A few weeks ago I stumbled on Stanford eCorner, a site, put up by the University where they put up podcasts of every entrepreneur and leader who speaks to their technology ventures class. Since this discovery I have listened to talks by Mark Zuckerberg, Carly Fiorina, Reid Hoffman, and a variety of other wildly successful entrepreneurs and leaders. But my favorite so far is Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and Square.
In his speech he talked about how he originally had the idea for Twitter in 2000, and back then he built it based on text messaging (which was just starting to get big). He tested it, it worked, but nobody signed up. He really loved the idea, but wasn’t sure how to make it work – so he shelved the idea and went on to live his life.
Timing is everything. He had the idea in 2000. Think about what kind of cellphone you had in 2000! Did you even have a cellphone? Could you access your e-mail or the internet? Could you play a game besides snake? If you had even heard of text messaging you were probably scarcely using it.
Over the next few years, everyone got blackberries and had the web at their fingertips. So in 2006, 6 years after he originally built it and tested twitter he relaunched it. Then a funny thing happened in 2007; the iPhone came out and further revolutionized everything we knew about mobile communication. The growth of the iPhone and the social revolution of Facebook went on to fan the small flames that were Twitter and it exploded with growth.
Jack never gave up on his idea, and I think this is an inspiration. While I’ve admitted failure in the area of the Young and Frugal Challenge, I really don’t think it’s a failed concept. Failed implementation? Yes, and that lies on me. That is something from which I can grow and learn. Who knows, maybe in 6 years I’ll pick the challenges up off the shelf, tweak the concept, and give it another go. But for now? I think I’ll steer the site back to being a blog on business and personal finance.
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