From the father of Twitter to All In Bitcoin, Jack Dorsey's crypto revolution

Source: Token Dispatch

Original title: Jack Dorsey: The Man Who Rewired Global Communication

Compiled and organized by: bitPushNews

“They're always talking about where they're going, what they're doing, and where they are now, which is where Twitter is inspired.”

There was no sound in the conference room. 2008/10. Jack Dorsey (Jack Dorsey) Looking around Twitter's board members looking for an ally. Not a single one.

Evan Williams avoided his gaze. Venture capitalists talk about “operational challenges” and “management issues” in a cautious tone.

The platform crashes frequently. The employee complained that he left his yoga class early. The board has lost confidence in him.

Fred Wilson read out the verdict: They need new leadership. Williams will take over as CEO. Dorsey could continue as chairman, but his day-to-day control of Twitter came to an end.

He's not arguing. The 31-year-old has never run a company of this size. The pressure kept him out of breath. But walking out of the building, which housed his hard work, he felt a pain in his heart. The platform stemmed from his teenage obsession with scheduling communications. Now, that vision belongs to someone else.

Being fired from a company I founded, I learned lessons that business schools would never teach. For Dorsey, this is just the beginning.

“Black” got a job offer

Jack Patrick Dorsey grew up in a working-class Missouri family and believed in Catholicism. His father makes mass spectrometers, and his mother runs a coffee shop. Young Jack had a stutter, which made him stay indoors more, where he discovered computers and communication systems.

Dorsey wrote scheduling software. Real taxi companies use his code to coordinate their fleets, solving real problems for real businesses.

His obsession was no accident. Dorsey has long recognized the power of simple, frequent updates to coordinate complex systems. First aid dispatchers don't waste a word because clarity saves lives. What if this same efficiency could improve everyday communication?

At Bishop DuBourg High School (Bishop DuBourg High School), he worked as a part-time fashion model. After school, he “invades” systems, not to destroy them, but to understand how they work.

The “invasion” that changed his life occurred when he was 16 years old. Dispatch Management Services (Dispatch Management Services) has set up a website, but no contact information is listed. When Dorsey discovered a security flaw, instead of exploiting it, he sent an email to the company's chairman explaining the vulnerability and how to fix it.

Dorsey began the conversation this way.

Chairman Greg Kidd (Greg Kidd) decided to hire him within a week. A teenager from Missouri works for a Manhattan logistics company to learn how to coordinate movement and resources in real time.

At age 14, the scheduling software he programmed was already actually used by taxi companies. At age 18, he dropped out of NYU, just one semester away from graduation. The idea that occupied his mind was so strong that he couldn't wait to get a diploma.

What if people could broadcast brief status updates to friends just like a dispatcher updates their location and activities? If you could effortlessly call or email, how about knowing what everyone on your network is doing right now?

A platform that eats up the world

In 2000, Dorsey moved to California and founded a company focused on dispatching couriers and emergency services through the Internet. The project failed. Over the next five years, as a freelance programmer, he continued to refine his ideas and wait for the right moment.

The timing came in 2006 for Odeo, a struggling podcast company. During a brainstorming session, Dorsey proposed his concept of status updates. He described it as combining the broadcast nature of a blog with the instantaneity of instant messaging.

Dorsey collaborated with Noah Glass (Noah Glass) and Biz Stone (Biz Stone) to build the first Twitter prototype in two weeks. The name “twttr” follows the five-character SMS short code format and is inspired by Flickr.

@firstversions

At 9:50 p.m. on March 21, 2006, Dorsey posted his first tweet: “Just set up my twttr.” @jack

Those 24 characters changed the way millions of people communicate.

Twitter's breakthrough moment happened at the 2007 South by Southwest Music Festival (South by Southwest). Attendees use the service to coordinate gatherings and share real-time updates. The number of daily tweets jumped from 20,000 to 60,000 during the festival. Dorsey's teenage instincts about status updates proved correct.

But success brought him a challenge for which he was unprepared.

While serving as CEO from 2007 to 2008, Dorsey struggled with Twitter's operational requirements. The service crashes frequently. Employees complained about his management style. There are reports that he will leave yoga classes and fashion design courses early.

The board lost patience.

In October 2008, Judgment Day came. They fired him from the company they built themselves. Co-founder Evan Williams took over. Dorsey has retained the title of chairman, but everyone knows the truth. This gifted teenager who conceived Twitter was deemed unfit to be an administrator.

Although this lesson was painful, it made his mind clear. Dorsey can create products that people love. But he hasn't been able to build an organization that can expand.

Instead of backing down, he chose to transition.

His former boss Jim McKelvey (Jim McKelvey) recently lost a glass art deal because he couldn't accept credit card payments. McIlvey's frustration is shared by millions of small business owners who lack merchant services.

Their solution is a compact, square device that plugs into a smartphone's headphone jack. Anyone can accept credit card payments anywhere. The first Square card reader cost $10 and turned every phone into a point-of-sale system.

Square embodies the same philosophy as Twitter. Eliminate friction and achieve inclusiveness. If Twitter gave everyone a broadcasting platform, then Square gave every entrepreneur the ability to process payments that were previously only available to large companies.

The company made a public launch in 2010.

This time, Dorsey learned his Twitter experience. He built a stronger operating system. Experienced managers have been hired. Focus on sustainable growth rather than going viral.

By 2015, Twitter was struggling under the management of its new leadership. User growth has stalled. Shares fell. Competitors like Facebook and Instagram are getting more attention.

The board asked Dorsey to return as CEO on an unprecedented condition: he will continue as CEO of Square at the same time.

Critics question whether anyone can effectively run two large listed companies at the same time.

He has offices in both companies at the same time. Schedule your own time down to the minute. While providing strategic guidance, it relies heavily on the leadership team.

This arrangement worked. Twitter has stabilized. Square continued to grow and went public in November 2015. Both companies benefit from Dorsey's sense of design and his ability to reduce complexity to simple solutions.

This CEO, who was fired, learned how to be a leader.

Building the currency of the future

While Dorsey was rebuilding his career, he discovered Bitcoin. This cryptocurrency embodies the principles he learned from scheduling systems: decentralization, peer-to-peer communication, elimination of intermediaries.

“Bitcoin completely changed everything,” he declared in 2018. If he hadn't run Twitter and Square, he'd be working full time with Bitcoin.

He wasn't content to just say words. Square invested $50 million in Bitcoin in 2020. That was followed by an additional $170 million. via SquareCash AppHe made Bitcoin accessible to millions of people who have never owned a cryptocurrency.

Dorsey also set up the Spiral division to fund open source Bitcoin development. Unlike most corporate crypto projects that focus on profit, Spiral's mission is altruistic.

To improve everyone's Bitcoin infrastructure.

But his second term at Twitter went hand in hand with growing scrutiny of the platform. The 2016 election revealed how foreign forces are using Twitter to spread disinformation. Congressional hearings and advertisers' boycotts have become commonplace.

These challenges peaked after the 2020 election. Twitter began tagging controversial tweets and eventually suspended high-profile accounts, including President Trump, following the January 6 Capitol Hill riots.

Dorsey defended the decisions, saying they were necessary, but acknowledged their potential impact. “I believe it was the right decision for Twitter,” he wrote of the Trump ban. “But I also think it's important to look at the broader impact of this action on global public dialogue.”

This experience strengthened his belief that centralized platforms have too much power. He began funding research on decentralized alternatives, includingBluesky, a Twitter-supported project aimed at developing an open social media protocol.

On November 29, 2021, Dorsey resigned as Twitter CEO for the second time. His letter of resignation explained his reasons. “I've decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to break free from its founder.”

Unlike the first time I left, this time it was voluntary and planned. He has prepared his successor, Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal (Parag Agrawal), and believes Twitter needs a leadership without the baggage it had when it was founded.

Less than a year later, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and began implementing his own vision. Dorsey kept 2.4% of the shares, but has made few public comments on the changes.

Leaving Twitter behind, Dorsey has become a decentralized evangelist.

He donated 14 bitcoins to supportNostr, a decentralized social networking protocol that requires no central server or corporate control.

在Blockcompany, he doubled down on the Bitcoin plan. The company developed a 3nm Bitcoin mining chip and launchedBitkey, a self-hosted wallet designed for regular users. Block's mining hardware has a modular design and is designed to last ten years rather than the industry standard three to five years.

Today, Dorsey is active at the intersection of technology and ideology. Through Block, he's building the financial infrastructure for the post-traditional banking world. By advocating for Bitcoin and funding Nostr, he is promoting alternatives to current internet platforms.

A common thread has always been his belief that individuals should take control of their financial and digital lives. Bitcoin has eliminated reliance on banks and governments. Nostr has eliminated reliance on platform companies. Self-hosted wallets eliminate dependency on exchanges.

These are all expressions of its political philosophy:Individual sovereignty is valued above institutional control.

Dorsey has always been as focused on the future as when she dreamed of drawing a real-time city map. His current projects all stem from a belief that the most important internet infrastructure is still under construction.

Police scanners, which fascinated him when he was young, still influence his communication philosophy — the best information is alwaysSimple, clear, and executable。

They tell you where someone is and where they are going.

Everything else is noise.

Dorsey's accomplishments go far beyond Twitter or Block. He proved that complex systems can also be simplified without sacrificing functionality.

The scanner's sound is still crackling. He's still listening and drawing a dynamic map of everything at this moment.

This is Jack Dorsey's story.

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