I could never narrow it down to one of them. I had a simple theory: in the beginning, Startup L. Jackson's Twitter followers had a higher probability of following the real author's account, and they would have probably followed the author before Startup L. Jackson.
All I had to do was get the list of people following SLJ (which Twitter provides in reverse chronological order), then find who those people followed before SLJ. The people above were followed by at least six of SLJ's first 500 followers, making them prime contenders, but as I said, I never found a smoking gun for any of them.
This was one of the weaknesses that was fixed. You might have noticed that at the time of my post, if you had pulled this list again, @pt ceased following @StartupLJackson.
That shouldn't have mattered much - I assumed the author's real account wouldn't follow their parody to avoid giving clues.
What I expected to find was that, if I looked at who SLJ's first 100 followers followed, I'd find some accounts they disproportionately followed prior to following SLJ. And I did find that - the people followed by the first 100 (prior to SLJ) pointed to a Pivotal connection. Because many of them were following @pt, it wouldn't have made much difference if @pt didn't follow SLJ.
Ah, I misread what you were saying. You're right, that really makes it hard to narrow down. You should have tried cold emailing them all at the same time to see if anyone replied positively!
@davemcclure - Dave McClure
@pt - Parker Thompson
@tylerschultz - Tyler Schultz
@supernate - Nate Clark
@dsboulder
I could never narrow it down to one of them. I had a simple theory: in the beginning, Startup L. Jackson's Twitter followers had a higher probability of following the real author's account, and they would have probably followed the author before Startup L. Jackson.
All I had to do was get the list of people following SLJ (which Twitter provides in reverse chronological order), then find who those people followed before SLJ. The people above were followed by at least six of SLJ's first 500 followers, making them prime contenders, but as I said, I never found a smoking gun for any of them.