Twitter: The Microblog Born Inside a Podcast Startup

In 2005, Steve Jobs walked onstage and announced that iTunes would natively support podcasts, and in a single keynote he gutted the entire business model of a startup called Odeo. Instead of shutting down, the team, including a developer named Jack Dorsey, ran internal hackathons to find a new direction. Two weeks later they had a prototype built around a 140-character message broadcast to anyone following you, and Dorsey posted the first tweet in March 2006.

For founders, this case sharpens a counterintuitive idea about constraint and timing: sometimes the collapse of your original plan is what frees a team to build something far bigger. It asks you to look hard at the part of your business you may be protecting out of sunk cost and inertia, and what your team would actually be excited to build if it vanished tomorrow. Why a dying plan can clear the runway, rather than end the road, is what the app makes you sit with.