Jack Dorsey of Twitter Shares the Success Secrets

Hundreds of small business owners crammed the halls of the Casa Loma Ballroom in St. Louis last month to see native-St. Louisan Jack Dorsey speak with a panel of entrepreneurs about their experiences opening a small business and how they can strengthen their community.

Aside from engaging with the panel of small business owners, Dorsey also took the time to field a few questions from the crowd.
Here’s a bit of what he had to say.

What does it take to create a successful business?

You need to believe and do whatever it takes to make it successful. It’s that confidence and conviction that it’s going to work that you really need. You’ll learn whatever you need to learn. That’s always been fundamentally what drives us as a company — that desire as an entrepreneur that ‘I want to see this in the world and use it every single day. I want to go and work on it every single day and I’m making the bet with the world that the world wants to see the same thing.’ If you have that passion and desire, everything can work out. And when it doesn’t — sometimes it doesn’t — you put those ideas on the shelf and then you come back and revisit them later as different ideas or companies.

What is the biggest thing that keeps you going and motivated to make sure you succeed?

It’s really just taking that first step. One simple tool is note taking. We want to rethink everything we are doing all the time so we are constantly innovating and bringing new things to the world. But it’s just getting those things out of your head. It sounds simple, but it’s so hard. If you can get it out of your head in whatever medium — code, pen and napkin — the most important thing is showing it to someone else and getting that feedback. Even if it’s a friend who says, ‘That’s the stupidest idea ever, but there’s this.’ You’re really looking for that ‘but’ to think about your idea differently and suddenly you have a company. It’s as simple as drawing and writing it down and being persistent and having the patience to get it done.

Where do you see the future of content marketing for small business and large business?

Technology throughout civilization has done two things. It’s gotten more people to participate and it makes them faster (at participating). (Technology will continue to allow) people to participate in mobile conversation faster. It might mean you show them there are people behind the brands or people crafting these things. Telling your story is tough. It’s not the easiest thing to do. But just listening to these panelists and hearing what they do is inspiring. I want that engaged feeling they are expressing right now (all the time). That’s marketing and your message.

What is your take on mentorship and what it means for small business?

I think one of the things that makes Silicon Valley so great at building tech companies is its culture of transparency. With mentors, they don’t find you, you have to find mentors and ask them questions and find people that push you. I think Jim (McKelvey) has come across a pretty good way to do this (with LaunchCode) with internships. You don’t have to learn through all these classes but by doing it and participating in an apprenticeship. That’s how I learned when I was 15 and I learned the hard way in many, many cases. It taught me so much about how to run an organization and building a business and creating something the world wants to use.