At the same time, we were looking at 'groups' models and how groups were formed and put a couple things together to look at this idea of status and to look at this idea of grouping and it sort of hit me — the idea for this product.

That's a thing I want to reiterate — you're trying to look for the full story. Some people have gotten credit, some people haven't. The reality is it was a group effort. There were lots of people putting ideas into and it couldn't have been done without this group of people. Whether or not there's individuals who get credit or don't get credit, that may be totally irrelevant. It was a collaboration. And it was almost a collaboration that came out of necessity.

I had this strange feeling that I had never had before — that this was something big. I felt it from the onset.

I really felt strongly, more strongly than I felt about anything in the past and since then — that this is something massive sitting right here in front of us. All it needs is time to grow.

Initially, the product was growing because of the social aspect between people. The idea that police departments or fire departments are using it to give updates on the city, that was something we built into it in the very beginning as a concept. A lot of that stuff was hashed out early on.

Ev is very shrewd. He's a very shrewd businessman, and he's had a lot of practice. He's had lots of failures in the past. He's had some big failures in the past. That's his business — to isolate and spot value where it is.

Obvious was supposed to be this umbrella company where they had multiple projects. Like an incubator. And he stopped until Twitter became one of those things.

It was highly, highly compelling. Highly engaging. I'd been testing, doing the shortcode, writing up the description of what it was.

The people who run the SMS gateway were like, "This thing is the best thing I've seen. The best thing I've seen using SMS in this way." They were doing thousands of different SMS applications at the time.

It's not overly complicated. It's not. It's super-simple. That's the thing that someone needs to address. Those core concerns.