Biz Stone Quotes

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

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

Your goals should be bigger than your ego,

Constraint inspires creativity

Opportunity is manufactured

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Constraint inspired creativity. Blank spaces are difficult to fill, but the smallest prompt can send us in fantastic new directions

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

Even the simplest tools can empower people to do great things

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.

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.

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

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

Trust your instincts, know what you want, and believe in your ability to achieve it. Rules and conventions are important for schools, businesses, and society in general, but you should never follow them blindly.

If we probe what’s behind our assumptions, what we find isn’t knowledge or wisdom. It’s fear. We’re afraid that other people’s ideas will make us look less than. We’re afraid that if we make a change, a product won’t come in on time.

Larry Wall, who created the programming language Perl, once said, “When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks; they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.” Hashtags, @replies, and retweets emerged in just that way.

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.

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.

Adopting a career because it’s lucrative, or because your parents want you to, or because it falls into your lap, can sometimes work out, but often, after you settle in, it starts to feel wrong. It’s like someone else punched the GPS coordinates into your phone. You’re locked onto your course, but you don’t even know where you’re going. When the route doesn’t feel right, when your autopilot is leading you astray, then you must question your destination. Hey! Who put “law degree” in my phone? Zoom out, take a high-altitude view of what’s going on in your life, and start thinking about where you really want to go. See the whole geography—the roads, the traffic, the destination. Do you like where you are? Do you like the end point? Is changing things a matter of replotting your final destination, or are you on the wrong map altogether? A GPS is an awesome tool, but if you aren’t the one inputting the data, you can’t rely on it to guide you. The world is a big place, and you can’t approach it as if it’s been preprogrammed. Give yourself the chance to change the route in search of emotional engagement.

When it came to listening to the folks who used Twitter, we put our money where our mouths were. Watching for patterns of use across the system, we built features based on those patterns. Larry Wall, who created the programming language Perl, once said, “When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks; they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.” Hashtags, @replies, and retweets emerged in just that way.

You are a biznessman and I am a biznessman,” he went on. “Realistically, there should be nothing between us to discuss but bizness. Let us leave discussions regarding the unrealistic to others. Are we agreed?” “Certainly,” said my partner. “It is rather our role to take what unrealistic factors that exist and to work them into a more sophisticated form that might be grounded in the grand scheme of reality. The doings of men run to unrealities. Why is that?” the man asked, rhetorically. He fingered the green stone ring on the middle finger of his left hand. “Because it appears simpler. Added to which, there are circumstances whereby unreality contrives to create an impression that overwhelms reality. Nevertheless, business has no place in the world of unreality. In other words,” the man said, continuing to finger his ring, “we are a breed whose very existence consists in the rechanneling of difficulties. Therefore, should anything I say from this point forward demand difficult labors or decisions of you, I ask your forbearance. Such is the nature of things.

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

Fear in the absence of knowledge breeds irrationality. We should always seek knowledge, even in the face of fear.

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 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.

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 less.

He craned his neck around so that he could look into the back at Pinky. “You done good tonight, younger. Did exactly what I told you. Ain’t no way no one’s going to be able to tie that back to us, and anyway, it’s all gonna get lost in all this nonsense.” “Yeah,” Pinky said proudly. “Thanks.” “First time you done that, right?” “Yeah.” “How was it?” “Cool,” Pinky said. “You should’ve seen his face when I pulled the gun on him.” He giggled. “Looked like he was going to shit his pants. Then”—he made the shape of a gun with his forefingers—“blam, blam, blam, blam.” Bizness looked at him. There was a smile on his face, but there was no emotion in his eyes. They were blank and empty. Boy was a stone-cold killer. It was a little unsettling. He could see he wasn’t the smartest kid, and he knew he’d end up getting merked himself eventually, but until that happened, he’d keep him close. People like him, with no empathy, they were hard to find. They were useful, too. There were plenty of people he could do with having out of the way. Wiley T, for a start. Finish the job that JaJa never even started.

Hell yeah! Twitter was proof that leaderless self-organizing systems could be true agents of change.

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?

Josh Miller, 22 years old. He is co-founder of Branch, a “platform for chatting online as if you were sitting around the table after dinner.” Miller works at Betaworks, a hybrid company encapsulating a co-working space, an incubator and a venture capital fund, headquartered on 13th Street in the heart of the Meatpacking District. This kid in T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, and a potential star of the 2.0 version of Sex and the City, is super-excited by his new life as a digital neo-entrepreneur. He dropped out of Princeton in the summer of 2011 a year before getting his degree—heresy for the almost 30,000 students who annually apply to the prestigious Ivy League school in the hope of being among the 9% of applicants accepted. What made him decide to take such a big step? An internship in the summer of 2011 at Meetup, the community site for those who organize meetings in the flesh for like-minded people. His leader, Scott Heiferman, took him to one of the monthly meetings of New York Tech Meetup and it was there that Miller saw the light. “It was the coolest thing that ever happened to me,” he remembers. “All those people with such incredible energy. It was nothing like the sheltered atmosphere of Princeton.” The next step was to take part in a seminar on startups where the idea for Branch came to him. He found two partners –students at NYU who could design a website. Heartened by having won a contest for Internet projects, Miller dropped out of Princeton. “My parents told me I was crazy but I think they understood because they had also made unconventional choices when they were kids,” says Miller. “My father, who is now a lawyer, played drums when he was at college, and he and my mother, who left home at 16, traveled around Europe for a year. I want to be a part of the new creative class that is pushing the boundaries farther. I want to contribute to making online discussion important again. Today there is nothing but the soliloquy of bloggers or rude anonymous comments.” The idea, something like a public group email exchange where one can contribute by invitation only, interested Twitter cofounder Biz Stone and other California investors who invited Miller and his team to move to San Francisco, financing them with a two million dollar investment. After only four months in California, Branch returned to New York, where it now employs a dozen or so people. “San Francisco was beautiful and I learned a lot from Biz and my other mentors, but there’s much more adrenaline here,” explains Miller, who is from California, born and raised in Santa Monica. “Life is more varied here and creating a technological startup is something new, unlike in San Francisco or Silicon Valley where everyone’s doing it: it grabs you like a drug. Besides New York is the media capital and we’re an online publishing organization so it’s only right to be here.”[52]

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.

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.

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.

If this book were limited to 140 pages, it would end here.

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.

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.

Twitter'ın Kurucusuyla Fırsat Yaratmak Üzerine By Biz Stone • hbrturkiye.com Oldukça zengin bir şehirde büyüdüm ancak annemle babam ben daha küçükken ayrılmıştı. Babamın hayatımda çok fazla bir yeri olmadı ve biz fakirdik. Tanıdığım birçok çocuk beyzbol ve futbol oynarken ben sekiz yaşımda, para kazanmak için çimleri biçmekle meşguldüm.... Fikir : Stone ve iş ortağı, başarısız giden bir podcast şirketinde çalışırken 140 karakterlik durum güncellemelerini kullanmanın bir yolunu buldu ve bu fikir onları bir sosyal medya devi haline getirdi. Oldukça zengin bir şehirde büyüdüm ancak annemle babam ben daha küçükken ayrılmıştı. Babamın hayatımda çok fazla bir yeri olmadı ve biz fakirdik. Tanıdığım birçok çocuk beyzbol ve futbol oynarken ben sekiz yaşımda, para kazanmak için çimleri biçmekle meşguldüm. Liseye başladığımda, bir spor dalıyla uğraştığınızda doğal olarak iyi bir sosyal çevreye sahip olabileceğinizin farkına varmıştım. Aslında doğal olarak atletik bir yapıya sahip olmama karşın hiçbir zaman organize sporları yapmamıştım. Basketbolu, beyzbolu, futbolu denemiştim ancak hiçbirinde iyi değildim. Okulumuzun erkek lakros takımı yoktu ve ben lakros oynayan hiç kimse olmadığından dolayı herkesin bu konuda en az benim kadar bilgisiz olacağını fark ettim. Eğer bir koç ve yeterince öğrenci bulabilirsem, lakros takımı kurulması konusunda okul yönetimini ikna etmeyi başaracaktım ve onları buldum. Sonrasında lakrosta çok iyi bir noktaya geldim ve takımın kaptanı oldum. Bu deneyimde benim için önemli bir ders vardı ve bu ders iş hayatında da geçerli. Bazı kişiler fırsatların sözlükte tanımlandığı gibi olduğunu düşünür: Bir şeyi mümkün kılan olasılıklar kümesi… Ve fırsatların doğal olarak kendilerine geleceğine inanırlar. Ya “fırsatı belirlersiniz” ya da oturup fırsatın “ayağınıza gelmesini” beklersiniz. Ben bu konuda farklı düşünüyorum. Sonuçların mimarı olmalıyız, fırsat sizin yarattığınız bir şeydir gelmesini beklediğiniz bir şey değildir. Hayatımın 40 yılına baktığımda oturup beklemek yerine fırsatları sürekli kendimin oluşturduğunu görüyorum. Bu kariyerimin ilk zamanları için de, bazı arkadaşlarımla Twitter’ı kurarken de ve son girişimlerimde de geçerli. Gerçekten de girişimcilik kendi fırsatlarınızı yaratmaktan ibarettir. Bu, start-up’lar için çok daha geçerli bir kuraldır. Kendinizi CEO olarak ilan eder ve planın içini doldurursunuz. Fırsat yaratmaya yönelik uç bir örnek, ilk tam zamanlı işimi alışımdır. University of Massachusetts Boston’da burslu okuyordum ve okulumdan memnun değildim. Little, Brown adlı bir yayıncılık şirketinde yarı zamanlı çalışıyordum ve ofisteki kolilerin düzenlenmesinden sorumluydum. Kitapların dış kaplarını tasarlayan kişilerle tanışmıştım. O dönemde tasarımcılar, X-ACTO tipi bıçaklar ve kâğıttan Mac bilgisayarlara daha yeni geçiş yapıyordu. Birlikte büyüdüğüm bir arkadaşımın Mac’i vardı ve ben Photoshop ve Quark kullanmaya alışkındım. Bir gün ofiste tek başımayken bir görev dokümanı, yani belirli bir kitap için dış kılıf tasarlama görevi buldum ve hemen hızlıca bilgisayarda bir tasarım yaptım. Tasarımımı tekliflerin arasına koydum ve kimseye söylemedim. Birkaç gün sonra art direktörümüz editörlerin ve pazarlamacıların en iyi alternatif olarak seçtiği tasarımımı kimin yaptığını bulmaya çalışıyordu. Tasarımı, kolici çocuğun yapmış olmasına şaşırmıştı. Benim tasarım yazılımlarını kullanabildiğimi öğrendiğinde bana tam zamanlı bir iş önerdi. Ben de insanlar okuldan mezun olunca zaten bu tür işlere giriyorlar diye düşündüm, okulu bıraktım ve bu işi bir staj olarak gördüm. Art direktör daha sonra benim için önemli bir mentor ve yakı

Assumptions for Twitter Employees We don’t always know what’s going to happen. There are more smart people out there than in here. We will win if we do the right thing for our users. The only deal worth doing is a win-win deal. Our coworkers are smart and they have good intentions. We can build a business, change the world, and have fun.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks; they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.” Hashtags, @replies, and retweets emerged in just that way. Shortly

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

Google didn’t get everything right, though. There was a crazy-strict rule in Product Management that you had to have a computer science degree to join the team. Many people wanted to transfer to Product because they had ideas they wanted to pursue, but they were prevented because they didn’t have the right degree. One was Biz Stone who, stymied by the rule, left Google to cofound Twitter. Another was Ben Silbermann, who, similarly blocked, left Google to found Pinterest. Kevin Systrom also left Google to cofound Instagram when he couldn’t join the PM team because of his college degree.

Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.” -- Biz Stone, Co-Founder of Twitter.

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

We all have many different options for contacting people electronically: email, text, IMs, Tweets. There is a time and a place for each. When a plane lands in the Hudson in front of you, that’s a Tweet. That’s the ultimate Tweet. You don’t email a friend that. You tweet it.