Oddbean

Here is some of it. ___ Mike Solana: You didn't just leave Bluesky's board, you deleted your profile. That feels pretty meaningful. Right off the bat, the most obvious question: why did you leave? Jack Dorsey: Well, can we back up for some context for why we started it? Yes, would love to. We were doing something similar to what we did at Square at the time, which was fund a bunch of open source developers to work on the Bitcoin protocol, because it directly benefited everything Square was doing in terms of money movement. I wanted to do something similar with Twitter, because it was the only way to get out of a lot of the issues we were seeing around the decisions we had to make on accounts, and the pressures we had as a public company based entirely on a brand advertising model. The only way to do it was to remove the protocol layer from Twitter and make it something we didn't control. So what if we created a team that was independent to us, that built a protocol that Twitter could use, and then build on top of? Then we wouldn’t have the same liabilities, because the protocol would be an open standard, like HTTP or SMTP. Twitter would become the interface, and we could build a valuable business by competing to be the best view on top of this massive corpus of conversation that's happening in real time. So it took us about two years to interview people [who would build the protocol]. We actually looked at Nostr — I think the team even talked with fiatjaf [Nostr’s creator] — early on, but for whatever reason decided to pass. I wasn't really privy to a lot of that conversation, or more likely, I wasn't paying enough attention. We eventually landed on Jay [Graber]. She seemed great, and we decided to fund her. Around that time, I was also planning my exit [from Twitter], and Parag [Agarwal] was going to take over. And when Elon made the offer to buy the company, I think she had this general fear of — what do we do? Like, is there any way that the funding could be taken back? We gave them $14 million to work on the protocol. At this point, did Twitter have a controlling share of the project? No, [Twitter] had an advisory seat. But there was no informed structure. It was, we're going to set this money aside, and whoever we hire can determine how best to build this protocol. In Square's case — Square Crypto, which became Spiral — Steve [Lee] decided he wanted to stay within the company, but he and his team would make all the decisions around what they work on. In Jay's case, she decided she wanted to set up a completely different entity, a B Corp. That accelerated even more when Elon made the acquisition offer, and it very quickly turned into more of a survival thing, where she felt she needed to build a company, and build a model around it, get VCs into it, get a board, issue stock, and all these things. That was the first time I felt like, whoa, this isn’t going in a direction I'm really happy with, or that wasn’t the intention. This was supposed to be an open source protocol that Twitter could eventually utilize. And then, as you know, Elon backed off [on the acquisition], and that disaster happened [laughs], until he finally bought it, which was the worst timeline ever. But throughout all that, it became more and more evident that Bluesky had a lot of great ideas. And they're ideas I believe in. I think the internet needs a decentralized protocol for social media. I think Elon needs it. I think X needs it. I think it removes liability for the company, to separate those layers. But what happened is, people started seeing Bluesky as something to run to, away from Twitter. It's the thing that's not Twitter, and therefore it's great. And Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd. This tool was designed such that it had, you know, it was a base level protocol. It had a reference app on top. It was designed to be controlled by the people. I think the greatest idea — which we need — is an algorithm store, where you choose how you see all the conversations. But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it. That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that's truly decentralized. It’s another app. It's another app that's just kind of following in Twitter's footsteps, but for a different part of the population. Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That's not what I wanted, that's not what I intended to help create. Around the same time, I found Nostr. We don't know who the leader is, it's like this anonymous Brazilian. It has no board, no company behind it, no funding. It's a truly open protocol. The development environment is moving fast. And I gave a bunch of money to them. Day by day, I learned that this was actually the path. It emerged from something that was not Twitter-driven, it was a reaction to Twitter's failures, and I thought that was right as well. That's what I should help, and that's what I should support. So I just decided to delete my account on Bluesky, and really focus on Nostr, and funding that to the best of my ability. I asked to get off the board as well, because I just don't think a protocol needs a board or wants a board. And if it has a board, that's not the thing that I wanted to help build or wanted to help fund. At that point, was there any resistance to you leaving, or was there just agreement you wanted different things? I think there was a general agreement that we wanted different things, and I think we had only met as a board once. It was super early on, so it wasn't a very active board. There wasn't a lot of attachment, at least from my perspective. All that said, I really respect Jay. She was under a lot of pressure to survive and do the things that she did. But directionally, I just don't align with it. And I'd love to see more effort placed on open protocols akin to Nostr, which hits every single attribute that I was searching for when we originally kicked this idea off. If you go back to my thread, and Mike Masnick’s Protocols, Not Platforms article, it hits every single one of those things, whereas Bluesky ultimately just went another direction. Yeah, once I had access, Bluesky really just confused me. It didn't present as an underlying technology people, maybe even Twitter, would be building on top of. I mean it looked, felt, and functioned like just another version of Twitter. It was the anti-Twitter. People were literally running from Twitter to Bluesky, and that is not a way to build something successful. Of course, the architecture that you believe — and I agree — is kind of naturally vulnerable to censorship is still in place at X, and while Elon does appear committed to openness and freedom of speech, the great hope of decentralized technology is we don’t have to trust anyone. So given that it hasn't changed, why are you back on Twitter? Well, I never left. I just haven't been posting as much. But you seemed to defend it, you described it as “freedom technology.” Well, I put that post on both Nostr and Twitter. And the reference of, "you're on one," it refers to different things based on where you read it. Twitter is still a corporation. X is still a corporation. It has to make a conscious choice about the rights it grants to users, based on its policies. The fortunate thing is it's no longer a public company with a profit incentive based on an advertising model that can be wildly swayed by the whims of advertisers moving their budget elsewhere if they don't like what you're doing. So Elon made a choice, and I think it's the right choice. I think he bought it at the wrong time in the market, obviously, but the choice was, I'm just going to suffer that cost to maintain these policies that I want. And that means the advertisers have left, predominantly, and the business model is going to struggle. You have to build up a lot more than advertising to make that model work. You have to build subscriptions, which Elon is doing. You have to build commerce. You have to base more of your model on these internet primitives that can monetize better than advertising if you're going to have policies like [Elon’s]. It's provable now, because you can see the decline from where the business was. Twitter was a $5 billion a year business. I don't know what it is now, but it's obviously nowhere near that, right? These are choices that can be made, but it doesn't mean that it's going to be the same level of business for quite some time, until you figure out a completely different model around it. You know, for many Americans — despite all of your work clearly to the contrary, in my opinion, despite Bluesky, despite Nostr, despite everything you’ve said publicly, and in your appearances before Congress — you're still the face of censorship, because you presided over Twitter during a truly censorious regime. Given your perspective here, how did that happen? Had you lost power at the company? Was it something with your board, or was it just the advertisers? Was there just no way to do anything else at Twitter at that time? I think the core, critical sin was choosing the advertising model to begin with. Brand advertising is not like direct advertisement, which is more programmatic. It requires something like a Disney to essentially give you a favor, because the only players that matter to them are Google and Facebook. Snapchat, Twitter, everything else did not matter. And these are ads that are essentially throwaway for them. But we made that choice in order to go public. We needed a model. Facebook's model was really good. So we came up with an ad program and ran with it. And I came back to the company a year after IPO, and we were seeing a decline in growth, and that manifested in a decline in ad revenue. So our first focus was to rework the product so we were growing again, and then second was to get off this dependency on advertisement. And when you're entirely dependent on that, if a brand like P&G or Unilever doesn't like what's happening on the platform, and they threaten to pull the budget, which accounts for like 20% of your revenue? You have no choice, and... you have no choice. If you take a stance, and they pull the budget, and the stock market sees that, the stock price goes from like 70 bucks to 30. Then you have employees leave because they can get greater value elsewhere, and that's the whole conundrum that you're stuck in. And you're at risk of a hostile takeover, right? Yeah, and we had an activist come in, by the way. And he sat on our board for a year and a half. We didn't have dual-class voting shares, we had no defense whatsoever. So my only path out that I could see was: we have to be on a protocol that we can't remove content from. We have to move away from this dependency on brand advertisement. We were moving into commerce, direct response, and payments. You can see all those experiments were going on before the company was sold. And we must move to a position where our policies are actually matching the fact that from a technology standpoint, we can't take the same actions that we did in the past, pure and simple. As a public company, that's very hard to do, because every move you make is scrutinized and it reflects in your stock price. So a big part of it was our model. A big part of it was the company was much bigger than it should have been. I was extremely challenged by my board. The board has always been a problem at that company, and I was happy to see it end. But there was only one way for it to end, which is going private. And I think that's the greatest act.