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Jack Dorsey explains how recognizing fortunate situations led to the founding of Twitter and Square

May 09, 2024

As Jack explains, one of the strongest skills you can cultivate as an entrepreneur is the ability to recognize fortunate situations when they’re occurring.

When Jack was working at the failed podcasting startup Odeo, he could’ve kept the idea for Twitter to himself:

“I could’ve taken that idea, not told Ev [Williams], not told Biz [Stone], not told Noah [Glass] and all my other coworkers at Odeo and tried to start my own company with that idea. But the fortunate situation was that I was working with some really amazing people, and we had a great team. So of course it makes sense to start there.”

The fortunate situation that led to Square was when Jack’s old boss Jim McKelvey called Jack about a sale he lost for his glass-blowing business because he couldn’t accept credit cards:

“Here he was talking on his iPhone—this general purpose computer, and he couldn’t accept $2,000 from someone who wanted to pay him. Why is that? So we decided to answer that question. We did a bunch of research, and I started writing some server code. We hired a guy to write some iPhone code, Jim built some hardware, and in a month we had a device that plugged into the audio jack of your phone that could swipe a card and take a payment… It really just comes down to recognizing that fortunate situation and recognizing the people around you that could help.”

Most people have a hard time getting past the idea stage, but Jack recommends making that idea tangible as soon as you can:

“The hardest thing is to get started, and I think the most important thing that I’ve learned is that you have to get the idea out of your head as soon as you have it. Get it on paper and then take it one step further and just show someone… There’s two really good outcomes from that moment: you decide I’m either going to put more resources into this thing, or I’m going to put it on the shelf for a later day—and that’s perfectly admirable. Build a thousand things and then put them on a shelf—you’ll use them.”

For example, Jack first had the idea for Twitter in 2000, but it wasn’t until 2006 that he found himself in the fortunate situation of being part of a talented team at Odeo that could help him build it.