Jack Dorsey Biography

Jack Dorsey (born November 19, 1976) is an American web developer and businessman widely known as the creator of Twitter and as the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. In 2008, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 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.

Early years

Dorsey grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and by age 13, he 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. He was raised Catholic, and his uncle is a Catholic priest in Cincinnati. He went to Catholic high school at Bishop DuBourg High School and attended the Missouri University of Science and Technology before subsequently transferring to New York University, where he first came up with the idea for 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 realtime status/short message communication service.

When he first saw implementations of instant messaging, Dorsey wondered whether the software's user status output could be shared among friends easily. He approached Odeo, who 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.

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.

Twitter, Inc.

Dorsey, Stone and Noah Glass co-founded Obvious, which then spun off Twitter, Inc. 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, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of funding by the venture capitalists who backed the company. On October 16, 2008, Williams took over the role of CEO, and Dorsey became chairman of the board. On March 28, 2011, Dorsey returned to Twitter as Executive Chairman.

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. His three guiding principles, which are shared by the whole company and through its culture, are simplicity, constraint, and craftsmanship.

Square, Inc.

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 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 Mission Street in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. In September 2012, Business Insider magazine valued Square Inc. at 3.2 billion.

Public Service

Dorsey has served as a judge for Mayor Michael Bloomberg's NYC BigApps competition in NYC.