四年前,我在TED上,介紹了當時工作的公司Odeo。由于那次演講,紐約時報為我們寫了一大篇文章,然后它又帶來了更多媒體的報道,吸引了更多關(guān)注。之后我決定要當這家公司的CEO——那之前我只是個顧問——并成功獲得風險投資 同時招聘更多人才。
One of the guys I hired was engineer named Jack Dorsey,and a year later,we were trying todecide which way to go with Odeo .Jack presented an idea that he had been thinking aroundwith for a number of years based around sending simple status and updates . So we kind ofput the two into together .in the eraly 2006,we launched Twitter as a side project to Odeo.
我招了一名叫Jack Dorsey的工程師,當一年后我們商量Odeo的發(fā)展方向時,Jack提出了一個他捉摸了好幾年的點子基本上就是個能向朋友們發(fā)送簡單消息的想法。Odeo當時也在探索短信服務,所以我們差不多是想將他們兩結(jié)合在一起。2006年初,作為Odeo的一個業(yè)余項目,Twitter項目開始進行。
Now,it is hard to justify doing a side project at a start up where focus is so critical .But I hadactuallly launched Blogger as a side projet to my previous company thinking that it was so littlething we do on the side .And it ended up taking over not only the company but my life for thenext five or six years .So i learned to kind of follow hunches even though you cant necessarilyjustify them or know where they are going to go .And that 's kind of what is happenking withtwitter time after time .SO for those of you unfamiliar ,Twitter is based around very simple.seemingly trivial concept:you say what you are doing in 140 characters or less .And peoplewho are interested in you get those updates .If they are really interested,they get the updatedas a text message on their cell phone .
現(xiàn)在很難說搞業(yè)余項目是不是個好主意,因為對于初創(chuàng)型企業(yè),專注是至關(guān)重要的。 但事實上,我在前一家公司推出的Blogger服務,也是一個業(yè)余項目。我當時想這只不過是個隨便搞一下的小玩意。結(jié)果它不但占據(jù)了整個公司 也占據(jù)了我之后五、六年的生活。從中我學會了跟隨直覺,盡管你不知道它是否正確,也不知道它會發(fā)展成什么樣子。 這種情況又一次發(fā)生在了Twitter身上。那么,對于那些不熟悉Twitter的人,它基于一個非常簡單,甚至微不足道的概念。你用不超過140個字說自己在做什么,對你感興趣的人就會收到這些消息。如果真的十分感興趣,他們甚至可以通過短信在手機上獲得這些信息。