Re: Twitter wasn't founded at Cornell and Jack Dorsey didn't go here...
Aniq started this... |
Imma let you finish. |
Who are these kids at the Cornell Daily Sun that have no journalistic
integrity... creating alums from thin air...
"Former Cornell student Jack Dorsey founded Twitter soon after leaving
our beloved alma mater. Dorsey created Twitter based on the idea that
he could apply social networking principles to instant messaging. And
with this spark the micro-blogging culture was born."
( http://cornellsun.com/section/opinion/content/2009/04/07/have-you-twatted-yet )
Anyway - straight from the horse's mouth:
"To be clear: I didn't attend Cornell (and didn't invent Twitter
there)." - Jack Dorsey ( http://twitter.com/jack/status/1480648277 )
From the perspective of a proud Cornellian - this is outrageous and embarrassing, particularly because it was never corrected (or checked) by the Cornell Sun and it was a rumor that was instantiated from people at Cornell probably.
If you look at the Wikipedia changelog ( http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jack_Dorsey&dir=prev&offset=20081106075605&limit=500&action=history ) the article was changed from NYU to Cornell on
08:59, 25 March 2009 128.253.43.44 (talk) (6,146 bytes) (→Early years)
This IP address geolocates back to Ithaca, NY... more specifically - to Cornell's campus.
I think this is funny when they're supposed to be firm believers in their own platform - not saying that this isn't something that they should or shouldn't do (it probably helps them for marketing to alumni networks in a lot of ways) - but you'd think that with 500K+ users they'd be able to find a web developer...
The team we were hanging out with last week at MIT did a pretty good re-enactment of this ;).
My favorite part is at 1 minute, 10 seconds.
Just read this post by Seth Godin on Hubris vs. Humility:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/12/hubris-vs-humil.html
He makes a great (and obvious) point in who you hire and what they
bring to the table. Experienced marketing/sales/executive hires from
big names are great on paper, but the questions you should be asking
are "how will they function with a $0 budget?" and "what can they do
that nobody else can do?". I've seen more than a few internet startups
fail with former investment bankers at their helm because they thought
they knew what they were doing. By the same token, we've all seen huge
companies blow millions of dollars on marketing campaigns that left
most of the sane world underwhelmed (remember the Seinfeld/Gates
Microsoft commercials? or the Zune commercials with random alien
creatures eating each other?).
This also totally extends to coders - so many "talented engineers" end
up flopping at startups because they want their 20% time or get burned
out from wearing the hats of
developer/designer/manager/ambassador/vision.
There really should be a better way of figuring someone out besides
where they worked, where they went to school and what their GPA was...
(because realistically, how many people would be investment bankers if
they got paid $60k/yr?).
"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times,
people don't know what they want until you show it to them." - Steve
Jobs
I definitely agree with him here -- two years ago, you'd be like "oh,
it's a phone without a keyboard that plays video and has a great web
experience" or you could hand someone an iPhone watch their face.
Sometimes, those "sales" challenges emerge early on also. For example,
with my startup, we started "selling" and "pitching" to people before
we even had the product completed so that we could find out what the
market wanted and how we could make something compelling for them (and
by compelling, I mean something that they would be willing to spend
money on and would solve their problems/save their time). Even now,
it's not hard to sell the idea to people, but whether or not they buy
in to it will only come with time ;)
Co-founder at http://www.hirecube.com/ (sign up for our beta!)
Currently working on http://www.entryboard.com/
and http://www.interviewpad.com/
Also (rarely) blogging at http://www.stateofwork.com/
