Dick Costolo: belief

Transcript context

…The more interesting way to look at this was Zuck was then, and is still incredibly smart as in many things and as an acquirer, and at this point in time, Twitter was growing faster than Facebook. This was a little later that Twitter hit 50 million MAUs, but the growth was accelerating significantly during these years. When you showed up a little bit after these discussions, there was still no revenue at the company. I'm curious to hear your perspective on what it was like building it, both in terms of how you first did this distribution deals with Google and Microsoft to monetize, but then also building out the ad platform. We've talked about a bunch on this show whether it's Google or Facebook, there aren't that many people that have built out ad platforms at scale like you set out to do when you arrived. How did you even think about even starting to do that? I'll separate the two things, the two data deals with Google and Microsoft. I got in there September maybe August 29th. September 1st was my first day and we had those two data deals done at the very beginning of October and were just the first priority, like, let's get these things done. There have been discussions going on back and forth for a number of months now, that kind of been dragging on. I'll go get those wrapped up. We went and did those two data deals but at the same time those were a fixed amount for a fixed period of time. Who knows, whether we're going to have the leverage to do those same deals again two years down the road. We knew we needed a more scalable strategy. It was pretty quickly decided to pursue an advertising strategy. The big challenge with Twitter and building an ad network around Twitter was unlike Facebook for example, the Twitter content went all over the place. It went to Twitter.com. It went to third party clients. It went to SMS alerts. It went to ESPN.com, and the New York Times, and on and on. We realized right away, we need an advertising format that goes everywhere the tweets go. From there, you quickly realize, well, the one thing that can go anywhere, a tweet can go as another tweet. So we'll make the ads tweets and we'll just inject them into the feed. Whether it's a syndication feed, or a third party feed, or our own site. That was the birth of the native—probably much to the dismay of a bunch of your listeners—it was the birth of the feed-based ad that ended up being what's used in all these products today, Facebook and Pinterest. I didn't realize that. Twitter pioneered that before Facebook?…

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