Jack Dorsey, the tech industry’s titan, was once a young St Louis man who tried his hand at modeling.
After Dorsey (45) resigned from his position as Twitter’s chief operating officer, Dorsey will now have ample time to focus on his new hobby: Bitcoin-mining.
Dorsey still remains the CEO of Square Inc, the hugely successful financial payments company that he co-founded in 2010.
Dorsey used his public platform in recent years to promote cryptocurrency and especially bitcoin.
Next chapter: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey resigned on Monday after 16 years with the company he co-founded. He’s currently involved in a new venture that mines bitcoin.
Dorsey started his career as a model, before he switched to computer programming. One month after graduating from NYU, he dropped out.
Square announced to his 5.9 million followers that a new venture was being launched based on bitcoin in July.
Dorsey spoke at the Bitcoin 2021 Convention and stated that bitcoin could help to bring about world peace.
Dorsey is the son of a businessman, and a homemaker. He was born in St Louis.
Dorsey was a young man who dabbled with vintage clothes modeling. He also created dispatch routing software for taxi firms before enrolling at University of Missouri-Rolla. He transferred to New York University in 1995 after more than 2 years. However, he dropped out of school just 1 semester before graduating 1997.
Dorsey was still at NYU when he came up with the idea of Twitter.
To pursue his career in programming, he came to California and founded his company that provided web-based dispatch services.
Dorsey started exploring instant messaging and began to explore the possibility of communicating with small groups of people in real-time. He approached Odeo, a podcasting company, which he found his future Twitter cofounders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone.
Stone and Dorsey built a prototype for Twitter within two weeks. The new service attracted many users to Odeo just before it was shut down.
Twitter was originally known as twttr and launched March 21st 2006. Dorsey sent his first tweet on March 21, 2006, simply saying: Just setting up my Twttr.
The co-founders of the social media startup, Twitter.com, purchased the domain for $7,000.
Dorsey, (far right), co-founded Twitter after meeting his Odeo partners.
Dorsey’s first tweet was sent on March 21st 2006: “Just setting up my twitter twtr”.
Dorsey became the CEO of the company, but he continued to pursue his passions in fashion design and yoga.
In his 2013 book Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, author Nick Bilton quoted Dorsey as telling his business partner Noah Glass: ‘I’m going to quit tech and become a fashion designer.’
Dorsey was willing to leave his job in order to attend fashion design classes at Apparel Arts. This school is located in San Francisco. He also enjoyed drawing and yoga.
Williams, the co-founder of Twitter told Dorsey that you could be either a dressmaker or the chief executive officer of Twitter at one time. But you can’t be both,’ according to Bilton’s book.
Williams replaced Dorsey as CEO in 2008 and he returned to that role in 2015.
In his goodbye letter on Monday, Dorsey said he has ‘worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders” and that to focus too much on whether companies are led by their founders is “severely limiting.’
Dorsey also wrote that he would be retiring from the company’s board in May 2022. This was because he wants to give space to Parag, Parag’s new CEO to take control of things without having to influence him.
Dorsey sent a note to his “team” that stated, “I’m very sad…but really happy.” There aren’t many businesses that reach this level. It’s rare to find founders who will choose their company over personal ego. This was the right decision, and I am certain we will prove it.