nDorsey, Twitter & Square Visionary
from Business Insider.com 10/12 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz
Jack Dorsey’s continued success & dedication to change how we look at the world has led many tech pundits to call him the next Steve Jobs – who was the Visionary behind Apple. Dorsey has had a similar path as Jobs. Just as Jobs got the boot out of Apple – the company he founded, so did Dorsey at Twitter. But both eventually found their way back into their respective companies and turned into the lead product Visionaries at them.
How Jack started. While growing up in St. Louis, Missouri –at 14 – Dorsey became interested in Dispatch Routing and wrote open source SW to help “dispatch” Taxis to waiting customers. He eventually moved to New York City, the “Capital of Taxis”, to study at NYU. Several years later, in 2000, he started a company in Oakland, California, to dispatch couriers, taxis, & emergency services from the web.
The birth of Twitter. That same year, Dorsey signed up for Live Journal – a social network where users can share Blogs. Inspired by the experience, he thought of ways to improve the service: make a more real-time, up-to-date Blogging service that you can share with friends.
Real-time Blogging was the concept he thought about for the next 5 yrs and tried to silently introduce it into my various projects,” Dorsey. “It slipped into my dispatch work. It slipped into my networks of medical devices. It slipped into an idea for a “frictionless” service market. It was everywhere I looked: a wonderful abstraction which was easy to implement and understand.”
Pod-Casting to Twitter. After dropping out of NYU, Dorsey later found himself working at Evan Williams’ Podcasting service Odeo in 2006. It was there that Dorsey’s idea fully manifested into Twitter and Williams named him CEO. In 2008, Twitter’s board of directors and Williams pushed Dorsey out of the company, because he was struggling to keep the site up & running. This effectively made Williams the new CEO and Dorsey the chairman of Twitter. In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, Dorsey said that it felt like being “punched in the stomach” when the board ousted him from the company that he created.
[ Founding of Square, Back to Twitter, Making Life better w/ Tech in Premium Content ]