Accepting Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award tonight.
On serving as founder of Twitter and Square simultaneously:
“It helps that they are across the street. I am at both companies every day. To balance time between the two takes strong practice, a focus on the ‘how’ of my time. So my days are themed:
Monday is management
Tuesday is for product
Wednesday is for communications, marketing and growth
Thursday is for partnerships
Friday is for company culture
Saturday is off time and hiking
Sunday is for recruiting and strategy (preparing for the week ahead) and feedback.
So when I get interruptions, I can say ‘It’s Tuesday; I have to focus on product.”
Why 140 characters?
“Constraints inspire creativity. The scale of the canvas is really important. 140 makes us more expressive than composed. Beauty is a constraint of the tool. But there was also a practical reason. We had to work with all cell phones and in the early days of SMS, messages were limited to 160 characters, and we used 20 for the user name. We did not want to split messages up.”
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