“Twitter itself was a bit of a side project. You could say it was a mistake that worked out very well for us.”

So begins Biz Stone’s master class to MBA students at the Said Business School in Oxford. It’s a dark Monday afternoon in November, and, as part of the annual Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford program, and alongside other accomplished founders such as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, mydeco’s Brent Hoberman and Plink’s Mark Cummins, the Twitter creative director is inspiring the audience by openly admitting to having failed.

“It turns out other people had been thinking of this. It’s called podcasting, but we thought we were geniuses,” Stone says in a self-mocking tone. “We worked on it for about a year but we realized something that was a bad sign. We didn’t like podcasting. We didn’t listen to podcasts and we didn’t want to make podcasts.”

Then fate, or rather Steve Jobs, dealt a blow. Apple made podcasts available directly from iTunes.

“We were like, ‘Well, that’s a good place for it. Probably a better place than some website with a pink logo.’”

Stone and co-founder Evan Williams used some Google logic: everybody take some time and develop something you want to see in the world. “I had become very close friends with one of the engineers at Odeo called Jack Dorsey,” continues Stone. “Jack had a long history in writing software for dispatch. For bicycle couriers and ambulances and these sorts of things…. And he knew that I had all these years of experience at building social networking/blogging systems that allow people to express themselves and communicate. We started talking.”

Then building. A prototype for what would become Twitter was born within two weeks. “We showed it off to the rest of our colleagues at Odeo. They weren’t that impressed. They were saying, ‘So that’s all it does? You send a message and it goes out to other people and if they want it, they can get it?’ And we were saying, ‘Yeah!’ They said, ‘Can’t you add video or something and make it more complicated?’ One person called us ‘the Seinfeld of the internet — it’s a website about nothing.’ I thought, ‘I love Seinfeld.’ We put that on our front page as a testimonial.”

Stone says he realized they were on to something while ripping up the carpeting in his new house during a heatwave.

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