Fast Company finally looks at The Curious Genius of Twitter — which was just a side project:
It’s happened a couple of times where side projects have become the interrupting thing. Blogger and Twitter were both side projects. In both cases, they eventually became more compelling than the main thing we were working on. But because they were side projects in a company that was ostensibly doing something else, they didn’t need to be questioned a lot at first — other than, “Why aren’t we focusing on the main thing?” They didn’t need to be justified as whole businesses in themselves. A lot of ideas die when they’re questioned too much in their early stages.
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams created Blogger, which was acquired by Google, where he then worked for over a year:
I’m just much more of a startup guy, and Google was pretty big by the time I left. Maybe I could have started something new there, but there wasn’t a lot of reason to — I could start something new elsewhere. Google has a lot of resources but to get those resources you also have to have skills that aren’t necessarily my skills.