Jack Dorsey

Jack Dorsey

Jack Dorsey is an American entrepreneur and businessman famed for development of Twitter and the creator and chief executive officer of Square. In 2012, he bagged the ‘Innovator of the Year Award’ by the Wall Street Journal.

Dorsey was born on 19th November 1976 in Fairmont City, Illinois. He attended the Catholic High School at Bishop DuBourg High School and  enrolled in the Missouri University of Science and Technology but later transferred to New York University where he first got the idea of Twitter. At the young age of 15, he wrote dispatch software which is still used by many cab companies. ‘The King of Tweets’ as he is popularly known initiated a company that dispatched taxis, couriers and emergency services from the internet in 2000. His other ideas included the ‘frictionless service market’ and networks of medical devices. In July of 2000, Dorsey came up with the idea of a web-based realtime status or short message communication service. He was inspired by LiveJournal and maybe AOL messenger. He teamed up with Christopher Isaac “Biz” stone and in two weeks’ time came up with a Twitter prototype. Originally named ‘twttr’, Twitter Inc. was set up in 2006 and is now one of the most widely used social networking website all over the world. Jack Dorsey was the first person to post a tweet on Twitter which said ‘just setting up my twttr’. Dorsey was selected the chief executive officer of the company.

Twitter was at first derided as a time wasting tool and platform for self-centered people who cared to broadcast every minute of their lives. It was even mocked by the comedy host of a late night show Conan O’Brien in his segment ‘Twitter Tracker’. But soon Twitter became widely popular amongst celebrities and business personalities and soon it became a powerful platform for Presidents and political people like Barack Obama and John McCain on which they could keep their supporters up to date. The website reached new heights of success during the Iranian presidential elections in 2009. When the government blocked cell phone messages and foreign news coverage, thousands of Iranian protestors posted tweets on live status updates. By 2010 Twitter had more than 105 million users who posted almost 55 million times a day. Apart from Twitter,  Jack Dorsey also invested in another social networking company called Foursquare. He established Square in May 2010 which is a business platform where debit and credit card payments can be accepted and paperless receipts can be sent through e mail and text messaging. According to an estimate by the Business Insider magazine the company was worth $3.2 billion in September 2012.

Jack Dorsey has proved his supremacy in entrepreneurship through his wisely chosen business ventures. He uses his three traits of simplicity, craftsmanship and constraint to run his businesses. His love of dispatch routing made him one of the richest people of the world. As of March 2013, his net worth is $1.1 billion. Even though Twitter has already brought a huge change in the way people communicate, for Dorsey this is not the end.