Once upon a time, there was an ocean that surged with a billion and one stories. Every one was different, and they combined in unexpected ways to create new stories. Fishing one out of the torrent took patience, but could be enormously rewarding.
The ocean in question is the subject of Salman Rushdie’s 1990 fantasy novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a book unfamiliar to me until Jack Dorsey spontaneously urged me to read it as we chatted in the Aviary, a secluded spot at Twitter’s expansive San Francisco headquarters. “I think you’d really like it,” said the company’s cofounder and CEO, smiling intriguingly. “It reminds me of Twitter.”
Once you read Rushdie’s fable about “a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity,” as I rushed to do, it’s obvious why Dorsey sees parallels between it and the service he helped launch in 2006. (Told of Dorsey’s affinity for his novel, Rushdie, who tweets prolifically about everything from politics to baseball for an audience of 1.2 million followers, says he’s “tickled” and is “happy to have been 16 years ahead of the game.”) In the book, the sea of stories is being poisoned by a bad guy who prefers silence to speech, and an intrepid lad must try to restore its splendor.
Dorsey’s task? He must rekindle the promise of Twitter’s first several years, when the company aspired to be the first billion-user internet service. Dorsey was famously fired as CEO in 2008, returned as executive chairman in 2011, and succeeded Dick Costolo as CEO last year. (He also launched the financial services company Square and is still its CEO.) Now his role is widely, and uncharitably, seen as a rescue mission for an endangered institution.
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