SUCCESS TO SIGNIFICANCE SPEAKERS SERIES
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FACULTY
In 2006 Jack Dorsey invented Twitter. The 33-year old entrepreneur now serves as CEO for the social media phenomenon that insiders project will have more than 26 million users by the end of 2010. Dorsey recently unveiled his latest creation, Square: a mobile device that allows credit card payments by cell phone. In 2008 Bart DecremGLOBAL founded SBT ALUMNI BOOK REVIEWS MBA the American software and video game developer Tapulous. Within a year, the PROGRAM entrepreneur watched as his company rocketed to the top of its industry with the most popular download for the iPhone, Tap Tap Revenge. Crowned as one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business, Decrem’s mark on the industry can be found at the fingertips of millions of consumers around the world. MISSION
WEBSTER SBT BY THE NUMBERS
STUDENTS
Making the World Immediate
Dean Benjamin Akande presents @Jack with personalized baseball bat and glove
@Jack receives the Key to St. Louis City from Mayor Francis Slay
Twitter's @Jack meets Webster University president Dr. Beth Stroble, @Websterpres
by Jack Dorsey @WebsterU September 18, 2009 I am absolutely honored to be with you today, this morning. This is a fantastic program, and a fantastic university. You have an amazing staff and you have an amazing student body. I’m humbled to be here. Thank you very much. So what I really liked about this meeting was it was framed as a Tweet Up. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, this is something that came from our user base. A TweetUp is a meet Twitter creator and co-founder Jack Dorsey up of Twitter users. They spend about 5 minutes speaks at Webster University talking about Twitter, then get into beer, cocktails, whatnot. Then a conversation divulges. The point is to bring people together and to share what is going on with the technology and more importantly to share what is going on in the world around them. And that was the big inspiration and the big philosophy behind the technology itself. At Twitter, we had a lot of ideas on where the technology was going. When the company started we thought is was going to be the best thing ever for junior high and high school students. It turned out it was the best thing ever for old UNIX hackers with beards. That was surprising. It was a very long road to get where we are today in terms to user base. We learned along the way was that we were very bad initially at communicating to the public about what we were doing. We had some very public and infamous failures and down time. We weren’t telling anyone why it was happening or what was going on. Here we were building a communications technology that’s focused on transparency and we were being closed off. Not only did that realization help our approach to the company, it helped our approach internally as well. One of the biggest problems with any start up or any company in general is internal communication and working together. What kept me up at night was not that the servers were going down. It was that this programmer was not agreeing with this programmer. They were at a stalemate and we could not step together as a cohesive unit. That kills us and that was our greatest competition and still is to this day. We also learned from Twitter that we can learn from Twitter. We didn’t have all the ideas. We didn’t have the direction. A lot of what you see on Twitter today is from the users. The @ reply, the @ symbol itself, did not come from the company or anyone at the company. It came from our users. The word “tweet”, we didn’t come up with (laughs). That was all our users and again it was something we resisted for a long time. So this is a very important lesson for us as well. We became very good listeners to how people were using the system and more importantly, we became good editors of that listening.
This work has inspired and distilled three concepts I have dedicated my life to and that I love. The first is immediacy, allowing people to immediately create and consume and participate in these services with no barriers and no walls. People get in, they use it and they make their own value on top of it. If you have immediacy you can inspire transparency because it is easier to talk about what you want to say. Text is a very freeing abstract notion and we learned a lot about people through text where we wouldn’t through speech. This is where the constraint comes in of the 140 characters and so instead of asking someone to write a big thesis on the wall or on a blank page you ask them to write it on the size of the paper in a fortune cookie. Any mark on that paper is valuable and that is really important. We have more transparency because people are updating more, they are communicating more, and they are reacting more . And then what that inspires is approachability. It makes organizations, it makes systems and it makes humans more human. Go to www.webster.edu/notabene2010 to watch @Jack’s entire address, including his first public mention of his new business Square.
At the Intersection of Mobile and Social 5 minutes with Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous
What’s your Webster story? The funny thing is in a way our company Tapulous was born here. I started the company in January 2008 with only me and a cofounder in California. But we had two developers in Iowa and this really talented young designer named Louie Mantia who was a student at Webster University here in St. Louis. When we were getting everybody together we decided to meet in St. Louis. Louie hosted us and we spent three days here on campus at Emerson Library. It was here we mapped out our plan and out of that came Tap Tap Revenge. Where do you see social media going? There are a couple of big waves that are all coming together. The phone is becoming our main computer and it is inherently social. So the social wave has become the center of computing and the center of what we have been doing on the web over the last couple of years. Social connections are the main filters in which we experience the web. Another part of it is the ebb and flow between the forces of centralization on the internet and the forces of decentralization. We are now in a phase where the power is on the periphery and the most influential people are the ones that I know who recommend things and who talk to me. The conversion of social and mobile computing is really exciting and is going to be a dominant force in the next 10 years. So my sense is that for the next decade I’m going to be at the intersection of mobile and social. Go to www.webster.edu/notabene2010 to watch all of Bart’s video interview, his address at Webster as well as presentation from all our speakers.