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

I found this company called Odeo, which was a podcasting company, and I could care less about podcasting. I didn't really know what it was, but I really liked the people running the company. And I decided to send my resume. And then I quickly learned as soon as I had my first interview that no one else in the company really cared about podcasting either. And that was one of Odeo's biggest failures, is we actually were not building tools for us. We were building tools for other people, and we didn't even use the tools all that often. We didn't like making podcasts. We liked consuming a lot of them, but we didn't like making them. It was a little bit of a depressing time. But what was really cool about the company is there are all these great people who I loved working with, and that created this environment where any idea could thrive. And one of those ideas became Twitter. It was a very simple idea. And why did we build it? We weren't solving any problem. Twitter solves no. No one's problem at all. It was something we wanted to use. It was something that we wanted to see in the world. It was something that 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, and it resonated with other people. And that, I think, is one of the biggest lessons I learned, is 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 something new, starting a new company. It's actually just taking significant risk in order to build what you want to see in the world.