Jack Dorsey | |
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Dorsey at a London cafe in November, 2014
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Born |
St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. |
November 19, 1976
Residence | San Francisco, California, U.S. |
Alma mater |
Missouri University of Science and Technology (transferred) New York University (dropped out) |
Occupation | CEO of Square, Inc., Twitter, |
Net worth | US$1.2 billion (August 2016) |
Board member of |
Jack Dorsey (born November 19, 1976) is an American computer programmer and internet entrepreneur widely known as a co-founder and CEO of Twitter, and as the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. In 2008, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. For 2012, The Wall Street Journal gave him the "Innovator of the Year Award" for technology.
Dorsey was born and raised in St. Louis, the son of Marcia (Smith) and Tim Dorsey. He is of part 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 went to Catholic high school, at Bishop DuBourg High School.
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 many taxi cab companies. Dorsey attended the Missouri University of Science and Technology before subsequently transferring to New York University Tandon School of Engineering, but he dropped out. He first came up with the idea that became Twitter at New York University. While working on dispatching as a programmer, he later moved to California.
In Oakland in 2000, Dorsey started his company 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.