An Open Letter to Washington
We’ve all had the good fortune to found Internet companies and nonprofits in a regulatory climate that promotes entrepreneurship, innovation, the creation of content and free expression online.
However we’re worried that the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act–which started out as well-meaning efforts to control piracy online–will undermine that framework.
These two pieces of legislation threaten to:
* Require web services, like the ones we helped found, to monitor what users link to, or upload. This would have a chilling effect on innovation;
* Deny website owners the right to due process of law;
* Give the U.S. Government the power to censor the web using techniques similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran; and
* Undermine security online by changing the basic structure of the Internet.
We urge Congress to think hard before changing the regulation that underpins the Internet. Let’s not deny the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders the same opportunities that we all had.
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square
Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch
David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo!
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post
Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and co-founder of Alexa Internet
Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal
Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist
Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay
Biz Stone, co-founder of Obvious and Twitter
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation
Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter
Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!

Stone wrote that Lift has partnered with Tony Stubblebine and Jon Crosby. Stubblebine and Crosby will be driving the project while Obvious will provide resources to get it off the ground and running. The product is still in private alpha mode.

Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter who recently stepped away from the company to relaunch Obvious, has taken a role as strategic advisor at Spark Capital. According to Mashable, startups Spark Capital has invested in include Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Boxee, Kik and Stack Exchange. Stone also runs the Biz & Livia Stone Foundation and is a strategic advisor at AOL.

Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jason Goldman, men responsible for Twitter, plan to re-start their former company The Obvious Corporation. Obvious was a company they formed prior to Twitter’s fame, and abandoned in favor of focusing on Twitter. The reborn Obvious will, in Stone’s words, “help people work together to improve the world.” What that means, exactly, is unclear, but it sounds like it will be a source of innovative products. All three have stepped back or resigned from Twitter to return focus to The Obvious Corporation. [TechCrunch]

Glass strongly believes that he should be considered a co-founder in Twitter, but he is never acknowledged in the origin. When working at Odeo, Glass found out that Dorsey was not interested in the project he was working on either. Both became obsessed with Twitter after they came up with the idea.

“We were sitting on Mission St. in the car in the rain. We were going out and I was dropping him off and having this conversation. There was a moment where it all fit together for me,” stated Glass in the interview. “We went back to Odeo and put together a team. A very separate working team, mostly it was myself, Jack, and Florian [Webber], a contractor. [Florian] was working from Germany at the time.”

When asked about whether he has equity in Obvious, Glass said that he didn’t walk away with anything initially. At a later time, he received a certain amount of equity in Twitter. And he received a small amount of cash during the buyback.

After Stone got into the car, he did not know that the Dorsey and Williams had a meeting scheduled with Zuckerberg to talk about the acquisition. After casually talking about a price, Stone thought of $500 million.

After entering a meeting room, Mark Zuckerberg took the only single chair in the room. Biz Stone and Evan Williams had to share a small love seat to discuss the price with Zuckerberg. Biz attempted to tell a few jokes, but they did not really work. “It seemed like he had twelve people in his head,” said Biz in the interview, “He was prepared for every scenario.”

Zuckerberg said that he did not like to talk numbers but said he would say “yes” or “no” to a specific number that they asked for. After they said $500 million, Zuckerberg said “that’s a big number.” There eventually was an offer in cash and stock, but Williams decided to tell him no thanks.

You can hear the whole interview here: http://matthewkeys.net/sterntwitter.mp3

[TechCrunch]

Earlier this week, Stephen Colbert won the first ever “Golden Tweet.” To hand out the award, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone made a guest appearance on the show. Check out the video above.

[TechCrunch]