Quotes from Biz Stone

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.