The Twitter co-founder advised students to learn from their mistakes. (Tim Lee / Photo Editor)

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey learned from his own mistakes, and on Nov. 4, he instructed students of the College to do the same.

“The number one thing you can get right in the beginning is being upfront,” said Dorsey during the Kendall Hall event that was hosted by the School of Business.

Dorsey created Twitter in March 2006 as a side project of podcasting company Odeo. Within a year, the microblogging site was on the verge of skyrocketing.

“We were in the right position at the right time,” he said.

According to Dorsey, the company had a crucial advertising break at South by Southwest festival in April 2007. However, the site was soon inundated with new users and system crashes threatened to derail the up-and-coming project.

“We were not acting as a cohesive company, we were not talking to each other,” Dorsey explained. “And here we were building a technology that was focused on communication and transparency.”

After a rough stretch, Dorsey said, the Twitter heads settled down and began talking. They used blogs and communicated with users about the internal problems, and developed tools to visualize site traffic, all of which helped smooth the recovery. After a year and a half, the site was running consistently.

“Being critical of what we?re doing constantly helps decide where we need to go,” he said.

Today, Twitter is ranked as the 12th most popular Web site in the United States.

Still, Dorsey said, there is “a constant evolution, a constant integration, all based around very, very fluid, upfront communication.”

He described how many of Twitter’s most important features are created by users

“Almost everything you see in Twitter today is not from the company, and that is one of the most amazing things about this technology.”

Those features include applications “that were used in places like Iran, places like Moldova, places like Mumbai, during these massively shared experiences, that really changed the uses of the technology.”

Dorsey even admitted, to the amusement of the Kendall audience, that he thought the term “tweet”— a user-created name for Twitter’s status updates — sounded “ridiculous.”

According to Dorsey, this high degree of openness is what makes Twitter work.

“The people that are defining where Twitter goes today, and where Twitter goes tomorrow, are not necessarily in the company, but all of the people using it right now,” Dorsey said.

“Just thinking about that is so inspiring and so challenging from a typical entrepreneur standpoint,” he said.

At the same time, the flux of ideas circulating through the site creates a role for the company leader as an editor of content. One of Dorsey’s jobs is producing “a cohesive narrative that speaks to the majority of people.”

Dorsey said he gets asked frequently about Twitter’s business model.

“It’s not something that’s really easy,” the chairman said, explaining that the company is still trying to figure out the best way to make a profit without impinging on the service.

But Dorsey is still ambitious, telling the audience that he hopes to expand his work into new fields, chiefly health care and economics. He said that health care “seems like a complete black box,” despite its importance, and asserted that “no single human on this planet understands the global economic market.”

At a time such issues are talked about worldwide, Dorsey hopes that his technology can bring some transparency to the issues.

At the end of his lecture, Dorsey gave students advice. “The hardest part in starting anything is starting it,” he said. Having worked on communications concepts since he was 15, the Twitter creator knows something about ideas.

“Get them out,” he told students. “Get them out on paper. Play with them. Allow others to play with them.”