Jack Dorsey, Co-Founder of Twitter and Square, Delivers His Keynote at Disrupt SF

there is no introduction that I could give to do justice to the amazing talents of our next guest please welcome Jack Dorsey co-founder of Twitter and square good morning how is everyone this is huge I'm Jack and there's one reason I'm here about 36 years ago there were two best friends and they started a pizza restaurant there 19 years old one of them was named Tim the other one was named Ron and they saw this pizza restaurant named two nice guys and the pizza restaurant in st. Louis Missouri started doing very very well and they wanted to protect the business and also their friendship and they made one rule is that they would not date the waitstaff and the first person I hired was my mother and I was born 10 months later so that's my founding story and I want to I want to talk a little bit about founders and entrepreneurship I never wanted to be an entrepreneur sorry I'm a little a little bit behind here I never wanted to be an entrepreneur I never woke up one morning and said I need to be an entrepreneur I need to get a ticket to San Francisco I need to get a subscription to entrepreneur magazine although it's a very fine publication I actually wanted to be Bruce Lee but that job was a job was already taken now I wanted to be a sailor I wanted to navigate the world I wanted to see the world and to explore and to experience it I wanted to be a tailor I wanted to craft amazing products I wanted to build things for myself that I could share with others and and love the work and I wanted to be an artist specifically a surrealist the my favorites because they see the world in a very very different way that really opens your eyes and makes you think in different ways along the way I realized that there was something interesting which was life really happens at intersections and for me it was truly intersections I was fascinated by cities and what was happening around me in a city and what I found was it what was really important was recognizing what was happening in that intersection and determining the right thing to do then I started looking at founders and these are some guys that you've heard a lot about recently founders of our nation they had a lot of really good ideas but they had one great idea and that great idea can be summed up in the phrase a more perfect union they the realization that they weren't going to get everything right the first time around that a lot of the work had to be unfinished a lot of work had to be undefined unpainted and open to the Future open to change open to evolution and that there would not be one founding moment of this nation of this organization of this company but in fact many because a lot of the ideas they had at the time were just purely wrong they were disproven and they're disproven again and again and again by men like President Lincoln and it wasn't just individuals that disproved some of these initial founding concepts but is also the people rising to speak their voice and to push the country in new and amazing ways John F Kennedy not only pushed us to think about ourselves but think about what's outside of this planet which outside the world so there's a there's a massive amount of energy spent an emphasis spent on the original founding moment of a company for Twitter a lot of people consider eV biz myself and this green deer to be the founders of the company but that ignores reality companies exist and evolve over time and in fact they have multiple founding moments so I consider Dick Costolo our CEO a founder he's had such a dramatic impact on the company the culture what we're doing that he's really questioned everything that we started with and made it better Heath our CEO at square another person i consider a founder of the company because he has the attitude because he came in and made an impact and he changed the course of the company with that attitude and with that impact Howard Schultz not a founder of Starbucks he joined Starbucks as a director of marketing he went over to Italy he saw all of these cafes on the street he saw what they were serving they were serving espresso drinks cappuccinos lattes and he thought that that might also work in the United States he brought it back to the management they said that'll never work we're not doing that he was given an opportunity to start one firm with serving expresso drinks it worked out management still said no so he left and he started his own company that that served espresso drinks instead of beans two years later they sold him the brand Starbucks 30 years later here we are the largest multinational corporation on the planet and a massive success not a founder but amazing amazing impact and has the moral authority of the company right now to really transform it in new and interesting ways Marissa not a founder of Google certainly not a founder of Yahoo but has the context as the drive has the recognition and has the moral authority to really change and to create another founding moment within the company so in our companies in Twitter and square we believe this to be true an idea that can change the course of the company can happen and can come from anywhere so a founder is not a job it's a role it's an attitude and it's something that can happen again and again and again and in fact it has to happen again and again and again otherwise we would not move forward if we stuck to the ideas of our original founders of this nation we would not be here today this country would not evolve this nation would not involve this organization would not involve and neither would these companies there's this great quote by a science fiction writer named William Gibson which says the future has already arrived it's just not evenly distributed yet so just think about this for a month the future is already here it's already arrived it's just not evenly distributed yet so our job as founders as entrepreneurs which is just someone with curiosity confidence and cleverness is to distribute the future that's already here it's in our companies it's in this room we need to make sure that spreads all over the world and to do so as quickly as possible with the right amount of purpose and the right the right values this is disruption disruption is like an earthquake disruption has no purpose it has no values it has no organizing principle it has no direction and it has no leadership I think we have to change the name of this conference this is not what we want to bring into the world what we want to bring into the world is revolution revolution has values revolution has purpose revolution has direction has leaders revolution looks at the intersection ahead and pushes people to do the right thing and it doesn't always have to be loud it doesn't always have to be violent it's just as powerful in its stillness so the thing I would love for all of you to consider is how we recognize disruption how we recognize everything that's going on in the world how we recognize easy these intersections ahead of us and how we take on the attitude of founders how we take on the attitude of entrepreneurs and we distribute the future as quickly as possible speeches will not distribute the future the tools that all of you are building will accelerate that will distribute the future and that's what we want to do in the world we don't want disruption where we just move things around from point A to point B we want a direction we want a purpose and we want to combine forces and we want to cooperate to get there because it's not going to happen alone and the important thing to realize is that you don't have to start from scratch to do something interesting you don't have to start from scratch to have a massive impact in the world you have to have a good idea you have to convince other people of those ideas and you have to push as quickly as possible Twitter was not started because we started a company Twitter was started because we had a good idea and it started out of a failed company that can happen in any company today that can happen in any organization today but I challenge you to think about is to pick a movement to pick a revolution and join it I want to end with one of my favorite quotes which is join us jicama movement take something that you believe in and pick something that you want to make an impact in and then question every single thing and be a founder and be an entrepreneur inside those organizations and inside that movement but actually Gandhi never said this it was actually this guy so the what we really need to do here in San Francisco and here in the world is to really use technology to remind people that were you're human that civilization is meant to connect together civilization is meant to be easy and the technology should completely disappear and should be easy to pick up and every single person in this room can be a founder be an entrepreneur and have a massive massive impact in the world thank you very much

Channel: TechCrunch

Views: 86,389

Keywords: Disrupt San Fransisco, disrupt sf 2012, TechCrunch Disrupt, TechCrunch, Disrupt, tech, technology, Jack Dorsey, twitter, square, twitter founder, square founder

Id: J-y8TcHT8Lg

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 21 2012