Jack Dorsey, born on November 19, 1976 is an American web developer and businessman widely known as a co-founder of Twitter, and as the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. In 2008, he was named to the MIT Technology ReviewTR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. For 2012, The Wall Street Journal gave him the “Innovator of the Year Award” for technology. His net worth is US $2.5 billion.
Dorsey was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Marcia (Smith) and Tim Dorsey. He is of part Italian descent. His father worked for a company that developed mass spectrometers and his mother was a homemaker. He was raised Catholic, and his uncle is a Catholic priest in Cincinnati. He went to Catholic high school, at Bishop DuBourg High School.
By age thirteen, Jack Dorsey had become interested in dispatch routing. Some of the open source software he created in the area of dispatch logistics is still used by many taxi cab companies. Dorsey attended the Missouri University of Science and Technology before subsequently transferring to New York University, where he first came up with the idea that became Twitter. While working on dispatching as a programmer, he later moved to California.
In Oakland in 2000, Dorsey started his company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web. His other projects and ideas at this time included networks of medical devices and a “frictionless service market”. In July 2000, building on dispatching and inspired in part by LiveJournal and possibly by AOL Instant Messenger, he had the idea for a Web-based real time status/short message communication service.
When he first saw implementations of instant messaging, Jack Dorsey wondered whether the software’s user status output could be shared among friends easily. He approached Odeo, which at the time happened to be interested in text messaging. Dorsey and Biz Stone decided that SMS text suited the status message idea, and built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks. The idea attracted many users at Odeo and investment from Evan Williams who had left Google after selling it Pyra Labs and Blogger.
TWITTER
Williams, Stone and Noah Glass co-founded Obvious, which then spun off Twitter Inc. with Jack Dorsey as the CEO. In his role during the pivotal days of the company’s founding, a compilation chronicling the originally named “twttr” and the time leading up to the official launch is shown in a timeline of tweets revealing Twitter’s beginnings. As chief executive officer, Jack Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of funding by the venture capitalists who backed the company. He reportedly lost his position for leaving work early to enjoy other pursuits such as yoga and fashion design. On October 16, 2008, Williams took over the role of CEO, while Dorsey became chairman of the board. On March 28, 2011, Dorsey returned to Twitter as Executive Chairman after Dick Costolo replaced Williams as the CEO.
As the service began to grow in popularity, Dorsey chose the improvement of uptime as top priority, even over creating revenue – which, as of 2008, Twitter was not designed to earn Dorsey described the commercial use of Twitter and its API as two things that could lead to paid features. He describes his three guiding principles, which he says are shared by the company, are simplicity, constraint and craftsmanship.
Dorsey developed a small business platform to accept debit and credit card payments on a mobile device called Square, released in May 2010. The small, square-shaped device attaches to iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or Android devices via the headphone jack, and as a mini card reader allows a person to swipe her or his card, choose an amount to give to the recipient and then sign his or her name for confirmation. Square is also a system for sending paperless receipts via text message or email, and is available as a free app for iOS and Android OS. The company grew from 10 employees in December 2009 to over a hundred employees by June 2011. Square’s office is located on Market Street in San Francisco. In September 2012, Business Insider magazine valued Square Inc. at $3.2 billion. Jack Dorsey is CEO of Square, Inc.
Producer Tom Anderson and correspondent Lara Logan interviewed Dorsey for a segment of CBS 60 Minutes called “The Innovator: Jack Dorsey” which aired during March 2013. In 2013, talking to CNN, Dorsey expressed admiration for Michael Bloomberg and his reinvention through design and simple interfaces of what it means to be mayor. Dorsey thinks becoming mayor of New York City is an aspiration that would raise the bar for him. Dorsey served as a judge for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s NYC BigApps competition in 2011.
Jack Dorsey was announced as a new member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company on December 24, 2013. The press release referred to Dorsey as a “talented entrepreneur” and explained that his experience is aligned with the corporation’s “strategic priorities.”
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