9781422270486

After Dorsey retrieved some internal email addresses from the website, he notified the company of the weakness he found. The company was so impressed with Dorsey that they hired him a week later. He was only 20 years old at the time, but he was already thinking big. In 1999, he dropped out of college with one semester left and moved to Oakland, California, where Dorsey started his own company that dispatched couriers, taxis, and emergency services using the Internet. He did not make much money, however, and left the failing company to move back to St. Louis. Dorsey began to think about how technology could be used to improve the world. He reflected on the dispatch conversations he listened to as a child and thought of ways to apply that thinking to the Internet, which was now expanding rapidly. He moved back to the Bay Area in 2005 and began working as a low-level coder for a podcasting company called Odeo, which is where his dreams began to take shape. He saw a clear connection between the Internet and the increasing use of cell phones. At the time, smartphones were uncommon and just starting to emerge. If Dorsey wanted to connect everyday people to the Internet through cell phones, he would need to do it through text messages. SELLING POINT Dorsey’s boss at Odeo was its co-founder, tech entrepreneur Evan Williams, who had already sold a previous startup to Google. A few months into his tenure, Dorsey was in a brainstorming session with Williams, who was looking for a new direction for the company after Apple had launched a product that was poised to take all of Odeo’s market share. Dorsey pitched his idea for a microblogging platform based on SMS text messaging, and Williams decided to run with it. Also

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Story of a Startup