Biz Stone Quotes & Sayings

Essentially, you become a top tweet because so many people are engaging with that tweet. They're either retweeting it, or they're favoriting it; they're doing one of many things to indicate to us that that tweet is interesting and engaging to users. — Biz Stone

Positive culture comes from being mindful, and respecting your coworkers, and being empathetic. — Biz Stone

At Twitter, mobile is in our DNA ... For us, it's all about mobile, and it always has been. — Biz Stone

Google has a strong focus on technology, and it serves them well. My experience there was that they ordered technology first and people second. I believe the opposite. It isn't all about how many servers you have or how sophisticated your software is. Those things matter. But what really makes a technology meaningful - to its users and its employees - is how people come to use it to effect change in the world. I don't mean to throw Google under the bus. Obviously they're brilliant. It's just that my priorities are flipped. People come before technology. — Biz Stone

For me, I've learned about what it means to focus on a culture, to build social responsibility, and the idea of a company as a super-organism. — Biz Stone

We lacked something that is the key to a successful startup, and it was bigger than sound quality. It was emotional investment. If you don't love what you're building, if you're not an avid user yourself, then you will most likely fail even if you're doing everything else right. — Biz Stone

The most rewarding thing for me has been this affirmation for me that people are basically good and smart, and if you give them a simple tool that allows them to exhibit that behavior, they'll prove it to you every single day. — Biz Stone

If I had one piece of advice to tell an entrepreneur, I always say, 'You have to have emotional investment in what you're working on.' That's what we lacked at Odeo. — Biz Stone

What if the New York Times gave out free, cheap Kindles to everyone and said this is how we're doing it now. You know? Maybe that's a way to go. The technology gets cheaper and cheaper, and at some point it has to be cheaper than all these trucks and all this gas, to just say, let's give away a Kindle to everyone. — Biz Stone

Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success. — Biz Stone

Willingness to take risks is the path to success. — Biz Stone

Embrace your constraints. — Biz Stone

Success isn't guaranteed, but failure is certain if you aren't truly emotionally invested in your work. — Biz Stone

With Twitter, it's as easy to unfollow as it is to follow. — Biz Stone

The normal press cycle is to put a company on a pedestal and then knock it down. It's much more interesting that way. — Biz Stone

When you hand good people possibility, they do great things. — Biz Stone

People first. Technology second. — Biz Stone

The thing that excites me, and the thing that excited me about Twitter, is the idea of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight. — Biz Stone

I was writing and developing software for alumnae to be able to connect and communicate. — Biz Stone

Plain hard work is good and important, but it is ideas that drive us, as individuals, companies, nations, and a global community. Creativity is what makes us unique, inspired, and fulfilled. — Biz Stone

There are a lot of sources of information out there, so why don't you curate for yourself a list, like a real timeline of information, like the New York Times, or JetBlue, or your friends, or this comedian, or this guy who pretends to be a cat, or whatever it is, whatever entertains you, whatever you find useful. — Biz Stone

Even the simplest tools can empower people to do great things. — Biz Stone

A Twitter update is simple and fast and gets the information and news, and it spreads it very quickly, and it can contain links so you can then link to this whole context of information. — Biz Stone

I invite you to open your mind to new possibilities. Let's fake it till we make it. Let's create visions of an aspirational future. You don't have to quit your job. But think about what might change your trajectory by half a degree. It could be that when you come home every night your first words are "I'm home! How can I help?" Try doing that. You may have a shitty job. You don't like it. You do it for the money, even if the money isn't great. Try to look at your work in a different way. Find something about your life that's great. Follow that thread. Volunteer. Even if you're in the worst possible situation, there's hope. Challenge yourself. Set your own bar. Redefine your success metrics. Create opportunities for yourself. Reassess your situation. We are all marching together. We're headed toward something big, and it's going to be good. — Biz Stone

Understand that you dont have all the answers, you just have to start somewhere and keep an open mind. — Biz Stone

There's a lot of social input when you put these things out there. People's ideas cross with other people's thoughts. — Biz Stone

I believe that the open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. — Biz Stone

The point of school, after all, isn't to do homework. The point of school is to learn. It was a mistake to assume that teachers - or anyone else, for that matter - automatically knew what was best for me.

Rules are there to help us - to create a culture, to streamline productivity, and to promote success. But we're not computers that need to be programmed. If you approach your bosses or colleagues with respect, and your goals are in alignment, there's often room for a little customization and flexibility. And on the other side, those in positions of power shouldn't force people to adhere to a plan for the sake of protocol. The solution, always, is to listen carefully - to your own needs and to those of the people around you. — Biz Stone

I got an idea: people like news why don't we write the news down on a piece of paper, and we'll gas them up and drive them to everyone's house. I mean, if you were going to say that now, it doesn't sound like a great idea, because there are other ways you can distribute the news. — Biz Stone

The international limit on mobile texting, or SMS, is 160 characters. We wanted Twitter to be entirely readable and writable on every single one of the over five billion mobile phones on this planet, because they all have SMS built in. So we said it has to be within 160 characters, all the tweets. — Biz Stone

We focus a lot on culture specifically at Twitter because of this spotlight, and of the fact that we don't want to end up like the child actor who found success early and grew up all weird and freaky. — Biz Stone

We can figure it out, it's not like we all have a disease. — Biz Stone

I don't think of Twitter as a social network. I think of it as a messaging system that has a lot of social components to it. — Biz Stone

Design is a career where you learn creative decision making. — Biz Stone

...It doesn't pay to act bulletproof. Nobody is flawless and when you act as if you are, it always rings false. — Biz Stone

You curate information that you want to receive. It's a lot different because I'm not asking you if it's okay, I'm just saying I'm following your updates. That's why I don't think of Twitter as a social network. — Biz Stone

Our promise was to deliver value before profit, ... — Biz Stone

Opportunity is manufactured — Biz Stone

Embrace constraint. What you get in return is the art and craft of editing your own life, weeding out what is and isn't necessary. — Biz Stone

Investors are employees you can never hire. We made sure to pick investors that thought like us. — Biz Stone

The smallest, earliest gifts forever alter your trajectory for doing good. This is what I mean by the compound interest of altruism. Start early to maximize the compound interest in your efforts. — Biz Stone

I haven't been paying attention to politics long enough to have really smart opinions. — Biz Stone

When you think about Twitter, there are people all around the world reporting twenty-four seven, every second. They're reporting what they're seeing and what's happening around them. So there's a lot of potential for breaking news. — Biz Stone

I've seen people twitter in haiku only. — Biz Stone

Fear in the absence of knowledge breeds irrationality.

We should always seek knowledge, even in the face of fear. — Biz Stone

Failure was part of the path. It was worth the risk. In fact, it was a critical component of growth. By sharing it with our users, we were showing our ultimate confidence in ourselves and our success. We weren't quitting, and we hoped our faith would inspire theirs. — Biz Stone

Creativity comes from constraint. — Biz Stone

Twitter provides a great amount of timely information, but we still need those people to fill out the rest of the story and the context. — Biz Stone

I think we definitely want to focus on the simplicity aspect because it's something that's built into the culture even here at Twitter. Constraints inspire creativity. — Biz Stone

At least half the job of CEO is communication - because of human nature. People fear what they don't know. If the board wasn't hearing that things were going well, they assumed that things must be going badly. — Biz Stone

Constraint inspires creativity — Biz Stone

I thought I was going to stay at Google, because it was a great place to work. — Biz Stone

I love Sherlock Holmes, but I love any of these old stories where the writer was paid by the word, so the adventures just continue forever. They are almost like they were meant to be read out loud. — Biz Stone

Balancing family and work is a top priority for me, and I treat it as such. Meaning, I actually put specific family time and events in my calendar so that precious time is dedicated and properly blocked off from any work that may try to sneak its way into my schedule. — Biz Stone

Inventing your dream is the first and biggest step toward making it come true. — Biz Stone

I think that's a really important role that people sometimes forget about, especially with all these newspaper shutting down and having trouble, where are all these stories going to go? I think you have something really great with all those stories waiting to be told, but I just don't know how it shapes up exactly. I don't think there are going to be a lot of newspaper reporters sitting around not writing. — Biz Stone

If you make the opportunity. you'll be the first in the position to take advantage of it. — Biz Stone

The other thing I'll say about money is that having a lot of it amplifies who you are. I have found this to be almost universally true. If you're a nice person, and then you get money, you become a wonderful philanthropist. But if you're an asshole, with lots of money you can afford to be more of an asshole: "Why isn't my soda at sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit?" You choose who you are no matter what, but I have to say that the anxiety of making ends meet gives you a bit of a pass. When you're rich, you have no excuse. — Biz Stone

Both my wife and I have a lot of compassion for animals in general. — Biz Stone

You don't have to spend the entire day hunched over your computer consuming this information. Maybe, it is as simple as once in a while glancing down at the device that's invaluable to you or many reasons, catching up, or it lets you know when you should know something. But as these things get better and we get more connected in it, it will get more sophisticated. — Biz Stone

I think it's a really big deal to be able to meet people outside the context of something like a conference room or someplace where everything feels like it's formal talk. — Biz Stone

People are watching TV, they're watching some clips on their iPhone. I mean, some folks are sitting there on the iPhone, watching the Colbert Report, and meanwhile there's a huge plasma TV right in front of them that they could be watching it on. — Biz Stone

We hired a CSR person at Twitter, years before we hired our first sales person, to make sure we had a culture and impact of doing good. — Biz Stone

In order to succeed spectacularly you have to be willing to fail spectacularly. — Biz Stone

In any leadership position, you're always going to be disappointing somebody. — Biz Stone

If people are passionate about your product, whether it's because they're hating or loving it, those are both good scenarios. — Biz Stone

You can shut down a service, and yet people will find ways to communicate. — Biz Stone

This idea that the open exchange of information can have a positive global impact is being proven over and over again around the world nearly on a daily basis - and for Secretary Clinton to recognize that, I think, is a huge step. — Biz Stone

When I studied graphic design, I learned a valuable lesson: There's no perfect answer to the puzzle, and creativity is a renewable resource. — Biz Stone

I realized that a company can build a business, do good in society, and have fun. These three goals can run alongside one another, without being dominated by the bottom line. — Biz Stone

When you think about email or IMing, why aren't you writing back? I can see your avatar, I know you're online, why aren't you writing me back? But with Twitter, everybody sends their responses to Twitter, and Twitter then sends them out to everyone. So there's not this constant connection. You can be hyperconnected, then you can take a break for a couple days and it's fine. — Biz Stone

There's no such thing as a superhero, but together we can world in a new direction. — Biz Stone

Trust your instincts, know what you want, and believe in your ability to achieve it. — Biz Stone

Doing startups is all about making mistakes. — Biz Stone

You can provide a short-format content, and it can grow, and it can spread virally across the entire Twitter system, and it can contain within it a link to something that's much longer, that's a long essay or that's a video. — Biz Stone

I'm still kinda old-school. We're twittering, and we're all twitterers. And we write tweets. The only thing I don't love is twits. — Biz Stone

The two things I use the most are the MacBook Air and my iPhone. Those are my two most-used gadgets that are dented, scratched and smashed. — Biz Stone

I think before Twitter people didn't think that way, not in any sort of meaningful or specific way, so what I'm trying to say, if we're trying a bunch of stuff, a lot of cool and great social stuff, a lot of platform stuff, then some of it will stick, and some of it will be junked over. Some of it will be just like the cell phone, you can't imagine not having it. — Biz Stone

If you take an idea and just hold it in your head, you unconsciously start to do things that advance you toward that goal. — Biz Stone

I started as an artist and I had a side job moving some heavy boxes for a publishing company. They had just gotten a Mac for their art department, the department that creates the book covers. I was kind of showing the art director a thing or two about how to use a Mac. And one day everyone went out to lunch and I jumped on the computer and designed a book jacket and slipped it in the pile to go to the review board in New York. They picked my jacket and when the art director got back to Boston, he wanted to know who designed it and I said, "Me." He was like, "The box guy?" — Biz Stone

I started out as an artist, and I continue to think of myself as an artist first, and a technologist and entrepreneur after that. — Biz Stone

Lesson number one: opportunity can be manufactured. Yes, you can wait around for the right set of circumstances to fall into place and then leap into action but you can also create those set of circumstances on your own. In so doing, you manufacture your own opportunities. This has helped me immeasurably. — Biz Stone

I think of Twitter as a messaging system that you didn't know you needed until you had it. Think about when cell phones first started coming out. People said, "Why would I carry my phone around?" And now you'll drive back to your house thirty miles if you forget your cell phone. — Biz Stone

Everything I've done, I've made up. Some of that might have been right; most of it was probably wrong. — Biz Stone

If you're thinking of acquiring a company and want to keep it a secret, tell everyone in the company; let them all in on the truth. Say, 'Listen, if this gets out, we'll probably lose the deal, so we're all in this together.' — Biz Stone

In a job where you're on a computer all day, and we cater lunch and we put snacks in the kitchen, well, we all started gaining weight, even though we try to pick healthy stuff, but inevitably you find the cashews. — Biz Stone

We realized we weren't really using Odeo, we weren't investing our own time creating podcasts. We were building a tool that was a great idea for some other people. That's a dangerous way to go because if you don't actually use it yourself and love it, then you aren't going to be as fully invested in it from the start. That's what leads you to doing side projects. — Biz Stone

We actually created Twitter and Odeo at the same time. When we realized we didn't really want to be running Odeo anymore we looked around for anyone who wanted to buy Odeo, but not acquire us as a technology. But people aren't as interested in that. — Biz Stone

Your goals should be bigger than your ego, — Biz Stone

Four years later, in 2013, Facebook bought Instagram for one billion dollars in cash and stock. A billion dollars! Driving to Palo Alto in Evan's Porsche, I couldn't even conceive of a number that high. I like to think that Mark Zuckerberg learned something from his encounter with us. He wasn't going to hedge his bets this time with some paltry offer like five hundred million in a mix of stock and cash. He probably said to Kevin Systrom, the creator of Instagram, "You've been working on this for eighteen months. I will give you one billion dollars." I mean, startup, schmart-up. Who could say no to that? — Biz Stone

We can break news really fast. When an earthquake happens, there are people Twittering about it. — Biz Stone

We did Twitter, and Twitter grew so fast, and in 2006 we spun it out into Twitter, Inc. — Biz Stone

The reason I really started running was for meditative purposes. I would pick some problem to have in my head while running. — Biz Stone

I'd dropped out of college to start design thing. — Biz Stone

Creativity is a renewable resource. Challenge yourself every day. Be as creative as you like, as often as you want, because you can never run out. Experience and curiosity drive us to make unexpected, offbeat connections. It is these nonlinear steps that often lead to the greatest work. — Biz Stone

I never even graduated college. I never finished learning, as it were, and I have a psychological need to be in a learning environment at all times. — Biz Stone

I think when people twitter 20 or 30 times per day, that's too much. They are boxing everyone else out, and people stop following them because they need a break. — Biz Stone

Even though running is physically straining, it's mentally refreshing. Especially when you feel like you've accomplished something. — Biz Stone

When a plane lands in the Hudson and there's a Twitter user on the ferry taking a picture of it, Boom. That's it. The water is still splashing. Here's the photo of the thing. — Biz Stone

My personal view about how people should use Twitter is less relevant than our goal to provide the infrastructure for a new kind of communication and then support the creativity that emerges. — Biz Stone