Jack Dorsey

Jack Dorsey
Dorsey in 2018
Born	Jack Patrick Dorsey (1976-11-19) November 19, 1976 (age 48)[1] St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Occupation(s)	software designer, entrepreneur

Jack Patrick Dorsey (born November 19, 1976)^[3] 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.^[4] In 2008, he was named as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.^[5]

He worked as a model.^{[6][7][8][9][10]}

Dorsey was born Jack Patrick Dorsey in St. Louis, Missouri,^[11][12] the son of Tim and Marcia (née Smith) Dorsey.^[13][14][15] He is of English, Irish, and Italian descent.^[16] His father worked for a company that developed mass spectrometers and his mother was a homemaker.^[17]

He was raised Catholic, and his uncle is a Catholic priest in Cincinnati.^[18] He attended the Catholic Bishop DuBourg High School. In his younger days, Dorsey worked occasionally as a fashion model.^{[19][20][21][22][23]}

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.^[13] Dorsey attended the University of Missouri–Rolla for two-plus years (1995–97)^[18] before transferring to New York University, but he dropped out in 1999,^[24] one semester short of graduating.^[18] He came up with the idea that he developed as Twitter while studying at NYU.^[18][25]

While working on dispatching as a programmer, Dorsey moved to California.^[26][27] In 2000, Dorsey started his company in Oakland to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web.^[28] His other projects and ideas at this time included networks of medical devices and a "frictionless service market".^[28] In July 2000, building on dispatching^[13] 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.^[28]

When he first saw implementations of instant messaging, Dorsey wondered whether the software's user status output could be shared easily among friends.^[13] He approached Odeo, which at the time happened to be interested in text messaging.^[13] Dorsey and Biz Stone decided that SMS text suited the status-message idea, and built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks.^[13] The idea attracted many users at Odeo and investment from Evan Williams,^[13] a co-founder of that firm in 2005 who had left Google after selling Pyra Labs and Blogger.

• Max, D. T. (October 21, 2013). "Two-hit wonder". Profiles. The New Yorker. Vol. 89, no. 33. pp. 48–59.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jack Dorsey.

• Jack Dorsey Corporate Bio at the Wayback Machine (archived June 18, 2017)
• Jack on Twitter

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