Nobody Cared About Podcasting
Dorsey: I found this company called Odeo — a podcasting company. I could care less about podcasting. I didn't really know what it was. But I really liked the people running the company.
As soon as I had my first interview, I learned that no one else in the company really cared about podcasting either. That was one of Odeo's biggest failures — we were not building tools for us. We were building tools for other people. We didn't even use the tools. We liked consuming podcasts, but we didn't like making them.
No one in the company cared about podcasting. We were building tools for other people, not for us.
Something We Wanted to Use
Dorsey: What was cool about the company is there were all these great people who I loved working with. That created an environment where any idea could thrive. One of those ideas became Twitter.
It was a very simple idea. Why did we build it? We weren't solving any problem. Twitter solves no one's problem at all. It was something we wanted to use. Something we wanted to see in the world. Something we wanted to use on a daily basis. That's all that drove us. That's what got us up every single morning. That's what made it meaningful. And it resonated with other people.
Twitter solves no one's problem at all. It was something we wanted to use. That's what got us up every morning.
Entrepreneurship Is Not Starting a Company
Dorsey: One of the biggest lessons I learned — Twitter did not start as a company. Twitter started as a product within another company that was failing.
This really emphasized the fact that entrepreneurship is not necessarily starting something new, starting a new company. It's actually just taking significant risk in order to build what you want to see in the world.
Entrepreneurship is not starting a new company. It's taking significant risk to build what you want to see in the world.