Christopher Isaac "Biz" Stone[1][2] (born March 10, 1974)[3] is an American entrepreneur who is a co-founder of Twitter, among other technology companies. Stone was the creative director at Xanga from 1999 to 2001.[4] Stone co-founded Jelly, with Ben Finkel. Jelly was launched in 2014 and was a search engine driven by visual imagery and discovery. Stone was Jelly's CEO until its acquisition by Pinterest in 2017.[5]
From 2003 to 2005, Stone held a senior leadership role at Google.[8]
Stone co-founded the social network Twitter in 2006 and left the company in 2011.[9]
Stone made his directorial debut in 2012, working alongside Ron Howard and Canon USA to direct a short film, Evermore, as a part of Project Imaginat10n.[10] Stone is also an advisor to Zoic Studios, and an Executive Producer of the documentary Eating Animals along with Natalie Portman.[11]
In 2024, Stone joined the board of directors of social network Mastodon's US nonprofit entity.[12]
Aside from Twitter, Stone is an angel investor and advisor in the startup community having backed companies such as Square, Slack, Medium, Nest, Beyond Meat, Pinterest, Intercom, and Faraday. Stone is a board director at Beyond Meat, Medium, Polaroid Swing, Workpop,[13] and Jelly Industries. Stone is the Chairman of Polaroid Swing.[14]
Awards and honors
Along with Jack Dorsey, Stone holds the patent for inventing Twitter.[15]
In 2015, Stone's Twitter won an Emmy and Stone received CIPR's most prestigious accolade for leadership at the forefront of developing new forms of media.[18]
Stone has published three books, Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content (New Riders, 2002), Who Let The Blogs Out? (St Martins, 2004),[19] and Things A Little Bird Told Me (Grand Central, 2014).[23][24] In addition to his long running personal blog and Medium articles, Stone has published op-eds for The Atlantic[25] and The Times.
Stone lives in Marin County, California, with his wife Livia and his son Jacob.[30] He and his wife founded and operate the Biz and Livia Stone Foundation, which supports education and conservation in California.[31]
