I try to spend a lot of time with people outside my direct reports. The view from the top is totally distorted. If you only spend time with your directs, you have no perspective on what's really going on.
You can choose to listen to one end of the spectrum or the other on Twitter, just like you can on television. But hopefully what we've done is given a voice to that broad middle ground.
We've recognized that Twitter is the second screen for TV, and TV is more fun with Twitter. There are a bunch of ways that we can be complementary to broadcasters.
I think if you look down the road for Twitter, we would like to be a company - a service - that is used by billions of people around the world in every country in the world because we feel that the power of Twitter is that it brings people closer to each other, to their governments, to their heroes, etc.
For many people, when they come to Twitter, the language is opaque. We need to push the scaffolding to the background and bring the content forward. The media, the photos, the videos.
When we think about the characteristics of Twitter that make it unique, it is all of public, real-time, conversational, and distributed. We are the only platform that is all of those at scale.
What launched me toward Feedburner? Well, the Internet happened. When I saw Mosaic, I thought, 'I gotta do this.' I founded and sold a few companies. Feedburner was my fourth.
We have a core value here at Twitter that says we want to defend and respect the user's voice. And that's important to us on a global basis. Someone doesn't sign up for a service expecting that their sign up information is going to be handed over without them being asked... We're going to defend our users' rights.
Twitter needs to continue being a good listener and recognize that the service has been redefined by lots of people, tweet by tweet, but also come up with its own priorities.
Twitter is the perfect complement to television. TV has always been social. You talk to the person you're sitting next to on the couch. You talk to the people you're - you know, at work with the next day around the proverbial water cooler.
Twitter brings you closer. I mean, we see this over and over again from our users. It brings them closer to the action. It brings them closer to their heroes.
The way you build trust with your team is around super-clear communication in that instant when they say, 'I will be sad if you don't do X.' You have to say, 'We're not going to do X, and here's why, and believe me, you'll be much sadder later if I let you go do it and you spend a bunch of time on it and nothing ever happens.'
People have Plato's form in their mind of what a leader is, or what a C.E.O. is, and it is a bunch of elements that I really don't conform to at all. I've given this a lot of thought, and I came to the conclusion that I don't care.
I think that content posted to Twitter is distributed to more platforms, services, sites, online and offline than any other services out there. Would love to see if someone can prove to me otherwise.
As a leader, you need to care deeply, deeply about your people while not worrying or really even caring about what they think about you. Managing by trying to be liked is the path to ruin.
