Writing when you have a word limit to stick to is stimulating and challenging at the same time. Leveraging the character limit for your own good is simply another level. And that’s the idea behind Twitter.
With 280-character posts called “tweets,” this social media site has changed the way short messages are sent. News, views, reviews, and whatnot are exchanged on Twitter.
Sports, politics, the movie industry, social workers, businessmen, organizations, the ordinary public… On Twitter, nearly every class and kind of person could be found. It would have been hard to follow that favorite celeb of yours had it not been for Twitter.
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and founder of Square, is the focus of this article. Jack Dorsey’s net worth is $11.8 billion as of November 2021.
Childhood:—
Jack Dorsey was born on November 19, 1976, in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A. Jack grew up in a middle-class Catholic family. He grew to be an amazing entrepreneur alongside his brothers Andrew and Dannie Dorsey.
Jack was an observant kid who had a speech impediment. As a result, he normally stayed at home and developed a fascination for simplicity. An introvert in childhood, Jack overcame his shyness by participating in various oratory competitions. After many failed attempts, he overcame his fear of speaking in front of the public.
As a teenager, Dorsey loved spending time with computers. An early version of the IBM computer fascinated him, and he spent hours, if not days, analyzing and understanding it.
He wanted to make a live map of New York City with a lot of dots or symbols that stood for cars and landmarks.
Jack Dorsey, Education:
Dorsey went to the Missouri University of Science and Technology after he graduated from high school, but he left after two years to follow his dream of living in New York. He then went to New York University, but left in the last year to work on his idea for Twitter. His goal of creating the live map took over his academics, but fate has its quirks.
During the summer of 1991, Jack Dorsey joined Mira Digital Publishing Company. A young Dorsey interrupted his boss in the middle of a project. Although his boss promised to talk to him within a minute, Jack didn’t get to speak to him.
After the meeting, his boss saw him standing at the same spot. Jack had a thing for patience. He went on to lead a team of programmers in their thirties.
The Dot Com Setback:
Jack Dorsey got into Dispatch Management Services Corp. by hacking their security system and emailing the company’s manager, Greg Kidd, on how to patch the hack. He worked for the company for several years and worked on Greg Kidd’s project called dNet.com.
However, the dot-com bubble destroyed the efforts put in for dNet.com, and Dorsey was left unemployed. His condition was so bad that he had to go for massage therapy courses.
The Odeo Company, which specialized in internet startups, then saved Dorsey. Evan Williams served as the company’s CEO, and it was experiencing a financial crisis and employee ideological conflicts.
Jack Dorsey’s Twitter Launch:
At the heart of Jack’s ideation was the SMS concept. He wanted to combine the SMS idea with an algorithm so that only the sender’s network could read it. This was the core logic behind Twitter.
After two weeks, Dorsey and his friend came up with the iconic blue bird logo for Twitter. Dorsey sent out the first tweet, which read, “Just setting up my twittr” (yes, twittr and not Twitter). Twitter went public in the year 2006.
Jack Dorsey’s First Tweet Ever:
In the beginning, many people labeled the Twitter concept as “useless”. Even Williams was skeptical about its potential. It was a hard time since companies like Odeo, which supported young programmers to build their own companies, were not available to help Dorsey with his Twitter venture.
Naturally, there was a concern for funds to keep Twitter from shuttering. However, the Twitter team soon found a scanned image of half a million dollars in its checkbox. A man named Fred Wilson, who was willing to serve as a strategic consultant for Twitter, offered this payment.His plans assisted Twitter in building a global reach.
Over time, Twitter became more and more important, and the fast changes in smartphone technology only helped it grow. Twitter has around 2.2 billion visits per month at present. During the Southwest Film Festival in 2007, employees used multiple screens to demonstrate the facility of the real-time messages offered by Twitter.
This helped increase the daily tweet count from twenty to sixty thousand. In May 2008, the billionth tweet was posted. In the same year, the market capitalization of Twitter reached a whopping $1.5 billion USD. The market cap of Twitter is currently recorded at $35.13 billion as of December 1, 2021.
Exits Twitter:—
Jack Dorsey has served as the CEO of Twitter since he founded it in 2006. But he had to quit because the board thought there were problems with how the platform worked and how the company was run. He was forced out of his job in 2008.
The genius, on the other hand, witnessed a Steve Jobs-style return to his home company as CEO in 2015, and he ultimately made the decision to leave on November 29, 2021, when Parag Agrawal took his place that same day.
Speaking about Agrawal, Dorsey has mentioned that, firstly, he wants to stop Twitter from being a founder-led entity. Furthermore, he mentioned that his trust in him “is bone deep”. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey said that he won’t be hanging out on the board of Twitter for long.
This is vital because he thinks that it is “important to give Parag the space he needs to lead.” Dorsey took to his homegrown platform to post his resignation letter, which reads:
Working for Square
Dorsey is now working on the development of Square Inc. in parallel with handling Twitter. The company got its name from a small device used to pay with a credit card over the phone.
The Square is a reader inserted into a headphone jack. The information on any credit card can be obtained through a magnetic stripe reader embedded in it.
In 2012, Starbucks invested 25 million USD in Square, Inc. The CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, joined Square’s board and became one of the most important personalities on the board.
In October 2009, Twitter gained its first revenue of around 25 million USD. Google Inc. and Microsoft had a role to play in this deal. The deal was centered on the condition that Twitter messages would become visible to Google and Bing search engines. Later, Dorsey refused to work with Facebook. In 2013, there was a 182% increase in Twitter’s shares.
This was due to an increase in the stock’s value in the IPO (the stock price was 26 USD, but increased to more than 46 USD on the first day of trading). At present, 85% of the revenues come from online advertisements. Thus, it makes him an iconic social media entrepreneur.
Courtesy: StartupTalky