Jack Dorsey

About The Speaker

Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter Inc. in 2006, and returned as Chief Executive Officer in September 2015. Additionally, he co-founded Square, a mobile payments company, where he serves as CEO and Chairman.

Dorsey became interested in computers and communications at an early age and began programming while still a high school student. He was fascinated by the technological challenge of coordinating taxi drivers, delivery vans and other fleets of vehicles that needed to remain in constant, real-time communication with one another. When he was 15, he wrote dispatch software that is still used by some taxicab companies today.

After a brief stint at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, Dorsey transferred to New York University. He dropped out of college before receiving his degree and moved to Oakland, California, and in 2000 started a company offering his dispatch software through the Web. Shortly after starting his company, Dorsey came up with the idea for a site that would combine the broad reach of dispatch software with the ease of instant messaging.

He approached a now-defunct Silicon Valley company called Odeo to pitch the concept. Dorsey, Biz Stone and Odeo co-founder Evan Williams started a new company, called Obvious, which later evolved into Twitter. Within two weeks, Dorsey had built a simple site where users could instantly post short messages of 140 characters or less, known in Twitter parlance as "tweets." In 2011, Dorsey got the chance to interview President Barack Obama in the first ever Twitter Town Hall at The White House. Twitter went public in November 2013.

In 2008, Dorsey was named by the MIT Technology Review as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. He also received the ‘Innovator of the Year Award’ for technology from The Wall Street Journal in 2012.

In February 2017, Dorsey and Twitter Executive Chairman Omid Kordestani matched a $530,000 donation to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) raised by Twitter staffers. Their match brought the total donation to $1.59 million.