Top 25 Biz Stone Quotes

We hired a CSR person at Twitter, years before we hired our first sales person, to make sure we had a culture and impact of doing good.

I started out as an artist, and I continue to think of myself as an artist first, and a technologist and entrepreneur after that.

My personal view about how people should use Twitter is less relevant than our goal to provide the infrastructure for a new kind of communication and then support the creativity that emerges.

You can shut down a service, and yet people will find ways to communicate.

Even though running is physically straining, it’s mentally refreshing. Especially when you feel like you’ve accomplished something.

In any leadership position, you’re always going to be disappointing somebody.

Everything I’ve done, I’ve made up. Some of that might have been right; most of it was probably wrong.

The international limit on mobile texting, or SMS, is 160 characters. We wanted Twitter to be entirely readable and writable on every single one of the over five billion mobile phones on this planet, because they all have SMS built in. So we said it has to be within 160 characters, all the tweets.

A feeling I got from working at Google was that technology could solve any problem. Yes, it’s fantastic, but what I realized later was there’s technology, and there’s people. Google had its list ordered: Technology. People. And I think the right order is: People. Technology.

For me, I’ve learned about what it means to focus on a culture, to build social responsibility, and the idea of a company as a super-organism.

I haven’t been paying attention to politics long enough to have really smart opinions.

With Twitter, it’s as easy to unfollow as it is to follow.

I’m still kinda old-school. We’re twittering, and we’re all twitterers. And we write tweets. The only thing I don’t love is twits.

I love Sherlock Holmes, but I love any of these old stories where the writer was paid by the word, so the adventures just continue forever. They are almost like they were meant to be read out loud.

You can provide a short-format content, and it can grow, and it can spread virally across the entire Twitter system, and it can contain within it a link to something that’s much longer, that’s a long essay or that’s a video.

Both my wife and I have a lot of compassion for animals in general.

I thought about tennis. But the more I thought about the whole thing – lessons, equipment, going to the courts – I said screw it, I’m just going to go buy a pair of sneakers and go running.

Doing startups is all about making mistakes.

The most rewarding thing for me has been this affirmation for me that people are basically good and smart, and if you give them a simple tool that allows them to exhibit that behavior, they’ll prove it to you every single day.

Obviously, working at Google wasn’t a mistake. I used to just walk around. I don’t know if I was supposed to, but I’d just open doors and see what people were doing.

If people are passionate about your product, whether it’s because they’re hating or loving it, those are both good scenarios.

Balancing family and work is a top priority for me, and I treat it as such. Meaning, I actually put specific family time and events in my calendar so that precious time is dedicated and properly blocked off from any work that may try to sneak its way into my schedule.

If I had one piece of advice to tell an entrepreneur, I always say, ‘You have to have emotional investment in what you’re working on.’ That’s what we lacked at Odeo.

I’m convinced that there’s a new way to define capitalism, and that the definition should include three ingredients – that we love our work, that we are building a traditionally successful business, and that we are having some positive impact in the world, whether it’s local or global.

The thing that excites me, and the thing that excited me about Twitter, is the idea of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight.