Twitter CEO and former improv comedian Dick Costolo gave an almost hour long talk at the opening dinner of Web 2.0 Summit this week, peppered with his own unique brand of humor and insight.
When moderator John Battelle began the talk referencing a quote from a recent Chicago Tribune article, “Costolo’s job is to turn 140 characters emanating from the fingertips of Snooki, Anthony Weiner and Kim Kardashian into a money-making machine strong enough to withstand a bubble bursting,” Costolo himself chimed in with, “… This task seemingly insurmountable for a man of such limited distinction.”
Highlight: Battelle’s grilling of Costolo regarding Google’s recent announcement of hashtags and realtime search on Google+; “It’s early days,” Costolo began, to which Battelle responded, “That’s such a bad answer … ‘It’s early days’… ‘It’s not a zero sum game’ .. Can I answer for you?”
“A person can’t throw out a topic sentence any more,” Costolo quipped back, adding to the overall self-awareness of an already pretty self-aware interview (at some point the two throw around possible blog post headlines that could result from the interview — And Battelle mistakenly refers to me as ‘Alexis’).
It’s worth watching for at least a half hour or so in, if only to experience a prominent tech CEO with such a finely honed sense of the absurd.