Biz Stone tells the story of how he went from reading Ev Williams blog to founding Twitter together

“I was following Evan’s blog for a long time and I basically had an intellectual crush on the guy… When Blogger got acquired by Google, I sent him a note and said, ‘I feel like I’m the missing seventh member of your team. I’ve always felt like I should have have worked for you. So if you end up hiring more people at Blogger inside Google, email me.’”

It turns out Evan had also been reading Biz’s blog and bent over backwards to convince Larry Page and Sergey Brin - the Google founders who only hired computer science majors from elite universities at the time - to hire Biz. Eventually Larry and Sergey relented, and few weeks later, Ev picked Biz up in a yellow Subaru to go work at Google - the first time they ever met.

Eventually Ev left Google to start the podcasting company Odeo, and Biz faced a choice:

“I had to decide - what did I move out here for? Did I move out here to work for Google? Or did I move out here to work with Evan Williams?”

It was a hard decision because Biz would be leaving behind millions of dollars of Google stock options:

“I had lived my whole life poor, then my whole life in debt, and now it was like, Oh my god, we could be rich. Or I could go work for Evan.”

He continues:

“I basically ended up doing what I always do, which is following people. I decided that was the right thing to do. Odeo didn’t work out, but the next thing was Twitter, and that did work out. Now I’ve developed this theory that you can’t really go wrong following people rather than institutions.”

Full video: Kevin Rose “Foundation 41 // Biz Stone“ (Oct 2014)