Part 15 (2/2)

Out on the street, President Medvedev looked up at the building as he was directed inside by his security detail. He walked past the Subway sandwich shop to his right, through the open gla.s.s doors, and across the marble-floored lobby and into the elevator. He didn't need to wait for an elevator, because for the next several hours the only person who would be able to enter or leave the building or travel between floors would be him.

Goldman stood like a general surveying the team of engineers who were watching over the site. As the president slowly rose through the building past the third floor, an engineer looked up at Goldman and said three dreaded words: ”The site's down.”

”What do you mean, the f.u.c.king site is down?” Goldman asked. Like someone who had just fallen into a pool of icy water, he went numb. He started to mentally envision the worst-case scenarios.

There had been meetings over the previous few weeks with the White House, the State Department, the San Francisco mayor's office, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's office, and the Russian emba.s.sy to play through the meticulously planned visit. The plan: After the Russian president sent his first tweet, the White House would retweet it. Barack Obama would reply, congratulating him on his tweet, as would the mayor and governor, all welcoming the Russian president to Twitter and to the United States.

But that wasn't going to happen without a Web site. Worse, as Goldman was confined to the third floor until the president left the building, he couldn't run up and tell Ev and Biz. He tried to text them both, but without knowing what was going on three floors above, Goldman didn't know whether the president was there or if they could see their cell phones.

As the elevator door opened to the sixth floor, the president emerged, shaking Mayor Newsom's hand. He was then introduced to Ev, Biz, and d.i.c.k.

As Biz reached out to shake Medvedev's hand, his phone vibrated in his pocket. It was a message from Goldman, explaining the situation and urging Biz to do everything in his power to delay the first tweet.

Biz showed his phone to Ev, who peered at the screen with a fake smile. ”Shall we?” Mayor Newsom said as he led them down the hallway. Biz tried to delay, walking as slowly as possible as everyone went ahead. At one point a public-relations employee who had found out the site was off-line tapped d.i.c.k on the shoulder and said the same words that he had read from Goldman. ”The site's down.”

d.i.c.k turned with a look of confusion and shock. ”Like, totally down?” he asked as his eyes widened. Biz continued walking glacially, trying to come up with any excuse to delay the group from tweeting. ”Oh, we should show him the electric bike!” Biz said as they zigzagged like lost drunks through the office.

Twitter employees stood to the side as the group made its way through the cubicles, Biz's feet moving with the speed of an infirm ninety-year-old man, doing his best to slow the inevitable arrival in the cafeteria, where the first tweet was scheduled to leave American soil.

They continued strolling, slowly. Very, very slowly. They walked past some of the artwork Ev and Sara had chosen for the office, at one point catching a glimpse of one of Ev's favorite pieces of art, which sat in a black frame and, in a bit of irony, was hung upside down. It read: ”Let's make better mistakes tomorrow.”

Ev loved that poster. He had tweeted about it when it first arrived in mid-December, late on a Thursday afternoon, showing off a picture to his Twitter faithful with the t.i.tle ”New sign at Twitter HQ.” But with the site down and the Russian president just a few feet away from the cafeteria, they could do without today's mistake. Or tomorrow's.

Goldman dripped with sweat as he paced behind the engineers, who were doing everything they could to get the site back up, frantically talking to servers and code consoles. ”What's going on, guys?” he said. ”Talk to me; tell me we've got the site back online.” The engineers were trying every trick in the book, trying desperately to figure out what was wrong.

Upstairs, Biz and Ev were unable to hold off the president any longer. They walked into the cafeteria unsure of what they'd find on the computer. It all happened in slow motion, the pops of flashes from the media in tow as the president approached the podium, his fingers reaching out to touch the keys of a laptop set up for the first tweet. Ev looked over at Biz, who had no idea what was going to happen. Would the site work? Would this be the biggest embarra.s.sment possible for the company, a media storm from San Francisco to St. Petersburg calling Twitter and American technology a joke?

Then the G.o.ds intervened. ”We're back!” an engineer yelled as he leaned back in his chair, looking at Goldman. A sigh of relief enveloped the room.

”h.e.l.lo everyone!” Medvedev typed slowly in Russian into the Mac computer at the podium, ”I'm on Twitter, and this is my first tweet.” Ev had a microphone in his hand, narrating to the employees and the media what was happening. As Medvedev pressed ”send,” he looked up to the projector in front of him and smiled. The president then gave a thumbs-up with his left hand, beaming like a child who had just figured out a complicated puzzle. Biz, who was standing behind them both with his hands cupped in his jeans pockets, smiled as the screen's reflection glimmered on his gla.s.ses.

”Holy f.u.c.k,” he whispered to Ev as the president walked forward to talk to Mayor Newsom. ”That was close.”

Secret Meetings.

The front door to Jack's apartment swung open and d.i.c.k walked in. He wandered down the hallway to the kitchen, which opened out onto the living room, then continued around the corner and over to the fridge. He pulled the handle back and then nodded as he peered inside. ”Yep, just as I figured,” d.i.c.k said to Jack with a smile as he looked back at the fridge, empty except for a couple of bottles of water and beer. ”It looks like a bachelor pad, all right.”

As Jack laughed, d.i.c.k turned and strolled into the living and dining area to shake hands with Fenton and the few others who were in attendance, including an outside public-relations consultant Fenton had hired to help with any media-related issues that might arise from the meeting they were about to have.

Jokes then ceased as the meeting got under way.

It was the second of two private meetings that had taken place in Jack's Mint Plaza loft over the summer of 2010. It had been a few months since Jack had started to convince the board and senior Twitter employees that it was Ev's turn to be fired as the CEO of Twitter.

Jack had had no problem convincing Fenton that Ev was the wrong person to run the company. Fenton had happily slurped up the Jack Kool-Aid since day one. But Jack had found it much more difficult to convince the rest of the board.

Yet after Abbot, Ali, and other senior staffers complained to the board about Ev's recent management choices, the near miss with the Russian president, Ev's slothlike decision-making process, and his insistence on hiring friends, the tide had turned.

Ensuring that the right things landed in the right people's ears, Jack had spent the summer moving people around like p.a.w.ns in a chess match against his nemesis. The problem was, Ev had no idea he was playing. These private meetings taking place at Jack's apartment, at Blue Bottle Coffee, and at Square's offices? Ev had no clue of their existence.

After Jack had left a year and a half earlier, Fred and Bijan had believed that Ev was the right person to run Twitter. And Ev had quickly proven himself to them. But now, with revenue growing slowly and an entirely new set of problems having arisen with the ma.s.sive growth spurts Twitter had experienced through 2009, the first investors were both questioning whether he was the right leader to take Twitter to the next level, which would include making the company consistently profitable-then, if all went according to plan, taking Twitter public. Their fears had been heightened when Jack had indirectly whispered in their ears that they could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in investment money with Ev at the helm.

Of course, Ev didn't have a chance to a.s.suage anyone's fears. As far as he knew, everything was just fine at Twitter. He held his weekly meetings with Campbell, receiving his boisterous pep talk. ”You're doing a f.u.c.king great job!” Campbell would bellow. At board meetings Campbell would appear to listen to Ev's presentations on the state of the company. After Ev's sermons were done, the coach would clap loudly and hug his protege, proclaiming again to everyone in the room that Ev was ”doing a f.u.c.king great job!” and asking them to clap (none of this was a usual occurrence in a corporate board meeting). Then, after Ev left the room, proud that his mentor thought he was doing such a great job, Campbell would shout at the group: ”You gotta get rid of this f.u.c.king guy! He doesn't know what the f.u.c.k he's doing!”

For some of the senior Twitter staffers, including Ali, the entire ordeal had come down to one major issue that could take Twitter out at the knees.

Over the past year a company called UberMedia had been building and buying a number of third-party Twitter applications, including some big-name Twitter apps called Echofon and Twidroyd. UberMedia was managed by a shrewd businessman, Bill Gross, who was on the verge of buying another app, arguably one of the largest, called TweetDeck. But Gross had a much bigger plan in mind than just buying up third-party Twitter clients.

Gross's plan was to build a Twitter-network clone that could be used to divert people away from Twitter to an entirely new service, one where Gross could make money on advertising. He had also developed a business relations.h.i.+p with Ashton Kutcher and hoped to bring him into this new venture.

When Ali and d.i.c.k found out about the TweetDeck deal, they realized that such a sale would give Gross owners.h.i.+p of 20 percent of all Twitter clients. Ali and others at Twitter wanted to buy TweetDeck before UberMedia did. But Ev couldn't make a decision. He wondered if the tens of millions of dollars TweetDeck would cost would be worth it. One moment Ev agreed to buy the app, and the next he changed his mind, stalling the decision again.

At Jack's loft during the first of the private meetings, the group that met had made a pact on three things: first, that they would agree to stand together against Ev and Goldman no matter what happened; second, that they would remove Ev as CEO; and third, that they would ask d.i.c.k to become the interim CEO until they found a suitable replacement. Finally, they would bring Jack back to the company. Although Jack wanted to be CEO, he knew he couldn't do it while running Square at the same time, but just returning would be enough. At least for now.

Then there was the second meeting, where they told d.i.c.k part of the plan. He was being picked, they explained, because the employees trusted him and he could help as a transitional CEO until they found a permanent replacement. This they couldn't do until Ev was out.

Back at the Twitter offices, Ev was oblivious to the coup. He was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with pride about the latest Twitter numbers: People were sending more than two billion tweets a month on the service, and millions of new accounts were being created each week. He was also exhilarated by the new and improved, redesigned version of Twitter he was planning to launch on September 14, 2010; it had been code-named Phoenix internally. Externally it would be called #NewTwitter and would take short snippets of media and embed them directly within a tweet. No more clicking off to other Web sites to see photos, videos, or links people were sharing; they would all exist within Twitter in little side panes. The 140-character tweet was becoming an envelope with more information inside.

Although Twitter was now making more money with its advertising products, Ev wasn't as concerned with the revenue side of the operation, which was more fuel for the board's desire to oust him as CEO. d.i.c.k, on the other hand, had been leading the charge to make Twitter profitable, which contributed to the board's decision to ask him to be the interim CEO when they thrust Ev out of the company.

For Ev life was going according to plan. He and Sara were starting to try for a second child. He had cashed out a small amount of his Twitter stock, giving him millions of dollars to buy a new house in San Francisco and a second home in Tahoe, three hours northeast of the city, to go skiing with his family. Ev had continued to try and help the people close to him, giving money away in undisclosed ways. At a friend's art opening, he anonymously purchased the artist's work. He had also started to give vast sums away to charities, secretly donating hundreds of thousands of dollars. And taking care of his friends and family by paying off debts for those closest to him.

Ev didn't know anything about the private meetings or his lieutenants talking to the board or that his conversations with his coach would make their way back to Fenton and then Jack.

As far as Ev knew, he was ”doing a great f.u.c.king job!”

The Clown Car in the Gold Mine.

It was mid-September 2010, the sun s.h.i.+ning brightly through the window as Ev stood in his office, scribbling Twitter-related ideas on his whiteboard. Outside his office door, rows of cubicles were pulsating with the quiet murmur of keyboard taps and mouse clicks. The street below bustled with cars floating by.

He looked up to see Campbell filling the doorway like a linebacker.

Ev smiled, happy to see the Coach for their weekly session. Ev was in particularly good spirits; #NewTwitter was garnering good reviews from the tech critics. He was especially looking forward to a party planned that evening to help celebrate the employees' months of hard work. The New York Times was also working on a large Sunday business profile about him: the billionaire farm boy who helped invent Blogger and Twitter. The man behind two companies that had changed media and the way people communicate.

But Campbell looked troubled. ”Have a seat,” he said solemnly to Ev. ”This is going to be hard. We're going to have a hard conversation.”

Ev fell onto the couch, not sure what he was about to hear from Campbell. His mind started to race with possibilities. And then, like the thud of a bird flying into a clear gla.s.s window, Campbell told him. ”The board wants you to step up to the chairman role.”

Ev was confused. ”What do you mean?”

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