Twitter (with Dick Costolo)

Yeah, I prefer the one single take. So, you know, but we'll see what happens. Doesn't matter. Welcome to season seven, episode five of Acquired. The podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and venture capital firm in Seattle. And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an independent advisor to startups and angel investor based in San Francisco.

And we are your hosts. Today, we tell the story of a company that has changed every single one of our lives. Twitter. Whether you use the product all day, every day, like I know many of you out there do, ostensibly as part of your jobs, Or you have just seen the occasional discomforting tweet from a world leader, there is no doubt that Twitter impacts us all, especially heading into this historic US presidential election. But how did these hundred and forty character messages that grew out of the SMS protocol eventually play such an outsized role in our society?

And conversely, why is it that despite being the heartbeat of the world, Twitter still pales in comparison, both in user numbers and in revenue, to its juggernaut social media cousin, Facebook? So a lot of ink has been spilled on Twitter's founding and its early days of musical chairs between various founders and board members, and most of our listeners know all about that. So as Ben and I were reflecting on what the acquired way to do a Twitter episode would be, we realized that there actually was this. Pretty significant fork in history. You might say it turned on a knife point, where starting in about 2010, it could have been Twitter that ended up owning Instagram, not Facebook.

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