you know when we were building Twitter
we were not by any means planning for
success it’s hard to describe but we
were a few people in a room having fun
working on a product that we enjoyed
working on I realized that if you don’t
have an emotional investment in other
words if you’re not having fun at work
it’s really hard to stick with it
especially when everyone’s telling you
how stupid it is somebody told us early
on Twitter is the Seinfeld of the
Internet it’s a website about nothing
and I thought oh I love Seinfeld that’s
a great compliment I put it on the front
page as a testimonial and the guy was
like I’m trying to insult you the big
moment for me that changed my perception
of our work on Twitter in Austin Texas
there was a technology conference we
could see Twitter out in the wild for
the first time this guy he was at a pub
and it was too loud he wanted to talk to
some other tech colleagues about his
newest project he sent out a tweet
suggesting why don’t we go over to this
other pub that’s quieter and he had sent
out the tweet to his followers they said
good idea sent it out to theirs in a
very short amount of time it created
this sort of flock of humans the visual
that came to mind was that of a flock of
birds in flight something that looks
incredibly choreographed incredibly
difficult when in fact the mechanics of
flocking are very simple it’s just one
bird looking at the shoulder of the
other bird and following suit such that
the whole becomes greater than the sum
of its parts and for a few seconds the
individuals become almost like one
organism and then and then back to being
individuals and it’s a beautiful thing
to witness and I realized that there was
no technology that allowed humans to do
this something that’s very common in
nature but now humans were flocking as
one organism and that’s when I realized
well we built something new
that enables humanity to do something
that couldn’t do before all these things
just flooded into my head like but what
if it had been something important what
if it had been a disaster or something
else what if we get to a certain scale
what if these things could happen on a
global level we went back two days later
and we created Twitter incorporated up
into that point it was just a project we
went back we formed a company I said now
we’re working on something important
we were not by any means planning for
success it’s hard to describe but we
were a few people in a room having fun
working on a product that we enjoyed
working on I realized that if you don’t
have an emotional investment in other
words if you’re not having fun at work
it’s really hard to stick with it
especially when everyone’s telling you
how stupid it is somebody told us early
on Twitter is the Seinfeld of the
Internet it’s a website about nothing
and I thought oh I love Seinfeld that’s
a great compliment I put it on the front
page as a testimonial and the guy was
like I’m trying to insult you the big
moment for me that changed my perception
of our work on Twitter in Austin Texas
there was a technology conference we
could see Twitter out in the wild for
the first time this guy he was at a pub
and it was too loud he wanted to talk to
some other tech colleagues about his
newest project he sent out a tweet
suggesting why don’t we go over to this
other pub that’s quieter and he had sent
out the tweet to his followers they said
good idea sent it out to theirs in a
very short amount of time it created
this sort of flock of humans the visual
that came to mind was that of a flock of
birds in flight something that looks
incredibly choreographed incredibly
difficult when in fact the mechanics of
flocking are very simple it’s just one
bird looking at the shoulder of the
other bird and following suit such that
the whole becomes greater than the sum
of its parts and for a few seconds the
individuals become almost like one
organism and then and then back to being
individuals and it’s a beautiful thing
to witness and I realized that there was
no technology that allowed humans to do
this something that’s very common in
nature but now humans were flocking as
one organism and that’s when I realized
well we built something new
that enables humanity to do something
that couldn’t do before all these things
just flooded into my head like but what
if it had been something important what
if it had been a disaster or something
else what if we get to a certain scale
what if these things could happen on a
global level we went back two days later
and we created Twitter incorporated up
into that point it was just a project we
went back we formed a company I said now
we’re working on something important
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