Jack Dorsey

Jack Dorsey is an American entrepreneur and computer programmer, as well as Twitter's co-founder and its former CEO. Moreover, he is the co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Block, Inc., formerly known as Square

Personal Stats

Education

Jack Dorsey began his college education at the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1995. He attended the university for over two years before transferring to New York University in 1997. However, Dorsey dropped out of NYU just two years later, one semester short of graduating. It was during his time at NYU that Dorsey first conceived of the idea that would eventually become Twitter. 

Career

In 2000, while working as a programmer in dispatching, Jack Dorsey founded a company in Oakland with the goal of dispatching couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web. It was during this time that Dorsey had the idea for a Web-based, real-time, short-message communication service, inspired in part by LiveJournal and AOL Instant Messenger. He approached Odeo, a company then interested in text messaging, and presented his idea. Dorsey and his friend Biz Stone ultimately decided that SMS text suited the status-message concept and built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks. The idea proved popular among Odeo's users and received investment from Evan Williams, a co-founder of the firm.

In 2006, Dorsey co-founded Twitter, which has become one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, with billions of tweets posted daily by millions of users.

In 2009, Dorsey co-founded Square, a payment processing startup that enables small companies to take credit card payments by attaching a small device to their smartphone or tablet. Since then, Square has expanded its offerings to include small company loans, payroll services, and other financial goods. The company's name was changed to Block, Inc. in 2021.

Dorsey’s contributions to the technology industry have been internationally acknowledged. In 2008, he was included on the MIT Technology Review TR35, a ranking of the world's leading innovators younger than 35. In 2013, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most important persons in the world.

Dorsey established the Start Small Foundation in 2015, which focuses on community and economic development, education, and basic income for everybody. In 2021, he also revealed plans to launch Bluesky, a decentralized social media platform that will allow individuals greater control over their online identities and data. Bluesky is reportedly available on the App store as of March 2023. 

Personal Life

Jack Dorsey was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. His parents are Tim and Marcia Dorsey, with his mother having Italian ancestry. His father worked for a company that developed mass spectrometers, while his mother was a homemaker. Dorsey was raised Catholic and has an uncle who's a Catholic priest in Cincinnati.  He attended Bishop DuBourg High School and, in his younger days, occasionally worked as a fashion model. By age 14, he had already developed an interest in dispatch routing.

Social Media

Twitter - https://twitter.com/jack