Twitter Was Act One | Business. One brisk December day, Dorsey, 34, is leaving Third Rail, an artisanal coffee shop he frequents in New York’s West Village. As he walks, he is unusually effusive. “I just had a meeting I’ve been wanting to have since I was 14,” he says gleefully, “with the taxi-and-limousine commissioner.” Their topic: “Technology in cabs. Making transactions faster and easier and more informational. I said, ‘Anything you guys need. This was my first passion. His interest in New York City government goes surprisingly deep. By the time Dorsey was in high school he was writing rudimentary software programs that could be used to dispatch taxis, ambulances, or delivery couriers.
Jim McKelvey, who owned the company (which archived documents onto CD-ROMs) and who today is Dorsey’s partner in Square, recalls that first meeting in 1992. McKelvey took Dorsey on as an intern and learned that this awkward teenager could swiftly master most computing tasks. Dorsey kept improving as a programmer. How Great Entrepreneurs Think. What distinguishes great entrepreneurs? Discussions of entrepreneurial psychology typically focus on creativity, tolerance for risk, and the desire for achievement—enviable traits that, unfortunately, are not very teachable. So Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, set out to determine how expert entrepreneurs think, with the goal of transferring that knowledge to aspiring founders.
While still a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, Sarasvathy—with the guidance of her thesis supervisor, the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon—embarked on an audacious project: to eavesdrop on the thinking of the country's most successful entrepreneurs as they grappled with business problems. She required that her subjects have at least 15 years of entrepreneurial experience, have started multiple companies—both successes and failures—and have taken at least one company public.
Do the doable, then push it Here's another: Woo partners first Sweat competitors later. Top 5 Things Not to Do on Facebook. Chicago Startup Weekend. Entrepreneurship Corner: Stanford University's free podcasts and video clips of entrepreneurial thought leaders and innovators from Silicon Valley.