Jack Dorsey: The Birth of Twitter
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0:03 - 0:06So, just random contract jobs until
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0:06 - 0:11I discovered this company called Odeo, which was run by Evan Williams.
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0:11 - 0:14Biz Stone was joining in a few months.
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0:14 - 0:18It was a consumer podcasting company.
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0:18 - 0:21I had never written a resume before.
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0:21 - 0:25I had no interest in podcasting whatsoever.
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0:25 - 0:29But I was a really good programmer and I wanted
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0:29 - 0:33to understand the consumer side of the Internet.
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0:33 - 0:35A lot of what I was doing was in the back end.
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0:35 - 0:40While it would touch my mom and her life,
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0:40 - 0:41it would be so in an indirect way.
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0:41 - 0:47My mom may take a taxicab in New York City and may touch my software
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0:47 - 0:49or buy a ticket to Alcatraz and may touch my software.
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0:49 - 0:51But it wasn't direct.
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0:51 - 0:55I wanted to learn about being more direct in interaction.
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0:55 - 0:57So, I went to work with Ev and Biz.
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0:57 - 1:03I quickly learned that no one else there enjoyed podcasting, either.
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1:03 - 1:07So, no one was really excited to build the product or
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1:07 - 1:10build the tool and they weren't consumers of the tool.
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1:10 - 1:12So, we weren't building something that we loved to use.
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1:13 - 1:16So, quite an interesting situation which
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1:16 - 1:19allowed for other ideas to bubble up.
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1:20 - 1:29In late 2005, early 2006, we all broke up into separate groups.
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1:29 - 1:32We were given an assignment to come up with
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1:32 - 1:34an idea of something you'd like to work on.
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1:34 - 1:40The first thing that came to my mind was this idea back in 2000.
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1:40 - 1:43But now in 2005-2006, we had the SMS.
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1:44 - 1:48I could actually send an SMS message from Cingular to Verizon.
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1:48 - 1:50That was very, very new to the United States.
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1:50 - 1:53I was in love with the technology.
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1:53 - 1:57It degrades gracefully to every single device,
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1:57 - 1:59even the cheapest devices.
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1:59 - 2:03And it has this beautiful constraint of 160 characters.
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2:03 - 2:06It doesn't really work all the time.
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2:06 - 2:08It's really rough around the edges. I love stuff like that.
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2:09 - 2:10So, I brought up this idea,
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2:10 - 2:14"What if we could just use SMS? You could send what
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2:14 - 2:17you're doing. It will go out in real time to all the
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2:17 - 2:19people who are interested in hearing it. And then,
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2:19 - 2:21it would be archived on the Web. You could also enter
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2:21 - 2:24it from the Web and it would be device-agnostic.
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2:24 - 2:27It would be a whole thing. It would be awesome."
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2:27 - 2:30My two other people in the park, we were on a playground,
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2:31 - 2:31said it was a good idea.
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2:31 - 2:35We presented it to the company. It took about a week.
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2:35 - 2:37But then, the company finally got behind it.
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2:37 - 2:40I was given two weeks and one other programmer
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2:40 - 2:45in Biz Stone to write the software. And we did it.
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2:45 - 2:49At the end of that two weeks, I wrote the first tweet,
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2:49 - 2:50which was inviting coworkers.
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2:51 - 2:54And then, all the Odeo coworkers came on; they loved it.
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2:54 - 2:55And little by little,
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2:56 - 2:59we took from that company and we bought them on the Twitter project
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2:59 - 3:03until we spun it out as a separate company and sold off Odeo.
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3:03 - 3:09So, that's how that sort of visualization and early
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3:09 - 3:12desire to see the world led into Twitter,
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3:12 - 3:15which is still a desire for me.
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3:15 - 3:18Now we have more and more people using it all over the world.
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3:18 - 3:21And it's even faster to see what's happening
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3:21 - 3:23and what's unfolding in the world.
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3:23 - 3:26But it really comes down to that curiosity about what's happening right
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3:26 - 3:32now everywhere and really being the pulse of what's happening right
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3:32 - 3:36now everywhere and being able to point to every single medium.
- Title:
- Jack Dorsey: The Birth of Twitter
- Description:
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In this clip, Square and Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey shares how Twitter came into existence, while he was working at Odeo, a consumer podcasting company. Dorsey joined Odeo to gain a greater understanding of the consumer Internet market, but eventually learned that few people at the company, including him, were interested in podcasting. Dorsey says the Twitter project began at Odeo, when at the company's urging for new ideas, he suggested the concept that would become Twitter.
View more clips and share your comments at http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2639
- Video Language:
- English
- Team:
- Stanford Entrepreneurship Corner
- Duration:
- 03:42
mtharvey edited English subtitles for Jack Dorsey: The Birth of Twitter |