obvious, a company to buy the failure back from the investors with his own money.

"Jason Goldman joined us and the idea was that we could live our dream—developing multiple projects under one company with nobody to answer to but ourselves," he said.

At the time, the assets of Ev's freshly acquired failure included Twitter, a project Stone had put much effort into with Jack Dorsey and others.

"It was something we were endlessly ridiculed for as being 'useless' but we believed in it and Evan believed in us so he kept funding us until Twitter started spreading like wildfire. In 2007 Jack, Ev, and myself founded Twitter, Inc with outside capital," Stone said.

"Although it was incubated for about half a year at Obvious, Twitter was now it's own fast growing company and it demand all of our attention. The company Ev had created started a couple projects but ultimately faded out of the picture. So, for more than 5 years our attention was focused on Twitter as it grew from a 'useless' toy to a particularly informative global phenomenon with amazing potential," he added.

Stone also said Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has been very supportive of his plan to "focus on new endeavors while remaining a strategic asset to Twitter."

Stone said his plan now is to take a bit more time to focus on helping schools, nonprofits, and company advisory boards as well as The Biz and Livia Stone Foundation.

New model

Williams said they are now attempting to create a new model for building and running web products.

"My theory is that a confluence of factors are paving the way for a different type of company," he said in his blog.

He said such factors are:
Sites are cheaper and faster to build
The consumer web is increasingly hits-driven and increasingly crowded, which makes it more difficult to predict what's going to work
Sites that do get attention can make money with advertising and/or subscriptions.
The Obvious model goes something like this:
Build things cheaply and rapidly by keeping teams small and self-organized
Leverage technology, know-how, and infrastructure across products (but brand them separately, so they're focused and easy to understand)
Use the aggregate attention and user base of the network to gain traction for new services faster than they could gain awareness independently
"When justified by growth, resource needs, and desire of the team, we will spin off growing properties to form their own entities (with outside investment). It's not that we're against investors and acquisitions. That model works great for some things—especially once the idea is proven. But we're also not an incubator, with the goal of hatching companies from everything we build. Some things are perfectly worthwhile but don't need to be a company," he said.

He added he wanted to create a company that would be as much fun and as fulfilling as possible.

"Fun in work to me means a lot of freedom, and ton of creativity, working with people I respect and like, and pursuing ideas that are just crazy enough to work. I don't want to have to worry about getting buy-in from executives or a board, raising money, worrying about investor's perceptions, or cashing out," he said.

"It may be stupid. It may be naive. It may be selfish and undisciplined. And, frankly, it may not work. All I know is I'm more excited about work than I've been in a long time. And from excitement and bold moves, great things often happen," he added.

Musical-chairs shuffle

CNN Money said the move is the latest musical-chairs shuffle at a leadership overhaul at Twitter.

It noted Costolo took over Williams' role as the company's CEO in October, while Williams focused on product development.

Estranged co-founder Jack Dorsey then returned to lead product development.

source: gmanews