Jack Dorsey was born on
November 19, 1976, in St. Louis, Missouri, as the oldest of three boys. He had a speech impediment and struggled
to communicate with family and classmates. Jack was unable to say more
than one syllable at a time. Later, he described his difficulties,
saying “I could pronounce [words] in my head, but they just would not come out.” Jack’s parents took him to speech therapy
and, after two years, he improved greatly. Though he overcame his speech impediment, it
left an effect on the way he communicated. Jack became very reserved. He was more often the listener and
observer, and he couldn’t help but overanalyze himself when he spoke. Jack’s family moved a lot
while he was growing up. His father, Tim, was an engineer
who specialized in medical devices and changed jobs often. Marcia, Jack's mother, was a stay-at-home
mom who later opened a coffee shop. Because of his father’s job, Jack had
an early introduction to computers. A bit of a loner growing up, Jack
was quite taken with computers. Instead of wanting action figures
or toys, he wanted new technologies. At eight-years-old, his father bought
him his first computer, an IBM PC Junior. Jack learned to speak in code. Three years later, Jack got a Macintosh. By the time he was a teenager, he had taught
himself how to build computer programs and was helping Tim with work projects. Jack was also drawn to maps, city
planning, and how people in cities were connected in real-time. He followed the movement of
police and emergency cars, using a program he made himself. He listened to a police scanner and noticed
the way people spoke to convey information. They updated each other often and used
code to communicate in a short time. Jack got his first job in the field
when he was only 15-years-old. He was a programmer at Mira Digital
Publishing, owned by Jim McKelvey. Unpopular at school, he found
immediate success in the workforce. At Mira, Jack soon earned himself a reputation
for hard work, efficiency, and perfectionism. When he was still an intern, he was
managing people who were twice his age. Jim even referred to himself as the
“assistant to the summer intern,” because Jack was so valuable. When Jack turned 16, he became interested
in logistic dispatching and tried to start his own business: a bike messenger service. There wasn’t very much demand
for bicycle couriers in St. Louis, but Jack got to practice writing
code and he learned a lot about dispatch. After high school, Jack enrolled in the
Missouri University of Science and Technology, and majored in computer science and math. While in college, Jack came across a
company called Dispatch Management Services. It managed bicycle messengers in New York. He hacked the security system of the
company's website to expose its flaws. Jack then found the email of the
top manager, Greg Kidd, and told him about the security issue. Though he could have been arrested,
Jack was instead offered a job at DMSC. Later that year, Jack left Missouri
and transferred to New York University. There, he continued to work for
DMSC but that would soon change. As the Internet exploded and was being
used on computers all over the world, Jack and Greg tried to convince DMSC to focus
on their online presence to no avail. Frustrated, they both ended
up leaving the company. Around this time, Jack had been working on
courier software that would dispatch taxi and emergency vehicles using the Internet. He and Greg decided to move to San
Francisco and begin a Web-based dispatch company together, called DNet. DNet would provide same-day
delivery of online purchases. Jack then dropped out of university with only
one semester left and moved to San Francisco. There, he adopted a new look for himself. He wore dreadlocks that he would dye
different bright colours, wore earrings and a nose ring, and got tattoos. Unfortunately, Jack’s time
at DNet was cut short. The company’s CEO fired Jack when
they disagreed on business strategy. DNet did not survive for much longer and
failed during the Internet bubble crash. While this crash was devastating at the time
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to investment, tread carefully. Nothing is risk-free. Now unemployed and with no degree, Jack
moved around to a few cities in pursuit of relationships that also failed. Feeling like a complete failure at 26, he
made the difficult decision to return home. Back in St. Louis, Jack worked on coding for his
father, who had started his own business. Still, he had almost no money
to support himself with. He was very fascinated by eBay, but
didn’t have anything he could sell. Instead, Jack auctioned an offer to read
a children’s book called Goodnight Moon. He sold his service to four people,
including one who paid $100. Jack then decided to study botanical
illustration and would visit the Missouri Botanical Garden to sketch the plants. His mother, Marcia, liked to
paint and Jack was also an artist. But he realized he couldn’t make a living this
way and turned to an unexpected career path. Jack’s wrists were in pain
from years of programming. He was developing RSI,
repetitive strain injury. He tried using special keyboards that reduced
finger movement, but they didn’t help much. Jack was suffering from carpal
tunnel and needed relief. One of his friends suggested
that he get a massage. Not one to do anything halfway, Jack
learned how to give massages as well. He wanted to understand the
theory and the practice. Jack wound up studying a thousand hours of
massage therapy training and got his license. Eventually, Jack planned to start a
chair-massage service in San Francisco. His specialty would be that he
gave massages to programmers. He could give them massage therapy and also
speak to them about their coding issues. But when Jack returned to San Francisco,
he found the city was full of massage therapists and gave up on the idea. Jack then reconnected with Greg and
started babysitting his daughter in exchange for room and board. By night, he returned to coding and
ultimately decided to re-enter the field. His dream was to one day
work at a real tech start-up. While in search of opportunities, Jack ended
up working as a coder for a ferry company. Their ticketing program needed to
be updated and made more secure. His employer was unimpressed with Jack’s look
and told him to take out his nose ring at work. Instead of removing it, Jack wore
a bandaid to cover it in protest. He didn’t agree with changing his
personal choices for his employer. After the gig ended, Jack took up an artistic
pursuit again and went into fashion design. He took a fashion class, studied figure
drawing, and designed denim and a few skirts. But fashion remained a hobby, and Jack
refocused on a career in programming. One of his issues was that he found
it difficult to work for products and companies that he wasn’t passionate about. Around this time, Jack would often sit at
cafés, and particularly liked to sit by the window of one, letting the world pass him by. Jack was frustrated with
where he was in his life. He wasn’t working in an exciting
start-up like he hoped, and was wondering what options he had. Sitting in that café one day, Jack saw
someone familiar walk by the window. Jack had never met the man, a
well-known Internet entrepreneur, but he'd read many stories about him. As fate would have it, the man
walked right into the café. If he hadn’t, Twitter might
never have been created. The Twitter founding team seemed to
come together by luck and chance. They experienced similarities
in their upbringings. None of them quite fit into their
surroundings while growing up. All of them were college dropouts. They shared a relentless
drive to pursue their dreams. Evan Williams, known as
Ev, was raised by farmers. As a kid, he was a shy
daydreamer and an outsider. The guys around him loved to hunt, fish,
and shoot guns, but Ev was different. He would sketch ideas for video games,
take apart and reassemble his bike, and dream about buying a computer one day. After he moved to California and
learned how to write code, Ev created Blogger while working in a start-up. Blogger spread in the tech community,
then grew out to the rest of the world. Though his product was popular, Ev was
so broke he was barely managing to eat. Blogger reached a million users and there
was considerable buzz surrounding Ev. He was even featured in Forbes magazine. Noah Glass was also considered
unusual by people who met him. He was born in northern California, in a
rundown house next to a shabby barn where a hippie commune lived, including his mother. His father went out to get milk shortly
after Noah was born and never came back. Noah ended up living with his grandparents
and left the commune at an early age. He was a gentle and artistic
spirit who was full of energy. Noah moved quickly and jumped
from thought to thought. Once, he was even arrested because the police
thought he was under the influence of drugs. After multiple tests and an overnight stay,
they discovered that was just the way Noah was. One morning, Noah picked up an issue of
Forbes magazine and almost fell over. There was a picture of Ev,
in front of a computer with a distinctive orange Blogger sticker. In the background, a window showed the
kitchen of another apartment – the very same apartment Noah was standing in. They were neighbors! Noah jumped up and went to his balcony,
calling out to Ev to introduce himself. The two became good friends. Noah was also in the tech world, and
was working on a pirate-radio project that would allow anyone to set up
a radio station without a license. For Ev, Blogger became big enough to get
the attention of Google, and they bought it from him for millions of dollars. Ev became one of the Silicon Valley tech
entrepreneurs that so many people longed to be. Inspired by Blogger, Noah adapted his
pirate-radio project to an audio-blog service. It would allow people to create
and share podcasts with ease. He asked Ev to consider
investing in the business. Though Ev was hesitant to work with
friends at first, he eventually agreed. They named the start-up, Odeo. Later that year, it was Ev who
entered the café Jack was sitting in. It was like a sign from the universe. Jack immediately searched for
Evan’s email and sent him a resume. He mentioned that he had seen Ev at a
cafe, and asked whether he was hiring. Jack secured an interview with Ev and
Noah and was soon working at Odeo. The final piece of the Twitter
founding team was Biz Stone. Though Biz came from a wealthy Boston
neighborhood, he grew up on food stamps. His mother had several kids to care
for, and his father — a hot-tempered drinker — wasn’t around often. Biz's mother would sell their house
every few years, downgrading and using the sale money to pay bills. So, as Biz grew bigger,
his houses grew smaller. His childhood best friend had a computer
in his home, and he spent most of his time there playing video games. As a young adult, Biz worked at
a blogging network called Xanga. But Biz decided to quit after discovering
the company was profiting off private data from users under the age of
13 without their parents’ consent. He sent a cold email reaching out to Ev,
hoping to work at Google as part of Blogger. After some back-and-forth, Biz got the job
and moved from the east coast to California. When Ev left Google to work on his
own projects, including Odeo, Biz quit the next year and followed him. The future Twitter founders
were now assembled within Odeo. But their dream of being the first tech company
to occupy the podcast space was short-lived. Apple released its latest iPod, and
with it came a crushing blow to Odeo. Apple would be adding podcasts to
the services offered on iTunes. Odeo was dead in the water. Once again, a discouraged Jack began
to think of other career paths. Again and again, he had
failed in the tech industry. He confessed to Noah one night
that he wanted to leave Odeo, quit tech, and go into fashion design. Odeo had fallen apart. Noah and Ev were constantly at odds. Ev saw Odeo as a dead end, and he wanted
to put the whole experience behind him. Noah was trying to salvage their
efforts by pivoting to a new idea. Noah asked Jack what ideas he might have. Jack thought hard about his various
schemes throughout the years. His interest in the way people connect
and communicate live updates spanned back to those childhood days listening to
emergency responders on police scanners. He remembered his “status” idea for
real-time networks and told Noah about the concept to share live personal updates. Noah was impressed. Jack and the guys had only learned
about SMS, or texting, the past year. It was a popular way to communicate
among teenage girls, but it had not yet reached everyone else’s daily lives. Noah and Jack mused about the idea of
incorporating text messaging into the website. Noah said it would be a way to share
whatever you were up to and stay connected to people no matter how far apart you were. They pitched the idea to the
rest of the team the next day. It was in line with conversations the team had
since Apple's business-ending announcement. Earlier, Ev had pitched the idea
of a messaging platform that friends could follow each other on. But the group didn’t know what
the purpose of the site would be. What would people write
to share with each other? Jack had found the answer. Biz had also pitched the idea of combining
phones with the internet and saw a link between his idea and Jack’s idea. Long story short, everyone was intrigued. It was Noah who came up with the name
“Twitter.” Ev and Biz suggested that, like a blog, past statuses would stay
visible and flow in chronological order. Noah added timestamps and
emphasized the potential for human connection using the network. Jack worked hard to get a prototype
of the service running within a month. The first tweet ever was Jack sharing his first
status update, “just setting up my twttr". For the rest of the day, the
Twitter founders and Odeo employees became absorbed with the network. They wrote updates like “Heading home,” “n bed
readn” and “late night at the office.” Soon after, tweets were limited to 140 characters
to reflect the length of an SMS message and encourage brevity and a sense of speed. Things progressed quickly at the company. But beneath the surface,
tensions were simmering. The four co-founders, so alike in
some ways, were finding it harder and harder to work together. Noah was struggling in the company. While drinking one night, he leaked Twitter
to the press during its secretive early days. He blew up at an Odeo
employee for a small mistake. He wanted to oversee Twitter and was
constantly trying to convince Jack to leave with him to make it themselves. Finally, he was paranoid that he
would be kicked out of the business. Jack found Noah’s behavior so chaotic
that he gave Ev an ultimatum — Jack wouldn’t stay if Noah was here. Ev had no choice but to let go of Noah. Twitter was very slow to grow in the beginning. Many found the tweet character
limit made the platform boring. It was not until a year after its launch
that the industry recognized its value. At the South by Southwest festival, Twitter
named a handful of people its “ambassadors.” They displayed their messages on a screen in
the lobby of the conference centre as a stunt. Afterwards, media blog Gawker
declared that Twitter was “aflame.” Ev named Jack Twitter’s first CEO and
credits him with the idea of Twitter. Jack had always been a brilliant worker,
but he struggled in the new CEO role. Though he was in charge, the employees
did whatever they wanted — perhaps because, not too long ago, Jack had
been working under all of them at Odeo. Within a year, Twitter had 1.3 million users. In spite of its growth, the site
crashed often and struggled to monetize. Ev felt that Jack was failing the company. He was frustrated with the amount of time
Jack spent on his hobbies, as Jack would leave early to work on sketching or fashion design. The relationship between them suffered. Twitter’s board also doubted
Jack’s management ability. Jack had been trying to manage the company’s
finances, but was doing the math wrong. He would make major decisions, such as putting
someone as the head of an entire department, without consulting the board members. Things turned bleak for Twitter’s
first CEO as the board members made up their mind to get rid of Jack. Biz represented Twitter’s moral compass. A year before, when the FBI had tried
to get the company to reveal people’s personal information to investigate
crimes, Biz was firm on denying them. When he heard that Ev and the board were
thinking of firing Jack, he told them he would quit if they went through with it. Though Biz knew that Jack was in over
his head as CEO, he also believed that outright firing him was wrong. Biz had bought Jack some time. Twitter’s board told him he had three
months to right the ship, though they secretly knew that it couldn’t be done. Jack found out about his demise by accident
— one of the board members accidentally included Jack in an email about their
plan to phase him out of the company. With that, Ev became the CEO of Twitter. Jack felt the move was a total betrayal. Though it hurt Jack a lot, he used
the setback to motivate himself. He knew he had to prove that he was not
some one-hit-wonder who had stumbled into a social media phenomenon. He vowed to find a tangible problem
that he could tackle, solve, and profit from, and then returned to St. Louis to pause and reflect. There, Jack caught up with his
former Mira boss, Jim, and decided to start a new company with him. The two wound up creating Square, a
tiny credit card reader that could be plugged into an iPhone headphone jack. Unlike other card processors, Square didn’t
require small businesses earn at least $10,000 to accept credit card payments. Instead, it took a cut of every swipe,
2.75% plus 15 cents, while competitors charged up to 5% plus 10 cents. As Square took off, Jack set
his eyes back on Twitter. He was still a member of the board and
had been slowly convincing the rest of them that Ev was doing a poor job as CEO. It was working. People thought that Ev, while successful
at first, was struggling to manage the company as it grew bigger and bigger. By then, Twitter had well
over 100 million users. Three years after pushing to remove Jack as
CEO, Ev himself was removed by Twitter’s board. Another executive, Dick Costolo, became CEO,
and Jack returned to work in the company. Poor Biz never wanted to be
involved in boardroom battles. He didn’t understand how the
corporate guys could throw a cofounder’s career away so easily. When he heard that the board wouldn’t
even let Ev stay on as head of product, he decided enough was enough. Biz angrily told Dick how wrong these
decisions were and demanded that Ev be allowed to keep a role in the company. Like he did with Jack, Biz threatened
to quit if the plan went through. Unfortunately, once again Biz only managed to
buy his friend a bit of time before his end. Eventually, Biz himself left the company. He didn’t have much of a job there anymore,
and he felt that the moral culture he had worked to create at Twitter was changing. All of Twitter’s founders
were gone, at least for now. A few years later, Jack was
reappointed as CEO of the company, this time as a permanent position. He now had more experience after
building Square and its Cash App. And as the only founder that remained at
the company, Jack was a natural choice. Jack was now leading two
public companies at once. Analysts doubted that he could manage. Being CEO was a large commitment,
and Jack was being stretched and pulled in different directions. Still, Jack led Twitter
and Square impressively. After he started running Twitter again,
its stock increased 70% after five years. At the same time, Square’s stock increased
14 times since the company went public. While looking back at his bumpy road to
success, Jack shared some wisdom, “A founder is not a job, it's a role, 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." After six years as Twitter’s CEO,
Jack stepped down and made his CTO, Parag Agrawal, his successor. Jack advised that Twitter had to
“break away from its founding and founders,” and that dependence on
company founders is “severely limiting.” Today, Twitter is one of the world’s
largest social media platforms with over 200 million users — many of which are
celebrities, world leaders, and activists who use the platform as a megaphone. The company was also recently
sold to entrepreneur, Elon Musk, for a whopping $44 billion. According to Mashable, Elon plans to
significantly increase Twitter’s annual revenue and number of users and reduce the company’s
reliance on making most of its money from ads. This is the story about how a former massage
therapist came together with three other college dropouts to create one of the world’s
most vital social networking websites. He was part of several failed
ventures but always kept trying again. He pursued his lifelong fascination with
live connections, and in time, built a company that’s now worth billions. For more interesting stories about
today's biggest companies, don't forget to subscribe to our channel! Remember, skip the waiting list for Masterworks
by clicking our link, masterworks.art/hook, and start investing in contemporary art today!
