DORSEY
Jack

• 1. Early life
• 2. Personal life

Jack Patrick Dorsey is an American technology entrepreneur and philanthropist who is the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, and the founder and CEO of Square, a financial payments company.

Early life

Dorsey was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Tim and Marcia (née Smith) Dorsey. He is of English, Irish, and Italian descent. His father worked for a company that developed mass spectrometers and his mother was a homemaker. He was raised Catholic, and his uncle is a Catholic priest in Cincinnati. He attended the Catholic Bishop DuBourg High School. In his younger days, Dorsey worked occasionally as a fashion model. By age fourteen, Dorsey had become interested in dispatch routing. Some of the open-source software he created in the area of dispatch logistics is still used by taxicab companies. Dorsey attended the University of Missouri–Rolla for two-plus years (1995–97) before transferring to New York University, but he dropped out in 1999, one semester short of graduating. He came up with the idea that he developed as Twitter while studying at NYU.

While working on dispatching as a programmer, Dorsey moved to California. In 2000, Dorsey started his company in Oakland to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web. His other projects and ideas at this time included networks of medical devices and a "frictionless service market". In July 2000, building on dispatching and inspired in part by LiveJournal and by AOL Instant Messenger, he had the idea for a Web-based realtime status/short message communication service.

When he first saw implementations of instant messaging, Dorsey wondered whether the software's user status output could be shared easily among friends. He approached Odeo, which at the time happened to be interested in text messaging. Dorsey and Biz Stone decided that SMS text suited the status-message idea, and built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks. The idea attracted many users at Odeo and investment from Evan Williams, a co-founder of that firm in 2005 who had left Google after selling Pyra Labs and Blogger.

Personal life

In 2012, Dorsey moved to the Sea Cliff neighborhood of San Francisco. He walks five miles to work each morning and calls it a "very clearing time". He is a fan of Kendrick Lamar's music and of French radio station FIP.