Biz Stone Quotes

Embrace your constraints.

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

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

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

People first. Technology second.

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

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.

The future of marketing is philanthropy,

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Your goals should be bigger than your ego,

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

This is true emergence, the wisdom of crowds - like flocking, it represents group members making choices together. The bigger message of the nomenclature evolution was exactly what I had been telling new Twitter employees. It was our job to pay attention, to look for patterns, and to be open to the idea that we didn't have all the answers.

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?"

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

Once true passion hits you, you can recognize all the times in your life when you were chasing the wrong dream. And after you´ve experienced that sustained fulfillment , you´ll never want to settle for anything else

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.

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

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'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.

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.

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

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

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.

Creativity comes from constraint.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Willingness to take risks is the path to success.

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.

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

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

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.

Our promise was to deliver value before profit, ...

Think about your work situation. Do you treat your creativity like a fossil fuel - a limited resource that must be conserved - or have you harnessed the unending power of the sun? Are you in an environment where creativity thrives? Is there room for new ideas every day? Can you make room?

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Opportunity is manufactured

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.

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.

Fear in the absence of knowledge breeds irrationality.

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

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

Constraint inspires creativity

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

The ability to listen,watch and draw lessons from obvious and unlikely places breeds originality and growth

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

said, "Those are cool. I have an idea." He brought me over to his desktop to explain. Together we looked at his buddy list on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). There was a little feature called Status. It was there so you could say that you were away from your desk or out to lunch, and so on, so people would know why you weren't responding to their messages.

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.

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.

half a dozen of Jack's friends had set their status. Jack pointed out that instead of just saying "Away" or "Busy" or something like that, people were playing with the status message. One of them had changed it to "Feeling blah," and another had made it "Listening to the White Stripes." Or something like that. Jack said that he liked having a sense of how his friends were feeling or what they were up to just by glancing at these status messages. He asked me if I thought we should build something similar - a way to post a status message and a way to see your friends' status messages.

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.