Jack Patrick Dorsey (born November 19, 1976) is an American Internet entrepreneur, programmer, and philanthropist who is the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, Inc., as well as the founder and principal executive officer of Block, Inc., a financial payments company. As of June 2022, Jack Dorsey has a net worth of 4.5 billion dollars.
Early Entrepreneurship
Dorsey developed taxi dispatching software as a teenager, which was adopted by taxicab firms. He attended New York University before relocating to San Francisco in 1999, where he founded a company that used the Internet to deploy couriers, emergency cars, and taxis. In the year 2000, he contemplated employing text and instant messaging (based on dispatch software concepts) to stay in touch with pals. Six years later, he approached Williams and Stone with his idea, and the two collaborated to create the Twitter platform. Many people know Jack Dorsey as the founder of Twitter. But what few know is that he is also the founder of the payment app Square.
On March 21, 2006, Dorsey sent the first tweet. The program, which let users post 140-character messages, quickly became a popular social networking hub as well as a mainstream mode of communication. Dorsey was CEO until October 2008, when he was appointed chairman of the board. He was involved in Twitter’s first public offering (2013), which raised $1.8 billion in that role.
Dorsey co-founded and became CEO of Square, a mobile payments startup that provides credit card transaction devices and software, in 2009. It debuted in 2010 and has over two million users by 2012. Initially offered primarily in North America, Square expanded to international markets in 2013, when its services were made available in Japan. Dorsey was also elected to the Disney Company’s board of directors that year. In October 2015, he returned to Twitter as CEO while also serving as CEO of Square. During his second term at Twitter, the firm came under increasing fire for its efforts to prevent access to undesirable information.
Conservatives were notably outraged when Twitter permanently banned US President Donald Trump for statements that were found to be in breach of Twitter’s policy against the promotion of violence. This comes as more people ask for government regulations on social media. Dorsey resigned as CEO of Twitter in 2021, citing, among other things, that being a “founder-led” company was “severely restrictive and a single point of failure.”
Leading with employees in mind
Dorsey, unlike many of the founder-CEOs we’ve examined, does not believe in tightly controlling information or micromanaging staff decisions. Rather, he takes a hands-off approach, delegating crucial choices to the appropriate specialists and ensuring that staffs have the information they need to make sound decisions.
Unlike more traditional CEOs, Dorsey appears to value the creation of business culture and internal ideology over investor interests. This has resulted in an unemotional and risk-averse approach to change management, which resulted in substantial negative news for Dorsey in 2015 and 2016, after his comeback as CEO failed to turn the firm around spectacularly. Despite this, the strategy appears to be succeeding, as Twitter reported its first earnings on February 8, 2018.
One possible explanation for this achievement is that employees are aggressively pushed to think and act autonomously, as part of Dorsey’s management philosophy, and to accept responsibility for their actions. In a comparable situation, CEOs such as Elon Musk or Steve Duties may have simply changed the course of their firm by personally taking over their employees’ jobs and rebuilding the corporation under their own authority. Dorsey, on the other hand, delegated the task to Twitter workers. As a result, when other teams rely significantly on top-down direction, Twitter has a workforce that is careful, responsible, and innovative.
He announced his departure from the role of Twitter’s CEO on November 29, 2021. His resignation was effective immediately. Dorsey was replaced by the company’s former CTO Parag Agrawal, who took over as CEO effective immediately. Dorsey will continue to lead as the CEO of Block, Inc. In May 2022, Dorsey left the board of directors of the social network.
As a founder of two multi-billion-dollar companies, it is no surprise that Dorsey is a billionaire himself. Interestingly enough, the majority of his wealth is concentrated in Square. Currently, he owns around 13 percent of the company’s shares, while he only holds about 2 percent of Twitter’s.
Dorsey is an altruistic man. Outside of him giving away $1 billion worth of Square shares to Covid relief efforts, he also gave away nearly one-third of his Twitter shares to employees in 2016.
Business Mogul Elon Musk, just purchased twitter for an astounding $44 billion, which benefits Dorsey tremendously as a 2% shareowner. Dorsey is expected to net an additional $975 million once the transaction is fully complete.
Key Takeaways
Pursue your passions: Dorsey is, by all means, a unique man. He walks 5 miles to work every day, has a sleeve tattoo, and was interested in dispatch routing at 14. Many times we follow the path society tells us to take instead of pursuing things that genuinely interest us. Dorsey was able to take his passion for dispatch routing, pursue it full-time as a college dropout, and even merge the idea of dispatch routing with instant messaging to make Twitter.
Seek out partnerships: When Dorsey came up with the idea of Twitter, he didn’t try to create it himself. He knew he understood dispatch routing very well but messaging was new to him. Instead of trying to teach himself everything he would need to know, he instead partnered with Odeo, a firm that was already developing its own instant messaging platform. This partnership allowed him to bring Twitter to market much faster than he could’ve on his own.
Be curious and take action: Dorsey is among a select few special breed of entrepreneurs who founded two billion-dollar companies. He not only knows how to come up with great ideas but also executes them. For anyone thinking about starting a company, the most crucial step is just beginning. You never know if you are going to be the one who creates the next Twitter or Square. He continues to lead Block, where in April 2022 he changed his title from “CEO” to “Block Head.”
