He was a young tech entrepreneur, and Kanye West wanted to partner with him. What could go wrong?
When Kanye West announced he was teaming up with the co-founder of Twitter, the internet and Silicon Valley began to take notice. In March he told the New York Times Magazine “A rapper is like a kid in a candy store. But a billionaire is like having his own candy store.” That was almost three years ago.
The company has only just started to make a big splash. In February, Twitter’s stock price went public, and just a week later, the company reported a 30% increase in average ad revenue and saw its largest one-day price decline ever, a 10% decline in a single trading day. That was a sign that this young company was starting to deliver for investors who were hoping Twitter would make an impact over the long term.
The next year we’ll learn more about how Twitter’s fortunes turned around. But for now there is one thing that is clear: it is a company that is going to keep growing. For some people, it is the future. We’re going to see a lot more of this company.
How it all began
Kanye West was just a teenager when he first met the co-founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, with whom he had founded the app at 17. They connected over a shared admiration of hip-hop music and a love of technology. Williams’ father was one of the earliest adopters of email. “He was a technical guy,” West says. So Williams’ home office, complete with a ping-pong table and a computer, was as close to Silicon Valley as you could get, and the Wests had long discussions about what it would take to be successful. “He always wanted kids and kids who liked technology,” West says. “He loved us.”
As West looked into the future, he realized there was a market for something they were calling the Internet “News Feed” – a place where people could find news on the web and, eventually, share it with their followers, allowing them to easily see what people were talking about with the “trending” section at the top of their Twitter feed. But it was still a bit of a