Jack Dorsey on why building something for yourself can be better than trying to solve a problem

When a 29 year old Jack Dorsey joined the podcasting startup Odeo, he soon learned that no one there 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.”

As Odeo struggled, the team began to look for new ideas, and Jack presented his idea for Twitter. Somewhat counterintuitively, the product would not solve a specific problem:

“Twitter solves no one’s problem at all. It was something we wanted to use. It was something we wanted to see in the world. It was something we wanted to use on a daily basis, and that’s all that drove us. That’s what got us up every single morning, and that’s what made it meaningful.”

It turns out there were more people like Jack and the Odeo team who wanted to use it to.

“I think that is 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. And to me, this really emphasized the fact that entrepreneurship is not necessarily starting a new company. It’s actually just taking significant risk to build what you want to see in the world.”

Full video: Berkeley Engineering “View from the Top: Jack Dorsey, Square & Twitter“ (Oct 2013)