Visiting Twitter HQ

While I was in San Fran last week for F8, I (and Josh and Andrew) had the opportunity to meet with a friend of a friend (thanks to @delross for the intro) that now works at Twitter.  At Twitter headquarters.  Which, for all of us geeks, is a frickin’ pretty cool thing.

I was struck by a few things which I think speak to the success of Twitter so far.

Ev doesn’t have an office.  In fact, we walked right by his cube.  He wasn’t sitting at it, but was instead in a nearby conference room on his cell phone.  Perhaps he was finalizing plans for THIS, which sucks that we were a day early for that.  Though perhaps we’ll run into Conan at the Turner HQ in Atlanta soon.

Ev not having an office is important to me.  It means he’s connected with the business.  I’m working on a longer post right now about how I was lost in an office for years until I broke out about six months ago and am now sitting in a cube with my team.

— I’ll never have an office again, you can bet on that.

They have a very open environment.  No one has else has an office, which you probably guessed, but their cubes are also low-cut so you can see everyone.  They have many breakout areas where people can jump into conversations, and white boards of course everywhere.  You get the sense that everyone is involved in this thing being successful.

They have “chat with the execs” sessions every Friday afternoon.  Talk to whoever you want about whatever you want in whatever group you want.  That makes everyone feel connected and able to be heard.  That is SO important.

They are super nice and down to earth, at least the dozen or so people I met.  You can tell they love to work there and they have fun doing it.  And why not, with free drinks everywhere, catered breakfast and lunches and a DJ booth right in the middle of their main room.  But having people that WANT to come to work everyday, that’s the way to do it.

They all have Macs.  Just sayin’ (I’m looking at you IT group ;)

So long and short, I have a new found respect for Twitter and what they’re doing.

PS – I didn’t take any pics of the office.  I was tempted but I didn’t want to be that guy.  But others were that guy and here’s what they saw.