Twitter founder Jack Dorsey: “The great companies have multiple founding moments”

We talk a lot about founders. We talk a lot about founding moments. We put so much emphasis on the founding moment of a company, the founding moment of an organization, the founding moment of an idea. And these are the rock stars in the organizations. This is what everyone wants to be. And I think that's actually not reality. The great companies don't have just one founding moment. They have multiple founding moments. And just to show an example of this, we look at the United States. This is one of my favorite paintings because it shows that these guys had a good idea, but their best idea is captured in the phrase, a more perfect union. A more perfect union. We did not get everything right today. We're not going to get everything right right now. Others will come and they will finish the painting. Others will come and actually finish the organization in a way that we just can't predict, we can't project right now. And in fact, they did. We had people like Lincoln who completely changed how everyone thought about living in a union. I would consider him a founding father of our nation, of our ideas. And that is what we always want to strive for in our companies, is that we have multiple founding moments. We don't have just one. Right. A lot of people look at Biz and Ev and myself in this green deer as the founders of Twitter and then just stop. But the thing is, Twitter has had multiple founding moments throughout its history. We had One Spark in 2006. We built and we built and built, and then we listened. We listened to the people using the service. And in fact, a lot of what you see in Twitter today, the symbol, the hashtag, the retweet, the word tweet, came from the people using the service. It was not something that was invented by the company. It was not something that was invented by any of these guys up here. We just made it easier because we were really good listeners.