Jack Dorsey: How I Juggle Twitter And Square

you're working at two companies simultaneously which is kind of extraordinary in itself and you have this amazing way of you spent just talk really quickly about how you balance those two I think it's kind of interesting yeah so I um the only way to do this is to be very disciplined and very practiced um and uh and the way I found that works for me is I theme my days so on Mon Monday both companies focus on management and running the company which which is uh you know we have our directional meeting at Square we have our opcom meeting at at Twitter I do all my management 101's on that day Tuesday is focused on product Wednesday is focused on marketing and Communications and growth Thursday is focused on uh developers and Partnerships and Friday is uh is focused on the company and the culture and recruiting and Saturday I take off I hike uh and then Sunday is reflection feedback strategy getting getting ready for the the rest of the week and there's interruptions all the time but uh I can quickly deal with an interruption and then know that it's Tuesday I have product meetings and I need to focus on product stuff uh it also sets a good Cadence for the rest of the company so that we're always delivering we're always showing you know where we were last week and and where we're going to be uh the the following week um so it's been good but we're always we're always evolving it and you're splitting your time equally between the two yep how many hours at each one um eight hours at uh at each one and I live across the stre eight hours at each one every day but he's a young guy um that's impressive but okay talk me to us a little bit about what unites these two companies in your mind what is it that sort of the overarching trend or Zeitgeist that these two companies represent how do you think of them in your own mind as unified because I know you do I do and I think the uh the common base uh for both of them uh these in particular I don't know if there's an overall trend are they're both utilities um that an individual or an organization of any size can pick up and use immediately so in Twitter's case uh you can pick up any phone any device at all and use it to broadcast to the world immediately um as an individual or as the largest government in the world you can also use it to figure out what other people are doing what's happening in the world right now what's happening not only with what you care about and what's immediately around you but the entire world uh because we have more and more people using Twitter every day and using this way to share and to uh and to communicate with the world in Square's case it's the ability to instantly start a business 90% of this country pays with a plastic card no one is carrying checks around anymore no one's carrying cash around anymore um so that form of payment uh to actually start a business start to receiving uh payment for services has been cut off for many small merchants and for many so proprietorships and you know if I got really good at piano and want to teach other people or want to teach people tennis because I'm a pro I can't tap into the the the element that everyone's using that everyone has in their pocket so Square enables people to immediately start accepting credit cards from a tool they already have which is their mobile phone uh and it's not just individuals it's small businesses and medium-sized businesses and large businesses and and both uh you know both companies scale that very dynamic range and both companies are interesting in that they're true utilities you know we haven't defined a lot of how people are going to use them people come to each service and because they're still so nent both of them yeah well well also because they're abstract enough that people can do whatever they want with them right so well you don't want to Define it too much we don't want to we we don't want to make Square all about taxi caps and we don't want to make Twitter all about celebrities or politics everyone comes to each and they Define what they want to do with the service uh and they run with it um and and that to me is the best sort of uh technology is actually building a foundational utility that people can come to and build products on top of and build companies and movements and all these other things

Channel: Forbes

Views: 8,883

Keywords: Techonomy, Forbes, Tucson, TETucson, Twitter, Square, Jack Dorsey, David Kirkpatrick

Id: 0oT0DGonREo

Length: 4min 27sec (267 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 14 2011