Jack Dorsey founded Twitter and Square by recognizing fortunate situations: leaving Odeo led to Twitter, and helping a friend accept card payments on an iPhone led to Square. He stresses externalizing ideas fast, on paper or in a prototype, then deciding whether to push forward or set it aside.
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One of the strongest things you can cultivate as an entrepreneur is to not rely on luck, but cultivating an ability to recognize fortunate situations when they're occurring. Odeo was a very fortunate situation. Could have taken that idea, not told it to ev, not told it to Biz, not told it to Noah and all my other co workers at Odeo and tried to start my own company with that idea. But the fortunate situation was 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 for Square was that my co founder, Jim, contacted me. I've known him since I was 15 years old. He was my boss when I was 15 years old. And he said, I just lost a glass sale. He's an artist, he sells glass. And I lost the sale because I couldn't accept a credit, credit card. And here he was talking on his iPhone, his general purpose computer. He couldn't accept $2,000 from someone who wanted to pay him. Why is that? So we decided that we wanted to answer that question and we did a bunch of research and I started writing some server code and we hired a guy to write some iPhone code and Jim built some hardware and in a month we had a device that plugged into the audio jack of your iPhone and could swipe a card, take a payment. And I went around, I showed it to a bunch of investors and they were all amazed that it could even work. So we decided to really focus on it and make it a company. It really just comes down to recognizing that fortunate situation, recognizing the people around you that could help, and just owning it.
How do you think would be entrepreneurs get over that, Humphrey? Cause a lot of people say to me, they're like, I've got this idea and it's always on paper or in their head, but they don't want to take that jump to actually start something. How do you get over that?
I've gone down that road so many times. I mean, the hardest thing about all this is to get started. And I think the most important thing that I've learned is that you have to, as soon as you have it, get it out of your head, get it on paper. And then to take us one step further, just show someone. Just show someone what it looks like on paper, even code a little bit, and show someone the interaction. And there's two outcomes, and they're both really good outcomes. From that moment, you decide, I'm either going to dedicate some more resources to this thing or I'm going to put it on the shelf for now, for a later day, and that's perfectly admirable. Like, build us. Build a thousand things and then put them on the shelf. Like, you'll use them like that. First idea for Twitter, put it on the shelf in 2000, reused it in 2006, and now it's worked out. So I think you have to be comfortable with the fact that you're gonna have some ideas. The fortunate situation doesn't exist right now. That's okay. So clear it out of your head, move on onto the next idea. Onto the next idea. But too many people just get stuck in this concept. And when it's stuck in your head or stuck just on paper, then you're always making excuses for why it doesn't exist. Like, only I was working with Kevin Rose on this, or if only this situation happened in this macro environment, or if I was living in New York, or if I was funded by Fred Wilson, or like, whatever. You're gonna make a thousand excuses and never do anything.
