Twitter has millions tweeting in public communication service

SAN FRANCISCO — It's tea time at Twitter. While that may evoke images of courtly discussion over Earl Grey and finger sandwiches, it's quite another thing at Silicon Valley's new "it" company.

The idea is that any employee can step in front of the 43-person start-up and offer a no-holds-barred weekly critique on a Friday afternoon. Co-founders Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone often watch from the back, taking mental notes. Some employees recite poems; others make wacky slide presentations. The point is to express what the company means to them.

In another tradition, Alison Sudol, a musician with more than 500,000 followers on Twitter, this month spoke at headquarters, part of a monthly ritual in which artists and academics drop by to impart wisdom and entertain.

Both events underscore the bottom-up culture fostered by Twitter's unassuming co-founders, who have become reluctant media stars. "Tech founders get a little too much emphasis," CEO Evan Williams says. "So many people here contribute to our success."

Today, it seems everyone wants a piece of Twitter. There have been rumors of takeover overtures from Google, Facebook and Apple. Twitter, like Google, has become a verb (though the proper term is "tweet"). Twitter's co-founders have had a profound impact on how millions of people communicate. Yet, despite appearances on Oprah,The View and The Colbert Report,  many refer to them as simply The Twitter Guys.

"They've created a new way for people to communicate publicly and instantaneously," says Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist who is on the company's six-member board and an investor.

The trio, all in their 30s, are college dropouts with a modest track record of success. Each helped start a company before Twitter. Dorsey invented the service out of his deep fascination with taxi dispatches and city grids. Williams began reading business books for fun as a teenager. Stone wrote two books on blogging, and is Twitter's de facto public relations department.

They're sitting on a potential gold mine. The 3-year-old firm raised $35 million in February alone — $55 million to date — and was recently valued at about $100 million.

To be sure, behind the feel-good vibes, meteoric growth and nationwide fixation, Twitter's founders face issues of user retention, outages and persistent questions about monetization. Such are the challenges for a highflying start-up trying to live up to its considerable hype in the worst economy in more than 70 years.

Yet, industry leaders such as Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh are convinced Twitter is up to the task.

"All three (Twitter founders) have the belief that Twitter can change the world and the passion to make it actually happen," says Hsieh, a Web sales guru and fan of Twitter.

The brain trust

The weight of all of the lofty expectations rests squarely on the slight shoulders of Williams, 37, who oversees daily operations. The Clarks, Neb., native succeeded Dorsey as chief executive in October. He has successfully navigated a start-up before. As co-founder of Blogger, one of the first applications for creating and managing blogs, he helped sell it to Google for an undisclosed amount in 2003.

Following Blogger's sale, Williams was not long for Google. He eventually hooked up with a friend, Noah Glass, to start Odeo, at the time a podcasting company. It was there that the Twitter concept was born.

"Ev is the total package," says Chris Sacca, one of Twitter's first investors and an adviser. "He reminds me so much of (Sacca's former Google bosses and co-founders) Sergey (Brin) and Larry (Page). They understand products and how they can fit in the future."

The son of a now-retired farmer, Williams showed a predilection for commerce as a teenager. He read business books on real estate, marketing and publishing. "I realized I could buy books and learn something that people spent years learning about," says Williams, who dropped out of the University of Nebraska just as the Web was becoming a phenomenon, in 1994.

While Williams bears the operational brunt of running Twitter, the tireless Stone is the marketing hub. On a typical day, he fields 100 media requests.

"Ev is the technology builder, and Biz is the evocative and communicative one," says Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn, the popular business-networking service.

Their partnership was born of a close working relationship and friendship built after starting out as business competitors. In 2000, Stone co-founded Xanga.com, a website that hosts blogs and social-networking profiles. It "looked a lot like MySpace before MySpace," he says. Its rival was Williams' Blogger.

After Google bought Blogger, Williams asked Stone to join Google to help reboot Blogger with a new design and features. "I didn't really know Evan then," Stone says. "We were just familiar with each others' work. There was a mutual admiration."

By 2005, they left Google for Odeo. Stone's timing could have been better — he gave up his Google stock options because he wasn't there long enough to be vested — but Odeo was where Twitter was born.

"Twitter is so many things: a messaging service; a customer-service tool to reach customers, as proven by Zappos, Comcast and others; real-time search; and microblogging," says Stone, 35.

The least visible co-founder, Dorsey, 32, is rarely around the office and already onto his Next Big Thing. But the St. Louis native is the mastermind behind the notepad sketch in 2000 that led to Twitter. "My whole philosophy is making tech more accessible and human," Dorsey says.

When an image of the sketch was uploaded on the Internet in 2006, Dorsey wrote: "I had an idea to make a more 'live' LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it. …We're calling it twttr."

"Jack's original vision was staggering for its potential, as well as its simplicity," Sacca says.

These days, Dorsey is chairman of the company's board of directors and a strategic adviser, but is devoting his energies to a top-secret start-up. He won't say much about the new venture — only that it involves tech and communications, and that it may make its debut this summer.

In many ways, the boyish-looking Dorsey best captures the spirit and look of Twitter. He bears a forearm-length tattoo that he says represents an F-sharp, an integral symbol from mathematics, and a human clavicle — the only bone, he says, with "free range of motion."

"I'm a very low-level programmer," Dorsey says, chuckling. "This idea of a short, inconsequential burst of activity (Twitter) turned out pretty well."

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