EXCLUSIVE: An Interview With Twitter's Forgotten Founder, Noah Glass
Noah Glass is the Twitter cofounder you've never heard of. — He was pushed out of the company way back in 2006. — Before that he was the cofounder of a startup called Odeo. He had an investor who would become cofounder and CEO, Ev Williams.
Context & Ripple Effects
Noah Glass has been a ghost in Twitter's own origin story since 2006, when he was pushed out of the company whose name he gave it. His route there ran through Odeo, the startup he cofounded with Ev Williams — then an Odeo investor, later Twitter's cofounder and CEO. Williams has stayed publicly visible in the interim, including his December 2010 reflections on building in a web of infinite information, while Glass has given no comparable account.
That asymmetry is what makes this interview matter: the person with first-hand knowledge of Twitter's pre-founding days at Odeo is speaking on the record for the first time, against a confirmed record that has him ousted by the man who ended up running the company.
First-order effects
- Glass gets a platform to restate his role in Twitter's creation, directly contesting a founding narrative that has centered Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone since 2006.
- Twitter and its leadership face fresh press scrutiny over how the company was founded and how Glass's exit happened, at a moment when Twitter's early history is being actively retold.
Second-order effects
- Other early Twitter figures become newly valuable sources as outlets chase the full account of the Odeo-to-Twitter transition, raising the odds of competing insider versions.
- The company's control of its own story weakens: every profile of Williams or Dorsey now carries the counter-question of what happened to Glass.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, startup histories stop belonging solely to the founders who won the internal power struggles — ousted cofounders increasingly get their own retrospective record, forcing companies to manage founding myths as a long-term reputation liability.
The trend: As breakout startups mature, their erased early founders are re-entering the record through first-person interviews, forcing a rewrite of founding narratives the winning cofounders once controlled.