The best-performing people don’t just perform well in the roles they become famous for — they are often high-performers for long before they made it big.
Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom had shared a revealing anecdote on the Lex Fridman podcast about Jack Dorsey’s early days at Odeo, the podcasting startup that would eventually give birth to Twitter. The story offers a rare glimpse into the work ethic that would later define one of Silicon Valley’s most influential entrepreneurs, long before Twitter became a global platform. What makes this account particularly fascinating is that it comes from Systrom himself, who was an intern at the time and would go on to build Instagram into a billion-dollar company.
The scene was set at Odeo during a period when founder Ev Williams felt the team might not be pushing hard enough. As Systrom recalls, Williams devised an unusual motivational exercise. “He created this thing where every Friday — I don’t know if it was every Friday, I only remember this happening once — he had a statuette. And in the bottom it’s hollow, right? I remember on a Friday, he decided he was going to let everyone vote for who had worked the hardest that week.”
The mechanics were simple but effective. “We all voted closed ballot, right? We all put in a bucket and he tallied the votes, and then whoever got the most votes got the statue and in the statue was a thousand bucks. I recall there was a thousand bucks. Now it might have been a hundred bucks, but let’s call it a thousand. It’s more exciting that way.”
For Systrom, even as an intern, the exercise was memorable. “I actually got two votes. I was very happy. We were a small company, but as the intern, I got at least two votes.”
But the real revelation came in the results. “I remember Jack just getting the vast majority of votes from everyone, and I remember just thinking — I couldn’t imagine he would become what he’d become and do what he would do. But I had a profound respect that the new guy who I really liked worked that hard, and you could see his dedication even then, and that people respected him. That’s the one story that I remember of him working with him specifically from that summer.”
This anecdote illuminates a crucial period in tech history when the foundations of Twitter were being laid. Dorsey joined Odeo in 2005, and it was his proposal for a status-updating service called “Twttr” that would become the company’s lifeline when Apple’s iTunes began dominating the podcasting market. The work ethic Systrom observed wasn’t just about logging hours — it was the kind of intense focus that would soon manifest in Dorsey’s vision for real-time communication. By 2006, Obvious Corp was formed to acquire Odeo, and Twitter spun off as its own entity in 2007, eventually transforming how the world shares information in real-time. The fact that Dorsey commanded such respect from his peers during those early, uncertain days at Odeo suggests that his later success wasn’t accidental but rather the inevitable result of extraordinary dedication recognized even by those who would themselves go on to reshape the tech landscape.