>> hilary clinton was wesley educated and ivy league grad that worked in washington, d.c. at the nixon impeachment campaign. >> first lady hilary clinton tonight at 9 eastern live on c-span and on c-span radio and cspan.org. >> brought to you as a public service by your television provider. >> "hatching twitter: a true story of money, power, friendship and betrayal" is the name of the book. the author, "the new york times" tech report nick bilton who is joining us from san francisco. what was twitter supposed to be? >> that is the billion dollar question. or the $25 billion actually if you look at the ipo. twitter was different for everyone. it was started by four people that collectively were trying to build something that would, you know, communicate with each other and connect to friends. but they had different ideas of what it was. the genesis of it, the real moment, was with jack dosey and noah glass. they were two close friends and worked at a podcasting company in 2005-2006 and the company was failing. noah and jack were out drinking and jack had an idea you could build something that would allow you to say what you are doing like i am drinking, or i am eating, or i am at the park. and noah had the idea to share with friends. he was going through a difficult time, noah was, and he thought twitter would make you feel less alone. everyone had a different concept of what it was once it started growing. >> host: how did the name come about? >> it came about from noah glass. a lot of people don't know who he is because he was the forgotten founder and pushed out early on. but in the beginning he was influential. they came up with ideas and melted other people's ideas together from the pod casting company and they were building what would become twitter. there were different investigations of it. one was called status. one was called friend status. another was sm-messy based on the way people text. one was called twitch. noah glass was like a kramer character who is sweet and an artist. he felt like the name wasn't there. he went home one afternoon framework -- from work -- and this phone was dinging and he turned it to vibrate and and he thought about the word vibrate, which led him to twitch and that turn today twitter. >> host: what is noah glass doing today? >> he was pushed out by closest friends. there is a story that exist out there about twitter's genesis which was the story that was presented. in the valley theories are called creation myths. and while jack dosey had influence in twitter, it was almost a dozen people that influenced what it became. noah was one of the biggest driving forces in the early days. what happened was quickly there was a power struggle over who got to run and feed the thing and decide what it looked like and did. and there is a moment in the book where i explain jack going to evan williams who is financing the company and says if noah glass stays jack will leave. jack was an important programmer so evan had to fire him. >> host: where is jack dosey now? >> he is worth more than a billion. he run as company called foursquare and is involved in twitter as a chairman. he is, you know, he spends times with famous people and on magazines as being the inventor and creator of twitter. but his story excludes noah glass from the founding and noah glass ended up with almost nothing. >> host: he didn't benefit financially? >> i don't want to give away too much, but williams gives noah glass his own personal stock because he feels bad about what happened. but noah glass had to sell that very early on to get by and in the best case scenario it is as a pittance of what jack and evan and those guys ended up with. >> host: nick bilton, what year was twitter founded? >> founded in 2006. there were ideas from 2005 but a big part was early february and march of 2006. there is another interesting aspect in the founding of his company. this pod casting company -- there was a couple guys that worked there and they were quote unquote anarchist. they led protest against the president and other governments and they were involved in the may day and all of these, you know, different protests around the world. they were using a tool called textmob. that was a precursor to twitter and was similar to what twitter would become. it was a tool for people protesting saying the police are coming down 36th street everyone go to 37th and everyone's phone got an alert. that was another idea that led to this. >> host: you mentioned evan williams. who is he? >> he moved from a small farm town in clarks, nebraska with a population of a couple hundred people. he had an infinity toward computers and decided one that day he was going to move up to san francisco and build software or technology or get involved in start-ups. he was work up north on programming manual books and doing the marketing for those and then ended up in san francisco. he was trying to start company and out of that company there was a little project that he developed called blogger. it was one of the first blogging technology that existed. he ended up selling it to google and got $20-$30 million and used that to finance twitter. >> host: and christopher stone is another one. biz stone is what he is known as. >> he grew up in boston on welfare and came from a dysfunctional home. he is a sweet guy. he is a joker and always cracking jokes and making people feel better. he came out to silicone valley to work with evan williams on blogger. he was a big fan also of blogging and so on. and one of the things that happened was he had a title of co-founder at twitter. he did haven't a role as the company grew. but he was the moral fence that surrounded the company. twitter is a different company in many respects. i write stories for "the new york times" about facebook effecting people's privacy and google stealing people's images off their phone and things that happened over the years. i have never had to write those stories about twitter and part atmosphere -- of the reason -- is stone and goldman. they set up a rule that said twitter should be impartial and not seen as having a viewpoint. when twitter was being used into the iranian revolution or the occupy wall street, biz stone said they will not comment on this. we don't see it as a good or bad thing. >> host: what is the relationship between the four co-founders today? >> noah glass after he was pushed out of the company by his closest friends he fell into the depression and kind of has taken a long time to recover. these were his best friends. and evan williams, too. evan and him were close and they had a contentious relationship. he was struggling a lot to deal with that. and none of these guys talk anymore. as far as jack and ev, they are both still on the board of twitter. but their relationship is somewhat strained to say the least and part of that is because they both pushed each other out of the company. and biz stone has been the nice guy and gets along with everyone but he doesn't talk to noah glass either. >> host: three out of four got wealthy? >> yes. three out of four. it is giant steps between the wealth. willi williams made a billion. jack dosey made a billion. and biz stone made tens of millions and with noah glass the exact figure is unknown but it is single-digit low million or two and we don't even know if it is that. >> host: where did twitter get the money in the beginning? >> evan williams financed it with the money he made from twitter. he purchased back the stock from the ad venture capitalist in the valley. and put up his own cash until 2007 and the southwest by southwest event brought in some capital. >> host: we should introduce another person active and that is dick costolo. >> dick costolo is now the chief executive officer of the company. he runs the company. he didn't start out that way. he was a close friend of evan williams. after noah glass was pushed out, jack dosey took over as ceo. he was never trained to run a company and was put in charge of a growing company and couldn't do it. eventually after the site going down continuously and they had text messages bills because people were using twitter over the text messages and they were in the $100-$200,000 a month range. they had to fire jack and evan took over. he has a way of hiring his friends a lot of to time. he feels he can trust them and they will not turn on them which is a thing that does happen in the valley. and he hired a friend who become the chief operating officer. and jack had been putting together a coup to have williams fired from the company. and one of the people who kind of brought into this accidentally was dick costolo. dick costolo was put in a place where he knew his friend evan was going to be fired and the board asked dick to run the company. and after that dick was the ceo. >> host: how much time did you interview the five characters? >> i spent hundreds of hours. ex-girlfriends and boyfriends and i was in search of the cleaning people. i spend time with the founders and board members. i think i wracked up 65 hours with founders and board members alone and hundreds of hours with other people. i also got access through my reporting to thousands of documents and e-mails and internal legal documents. but the thing that was fascinating was the fact that the tweets these people sent, all of the these founders and board members, became one of the most important tools. the memories of jack and noah changes and there are instances where they overlap, but there are instances where they are different with things that don't make sense. an interview with jack and biz, biz believed a discussion took place at whole foods and jack believed it was a park. i was able to go through tweets and facebook updates and their four foursquare check-ins and their instagram and pivot what they were wearing at the time. >> host: nick bilton, where did you get the idea of the book? >> i was looking at twitter and looking this company changed everything. facebook changed the way we communicate but not the way we share stories and magazines and blogs or the way we have revolutions in politics. and twitter has changed all of those things. when i looked at the story from a high level i thought this was a company that is going to continue to do that. and then what i found in my reporting and i didn't know this going into it. my theory was it was created by one guy. but i found a story of four guys, who were close friends, and put together a company that was intended to connect friends and bring people together, but in the process tore their own friendship apart. >> host: you said this isn't an uncommon story in the valley? >> twitter is unique in the respect that all of the founders were pushed out over time. usually it is just one that is pushed out and then it goes away. but you have these stories in the valley and every big company has one of these tales to it. you saw facebook, snapchat -- which it is latest darling and one of the founders is suing the co-founders because he is saying he was thrown aside. and you saw it with twitter. you have a group of friends, often guys who knew each other in a dorm room or after work, and they find connections. and they set out to really build something together. and what happens in these instances is if the start-up fails it is great story. they are still buddies. but when it is successful you get people wanting to take credit and be seen as the next steve jobs or sole creator of a product. and see we see this time and time again. >> host: you say it was steve job's that created jack dosey in many respects. what do you mean by that? >> you have seen people saying jack dosey is the next steve jobs. and that is a creation that jack put forth. jack, after he was pushed out of twitter, he believed he should not have been pushed out and went on a spree of doing interviews with cbs and magazines and "vanity fair" and all of these places saying he was the sole creator of twitter and excluded everybody's name, especially noah glass. and he did that because he felt he was unjust pushed out. he started quoting steve jobs but didn't say it was steve jobs. he said he felt like we was punched in the stomach after being fired and that is what steve jobs said before about being fired. he was on-stage an a technology conference and talked about things using the same language steve jobs used saying magical and thinking about the users and all of these verbatim quotes. i said in the book i don't think that was right to do but but it was steve jobs that created this version of jack dosey. because jack and others want to be seen as the next innovator. there is nothing wrong with wanting to do that. but they should do it in a way that is them being the next innovator not trying to be someone else. >> host: no story is complete without a chapter on mark zuckerberg. what role did he play? >> mark tried to buy the company twice. the first time was the week that jack dosey was fired. it was in 2008, october. jack was for the idea, but williams was against it because he had just taken over as the ceo. they opted against it. and then the next time a year or so later, two years later, mark tried to buy it again. there is a great seen at his house in palo alto where williams, jason goldman and twitter's former lawyer went done to mark's house and there was a secret meeting and they had a discussion about him buying the company but they opted out. it is interesting because while mark wanted to buy the company and saw it as a threat to facebook, which it has been, he also looked at it with a perplexed chaos. he knew what was going on and the fight was going done and the events between evan and jack and others. and at a private dinner party at his house mark said it is as if they drove a clown car through a gold mine and fell in. >> host: who else has tried to buy twitter? >> who else hasn't tried to buy twitter is a better question. p-diddy showed up to say he wanted to use the service and if he was he wanted compensation and he would bring more famous people on. the founders said no. this is when williams and stone were running the company. another instance is evan and business went to ashton kutcher's place and sat with demi moore by the pool and tried to pitch the story. and then al gore is my favorite story. he was running current tv and gore saw the potential for what this was during the elections. and he invited evan and biz to his place in san francisco and wined and dined him and tried to convince him to sell him part of twitters. they wanted to create a twitter television. he got the founders very drunk. there was a moment where gore goes into the kitchen and comes out and says i hear this is the good stuff with a bottle of patron. and evan and biz decline. there are dozens of stories of people trying to buy it. >> host: where does twitter get the revenue? >> sponsored advertising and twitter accounts. if i want to get more followers, i could go and pay to have my account highlighted to people to see if i could get more followers. i can target people that live in san francisco and buy books. i can tell that based on their tweets or what it says in their profile. another way to do it is to actually promote tweets. one of the things i have done is i wrote a tweet about by book and said pick up "hatching twitter: a true story of money, power, friendship and betrayal" and shared the book cover, and i tweeted that. so i said people that search for ipo will see this tweet. or people that work at facebook or twitter will see the book. they will click on the look and go forward. >> host: what kind of revenue and employees? >> a little over 200,000 employees and $640 million is the projected income. next year is expected to be a billion. they are not profitable yet. they are taking the money they are getting from the ipo and advertising companies. >> host: what is your personal opinion about the ipo? >> twitter was smart in the fact they under valued the company. facebook was work $50 billion and now it is known as one of the biggest messes in ipo's in the valley. twitter decide to go out at a much lower evaluation. people said $18-$20 billion and they were talking about going out at $13 billion. but they valued themselves too low and that backfired. the stokes spiked and jumped to 80% over the asking price and now it has been falling since. i think we will find that sweet spot in the about the $18-$20 billion. >> host: when will twitter shares be available to the public? >> there are ways you can purchase them now. they will come on the market in six months. you have the lockup right now and employees cannot sell their stocks until six months after the ipo. there are ways to get it now and plenty more ways to be able to do it in the beginning of next year. >> host: what do you think the affect will be on the management of twitter? >> that is a great question. one of my concerns as a user of twitter, one thing i love is they care about the people that use the service. this company tries to stand up to governments who have people's accounts shutdown because they didn't like what they were saying. it is company that has protected its users on a continually basis. it has gone to bat for them going to court. it has been building systems that let people use twitter without being identified by their location or ip address to protect people. but when it becomes a public company the interest are no longer aligned with the users they are aligned with the shareholders and i am worried they will do things that benefit the shareholders and not in the best interest of the people that use the service. i help they can find that balance. >> host: and finally, where is noah glass today? >> noah glass lives in san francisco. he left the city for a couple years and went to live in los angeles on venice beach, california. he tried to find new projects to work on. you will have to read at the end of the book to find out where he is. but he is the character in the story who set out trying to find and build something that would make him feel less alone and he learned along the way, and i don't think any of the other guys did it in the way noah did, that technology is another thing that will c

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