“The cell phone is the most transformative technology for development.”
-Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University economist and emerging markets expert
Jack Dorsey grew up in downtown St. Louis and was obsessed with city life, the flow of human interaction, and computer programming. He had always kept a journal and had pondered how technology could make this task easier. Dorsey was working as a programmer in San Francisco when RIM’s mobile email device started making waves in the late 1990s. He immediately got hooked on the BlackBerry and wrote a piece of software to categorize emails as journal entries. . Dorsey was also one of the first users of LiveJournal, a social network that allowed people to view their friends’ posts about their activities in reverse chronological order. He had been writing rudimentary software programs to dispatch taxis, ambulances, and courier services since his high school days. So here, at the crossroads of BlackBerry and LiveJournal, he thought he could do for himself what he had been doing for years helping taxis and couriers: declare where he was and what he was doing.
That night in July 2000, Dorsey wrote code that allowed him to republish an email to as many people as he wanted. He entered the email addresses of five friends into the software, wrote an email with the subject line “I’m in the Bison Paddock looking at the bison” and took a walk to Golden Gate Park. His friends were not very enthusiastic because no one else had a mobile email device. Besides, no one really cared what Dorsey was doing in the park. But he continued to refine the concept, and by 2001 he had sketched out a basic template for a service he called Stat.us. A few years later, in 2006, Dorsey joined San Francisco software startup Odeo, which aimed to produce a directory of podcasts. But when Apple added a podcast directory to iTunes, Odeo’s business plan went down the drain. At that point, with Odeo in hard reset mode, his boss Evan Williams asked his staff for new ideas and Dorsey laid out his vision for Stat.us.
Dorsey was passionate about city life and the locomotives, police cars and taxis that were a part of it. He was fascinated by the way drivers and dispatchers radioed locations into taxi communications. Dorsey proposed that Odeo create a service that would allow anyone to write a line or two and send that message to anyone who wanted to receive it. The brief text alert was a way to add a missing human element in the ever-expanding digital life. The timing was flawless because texting had just started to take off in the United States. Dorsey would work closely with several others on a project called “twttr”. Before long, the team had a working product, and Dorsey wrote the first “just set up my twttr” tweet to coworkers. Williams wanted to turn Odeo into a multi-company incubator, so Dorsey became CEO of the new company that became known worldwide as Twitter. By 2011, when Twitter, with its precision and minimalism, became the center of modern culture, Dorsey had 1.6 million followers.
However, as Twitter became a cultural force, Dorsey was being pushed out. Although he was named president, he was no longer an employee of the company. He had seen all this before during the dot-com frenzy when, in 1998, he, along with Greg Kidd, had created dNetservice for sending email online. They raised money, hired a CEO, and then the new boss ousted the co-founders over strategy disagreements just as the tech bubble burst. Fast forward to October 16, 2008, Evan Williams took over as CEO of Twitter and the episode was like deja vu. But before Dorsey had time to sink into despondency, he got a call from Jim McKelvey. McKelvey had hired Dorsey as a teenage programmer for his St. Louis-based company that archived documents on CD-ROMs; he later became Dorsey’s business partner. Later in 2008, McKelvey passed the reins of the software company to him and opened a glassblowing studio in St. Louis. One day, after losing a $2,000 customer just because he wasn’t equipped to accept American Express, he called Dorsey.
They were talking on their iPhones when McKelvey proposed building a system that would make and accept credit card payments on smartphones. Within days, McKelvey left St. Louis, moved to San Francisco to team up with Dorsey and Tristan O’Tierney, and began work on what would eventually become Square Inc. It took them a month to cobble together a working prototype with codenamed Squirrel. Dorsey worked on the back-end server, O’Tierney on the iPhone app, and McKelvey worked on hardware and establishing relationships with payment partners. McKelvey built the prototype credit card reader; otherwise, he didn’t actually work at Square on a regular basis. In 2009, the three envisioned a business around a free device that would be given out to anyone who signed up: a small, square-shaped credit card reader that could be plugged into the headphone jack of an iPhone, Android phone, or a tablet. .
