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Jack Patrick Dorsey (born November 19, 1976)[2] is an American software developer and business person, widely known as the creator of social networking service Twitter. He is also the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company.[3] In 2008, he was named as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.[4]
Jack Dorsey | |
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_(44538272181).jpg) Dorsey in 2018 | |
| Born | Jack Patrick Dorsey November 19, 1976[1] |
| Occupation(s) | software designer, entrepreneur |
Dorsey was born Jack Patrick Dorsey in St. Louis, Missouri,[10][11] the son of Tim and Marcia (née Smith) Dorsey.[12][13][14] He is of English, Irish, and Italian descent.[15] His father worked for a company that developed mass spectrometers and his mother was a homemaker.[16]
He was raised Catholic, and his uncle is a Catholic priest in Cincinnati.[17] He attended the Catholic Bishop DuBourg High School. In his younger days, Dorsey worked occasionally as a fashion model.[18][19][20][21][22]
By age fourteen, Dorsey had become interested in dispatch routing. Some of the open-source software he created in the area of dispatch logistics is still used by taxicab companies.[12] Dorsey attended the University of Missouri–Rolla for two-plus years (1995–97)[17] before transferring to New York University, but he dropped out in 1999,[23] one semester short of graduating.[17] He came up with the idea that he developed as Twitter while studying at NYU.[17][24]
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While working on dispatching as a programmer, Dorsey moved to California.[25][26] In 2000, Dorsey started his company in Oakland to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web.[27] His other projects and ideas at this time included networks of medical devices and a "frictionless service market".[27] In July 2000, building on dispatching[12] and inspired in part by LiveJournal and by AOL Instant Messenger, he had the idea for a Web-based realtime status/short message communication service.[27]
When he first saw implementations of instant messaging, Dorsey wondered whether the software's user status output could be shared easily among friends.[12] He approached Odeo, which at the time happened to be interested in text messaging.[12] Dorsey and Biz Stone decided that SMS text suited the status-message idea, and built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks.[12] The idea attracted many users at Odeo and investment from Evan Williams,[12] a co-founder of that firm in 2005 who had left Google after selling Pyra Labs and Blogger.
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