Jack Dorsey: The perfect mix of ambition, conviction, and action — Titan Profiles #2
Jack Patrick Dorsey is an American billionaire technology entrepreneur and philanthropist who is the co-founder and CEO of Twitter and the founder and CEO of Square. Ever since 2008, he’s been bullish on Bitcoin and blockchain technology, seeing Bitcoin as a big part of the future of Twitter and the path to world peace.
It was always about the ideas
Taking an interest in programming and software development at a very young age, Jack was always a restless thinker, an innovator.
His primary focus was first courier, taxis, and emergency dispatch services from the internet, for which he started his own company. But he has also worked on projects like healthcare device networks and service marketplaces. Always looking for new solutions to real-world problems. Always creating something new.
However, it was not until he discovered a platform called LiveJournal that he would find the inspiration for his breakthrough idea. Being a user of that service, Jack started exploring the digital world of microblogging and instant messaging. He worked on the concept for years, including it in his projects and looking for new ways to develop it further. And because he’s a restless thinker, he went beyond business applications. What if he could combine microblogging and instant messaging as a point of contact with your friends? As a way to share your status in real-time, up-to-date, from the road? He brought the idea to Odeo, a podcasting company, and so Twitter came to be.
Disrupting credit card payments
Twitter may have been Dorsey’s big break, but it wasn’t his last. In 2010, a friend of his told him he was having difficulty accepting any form of payment other than cash due to high credit card and bank fees. Jack needed no more to dive into the fintech industry.
Square was born after an idea: to simplify credit card payments, bringing it to the mobile world and eliminating the friction of the middle-man — which is the reason behind the high fees. Now, where have we heard that before?
If that wasn’t enough, Jack’s idea for the company had a lot in common with Bitcoin’s fundamentals: “With Square, the goal is to get people in immediately and make the transaction as smooth and simple as possible,” he said back in May 2010. By that time, BTC was around $0.008, and Laszlo Hanyecz was about to make the first real-world transaction by buying two pizzas in Jacksonville, Florida, for 10,000 BTC.
An enthusiastic Bitcoin supporter
So why did Jack become such a die-hard Bitcoin advocate? Maybe it was his findings about the financial systems during his research for Square. Maybe it was his extensive knowledge of software development. Or maybe it was just convictions and his constant search for improving society. We don’t know for sure.
What we do know is that he believes in Bitcoin and its cause. And for a man who deeply understands the financial system’s pains and inefficiencies, that isn’t something to take lightly.
Plus, we’ve already said that Twitter’s CEO is a man of action. As such, his support for Satoshi’s creation goes well beyond just words. In fact, Jack has done a lot to promote Bitcoin adoption and usage, and that’s not even considering Crypto Twitter.
From little things, like adding the BTC logo to the hashtags #Bitcoin and #BTC, to more complex ones like adding Bitcoin support to CashApp — one of Square’s flagship products — , his efforts have spread awareness about Bitcoin and facilitated access to it for many people around the world.
Furthermore, besides helping people discover Bitcoin, he also assists developers in improving the protocol with each passing day. He even created a new, independent branch for Square — called Square Crypto — aiming to fund and support innovative Bitcoin projects and educate the public.
Working on the next big thing
Having built one of the most successful social media platforms globally and effectively providing millions of merchants with a new, easier way to take payments, Dorsey seems to be focused primarily on Bitcoin now.
In fact, back in Miami’s Bitcoin 2021 conference, he said he would be focused exclusively on it if he didn’t have Square and Twitter. “Bitcoin changes absolutely everything. There is nothing more important to work on in my lifetime,” he said.
And he meant it. About a month later, he announced that Square was developing a new business focused on making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services around Bitcoin. Or basically, to enable DeFi applications for it.
This adds to the statement that the company was also considering building a hardware wallet for Bitcoin, which would be fully open-source and in collaboration with the community.
Jack’s vision for the future
There’s no doubt that Bitcoin is a big deal for Jack, not only as a transformation device for the whole global society and financial system but also to reach humanity’s pinnacle. “We have all these monopolies off balance and the individual doesn’t have power. The amount of cost and distraction that comes from our monetary system today is real and it takes away attention from the bigger problems,” he said during the live panel of The ₿ Word — which he shared with Elon Musk and Cathie Wood.
“All these distractions that we have to deal with on a daily basis take away from those bigger goals that affect every single person on this planet and increasingly so. You fix that foundational level, and everything above it improves in such a dramatic way. It’s going to be long-term, but my hope is definitely peace.”
All in all, Jack Dorsey has proven to be on the people’s side. Besides supporting the most significant movement for financial freedom in history, he also actively works to spread the word, bring it to more people, and improve the protocol. He’s done so much already that it’s hard not to include him in the list of Bitcoin’s most distinguished personalities.
And the best news is, he’s just getting started.
