About this episode
A week before the 2020 US Presidential election, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo joins us to tell the story of a company that has impacted all of our lives (political and otherwise) like none other. While it's easy to forget now, a very viable alternate history exists where it's Twitter, not Facebook, who owns Instagram, and Vine, not TikTok, that's the global platform for mobile video. We dive into it all on this episode — and of course while we had Dick, we also had to discuss his controversial recent deleted tweet. Sponsors: Rippling: https://bit.ly/acquiredrippling Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig25 Odd Lots: https://bit.ly/acquiredoddlots ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredsn More Acquired! Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodes Join the Slack Subscribe to ACQ2 Merch Store ! © Copyright 2015-2025 ACQ, LLC New! We're codifying our own Playbook notes and takeaways from each episode, and posting them on our website. You can read them at: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/twitter-with-dick-costolo Links: Ashish Goel at Stanford: https://web.stanford.edu/~ashishg/twitter.html Dick and Adam's new firm, 01 Advisors: https://01a.com/ Carve Outs: Vote! https://www.vote.org