Twitter's employee #1 on how the bird was broken

“I think the global town square is a terrible idea, fundamentally,”

“No-one ever sets out to make the world worse with what they’re building,” Evan "Rabble" Henshaw-Plath said at the start of our interview.

It’s a pretty innocuous statement from most in the startup space. But when you were the first employee at Twitter and the person who hired Jack Dorsey, it hits a little different.

Rabble, who features in a recent documentary ‘Breaking the Bird’ on the tumultuous history and present day of Twitter, kindly sat down with Caffeine recently to share his unique perspective on one of the most controversial and powerful social media companies on Earth.

I was lucky enough to sit down with him to hear his insights into the platform’s evolution, its unexpected consequences, and his observations on the New Zealand startup ecosystem now that he lives down under

I started by asking him to reflect on the difference between the Silicon Valley that start up founders might be imagining now, and the ecosystem as it existed back in the early oughts.

“What is really most surreal about that period like 2004 to 2008 in San Francisco is how small it was. We are not talking about a large industry. There was no abundant venture capital. There was no one moving there to do a startup. It was basically a place where the startup boom in the late 90s and early 2000s had come and gone,” Rabble explained.