Yesterday’s news that Biz Stone is leaving Twitter to join co-founder Ev, on a different (ad)venture, is probably not surprising. After all, many entrepreneurs are driven by the freewheeling and heady freedom of inventing, innovating and not having to follow a whole bunch of rules. That changes when you get bigger, although Twitter is still relatively small despite the gargantuan size of its brand.  Their old/new company is called Obvious.

This, from the NY Times blog, really caught my attention:

“In an interview last year, Mr. Williams said Obvious was originally meant to be an incubator to develop ideas for multiple products or companies and see what happened. He learned that start-ups need that kind of flexibility, he said, because both Blogger and Twitter sprang out of other companies as side projects.”

Blogger and Twitter were side projects! It’s a great reminder that being open minded and keeping many irons in the fire can yield great things. Imagine the vision and foresight it took to let these projects flourish.