Jack Dorsey was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on November 19, 1976. He is an American entrepreneur and software developer. He is best known as one of the co-founders of Twitter and also the founder and owner of Square, a company that provides mobile payment solutions. On October 5, 2015, he was appointed CEO of Twitter by the company’s board of directors.
In 2008, he was named to the TR35 list by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as one of the top innovators in the world under the age of 35.
Dorsey is of Italian descent and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the son of Marcia and Tim Dorsey—his father worked for a company that developed mass spectrometers, while his mother was a homemaker. Raised Catholic, he attended Bishop DuBourg High School. By the age of 13, he had already developed an interest in dispatch routing.
Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass co-founded Twitter Inc., with Dorsey serving as the original CEO. In 2011, Dorsey returned to Twitter as executive chairman after Dick Costolo replaced Williams as CEO.
When Twitter began gaining traction, Dorsey prioritized improving uptime above all else, even revenue generation. In 2008, Twitter was not designed to make money. He emphasized that the company shared his three core values: simplicity, constraint, and craftsmanship.
Today, the platform receives over 2.2 billion monthly visits according to analysts from SimilarWeb. By May 2015, Twitter had 500 million registered users, 300 million of whom were active.
Following the 2007 South by Southwest festival, Twitter’s popularity surged after company employees set up screens displaying live user tweets. The team worked to increase daily tweets from 20,000 to 60,000. However, despite user growth, Wall Street remained unsatisfied with the company’s financial performance.
Currently, Twitter’s founders continue to seek new ways to improve user engagement. In the first quarter of that year, the platform reported $450 million in revenue.