Jack Dorsey: The man who reshaped global communication

By Thejaswini M A; Translated by Block Unicorn

Foreword

A hush fell in the conference room. In October 2008, Jack Dorsey looked around the table at Twitter's board members, searching for an ally, but found none.

Evan Williams wouldn't meet his gaze. Venture capitalists spoke cautiously of "operational challenges" and "management issues."

The platform crashed frequently. Employees complained about him leaving early for yoga class. The board had lost confidence in him.

Fred Wilson announced the decision: they wanted new leadership. Williams would take over as CEO. Dorsey would remain chairman, but his day-to-day control of Twitter was over.

He didn't argue. At 31, he had never managed a company of this scale, and the pressure was suffocating. But as he left the building that housed his brainchild, he felt a sting. The platform stemmed from his teenage fascination with dispatch communications. Now, that vision belonged to someone else. Getting fired from the company he founded taught him lessons never taught in business school. For Dorsey, this was just the beginning. Hacking for a Job Jack Patrick Dorsey grew up in a working-class Catholic family in Missouri. His father built mass spectrometers, and his mother ran a cafe. Young Jack, with a speech impediment, was housebound for extended periods, where he was introduced to computers and communications systems. Dorsey wrote dispatch software. Real taxi companies use his code to coordinate their fleets and solve real problems for real businesses. His obsession was no accident. Dorsey had recognized the power of short, frequent updates to coordinate complex systems. Emergency dispatchers don't waste time; clarity can save lives. What if that same efficiency could improve everyday communication? At Bishop Dubourg High School, he worked part-time as a fashion model. After school, he would hack into systems, not to destroy them, but to understand how they worked. A life-changing hack occurred at age 16. Dispatch Management Services had a website but listed no contact information. When Dorsey discovered a security vulnerability, instead of exploiting it, he emailed the company's chairman, explaining the flaw and how to fix it. Dorsey used this opportunity to start a conversation. Chairman Greg Kidd hired him within a week. The teenager from Missouri now worked for a Manhattan logistics company, learning how to coordinate transportation and resources in real time. At 14, the dispatch software he wrote was actually used by taxi companies. At 18, he dropped out of New York University just one semester shy of graduating. He had so many ideas on his mind that he couldn't bear to wait for his diploma. What if people could send short status updates to their friends, just like dispatchers update their location and activities? What if you could know what everyone in your network was up to without having to make a phone call or send a long email? In 2000, Dorsey moved to California and founded a company focused on dispatching couriers and emergency services online. The venture failed. For the next five years, he worked as a freelance programmer, honing his idea, waiting for the right moment. That moment arrived in 2006, when he joined the struggling podcast company Odeo. During a brainstorming session, Dorsey came up with his concept for status updates. He described it as a platform that combined the broadcast nature of blogging with the immediacy of instant messaging. Working with Noah Glass and Biz Stone, Dorsey built the first prototype of Twitter in two weeks. The name "twttr" was a play on the five-character text message code format, inspired by Flickr.

At 9:50 PM on March 21, 2006, Dorsey posted his first tweet: "just setting up my twttr."

Those 24 characters changed the way millions of people communicate.

Twitter's breakthrough moment came at the 2007 South by Southwest music festival. Attendees used the service to coordinate get-togethers and share real-time updates. During the festival, daily tweets surged from 20,000 to 60,000. Dorsey's teenage intuition about status updates proved correct.

But success brought challenges he wasn't prepared for. During his tenure as CEO from 2007 to 2008, Dorsey struggled to keep up with Twitter's operational demands. The service frequently crashed. Employees complained about his management style. Reports surfaced of him leaving get off work early to attend yoga and fashion design classes. The board lost patience. October 2008 arrived like Judgment Day. They fired him from his own brainchild. Co-founder Evan Williams took over. Dorsey retained the title of chairman, but everyone knew the truth. The teenage genius who had dreamed up Twitter was deemed unfit to run it. The lesson was painful, but also sobering. Dorsey could build products people loved, but he couldn't yet build an organization that could scale. Instead of retreating, he pivoted. His former boss, Jim McKelvey, had recently lost a glass art sale because he couldn't accept credit card payments. McKelvey shared the frustration of millions of small business owners who lacked access to merchant services. Their solution was a small, square device that plugged into the headphone jack of a smartphone. It allowed anyone, anywhere to accept credit card payments. The first Square card reader cost just $10 and turned every phone into a point-of-sale system. Square embodied the same philosophy as Twitter: removing barriers and democratizing access. If Twitter gave everyone a broadcasting platform, Square gave every entrepreneur the payment processing power only large companies could possess. The company officially launched in 2010. This time, Dorsey applied the lessons learned from Twitter. He built a stronger operating system, hired experienced managers, and focused on sustainable growth rather than virality. By 2015, Twitter, under its new leadership, was struggling. User growth stagnated, and the stock price plummeted. Competitors like Facebook and Instagram were attracting more attention. The board asked Dorsey to return to the CEO role, but with an unprecedented condition: he had to remain CEO of Square. Critics questioned whether one person could effectively manage two large public companies simultaneously. He maintained offices at both companies, meticulously planned his daily schedule down to the minute, and relied on his leadership team for strategic direction. The arrangement worked. Twitter stabilized, while Square continued to grow and went public in November 2015. Both companies benefited from Dorsey's design acumen and his ability to simplify complexity and find simple solutions. The fired CEO learned to be a leader. Building the Currency of the Future As Dorsey rebuilt his career, he discovered Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency embodied the principles he had learned in scheduling systems: decentralization, peer-to-peer communication, and the elimination of middlemen. "Bitcoin revolutionized everything," he declared in 2018. If he weren't running Twitter and Square, he would be dedicated to Bitcoin full-time. He wasn't content with just lip service. In 2020, Square invested $50 million in Bitcoin and later added another $170 million. Through Square's Cash App, he made Bitcoin accessible to millions of people who had never owned cryptocurrency before. Dorsey also founded Spiral, a division that funds open-source Bitcoin development. Unlike most profit-oriented corporate crypto projects, Spiral's mission is altruistic: to improve Bitcoin's infrastructure for everyone. But his second stint as Twitter CEO came amid increasing scrutiny of the platform. The 2016 election exposed how foreign powers used Twitter to spread disinformation. Congressional hearings and advertiser boycotts became commonplace. The challenges peaked after the 2020 election. Twitter began labeling controversial tweets and ultimately suspended high-profile accounts, including President Trump, after the January 6th Capitol riot. Dorsey defended these decisions as necessary, but he also acknowledged their impact. "I believe this was the right decision for Twitter," he wrote of the suspension of Trump's account. "But I also believe it's important to examine the broader implications of this action for the global public conversation."

The experience reinforced his growing belief that centralized platforms wield too much power. He began funding research into decentralized alternatives, including the Twitter-backed Bluesky project, which is developing an open social media protocol.

On November 29, 2021, Dorsey resigned as Twitter's CEO for the second time. His resignation letter explained his reasons: "I have decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founder."

Unlike his first departure, this one was voluntary and planned. He prepared his successor, CTO Parag Agrawal, believing Twitter needed leadership without the baggage of the founder's era.

Less than a year later, Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion and began implementing his vision. Dorsey retained a 2.4% stake but made few public comments about the changes. After leaving Twitter, Dorsey became a decentralization evangelist. He donated 14 bitcoins to support Nostr, a decentralized social networking protocol that requires no central servers or corporate control. At Block, he doubled down on the Bitcoin project. The company developed a 3-nanometer Bitcoin mining chip and launched Bitkey, a self-hosted wallet designed for mainstream users. Block's mining hardware features a modular design and is expected to have a lifespan of ten years, rather than the industry standard of three to five years. Today, Dorsey stands at the intersection of technology and ideology. Through Block, he is building financial infrastructure for a post-traditional banking world. Through his advocacy of Bitcoin and funding of Nostr, he is promoting alternatives to existing internet platforms. Threading all of this is his belief that individuals should control their own financial and digital lives. Bitcoin eliminates dependence on banks and governments. Nostr eliminates dependence on platform companies. Self-hosted wallets eliminate dependence on exchanges. These are all expressions of a political philosophy that values ​​individual sovereignty over institutional control.

Dorsey remains as focused on the future as he was when he dreamed up real-time city maps. His current projects reflect what he believes is the most important internet infrastructure still under construction.

The police scanners that first inspired him still influence how he thinks about communication. The best messages are concise, clear, and actionable.

They tell you where someone is and where they're going.

Everything else is noise.

Dorsey's achievements extend beyond Twitter or the Block. He showed that complex systems can be simplified without losing functionality.

The scanners are still crackling. He's still listening. He's still building a map of everything happening in real time.

So much for Jack Dorsey.