Early Life:
Jack Dorsey was born on November 19, 1976 in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Marcia and Tom Dorsey. He was raised Catholic and he is part Italian descent. His father worked for a company that developed mass spectrometers and his mother was a homemaker. As a child, he became obsessed with maps. He loved locomotives, police cars, and taxis. He designed his own maps using a graphics program and eventually he taught himself programming to learn how to make little dots to represent trains and buses to scoot around the maps. He would listen to police and ambulance radio frequencies so that he could plot the emergency vehicles on his map to where they needed to go.
He went to a Catholic high school called Bishop DuBourg High. He became interested in computers and communications and began programming while he was still a student there. When he was fourteen, Dorsey became interested in dispatch routing. He studied the technology behind coordinating taxi drivers, delivery vans and other vehicles that needed to remain in real-time communication with one another. By fifteen, he wrote dispatch software that is still used by many taxi cab companies today.
Dorsey attended the Missouri University of Science and Technology before transferring to New York University Tandom School of Engineering, where he dropped out before finishing his degree. It was at New York University where he first came up with the idea of Twitter. Soon after dropping out, he moved to Oakland, California. In 2000, he started his company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web. Shortly after starting his company, he came up with the idea that they could create a service that would allow anyone to write a short message about himself, using a cell-phone, and then send that message to anyone they wanted to. He was inspired by LiveJournal and AOL Instant Messenger. (LiveJournal is a social media site that helps you to keep a daily journal.) He approached the company Odeo, and Biz Stone and an investor named Evan Williams liked the idea and decided to consider it.
Twitter:
Dorsey, Stone, and Williams started a new company called Obvious, which later turned into Twitter with Dorsey at its CEO. Within two weeks, Dorsey and Stone built a prototype site where people could post short messages of 140 characters or less. Odeo launched Twitter in July of 2005, but it wasn’t until March of the following year that the world took notice. On March 21, 2006, Dorsey posted the first tweet, “just setting up my twttr.”
Twitter was not initially popular, as some thought it was for self-centered and shallow people. In the beginning, it also suffered from frequent service outages. But soon many celebrities and CEOs began tweeting, and Twitter started to gain popularity fast. Dorsey and his staff struggled to keep the service from going down. Suddenly, Twitter became the head of the “microblogging” movement.
On October 16, 2008, co-founder Evan Williams replaced Dorsey as Twitter’s CEO and Dorsey stayed on as company chairman. In 2010, Twitter had more than 105 million users who together tweeted some 55 million times a day. Dorsey became interested in other things. He invested in the social networking company, Foursquare and launched his own new company, Square in May of 2010. Square is a small, square-shaped mobile device that attaches to your phone via the headphone jack. It allows people to receive credit card payments by swiping their card through the square, choosing an amount to transfer to the recipient and then signing their name for confirmation. It also sends paperless receipts via text message or email. In September of 2012, Business Insider Magazine valued Square Inc. at $3.2 billion.
On March 28, 2011, Dorsey returned to Twitter as Executive Chairman after Dick Costolo replaced Evan Williams as the CEO. In 2015, Dorsey served as an interim CEO and then on June 20, 2015 he became its CEO again as Costolo resigned. Dorsey was named permanent CEO of Twitter on October 5, 2015. Not long after becoming CEO, he cut about 8% of Twitter’s workforce in a move to organize their top priorities. In May 2016, Dorsey announced that Twitter would not count photos and links in the 140-character limit so they could free up more space for text. He did this so that he could entice more users to join since the number of tweets was at an all-time low of about 300 million in January 2016 compared to about 500 million in September 2013.
Square:
Jack Dorsey is also a co-founder of the well known Square a credit and debit payment system on mobile devices release in May 2010. The small square shaped device attaches to your mobil device I pad, I phone etc. through the head phone jack and allows the person to swipe their card through this mini card reader and pay a business or person though the mobile device. It is also a system that uses paperless receipts and sends you email or text of the receipt instead of using paper. This is a free app to all iOS and Android OS. The company grew from 10 employees in 2009 to over 100 in 2011. Business insider magazine valued Square Inc. $3.2 billion in October 2014 Square Inc. filed an IPO to go on to the New York Stock Exchange.
Jack Dorsey
Early Life:
Jack Dorsey was born on November 19, 1976 in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Marcia and Tom Dorsey. He was raised Catholic and he is part Italian descent. His father worked for a company that developed mass spectrometers and his mother was a homemaker. As a child, he became obsessed with maps. He loved locomotives, police cars, and taxis. He designed his own maps using a graphics program and eventually he taught himself programming to learn how to make little dots to represent trains and buses to scoot around the maps. He would listen to police and ambulance radio frequencies so that he could plot the emergency vehicles on his map to where they needed to go.
He went to a Catholic high school called Bishop DuBourg High. He became interested in computers and communications and began programming while he was still a student there. When he was fourteen, Dorsey became interested in dispatch routing. He studied the technology behind coordinating taxi drivers, delivery vans and other vehicles that needed to remain in real-time communication with one another. By fifteen, he wrote dispatch software that is still used by many taxi cab companies today.
Dorsey attended the Missouri University of Science and Technology before transferring to New York University Tandom School of Engineering, where he dropped out before finishing his degree. It was at New York University where he first came up with the idea of Twitter. Soon after dropping out, he moved to Oakland, California. In 2000, he started his company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web. Shortly after starting his company, he came up with the idea that they could create a service that would allow anyone to write a short message about himself, using a cell-phone, and then send that message to anyone they wanted to. He was inspired by LiveJournal and AOL Instant Messenger. (LiveJournal is a social media site that helps you to keep a daily journal.) He approached the company Odeo, and Biz Stone and an investor named Evan Williams liked the idea and decided to consider it.
Twitter:
Dorsey, Stone, and Williams started a new company called Obvious, which later turned into Twitter with Dorsey at its CEO. Within two weeks, Dorsey and Stone built a prototype site where people could post short messages of 140 characters or less. Odeo launched Twitter in July of 2005, but it wasn’t until March of the following year that the world took notice. On March 21, 2006, Dorsey posted the first tweet, “just setting up my twttr.”
Twitter was not initially popular, as some thought it was for self-centered and shallow people. In the beginning, it also suffered from frequent service outages. But soon many celebrities and CEOs began tweeting, and Twitter started to gain popularity fast. Dorsey and his staff struggled to keep the service from going down. Suddenly, Twitter became the head of the “microblogging” movement.
On October 16, 2008, co-founder Evan Williams replaced Dorsey as Twitter’s CEO and Dorsey stayed on as company chairman. In 2010, Twitter had more than 105 million users who together tweeted some 55 million times a day. Dorsey became interested in other things. He invested in the social networking company, Foursquare and launched his own new company, Square in May of 2010. Square is a small, square-shaped mobile device that attaches to your phone via the headphone jack. It allows people to receive credit card payments by swiping their card through the square, choosing an amount to transfer to the recipient and then signing their name for confirmation. It also sends paperless receipts via text message or email. In September of 2012, Business Insider Magazine valued Square Inc. at $3.2 billion.
On March 28, 2011, Dorsey returned to Twitter as Executive Chairman after Dick Costolo replaced Evan Williams as the CEO. In 2015, Dorsey served as an interim CEO and then on June 20, 2015 he became its CEO again as Costolo resigned. Dorsey was named permanent CEO of Twitter on October 5, 2015. Not long after becoming CEO, he cut about 8% of Twitter’s workforce in a move to organize their top priorities. In May 2016, Dorsey announced that Twitter would not count photos and links in the 140-character limit so they could free up more space for text. He did this so that he could entice more users to join since the number of tweets was at an all-time low of about 300 million in January 2016 compared to about 500 million in September 2013.
Square:
Jack Dorsey is also a co-founder of the well known Square a credit and debit payment system on mobile devices release in May 2010. The small square shaped device attaches to your mobil device I pad, I phone etc. through the head phone jack and allows the person to swipe their card through this mini card reader and pay a business or person though the mobile device. It is also a system that uses paperless receipts and sends you email or text of the receipt instead of using paper. This is a free app to all iOS and Android OS. The company grew from 10 employees in 2009 to over 100 in 2011. Business insider magazine valued Square Inc. $3.2 billion in October 2014 Square Inc. filed an IPO to go on to the New York Stock Exchange.
References:
Jack Dorsey (2017). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dorsey
Jack Dorsey Biography (2015). Retrieved from http://www.biography.com/people/jack-dorsey-578280#synopsis
Kirkpatrick, David. “Twitter was Act One” (2011). Retrieved from http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/04/jack-dorsey-201104
Bilton, Nick. “All is Fair in Love and Twitter” (2013). Retrieved from http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/04/jack-dorsey-201104