On the day Sarah Oh got laid off from Twitter last November, her friend Gabor Cselle called with his condolences. Then he made her an offer: Would she help him build a better Twitter?
Cselle wasn’t trying to reinvent the social media wheel. He just wanted to return to a simpler time on the platform—before 4,000-character tweets or the bloodbath of blue check marks. Before Donald Trump or Alex Jones or Ye could spread vitriol like a virus. Before Elon Musk or even Jack Dorsey ran the company. (Cselle blames Dorsey, not Musk, for greenlighting “one crappy growth hack after another” in pursuit of more monthly active users.)