btrax’s CEO Brandon Hill had a chance to sit down with Biz Stone, co-Founder of Twitter
A few weeks ago my friend Tomihisa Fuon (@tomohisa), chief editor of Japanese web industry magazine Gihyo, asked me to setup a meeting with Biz.
Twitter has been the poster child for startups for more than a year – even making the front page of Time magazine. And the site now has over 7 million members and an astounding monthly growth of 1382%. So naturally Biz is a busy guy.
The three year old micro-blogging tool is especially popular in Japan – one of the company’s more substantial revenue sources. So I contacted a friend of mine who works at Digital Garage, Twitter’s partner company in Japan run by Joi Ito. And voila, a visit with Biz at Twitter’s San Francisco skunkworks.
The photo above is Tomihisa Fuon (@yukarim), Yukari Matsuzawa ( Japan country manager at Twitter) and Biz Stone at Twitter’s US office.
Although I cannot disclose everything we chatted about, Biz (@biz) was big on the idea that creativity should spring from limitations – even saying the Japanese poetry form haiku inspired Twitter’s 140 character limit.
He also has lived this firsthand – catapulting from designing everything on the site to being one of the three very public faces of Twitter. The two others are co-founder Evan Williams (@ev) and CEO Jack Dorsey (@jack).
Some other interesting tidbits:
- Just reached 50 employees
- Still built using the Ruby-on-Rails framework
- Twitter Japan is hosted independently from twitter.com
- Twitter gets their stickers printed in Japan
- Twitter staff don’t have business cards, just follow them (click the @ links throughout this article)
Brandon and the whole btrax crew is on Twitter @btraxinc. Read the full transcript (Japanese only) of Brandon and Tomihisa Fuon’s interview with Biz Stone.
Biz Stone Photo by Tim Wagner © 2009 | Group photo by Brandon Hill
btrax is a cross-cultural branding and web strategy firm with services
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