Jack Dorsey
Born	19 November 1976 (1976-11-19) (age 33)[1] St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Residence	San Francisco, California,  United States
Occupation	software architect, businessperson

Jack Dorsey (born November 19, 1976) is an American software architect and businessperson best known as the creator of Twitter.^[2] BusinessWeek called him one of technology's "best and brightest".^[3] MIT's Technology Review named him in the TR35, an outstanding innovator under the age of 35.^[4]

[edit] Early years

Dorsey grew up in St. Louis, Missouri.^[5] By age 14, he was interested in dispatch routing. Some of his open source software in this genre is still in use by taxicab companies.^[5] He attended University of Missouri–Rolla and New York University.^[6] While working on dispatching as a programmer he later moved to California.^[3][7]

In Oakland in 2000, Dorsey started his company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web.^[8] His other projects and ideas at this time included networks of medical devices and a "frictionless service market".^[8] In July 2000, building on dispatching^[5] and inspired in part by LiveJournal and possibly by AOL Instant Messenger, he had the idea for the realtime status communication.^[8]

When he first saw implementations of instant messaging, Dorsey had wondered if the software's user status output could be shared among friends easily.^[5] He approached Odeo, who at the time happened to be interested in text messaging.^[5] Dorsey and Biz Stone decided that SMS text suited the status message idea, and built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks.^[5] The idea attracted many users at Odeo and investment from Evan Williams^[5] who had left Google after selling them Pyra Labs and Blogger.

[edit] Twitter, Inc.

Biz Stone and Dorsey accepting a TechCrunch award for best mobile startup

Dorsey, Stone and Williams co-founded Obvious which then spun off Twitter, Inc.^[5] As chief executive officer, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of funding by the venture capitalists who back the company.^[9] On 16 October 2008^[10] Williams took over the role of CEO, and Dorsey became chairman of the board.^[11]

As the service grew in popularity, Dorsey had to choose improving uptime as top priority,^[12] even over creating revenue – which, as of 2008, Twitter was not designed to earn.^[13] Dorsey described the commercial use of Twitter and its API as two things that could lead to paid features.^[13] His three guiding principles, which are shared by the whole company and through its culture, are simplicity, constraint and craftsmanship.^[13]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jack Dorsey

• Jack Dorsey on Twitter