Jack Dorsey: The Man Who Reshaped Global Communication

During the process of rebuilding his career, Dorsey discovered Bitcoin.

Written by: Thejaswini M A

Translated by: Block unicorn

The meeting room was silent. In October 2008, Jack Dorsey looked around the table at Twitter’s board members, searching for an ally, but found none.

Evan Williams avoided his gaze. The venture capitalists spoke cautiously about “operational challenges” and “management issues.”

The platform crashed frequently. Employees complained that he left early for yoga classes. The board had lost confidence in him.

Fred Wilson announced the decision: they wanted new leadership. Williams would take over as CEO. Dorsey could remain as chairman, but his day-to-day control over Twitter was over.

He didn’t argue. At 31, he had never managed a company of this scale, and the pressure was suffocating. But as he walked out of the building that housed his creation, he felt a sting. The platform was born from his teenage obsession with dispatch communications. Now, that vision belonged to someone else.

Being fired from the company he founded taught him lessons business school never covered. For Dorsey, this was just the beginning.

Getting a Job Through Hacking

Jack Patrick Dorsey grew up in a Catholic working-class family in Missouri. His father made mass spectrometers, and his mother ran a coffee shop. Young Jack suffered from a speech impediment and spent much of his time indoors, where he was exposed to computers and communication systems.

Dorsey wrote dispatch software. Real-world taxi companies used his code to coordinate their fleets, solving real problems for real businesses.

His obsession was not accidental. Dorsey had already realized the immense value of short, frequent updates for coordinating complex systems. Emergency dispatchers didn’t waste time—clarity could save lives. What if the same efficiency could improve everyday communication?

At Bishop DuBourg High School, he worked part-time as a fashion model. After school, he would hack into systems—not to break them, but to understand how they worked.

The hack that changed his life happened at 16. Dispatch Management Services had built a website but didn’t list contact information. When Dorsey found a security vulnerability, he didn’t exploit it; instead, he emailed the company’s chairman, explaining the flaw and how to fix it.

Dorsey used this opportunity to start a conversation.

Chairman Greg Kidd decided to hire him within a week. A teenager from Missouri was now working for a Manhattan logistics company, learning how to coordinate transportation and resources in real time.

At 14, the dispatch software he wrote was already being used by taxi companies. At 18, he dropped out of New York University just one semester before graduation—he had too many ideas in his head to wait for a diploma.

What if people could send short status updates to friends, just like dispatchers updated their location and activities? What if you could know what everyone in your network was up to without making a call or sending a long email?

A Platform That Swept the Globe

In 2000, Dorsey moved to California and started a company focused on dispatching couriers and emergency services via the web. The startup failed. For the next five years, he worked as a freelance programmer, refining his idea and waiting for the right moment.

That moment came in 2006, when he joined the struggling podcast company Odeo. During a brainstorming session, Dorsey pitched his status update concept. He described it as a platform combining the broadcast nature of blogs with the immediacy of instant messaging.

Dorsey, together with Noah Glass and Biz Stone, built the first prototype of Twitter in two weeks. The name “twttr” followed the five-character SMS code format, inspired by Flickr.

At 9:50 pm on March 21, 2006, Dorsey posted the first tweet: “just setting up my twttr.”

Those 24 characters changed the way millions communicate.

Twitter’s breakthrough moment came at the 2007 South by Southwest music festival. Attendees used the service to coordinate meetups and share real-time updates. During the festival, daily tweets surged from 20,000 to 60,000. Dorsey’s teenage intuition about status updates was proven right.

But success brought challenges he wasn’t ready for. During his tenure as CEO from 2007 to 2008, Dorsey struggled with Twitter’s operational demands. The service crashed frequently. Employees complained about his management style. Reports said he left early for yoga and fashion design classes.

The board lost patience.

October 2008 arrived like judgment day. They fired him from his own creation. Co-founder Evan Williams took over. Dorsey kept the chairman title, but everyone knew the truth. The genius who conceived Twitter was deemed unfit to run it.

The lesson was painful, but it was also sobering. Dorsey could build products people loved, but he couldn’t yet build organizations that scaled.

He didn’t retreat—he chose to transform.

His former boss, Jim McKelvey, had recently lost a glass art sale because he couldn’t accept credit card payments. Millions of small business owners, like McKelvey, were frustrated by their inability to access merchant services.

Their solution was a small, square device that plugged into a smartphone’s headphone jack. Anyone could accept credit card payments anywhere. The first Square reader cost just $10, turning every phone into a point-of-sale system.

Square embodied the same philosophy as Twitter: remove barriers, democratize access. If Twitter gave everyone a broadcast platform, Square gave every entrepreneur the payment processing power once reserved for big companies.

The company officially launched in 2010.

This time, Dorsey learned from his Twitter experience. He built stronger operations, hired experienced managers, and focused on sustainable growth rather than viral expansion.

By 2015, Twitter was struggling under new leadership. User growth stalled, and the stock price fell. Competitors like Facebook and Instagram attracted more attention.

The board asked Dorsey to return as CEO, but with an unprecedented condition: he had to remain CEO of Square as well. Critics questioned whether anyone could effectively run two large public companies at once.

He kept offices at both companies, scheduled his days down to the minute, and relied on leadership teams for strategic direction.

The arrangement worked. Twitter stabilized, Square continued to grow, and went public in November 2015. Both companies benefited from Dorsey’s design sensibility and his ability to simplify and seek elegant solutions.

The fired CEO had learned to be a leader.

Building the Currency of the Future

During the process of rebuilding his career, Dorsey discovered Bitcoin. This cryptocurrency embodied the principles he learned in dispatch systems: decentralization, peer-to-peer communication, and the elimination of intermediaries.

“Bitcoin changes everything,” he declared in 2018. If he weren’t running Twitter and Square, he would devote himself to Bitcoin full-time.

He wasn’t content with just vocal support. In 2020, Square invested $50 million to buy Bitcoin, later adding another $170 million. Through Square’s Cash App, he enabled millions who had never owned cryptocurrency to access Bitcoin.

Dorsey also founded Spiral, a department funding open-source Bitcoin development. Unlike most profit-driven corporate crypto projects, Spiral’s mission is altruistic: to improve Bitcoin infrastructure for everyone.

But during his second tenure as Twitter CEO, the platform faced increasing censorship. The 2016 election revealed how foreign actors used Twitter to spread misinformation. Congressional hearings and advertiser boycotts became routine.

After the 2020 election, the challenge peaked. Twitter began labeling controversial tweets and ultimately suspended high-profile accounts, including President Trump, after the January 6 Capitol riot.

Dorsey defended these decisions, arguing they were necessary, but he also acknowledged their impact. “I believe this was the right decision for Twitter,” he wrote about Trump’s account suspension. “But I also believe it’s important to reflect on the broader impact of such actions on global public conversation.”

This experience reinforced his growing belief: centralized platforms hold too much power. He began funding research into decentralized alternatives, including the Twitter-backed Bluesky project, which develops open social media protocols.

On November 29, 2021, Dorsey resigned as Twitter CEO for the second time. His resignation letter explained why: “I decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders.”

Unlike his first departure, this exit was voluntary and planned. He prepared his successor, CTO Parag Agrawal, and believed Twitter needed leadership free from the baggage of the founder era.

Less than a year later, Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billions and began implementing his own vision. Dorsey retained a 2.4% stake but made almost no public comment on the changes.

After leaving Twitter, Dorsey became an evangelist for decentralization. He donated 14 Bitcoin to support Nostr, a decentralized social network protocol that requires no central servers or corporate control.

At Block, he doubled down on Bitcoin projects. The company developed a 3-nanometer Bitcoin mining chip and launched Bitkey, a self-custody wallet designed for mainstream users. Block’s mining hardware uses a modular design and is expected to last ten years, compared to the industry standard of three to five years.

Today, Dorsey stands at the intersection of technology and ideology. Through Block, he’s building financial infrastructure for a post-traditional banking world. Through Bitcoin advocacy and Nostr funding, he’s pushing for alternatives to existing internet platforms.

Underlying it all is his belief that individuals should control their own financial and digital lives. Bitcoin eliminates reliance on banks and governments. Nostr eliminates reliance on platform companies. Self-custody wallets eliminate reliance on exchanges.

These are political philosophies that value individual sovereignty over institutional control.

Dorsey remains focused on the future, just as he did when he dreamed of real-time city maps. His current projects reflect his belief that the most important internet infrastructure is still being built.

The police scanner that first inspired him still shapes his thinking about communication. The best information is concise, clear, and actionable.

It tells you where someone is and where they’re going.

Everything else is noise.

Dorsey’s achievements go beyond Twitter or Block. He has shown that complex systems can be simplified without losing functionality.

The scanner still crackles. He’s still listening. He’s still building the map of everything happening in real time.