Founders

my favorite use case for deep research I've found:

"tell me about the early days of x company and the challenges they encountered"

been doing this over the past week and learned so much

In Twitter’s early days (back in 2006), it started as a side project within a podcasting company called Odeo. Jack Dorsey had the idea of creating a simple way for people to share short status updates via SMS.

But things weren’t smooth sailing. First, the platform kept crashing because it couldn’t handle rapid user growth (remember the infamous "Fail Whale"?). Then, they had no clear way to make money—unlike Facebook, which had ads from the start.

On top of that, leadership was a mess. Dorsey was pushed out as CEO in 2008, and there were several power struggles over the years. Plus, while lots of people signed up, many didn’t quite get how to use Twitter effectively, making engagement a challenge.

And of course, Facebook was growing fast, so Twitter had to prove its unique value in the social media world.

Despite all this, Twitter powered through, eventually figuring out ads, improving its technology, and becoming the go-to platform for real-time conversations.