9781422270486

Monitoring what was happening around town on computer screens was fun, but Dorsey wanted to get to the heart of how vehicles moved and communicated. He used a police scanner to pick up radio signals transmitted from dispatch to emergency vehicles moving through his area of town. The way the people in the vehicles communicated with one another fascinated him. The people Dorsey listened to on the police scanner did not speak in full sentences. Instead, they used short codes to communicate what was happening. He thought this was very efficient and began thinking of ways these short bursts of communication could be used in other areas of life. The signals he listened to through his police scanner later became his first inspiration for the creation of Twitter. COLLEGE AND BEYOND After graduating from high school in St. Louis, Dorsey enrolled at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in 1995, but he did not stay there long. Even when he was still in college, he was already looking at future job prospects. In 1997, he transferred to New York University and moved to New York City. While there, Dorsey found the website of a dispatch company in New York City and thought about applying. Unfortunately, there was just one problem: the public website did not include a way to contact the company. Rather than giving up, he used his skills to get the contact information he couldn’t find on the public webpage. Using a flaw he found in the website’s programming, he entered the website through a backdoor and grabbed the information he needed.

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Story of a Startup