In Silicon Valley, every serious startup has a founders' story.
In Christmas of 2008, Jack Dorsey, the creator and chairman of Twitter, was visiting his parents in St. Louis. At the time, he was at loose ends. Twitter had five million users, but in October he had been replaced as chief executive by his better-known cofounder Evan Williams, who, rich from the sale of an earlier company to Google, had funded the original development of the communications network. Dorsey was wondering what he should do next. He felt it should be something big and complex. The economy was in a recession, but that was the best time to begin a new venture, he believed. "Everything has been cleared away and you can start fresh," he explains.
In St. Louis, Dorsey came across Jim McKelvey, a serial entrepreneur he knew. "Jim was my first technology boss," says Dorsey, who at 15 had written CD-ROM software for McKelvey. "We'd not spoken in years, and I had to tell him what Twitter was, but we immediately decided that we wanted to work together again. We didn't know what. But we spoke every week. One day in February he called me and said, 'I've just lost a $3,000 sale because I couldn't accept credit cards.'"
To read the full, original article click on this link: The New Money - Technology Review
Author: Jason Pontin
