Jack Dorsey

Social Media Pioneer/Tech Guru

The age of social media may have begun when Facebook went live, but Twitter took the medium to places it had never been seen before. Jack Dorsey defied the critics who said that people wouldn’t want to communicate in only 140 characters. Users not only adopted the new form of communication; this technology became a powerhouse of news dissemination and presidential politics. He became a billionaire before the age of 40 but refuses to rest on past success by driving forward into ever changing business technologies.

EARLY YEARS

Jack Patrick Dorsey was born on November 19th, 1976. He was raised in south St. Louis and attended Bishop DuBourg High School. Dorsey says that from an early age, he was interested in technology, especially the area of “dispatch routing.” He was fascinated by the city of St. Louis as a child, and with how everything seemed to move flawlessly. That may have been
different than what most kids his age were studying, but his interest in the movement of transportation services in a bustling metro area paid dividends later.

He attended college at the University of Missouri–Rolla for several years before transferring to New York University. Much like the story of many young genius’, he became restless in formal study environments. He dropped out of college just prior to graduation to begin his career because he was tired of waiting for his future to arrive.

RISE TO FAME

Dorsey moved to California around the turn of the century. The San Francisco area had become the world hub for tech companies, and he immersed himself in the culture. To some,
it was like the “new age wild west”, where motivated entrepreneurs could make a fortune with good timing, and a great idea.

His early interest in dispatch routing wound up being his first career in the Silicon Valley area. That technology allowed companies to dispatch drivers from many industries from the web. It was about this time that person to person instant messaging was also gaining a foothold, and he realized that the two could be combined. He had come up with the idea for Twitter during his college years, but now he saw how the emerging technologies cold make the social media service a reality.

SHOW ME SUCCESS

Dorsey began reaching out to other tech revolutionaries to see if his idea for real-time, short message communication service could become a reality. He partnered with industry leaders to continue developing the software, while also working to line up the necessary funding to keep the project moving forward.

Twitter, as it became known, started to grow rapidly in the early 2000’s. It was seen as a good alternative to Facebook for people to communicate but was still struggling to generate substantial revenues. But the service was generating plenty of users. At one point, there were more than 660-million tweets per day. Even though it wasn’t designed to effectively drive sales revenue, the value of the company drove Dorsey’s net worth to over a billion dollars. His net worth skyrocketed even more in 2022 when he sold Twitter to Elon Musk in a deal valued at $44-billion.

When not busy revolutionizing social media, Dorsey was working to revolutionize the way people pay for goods and services on the go. He and fellow St. Louisan, Jim McKelvey developed a mobile payment system they called Square in 2010. This technology solved a problem suffered by many businesses, where they couldn’t accept payments easily while out
of the office. Square allowed seamless payments via mobile devices like cell phones and iPads. The company retained a small fraction of the transaction amount, solving the problem that Twitter presented. This was technology that instantly generated money every time someone used the service. In just a matter of years, this company, too, was worth billions of
dollars. Two years after hitting the market, Square was valued by Business Insider magazine
as worth 3.2-billion dollars, with Dorsey owning about 25% of the enterprise.

Dorsey had achieved lofty heights that most business leaders can only dream about. And he did it all before turning 40. His every business move is followed by CEO’s and investors around the globe, while his personal life has become fodder for tabloids and gossip shows.

EXTRA! EXTRA!

*Dorsey was named “Innovator of the Year” in 2012 by the Wall Street Journal
*Even though he can afford any car in the world, he walks around 5 miles to work every day.
*Square was debuted to the world at the Taste of St. Louis dining event.