Jack Dorsey

Early life[edit]

Dorsey was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri.^[7][8] His father is Tim Dorsey and his mother is Marcia (née Smith) Dorsey.^[9][10][11] Jack Dorsey is partly of Italian descent on his mother's side.^[12] His father worked for a company that developed mass spectrometers and his mother was a homemaker.^[13] He was raised Catholic, and his uncle is a Catholic priest in Cincinnati.^[14]


Dorsey attended Bishop DuBourg High School. In his younger days, he worked occasionally as a fashion model.^{[15][16][17][18][19]} By age 14, he had become interested in dispatch routing. Dorsey enrolled at the University of Missouri–Rolla in 1995 and attended for two-plus years^[14] before transferring to New York University in 1997, but he dropped out two years later,^[20] one semester short of graduating.^[14] He came up with the idea that eventually became Twitter while studying at New York University.^[14][21]


While working on dispatching as a programmer, Dorsey moved to California.^[22][23] In 2000, Dorsey started his company in Oakland to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web.^[24] His other projects and ideas at this time included networks of medical devices and a "frictionless service market".^[24] In July 2000, building on dispatching^[9] 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.^[24]


When he first saw implementations of instant messaging, Dorsey wondered whether the software's user status output could be shared easily among friends.^[9] He approached Odeo, which at the time happened to be interested in text messaging.^[9] Dorsey and Biz Stone decided that SMS text suited the status-message idea, and built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks.^[9] The idea attracted many users at Odeo and investment from Evan Williams,^[9] a co-founder of that firm in 2005 who had left Google after selling Pyra Labs and Blogger.