It's So Obvious
My career in developing large scale systems that allow people to express themselves and communicate started in 1999 with Xanga. I left after a couple years and got more academic about the democratization of information on the web. Ironically, I wrote two books about blogging.
Context & Ripple Effects
Biz Stone's post reads as a personal origin story that doubles as an announcement: the man who started building large-scale self-expression systems at Xanga in 1999, and wrote two books on blogging along the way, is stepping back from his day-to-day role at Twitter. TechCrunch's same-day pickup fills in the names — Stone is relaunching The Obvious Corporation with fellow co-founder Ev Williams and former Twitter product chief Jason Goldman.
The move completes a rotation that began when Williams himself handed off the CEO job, a step-back our earlier Let's Take This Offline story covered, and continued with Williams arguing in December 2010 that the web's real problem was filtering a web of infinite information. With both founders now out of operations, Obvious becomes their vehicle for what comes after Twitter rather than a retirement.
First-order effects
- Stone shifts from Twitter operator to advisor-adjacent founder, while Obvious — the shell that originally spawned Twitter — reactivates as an incubator staffed by Williams, Goldman, and Stone.
- Twitter loses a second high-profile co-founder voice just as the company is scaling under professional management, concentrating operational authority further in the executive team.
Second-order effects
- Twitter's identity story now rests entirely on its current leadership rather than its founding trio, raising the stakes for whoever fronts the company publicly.
- Obvious's revival gives the founders a structure to seed multiple small projects instead of betting on one successor company, pulling talent and attention toward whatever they announce next.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the defining consumer-web companies of this cycle will increasingly be followed by founder-run studios that recycle teams, capital, and credibility into successive ventures — a structural alternative to the one-startup-per-founder norm.
The trend: Social media's founding generation is rotating out of operating roles into repeat-incubation vehicles, with Obvious's relaunch as the template case.