Jack Dorsey: The Right Idea at the Wrong Time

And that is really where a lot of my focus has been on, is visualizing data, visualizing information, moving around in real time. And I took that concept and eventually in 2000, realized that I had this beautiful picture of the city, but it was all verticals. There were no people in it. Where are all the people in the city? And that's when I started working on a very, very simple prototype based on some inspiration from Instant messenger with the away status, and also a service called LiveJournal, which was a very simple journal blogging application that allowed you to compose a blog post and it would go to a friend's page. And I also had the first BlackBerry because I was still working in dispatch at the time. It was called the Rim 850, and it was basically just an email pager. But what it allowed is I could be anywhere in the world, anywhere in the city, and I could share what I was doing, and maybe I could also see what other people were doing. So I wrote some very simple software to receive an email from my BlackBerry and then send it out to an email list of some people. I put on that list, put some of my friends, some of my family on it, and I got that done in about a day. And then I went out to Golden Gate park and I went to the bison paddock. We do have live bison in San Francisco. If you haven't seen it, they're awesome. And I typed out an email that said, I'm at Golden Gate park watching the bison. And it went out to my service and was broadcast out to all these people. And I immediately recognized two things. First, no one cared what I was doing. And second, no one else had a BlackBerry. So I was alone in my sharing and also receiving. So I was getting no information back. So wrong time. Good idea. Put it on the shelf.