That was the first reaction of Simon Oxley, British designer, when he saw one of his drawings on TV.
The year was 2009, and CNN was introducing an emerging startup from San Francisco: Twitter.
In Silicon Valley it’s a well known story; the original Twitter bird, cute and white with a tree on a blue background, was purchased for less than $15 on a stock photo website.
However, they rarely reveal that the author is a graduate from The Bournemouth and Poole College of Art & Design, England.
What is the American dream?
That’s the very nature of Silicon Valley, every success story focuses on (i) Americans, (ii) foreigners moving to America, (iii) American companies moving abroad.
And that’s also one of the less obvious lessons of our story, for any city aiming to be the next Silicon Valley.
London, Manchester, Berlin, Paris, you don’t become a startup hub just because you have many startups, or a few good exits.
You need to grow your own version of the American dream. In fact, you need to become a great story teller. Even this article is a small fragment of that set of stories.
I had a chance to contact Simon a few days ago. Usually I don’t write about design, but I was extremely curious about his reaction.
It doesn’t happen every day that one of your clients debuts to the stock market like Twitter for $1 billion (£624 million).
To the majority, it doesn’t happen in a lifetime. And although Simon’s bird left the scene a while ago, Twitter still uses his robot image for the error screen.
Building contacts
Net of commission, the revenue from his drawing was less than $10, but Simon doesn’t look mad at all.
Twitter was only one his many clients (another one, by coincidence, was me and that’s somewhat thrilling).
In the words of Wired, licensing his graphic “for the price of a sandwich” has connected his story to another famous artist, Carolyn Davidson, paid $35 for designing the Nike swoosh.
It has guaranteed interviews in prestigious magazine, including Wired, the Washington Post, Pando Daily and – today – Tech City News.
Exposing his artwork on the home page of Twitter to millions potential customers has provided “proper jobs” through more traditional agencies.
Simon admits that in recent years iStockphoto has too many contributors and competitions to guarantee a passive income for him and his family, a Japanese wife and two kids living in Oxford.
Revenge is success
In the meantime, his reputation has growth and the major source of income is now his personal website Idokungfoo.com (I Do Kung Foo), an idea born when he was living in Japan.
The GitHub octocat and the fish of Bit.ly, both logos are designed by Simon.
But guess what?
He was appointed to restyle the logo of iStockphoto, the very same company that many years before licensed his bird to Twitter for a few dollars without attribution.
There is a famous quote in Silicon Valley “the best revenge is success”. I agree, and I like to think that Simon avenged himself many times.