Biz Stone Quotations

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

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.

I'm convinced that there's a new way to define capitalism, and that the definition should include three ingredients - that we love our work, that we are building a traditionally successful business, and that we are having some positive impact in the world, whether it's local or global.

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

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.

A personal belief is that if you're not personally invested in what you're working on, you'll fail.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A feeling I got from working at Google was that technology could solve any problem. Yes, it's fantastic, but what I realized later was there's technology, and there's people. Google had its list ordered: Technology. People. And I think the right order is: People. Technology.

I thought about tennis. But the more I thought about the whole thing - lessons, equipment, going to the courts - I said screw it, I'm just going to go buy a pair of sneakers and go running.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I still blog, but I do think blogging will become obsolete, as there are more ways of interacting on the Web with low barriers to entry for people to engage and participate.

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.

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.

Obviously, working at Google wasn't a mistake. I used to just walk around. I don't know if I was supposed to, but I'd just open doors and see what people were doing.

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

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

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.

It's important to credit the brave people that take chances to stand up to regimes. They're the star.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.'

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.

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.

I mean just look at haiku, the idea of it. We want to focus on that singularity, on that simplicity, but we still want to add features and add value, but we want to do it in a way that fits in with that mentality of simplicity. You have to spend a lot of time thinking about it.

You have to think for an email. What's the subject? What's it about? It takes two seconds to think about that. So you have to think, Is this a work thing or a social thing? Which? Then you get into a situation that you don't want to be in, because then people are thinking about it too much.

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.

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.

I've probably overused this analogy of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight, but, in reality, it's so simple, real time communication of individuals that allow for this super organism type of organism to happen.

We didn't have anything before Twitter that allowed a group of people roaming around a city to communicate instantly, in real time, and in a coordinated way, in a group.

I think Twitter has brought something totally new to the table.

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.

I'm curious about writing in the age of online publishing. Because nobody cares about good writing online.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I started designing book jackets, which was great because I was good at it. And then from there I decided to become a freelance graphic designer and I needed to expand beyond book jackets, so I taught myself web design, and then in 1999 some friends of mine decided to start a company called Xanga.com, which was a very early kind of social network slash blogging community.

I knew Mac pretty well. I'd used them when I was younger.

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.

Creativity comes from constraint.

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

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

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.

I've seen people twitter in haiku only.

Willingness to take risks is the path to success.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Creativity is a renewable resource.

Embrace your constraints.

I mean, even when it's really simple, there's so much amazing beautiful creativity that can come out of that.

You have to have an emotional investment in what you're doing. If you don't love what you're doing, failure is pretty much guaranteed.

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

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.

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

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.

Doing startups is all about making mistakes.

Embrace your constraints. They are provocative. They are challenging. They wake you up. They make you more creative. They make you better,

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.

The future of marketing is philanthropy,

Design is a career where you learn creative decision making.

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

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.

The determination that led me to create a new sports team taught me an important lesson: opportunity is manufactured.

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

People first. Technology second.

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.

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

I realized ceativity is a renewable resource. You never run out of good ideas

Success isn´t guaranteed, but failure is certain if you aren´t truly emotionally invested in your work.

When you think of a social network, you have these two-way interactions: "Are you my friend? Yes? No? Yes?" Like LinkedIn, it's business oriented, but it's all about establishing connections. You connect to me through my other connections, and that sort of thing, and you sort of define who your friends are. Twitter doesn't have that.

In order to succeed spectacularly you have to be willing to fail spectacularly.