Why this guy claimed that he started Twitter? The story of betrayal friend or how Twitter started?

The story of the forgotten co-founder of twitter who got betrayed by his own best friend Jack Dorsey. A true story of Money, Power, Friendship & Betrayal. Not only that, the company investor Edam William may have cheated investor out of hundreds of millions by bluffing.

Noah glass, the forgotten cofounder of twitter who come up with the company's name. According to Nick Bilton's new book :

Most people think that the story of Twitter starts with Jack Dorsey or Evan Williams. But it actually begins with Odeo.

Early days at Odeo

Noah glass had his startup called Odeo. At early days, Noah glass created a product where user would dial a number and the service would turn your voice message into an mp3 message which would be hosted on the internet. Lated this voice mail idea turned into the called Odeo which was going to be a podcasting platform. One of the early investors in Odeo was a former Google employee, Friend and also neighbour of Noah, Evan Williams. Evan recently sold his company called Blogger to Google and he had a ton of cash.

Odeo moved from Noah's apartment to Williams old apartment. Next, Odeo moved into an office and started hiring more employee - including a quiet, on-again, off-again Web designer named Jack Dorsey , the 29 year old boy was shy after battling a speech impediment as a child.

By July 2005, Odeo had a product : A platform for podcasting. By this point, Odeo had 14 people working full time - including Evan Williams.

In 2005, Apple announced that iTunes would include a podcasting platform build into every one of those tens of millions of iPods in peoples pockets.

The employees of Odeo began to realize that Apple had just crushed them without the warning.

Evan Williams who by now was the CEO of the Odio knew that Odeo's future was not in podcasting, and that year, he told the company's employees to start coming up with the ideas for the new direction Odeo could go. The company started holding official Hackathon's where employees would spend whole day working on a project. They broke off into groups.

Noah and Jack

After hard days work the office crew would often see live music shows and party late into the night usually talking about technology. Noah gravitated toward Jack Dorsey, whom glass says "one of the stars of the company" .

Jack had an idea for completely different product that revolved around "Status" . Status was the popular idea around 2000s, Facebook featured them heavily and Foursqure was based totally around that. He got the impression that he was unhappy with what he was working on.

Jack started talking about the idea of status and how he was really interested in status. Glass says " I was trying to figure out what it was he found compelling about it."

Noah goes onto describe a moment when he and jack were talking in his car after a night of drinking. It was about 2am and raining outside. Jack said that he wan to quit the tech world altogether and become a fashion designer. Noah was taken aback and he pushed jack to explain his status idea further.

He quoted :

There was a moment when I was sitting with Jack and I said, 'Oh, I do see how this could really come together to make something really compelling.' 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. It all fit together for me.

One day in February 2006, Glass, Dorsey presented Jack's idea to the rest of the company.  It was a system where you could send a text to one number and it would be broadcasted out to all of your friends: Twttr.

Noah glass says it was he who came up with the name "Twttr". "I spend a bunch of time thinking about it," he says. Eventually, the name would become Twitter.

Noah would take charge of the twitter project while Jack did the coding. The original twitter was a social network anchored around text messaging. It sounds weird today but back then that technology that was widely adopted wasn't capable enough to have instant social media with you.

After the February presentation to the company, Evan Williams was skeptical of Twitter's potential, but he put glass incharge of the project.

And it was Glass's team, by the way. Not Jack Dorsey's.

Everyone agrees that original inkling for Twitter sprang from Jack Dorsey's mind. Dorsey even has drawings of something that looks like Twitter that he made years before he joined Odeo. And Jack was obviously central to the Twitter team.

But all of the early employees and Odeo investors we talked to also agree that no one at Odeo was more passionate about Twitter in the early days than Odeo's co-founder, Noah Glass.

By March of 2006, Odeo had a working twitter prototype. In July, TechCrunch covered twitter for the first time.

That same summer, Odeo employees obsessed with Twitter were racking up monthly SMS bills totalling hundreds of dollars. The company agreed to pay those bills for the employees.

The Earthquake & The Rise of Twitter

In August, a small earthquake shook San Francisco and word quickly spread through Twitter - an early 'ah-ha!' moment for users and company-watchers alike. By that fall, Twitter had thousands of users.

Suddenly company realised the usefulness of the platform was a News. Twitter was a fresh from of instant news both on a macro and personal level. It was an information network not a social network.

Back at Odeo, the company was splitting into two, those who worked on Twitter and those who worked on legacy audio stuff.

Scandal : Cheating Investor? or kind act?

At a board meeting for Odeo that summer, Noah Glass presented Twitter to Odeo's directors. They hardly blinked at it.

Then, In September 2006, Evan Williams Odeo CEO wrote a letter to Odeo's investor. In it, William told them that the company was going nowhere, that he felt bad about that, and that he would like to buy back their shares so they wouldn't take a loss.

In his letter to Odeo's investor, William wrote this about Twitter:

By the way, Twitter (http://twitter.com), which you may have read about, is one of the pieces of value that I see in Odeo, but it's much too early to tell what's there. Almost two months after launch, Twitter has less than 5,000 registered users.

I will continue to invest in Twitter, but it's hard to say it justifies the venture investment Odeo certainly holds -- especially since that investment was for a different market altogether.

Five years later, assets of the company the original Odeo investors sold for approximately $5 million are now worth at least 1000x more: $5 billion.

Some of the investors who sold Odeo and Twitter to Evan Williams for a few million dollars wonder about his intentions at the time.

Had Evan tricked them into thinking Twitter wasn't worth much, when he already knew it would be a gold mine?

One investor asked: "Could Evan have known this would be the world's best thing ever and hid it while re-capitalising the company?"

One early Odeo employee said that "Ev decided there was something interesting enough in Twitter that he wanted to buy all the assets and buy everyone out."

The Dark Side of Evan Williams:

The two personalities of Noah Glass and Evan Williams started to clash. Noah, he had designed some of the core features of Twitter and wanted to stay at helm. Very early on, Noah wanted to split Twitter off into a separate company form Odeo and become the CEO. In-fact he had already done the paperwork because if Evan Williams wanted to take control of twitter he could do so at any time. Noah was skeptical about Evan and confessed his fears to Jack. Jack sympathised and said that the things would be okay.

Betrayal

One day Evan asked Noah to go with him for a walk and was here the Noah's worst fears were realised. Evan told Noah that he was fired. All was not as it seems though Jack Dorsey who no abundant with and thought of as a friend but he was actually the person who wanted Noah out.

Jack had recently met with Evan Williams and threatened to quit if Noah wasn't let go.

Unaware of what Jack had done behind his back. Noah and Jack would meet at a bar later that night. A defeated Noah would drink late into the night. At one point Noah told Jack that he'd been fired. Jack acted dumbfounded and blamed Evan as the night came to close. Noah hugged his friend and walked home.

Jack soon become the CEO of twitter and Evan went to the chairman position.

Shock

Noah expresses how he felt:

"I felt betrayed by my friends, by my company, by these people around me I trusted and that I had worked hard to create something with. I was a little shell-shocked. I was like, 'Wait...what's the value in building these relationships if this is the result?' So I spent a lot of time by myself. And working on things alone."

Why was this so shocking?

Probably because, from employees to the more hands-on investors, all agreed that Twitter would not have been created without Glass.

Odeo engineer Evan Henshaw-Plath describes Glass, Dorsey, and Florian Webb as Twitter's "actual founders."

"Noah got really into it," says Henshaw-Plath. "Seriously obsessive. I-don't-care-if-my-marriage-dies-I'm-focused-on-this into it."

"Noah cared a lot about Twitter," says Blaine Cook, the Odeo employee who eventually became Twitter CTO. "If you look at his profile now, it says 'I started this.' And he did."