Part 18 (1/2)

Within seconds the press started scrambling to cover the announcement. An announcement that didn't mention the vicious mutiny that had taken place in the boardrooms of Twitter over the past months. An announcement that didn't mention that Ev had almost been completely out of a job. And one that didn't mention that Jack Dorsey would be returning to the company. That was all still to come.

V.

#d.i.c.k.

No Adult Supervision.

Do you smell that?” a round-faced Twitter engineer said as he peered up from his cubicle. It was late in the afternoon on a Thursday. Moments earlier the office had been as serene and calm as a summer lake, the only sound a faint white noise coming from employees' computers.

”It smells like weed,” the engineer said to his cubicle mates as he took a deep whiff to be sure his nose was being honest. ”Right? That's weed?”

Another engineer sat up, now sniffing too. ”Wait, is that rap music?” he asked.

They looked at each other, trying to figure out what was going on.

They didn't know it, but two hours earlier the metal elevator doors on the sixth floor of Twitter's office had quietly slid open and, like a scene from the beginning of a rap video, an entourage of a dozen large men, most of them black, had poured into the lobby.

”I'm Nick Adler,” a man with a shaved head said confidently as he approached the doe-eyed, pet.i.te receptionist, who, sitting behind the low counter, looked back at the posse with utter confusion. ”We're here to meet with Biz Stone. Omid sent us.”

The receptionist looked back and saw, towering above everyone, in the center of the group, like a queen bee surrounded by its lieutenants, the rapper Snoop Dogg. His head swayed slightly from side to side as he looked around the lobby, his sungla.s.ses concealing his bloodshot eyes. A large, droopy hat covered his cornrowed hair.

”Yes, um, let me call him,” the receptionist said, smiling awkwardly as she tried to reach Biz. But there was no one to call. There were no vice presidents or senior executives or any adult supervision at all in the building.

One of d.i.c.k's first tasks when he had taken over as CEO had been to remove Goldman as head of product at Twitter. d.i.c.k wanted to clean up the board, get out the old and bring in the new, make Twitter his company. Removing Goldman was the first step. Yet at the last moment there had been a compromise: Rather than being fired, Goldman was ”allowed” to quit.

In early December Goldman set out for the LeWeb show in Paris, and while onstage with M. G. Siegler, a TechCrunch blogger, he broke the news publicly.

”You've been with Twitter for a while. So what's next for you personally?” Siegler asked.

”I've just announced to the entire company last Friday that I'll be leaving Twitter at the end of the month,” Goldman said. ”I'm not going to say I need to spend more time with my family-as it only consists of my girlfriend and two cats-but I just need a bit of a break.” (He was still dating Crystal.) Ev, too, was nowhere to be found. After handing the CEO role to d.i.c.k and processing the initial shock of being pushed out of the company, he was actually excited by his new job, realizing that it freed him from the stresses of the business side of the company. Now he could focus on the product. So in November he got to work designing new features for Twitter. But things quickly soured.

When he presented these new product ideas to d.i.c.k, they were brushed off and mostly ignored. Before long Ev was being ignored too. There were executive-level discussions that he wasn't invited to, senior off-site meetings he was not privy to. Like Jack in his ”silent” chairman role, Ev was now a ”silent” product director.

Over the Christmas holidays, Ev set off to Hawaii with his family-a vacation he had taken with d.i.c.k many times before, but not this year. While away, sitting by the pool, thinking about the psychological trauma of the past several months, he realized he didn't really have a role at Twitter after all. He had been fired without being escorted out of the building.

On January 2, 2011, he sent an e-mail to everyone in the company, announcing that it was time to take a break. ”I've decided to extend my vacation even longer-through March,” he wrote. ”Why? I've been needing a break for a while, and the timing seems ideal. I'll still be available and monitoring email, attending board meetings, talking to d.i.c.k and other folks regularly, doing some press if needed, and keeping a close eye on things. But I'll also be spending a lot more time with Miles and Sara.” He signed the e-mail, ”Mahalo, Ev.”

With Goldman gone and Ev on leave, Biz wasn't coming into the office either. He felt like an intruder in d.i.c.k's company and had been spending his days trying to figure out if he would leave Twitter too.

”Hi. Um. Biz isn't around right now,” a short, white, geeky Twitter engineer said to Snoop Dogg's entourage as he appeared in the foyer with a laptop in his hands. ”He's on his way back to the office, but ... I can show you around until he gets here,” the engineer said.

The employee nervously led the group through a door to the right that emerged into the center of Twitter's offices. As the men flowed into the silent cubicles, a ruckus immediately ensued.

”Whad up, honey, you look fly-a-liscious,” Snoop said to a young, attractive female employee as he wandered by. ”d.a.m.n, girl, you be dope on a rope. What's your name, honey bunny?” he said to another, hovering over her cubicle in his oversized blue Adidas jacket with ”L.A.” emblazoned across the front. ”Oooh, oooh, ooh,” he added, pursing his lips and shaking his head from side to side as if he were about to eat from a buffet.

The sound of the entourage was so distracting to employees, it was as if someone had just set off a bottle rocket in a public library.

”Um, excuse me, Mr. Snoop Dogg,” the engineer skittishly said as he looked up at the six-foot-four-inch rapper. ”We're going to go, um, go into this conference room.”

Snoop, along with his entourage, which included Warren G and several other rappers, were in San Francisco for a show they were performing that evening. Nick Adler, who managed Snoop's digital presence, had organized the meeting and been told that Biz would be there to meet with the Snoop entourage. There was a slight problem, though: Biz had not been told. Nor had any of the other Twitter executives, who were all at an off-site meeting.

Snoop's visit had been set up by a new employee of Twitter's emerging media team, a group that had been developed to build relations.h.i.+ps with more high-level stars, including actors, athletes, and musicians. These people were called VITs, or Very Important Tweeters, inside the company.

It also signaled a change in music culture. Although top-of-the-charts musicians had visited Twitter in the past-including Kanye West and P. Diddy-these stars were no longer visiting a certain other media: radio, ironically the thing Ev and Noah had originally set out to reinvent in 2005.

Instead, musicians wanted to see Twitter. Enter Snoop Dogg.

But this particular ”tour” wasn't going as planned.

After Ev's ousting, d.i.c.k had organized a number of off-site meetings to reorganize the company. As a result, most execs were missing from the office as the slight, white engineer tried to entertain Snoop Dogg and his posse. It wasn't going well; he was like a subst.i.tute teacher trying to manage a group of unruly kids.

”So this is our new a.n.a.lytics tool,” he said to the group. ”It can show you which tweets are performing better than others.”

”Oh, really, dude? That's really neat, dude,” Snoop said, imitating a white-person voice. ”That's your new a.n.a.lytics tool. Dude, that's really cool.” Laughter erupted from the rest of the cla.s.s as they all sat playing with their phones, barely paying attention.

But the engineer continued to speak. ”So you can see, whenever you tweet about weed, you get a huge spike from your followers,” he said. At this Snoop sat up, staring inquisitively at a graph on the screen.

After some time in the conference room the entourage quickly sat for a short video interview to help publicize a new feature on Twitter, and they were then led out through the Twitter cafeteria and back to the lobby. As they wandered past a DJ table and microphone set up in the cafeteria, Snoop stopped in his tracks. ”Yo, yo, yo,” he said, his arms outstretched on either side. ”I can get on that?” he asked, pointing to the turntable. But before the engineer had a chance to answer, Snoop had a microphone in his hand and music was blasting out of the speakers. The sound flowed through the hallways, and employees quickly started to venture into the cafeteria. Before long people's phones were out, taking pictures, shooting videos, and, of course, tweeting.

Then, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of thin air, Snoop Dogg had something else in his hand: a large blunt the size of a Sharpie pen. Then a lighter. And a few seconds later he was smoking weed, ferociously. Seeing this, his entourage a.s.sumed it was okay to light up in the Twitter offices, so naturally they pulled out joints that had been in their pockets or tucked behind their ears.

In a matter of minutes, the cafeteria had become the stage for an impromptu Snoop Dogg concert, with a dozen large blunts being pa.s.sed around among famous rappers and Twitter employees, most of whom were dancing, some grinding on each other. A few girls stood on cafeteria tables, their arms waving in the air as if they were atop a large speaker in a nightclub, not at work. They were all partying while their parents were away.

Eventually a Twitter lawyer appeared. Asking Snoop Dogg and his entourage of rappers to stop smoking weed in the office wasn't an easy affair, but all parties must come to an end, and eventually they left, bequeathing a haze of smoke, dozens of stoned employees, and hundreds of tweets in their wake.

A note was sent around to employees by the lawyer reminding people that they were not allowed to use drugs at work. People were asked to delete tweets. Photos were removed from the Web. The only incriminating videos left online belonged to Snoop Dogg.

d.i.c.k was furious when he found out about the weed, the dancing, the partying employees. He vowed that this was the last time anything like that would happen. It was time for Twitter to grow up, he said.

Jack's Back!.

It was light outside and dark inside. Jack was pacing back and forth in front of the bright projector screen as cracks of daytime hidden behind the blinds crept in. His brown dress shoes slid against the carpet like a ballet dancer's slippers. A white employee badge with the name Jack Dorsey and the word ”Twitter” dangled from his waist, swaying from a thread clipped to his jeans.

”We're calling this Twitter 1.0,” he said to the several hundred Twitter employees who sat watching him. ”We're going to abbreviate it 'T1.'” Then he explained to them all that before that moment, until Jack had arrived back at the company, Twitter had been incomplete. ”Pay attention to the direction, not the details,” he said confidently. This was the new Twitter. He didn't praise the previous iteration of the product-Ev's version-but rather took a couple of slight swipes at it. It was a beta and incomplete, he said.

He had started his preamble by playing the song ”Blackbird,” by the Beatles, where a bird with broken wings learns to fly. Fitting. Some of the employees were excited, but many looked around, upset, as Jack disparaged the work they had spent the past two years on.

It was the moment Jack had been waiting and planning for-the moment that should have happened months earlier when Ev was forced down. Now Ev was being forced out.